This week, an estimated 1.8 million Muslims have left their homes from all over the world to embark on the Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. These worshipers will continue a tradition that spans over a millennium. But with the ongoing siege and genocide in Gaza, it seems that for yet another year, a large number of Palestinians will not be able to embark on the sacred journey.
This may seem normal, as Israel’s siege on Gaza and occupation of the West Bank has long impacted Palestinian access to Hajj. But historically, this is an anomaly.
Today, most Muslims would be surprised to learn that Palestine was once a central part of the Hajj journey. I spent much of my childhood in Medina, so I witnessed the city swell with pilgrims every Hajj season. But not once did I imagine that Hajj pilgrims once commonly visited not just Medina and Mecca, but also Jerusalem, Hebron, and other parts of Palestine. Palestine’s centrality in the Hajj—as a physical part of itineraries and as part of our collective memory—has been violently uprooted by Israel and other complicit states.
Jerusalem and the Hajj journey
Palestinians have participated in the Hajj for centuries, taking on multiple roles. For my research as a graduate student of history, I sift through several pilgrim accounts that show that our current realities were not always inevitable.
I learned that as early as the eleventh century, pilgrims like the Persian poet Nasir Khusraw wrote accounts of their journeys to Mecca by camel, horse, ship, or foot, and visiting Jerusalem on the way. Merchants in Palestine sold supplies to the Hajj pilgrims visiting the Aqsa Mosque and other holy sites, and hosts would welcome them into their guesthouses. Since at least the seventeenth century, Palestinian elites were appointed by Ottoman sultans to lead the Syrian Hajj caravan, one of the largest official caravans throughout Ottoman rule.
It was especially common for pilgrims from the Levant, Anatolia, and Central Asia to visit Jerusalem on their way to or from Mecca, being that Jerusalem is the third holiest place in Islam, and that Muslims once prayed towards the Aqsa Mosque, before God revealed to the prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings upon him) that the Ka’bah in Mecca should be faced during prayer. By the nineteenth century, some of these pilgrims, such as West Africans, had even been settling in Palestine in large enough numbers to form communities and neighborhoods whose legacies last until today.
Palestine became even more accessible in the early twentieth century with the increase of steamship and railway routes. In addition to the Ottoman Hijaz Railway, which connected Damascus to Medina starting in 1908, many railway stations interconnected several cities within the Levant.
By 1912, pilgrims like the Egyptian school headmaster Muhammad Hasan Ghali were utilizing these railways to explore various cities in Palestine, such as Jaffa, Haifa, Hebron, and, of course, Jerusalem, on their way to or from Medina. Labib Batanuni, another Egyptian Hajj travel writer of the period, especially recommended the Nabi Musa festival, which, although initially Sunni-led, was attended by Muslims, Christians, and Jews of various denominations. The festival also coincided with Easter week. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, a Christian Jerusalemite who wrote of his childhood before the 1917 Balfour Declaration, noted that this time of the year was especially vibrant with Christian pilgrims of various denominations from around Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa.
The Nakba, and a lasting impact on the Hajj
So what changed? Over just a few decades, Palestine’s centuries-long centrality in the Hajj network was violently uprooted.
At least since the Nakba of 1948, and even more intensely after the 1967 war, Israel has strategically destroyed much of the roads and railway networks that connected Palestinian cities to each other, the rest of the Levant, and beyond.
But Palestinians did not silently accept this isolation. Even when Palestinians in Gaza were prevented from visiting Jerusalem, they continued to journey to Mecca. And as part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, they demanded the right to build the Gaza International Airport. Two years after its inauguration in 1998, Israeli forces destroyed it.
By 2007, Israel declared a blockade on Gaza, which has yet to cease, restricting all imports and exports and placing travel bans on tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. In 2022, Israeli authorities placed additional restrictions on foreign visitors to the West Bank, requiring special permits that prevented them from teaching, studying, volunteering, or working there. Israel’s strategic isolation of Palestine is an imperialist policy aimed at segregating the once vibrant and well-connected cities and controlling the economy, ideas, and people that cross their borders. This isolation, while often evaluated in a modern framework and its effects on activism and international solidarity, rarely examines the impact on regional religious and cultural practices, like the Hajj.
Today, travel to Jerusalem as part of the Hajj journey, or even on its own, has become a rare privilege for both Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike. Still, Palestine did not surrender. Although rare, small numbers of Muslims without Palestinian ID cards have been able to visit holy sites despite the mounting restrictions. A few Christian pilgrimage groups have visited in recent years, too.
Palestinian Muslims have continued to embark on the Hajj despite the limitations placed on them. I remember being a child in the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, not long after the 2008 Gaza Massacre, and meeting an older woman who was visiting from Gaza. She was smiling, sitting on a chair by the other Palestinian women in her Hajj group, and made it a point to pat my head, learn my name, and pray for me. She taught me the uniting power of the Hajj — that it transgresses borders and forges deep yet global connections.
And Palestinians kept coming. For the 2023 Hajj, the last Hajj before the October 2023 genocide escalation in Gaza, six thousand Muslim Palestinian pilgrims crossed the Rafah border to board planes from Cairo to Jeddah.
In 2024, Muslims in Gaza were not permitted to do so—not when thousands of US dollars were required for each person wanting to cross the Egyptian border to flee Israel’s nearly daily civilian massacres. And as Israel continues its massacres and blockade on Gaza, it is looking doubtful that they will be able to do so this year.
Palestine in the heart of pilgrims
But the Hajj across the centuries strengthens Muslim unity, and the unity and solidarity with Palestinians, especially, will not elude this year’s Hajj pilgrims, despite concerted efforts to the contrary. Even outside of Hajj season, several Muslims have risked arrest and censorship to raise the Palestinian flag and wear the kufiyya and other symbols of support at the Holy Mosque in Mecca. The Friday sermons in Medina and Mecca have not ceased to include Palestine in their prayers. Throughout Ramadan this year and last, the imams of Mecca and Medina have led emotional prayers for Gaza, with thousands of congregants crying “ameen” behind them. By contrast, the responses to most other, often state-required, prayers were not nearly as loud or passionate.
Physically, Palestine’s historic central role in the Hajj route may have been uprooted: Israel prevented Jerusalem from being a typical stop on Hajj itineraries, Egypt barred Palestinians from crossing its borders, and Saudi Arabia suppressed verbal and visual support for Palestine.
But these attempts of isolation have only ingrained Palestine more strongly within the hearts of the pilgrims, whether or not they are of the Palestinian diaspora. And that is how Palestine will continue to play a central role in the Hajj this year.
Prophet Muhammad ? said:
“Whoever among you sees evil, let him change it with his hand. If he cannot do so, then with his tongue. If he cannot do so, then with his heart, which is the weakest level of faith.”
If only in their prayers and emotions, Hajj pilgrims will stand in solidarity with Gaza, its sixty-two thousand martyrs since October 2023, and its millions of displaced, injured, and malnourished civilians. That, in itself, is resistance.