Contemporary Moslem historical accounts of Moslem-Jewish struggles commonly proceed forward from the creation of the modern State of Israel in 1947. However, any examination of the current strife in the Middle East must first be put in its broader historical context.
For several millennium BCE the land known as Palestine was home to many peoples over different eras, including among others Canaanites, Philistines, Samaritans and Phoenicians. Jews lived there continuously from between 1,000 to 1,500 years before the Diaspora, which occurred under the Babylonians in 586 BCE and later the Romans in 70 CE.
Modern Arabs were late-comers in the region, arriving during and after the 7th century bloody Muslim conquests, when Arab armies from the Arabian Peninsula conquered much of the Middle East
The roots of the modern Arab-Jewish conflict can be traced back to the rise of Zionism—a movement for the re-establishment and development of a Jewish nation in the Levant—in 1897. At that time, the region known as Palestine, or the Levant, was part of the crumbling Ottoman Empire,and was inhabited by a majority Moslem Arab population with small Christian and smaller Jewish minorities. The culture was predominantly agrarian, the total population was less than a million.
Towards the end of WWI, the Levant came under British mandate. In 1917, the Balfour Declaration expressed support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
Jewish immigration accelerated during the 1920s and 1930s, and eventually tensions between Jewish settlers and Arabs escalated into armed violence. The Arab Revolt erupted in 1939 and began a period of intense armed Arab resistance against both British rule and Jewish settlers.
In 1947, the U.N. partitioned Britain’s Levantine mandate into the state of Israel and, commensurately, statehood for the Palestinians. However, not anxious to accept an independent Palestinian state on their borders, that offer was rejected by the surrounding Arab states.
Palestinian Moslems had the choice of accepting full Israeli citizenship or, at the frenzied urging of the Arab states, becoming refugees. Several generations later, the descendants of those who became refugees remain stateless to this day.
All of this is history.
Against these historical realities, there are several truths about the contemporary violence in Gaza and Lebanon that must be made clear.
First and foremost, Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. Genocide is defined as the deliberate and systematic attempt to wipe out a given population, usually based on some ethnic, racial, national or religious criterion. However, massive civilian casualties have been a fixture of modern warfare since the turn of the last century, and the war in Gaza was the Arab’s choice.
The response of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu to Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacre of Israeli citizens was predictable. Cold-blooded as it seems, what Hamas apparently wanted was the horrific optics of the Jewish military killing Moslem civilians. These casualties are not victims of Israeli genocide, they are the victims of Hamas’ undeclared war against the State of Israel.
Also, genocide is not subtle. If Israel was intent on committing genocide in Gaza, it would have not dropped thousands of leaflets advising its residents when and where it was planning to drop its bombs. Its IDF forces would have indiscriminately slaughtered hundreds of thousands or even millions Gaza’s hapless population; this has simply not happened.
Conversely, genocide is exactly what Hamas and Hezbollah have in mind for the Jews. A quote commonly attributed to Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, aptly applies here: “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.”
That is what the Arabs do.
There is absolutely no moral equivalence between a Nazi regime which sought to exterminate a race of people, and a nation and a people that seeks to avert its own extermination.
Second, Israel is not an apartheid state. Apartheid, from the Dutch/Afrikaans language meaning “apart,” refers to the old South African government’s policy of forced racial separation. Israel has no such policy. In fact, some 2.5 million of its 10 million citizens are Arab Moslems.
The claim is made that Israeli Moslems are often treated as second class citizens, and to an extent this may be true. But then, so were African-Americans in the Jim Crow South, and no-one has ever suggested that America was an apartheid state.
And then there’s this. Arab support of Palestinians in the West Bank is cynical at best. The reason they are stateless to begin with is that the Arabs refused to allow Palestinian statehood in 1947. For decades, now, Arab states have opportunistically used the plight of stateless Palestinians in the West bank, a humanitarian tragedy which they created, as a political and military tool to wield against their common enemy, the Jewish state of Israel.
And finally, it is imperative to recognize that the stated goal of all the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel organizations and terrorist groups over the last eighty years, and at one time or another all the Arab states surrounding Israel, has less to do with the efficient administration of Palestinian territory or care for its people than it does with the elimination of the State of Israel. That includes the annihilation of the some 7.2 million Jews who live there. Not even the Nazis could match that total.
The Islamic world’s open hostility against an indigenous people returning to their ancestral homeland has been the root cause of the violent history of Palestine. The tragic, internecine warfare which has destroyed much of Gaza and the West Bank is an ongoing expression of that hatred.
These are truths which Moslem scholars and historians would prefer the world to not remember.
They must never be forgotten.
Leave a Reply