Quote:
Originally posted by Sexual Harassment Panda
Perhaps a silly question, but anyhoo...does the Arab hatred of Israel and Jews predate the establishment of the Israeli state? Is the basis of the fundie Muslim objections that this is holy ground, such that any group who occupied that land would be now hated (e.g., Mennonites, Yankee fans, African-American Muslims)? Or would they still hate Jews (perhaps slightly less) even if the state of Israel did not exist, or existed outside of the old Caliphate?
I'm trying to figure out how much of this conflict is historical (as in pre-1948) and how much of it has to do with (rightly or not) the perceptions of injuries inflicted upon Muslims in the half century since then.
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It actually goes back to the Babylonian Captivity, in 597 B.C.E. when the First Temple was destroyed and the remaining Tribes of Israel were expelled from Israel and Judeah. During the Captivity, the Assyrians moved in large numbers into the former kingsoms of Israel and Judeah.
Many of them intermarried with the Jews who were not expelled and adopted their own form of Judaism. These people were known as Samaritans. When Cyrus of Persia overthrew Nebuchadnezzar in 537 B.C.E., the Jews were allowed to return to Israel and found the country to be populated by Samaritans, Phoenicians (who some believe were the ancestors of today's Palestinians), Chaldeans, and Egyptians.
The introduction of Islam in the 7th Century C.E. orignally saw a fairly large degree of intercooperation among the Muslims and the Jews, particularly in the areas of philosophy and medicine.
The hostility between Arabs and Jews did not really come into being until the Late Ottoman Empire, in the 18th-20th Centuries. The conflict over the land known originally as Canaan, then Israel, and then Palestine, didn't really come into bloom until the end of WWII, when the Brits, French, and Dutch began to try to deal with the simultaneous problems of resettling all the people displaced by the Nazis, the anti-Colonial movement, and the fact that it would have been mighty inconvennient to have to return all the land and property that had been stolen from the Jews when they were sent off to die.
