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Origins of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict - Statistical Data Included

Humanist, July-August, 2002 by David Schafer

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Surprisingly, perhaps, there has been some resistance to Zionism from its very inception from the most orthodox elements in Judaism, based for the most part on three arguments: first, that Zionism is a secular movement and would imperil the essentially religious nature of Judaism; second, that the indigenous Jews and Arabs of Palestine have enjoyed a harmonious relationship that would be disrupted by the introduction of European Zionists in large numbers; and last and most importantly, according to Jewish eschatology, a Jewish state must not be established until the Messiah comes to lead it. The proportion of Orthodox Jews who hold to these views is hotly debated; today they appear to be represented mainly by a branch known as Neturei Karta (an Aramaic name meaning "Guardians of the City").

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Nowadays, we have grown accustomed to hearing the present situation blamed not on Christian anti-Semitism but on intrinsic hostility between Muslims and Jews. Plenty of hostility has been built up on both sides over the past century, to be sure, but has it always been this way? Serious students, like Karen Armstrong in Jerusalem, William L. Cleveland in A History of the Modern Middle East, and I. J. Bickerton and C. L. Klausner in A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict are not quick to offer religious intolerance as a fundamental explanation of current events.

According to accounts of the early history of Islam, together with passages from the Quran and Hadith, Muhammad understood himself to be the last in a series of Jewish prophets, including Jesus, and his mission to be to renew the Jewish prophets' mission to Jews, Christians, and the whole world. The Quran uses the term ahl al-kitab (People of the Book) more than thirty times, mostly in Surahs 2-5, allotting special status to Jews and Christians as believers in the Torah and the Gospels (and later, when Islam spread to Persia, the term also included the Zoroastrians). Muhammad did reject those Jews who did not accept him as their prophet, and he regarded the Christian belief that Jesus was the son of God to be a form of polytheism. Still, as People of the Book, they were dhimmis (to be protected) under Muslim governments if they paid a jizya (poll tax).

In practice there was wide variation in the way Muslim authorities interpreted these rules, and instances are sometimes cited where Jews and Christians fared badly in areas ruled by Muslims. There are other cases, however, where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived at peace together and even created a remarkably unified kind of community. Perhaps the most notable example is the Muslim city of Cordoba in Spain, where both the Jewish philosopher Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) and the Arabic philosopher ibn Rushd (Averroes) were born and wrote in Arabic--described in the recent book The Ornament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal.

The name Palestine originally meant "land of the Philistines." From Greek and Roman times, Palestine was often combined administratively with Syria to form Syro-Palestine. After the Ottoman conquest in 1516, most of Palestine was included in the vilayet (major administrative unit) of Syria. Much later, at the start of the nineteenth century, a weakened Ottoman Empire, having repeatedly failed to control Persia (now under the Qajar dynasty), was also forced to accept a semi-autonomous Egypt under Muhammad Ali. Among a series of expansionist moves east and south, Egypt captured Palestine west of the Jordan River--the part we now call "Palestine." Egypt held it from 1831 to 1840 before it returned to the Ottoman Empire, with the northern portion in the vilayet of Beirut and the southern in the smaller sanjak (district or "flag") of Jerusalem.

Origins of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict - Statistical Data Included

Humanist, July-August, 2002 by David Schafer

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