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Excuse me, but Jews were an oppressed minority in the Muslim world for 1,300 years before the establishment of the State of Israel.
Any narrative of Muslim-Jewish coexistence is only sensical as a contrast to the Jewish experience in Christian Europe. Jews in the Muslim world had it better than European Jewry, but they by no means enjoyed any sort of equality.
The establishment of the Jewish state was undoubtedly a key historical landmark for Muslim-Jewish relations. But did it mean a complete disjunction in the relationship, an oppressor-oppressed role reversal, or was it merely an inflection point?
Nearly all Jews in the Muslim world fled for their lives, or else were forcibly expelled from their homes. An exodus of 850,000 Jews. Stripped of everything they knew except the traditions they carried in their hearts. The vast majority immigrated to Israel, never to return.
Nor did the Muslim world finally let the Jews live in peace once they had gathered in their ancestral homeland. Antisemitic antizionism was, and in many cases remains, state policy. Israel was surrounded on all sides by larger countries with larger armies set on its destruction.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, classic blood libel, and Holocaust denial—all antisemitic conspiracy theories that are widespread in the Muslim world. Antisemitic attitudes are more than twice as common in the Middle East & North Africa than in any other region.
So when you talk “racial justice” in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who deserves justice here? When you get the warm and fuzzies over Jews standing up for Muslims, especially against Israel and the mainstream Jewish community, how does that resonate in history?
