Palestinians and Israelis Once ‘Lived Happily Together,’ and Other Myths

The claim is common: “History shows that Palestinians and Israelis lived happily together on the same piece of land. So why not now?” When did Palestinians and Israelis, or Muslims and Jews, ever live happily together in peace? For that matter, when have Muslims ever lived in peace, not just with Jews, but with any of their non-Muslim neighbors? Their task is not to make peace, but to make war, until the entire world is everywhere dominated by Islam, and Muslims rule, everywhere. There was never peaceful coexistence in the land of Israel; the Jews were conquered by Muslims between 633 and 641 AD. From then on, those Jews who remained in the Land of Israel, and did not choose death or conversion to Islam, were forced to endure the status of dhimmi, which allowed them to live, and even to practice their religion, but only so long as they accepted the many onerous conditions imposed on them as dhimmis, including the payment of the jizyah, a burdensome tax that was imposed on non-Muslims to ensure their protection from attack by the Muslims themselves.

When was this period of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians? Not in 1948, when the Jews were attacked by the armies of five Arab states, while many Palestinians fled in order, as they thought, to get out of the way of what would surely be the victorious Arab armies, and then they could return in triumph, while any Jews who remained alive in Palestine would be treated as dhimmis under Muslim Arab rule. There has been no peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis since then, but intermittent warfare, including the scourge of Arab terrorism, by the Palestinians, against Jewish civilians. Even before the State of Israel was created, the Arabs were attacking the Jews, in the 1920s, in Jerusalem, in Haifa, in Tiberias, in Safed, and, especially, in Hebron, the second holiest city in Judaism, where in 1929 the entire Jewish population was murdered or fled. Then there was the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939, when marauding gangs of Arabs would attack Jewish settlements and kill their inhabitants. Where did anyone get the idea that Palestinians ever lived happily together with Jews?

Does anyone have any examples outside of Israel of such peaceful coexistence between Muslim Arabs and non-Muslims? Perhaps some may be thinking of Islamic Spain, sometimes hailed as such an example of Convivencia. But it was not so; the Christians were so badly treated by the Muslims that they spent 770 years fighting to push them out of Spain, in what was known as the “Reconquista.” As for Jews, they too suffered in Islamic Spain; the largest such atrocity against them occurred in 1066, with a pogrom in Cordoba, where the entire Jewish population of 4,000 was murdered overnight. The myth of a tolerant Islamic Spain where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony was created not by historians, but by writers in the West, such Washington Irving in Tales of the Alhambra and Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand in Le Dernier des Abencerages, who romanticized Islamic rule. Non-Muslims in the Islamic kingdoms were everywhere treated as dhimmis, forced to humiliate themselves when they paid the jizyah, forbidden to ride horses, required to move aside on footpaths for any Muslim, and in some places, made to wear garb identifying themselves as either Christians or Jews, with signs both on their clothing and on their dwellings, and in many other ways, too, had to demonstrate that, in effect, they knew their place.

Unbelievers in general, but Jews in particular, continued over the centuries to be subject to persecution and violence   massacres and pogroms – in the Muslim world. Nowhere can one find an example of peaceful coexistence, with Muslims and Jews “living happily together.”

For those who believe they did would read the Qur’an, they would discover that Muslims are commanded in 109 verses to wage violent jihad against non-Muslims, instructed to fight, to kill, to smite at the necks of, to strike terror in the hearts of, unbelievers. They would find that Muslims are instructed not to take Jews or Christians as friends, for “they are friends only with each other.” They would discover that Muslims are told that they are the “best of peoples,” while non-Muslims are “the most vile of created beings.” Those who wish to understand the status of Jews in Islam should familiarize themselves with the Qur’an and the hadith of Bukhari and Muslim, and also read the Hamas Charter, and the Palestinian National Covenant, both of which reject the existence of a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. Such study might provide them with a salutary shock.

Many believe, particularly among the Bidenites, that it is the Israelis who need to seek peace with the Palestinians, ignoring the fact that they’ve been trying to make peace with their Arab neighbors ever since they declared that desire in Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948. They have given back 95% of the territory they won in the Six-Day War. They have repeatedly made offers to discuss peace with Mahmoud Abbas, who has never seriously taken them up on the offer. It is not Israel that needs a scolding, but the Palestinians who seek Israel’s destruction.

Most intolerable of all is the claim that Jews should stop being “fixated on the Holocaust.” It is right and proper that the world’s Jews should want to make sure the Holocaust is remembered, for too many people have forgotten or never knew about it. It is essential that the world understand what happened to the Jews when they were stateless, and which helps explain why they are so determined to ensure the security of their tiny state, the only certain refuge for Jews which, had it existed during the Nazi period, might have taken in millions who otherwise would have been murdered. It is particularly important to remember the Holocaust now that Israel faces Palestinians who are either Holocaust deniers, as Mahmoud Abbas, or Holocaust abettors, as Hajj Amin El Husseini. Abbas wrote a doctoral thesis in which he claimed that no more than one million Jews were killed by the Nazis and that, furthermore, the Zionists and the Nazis collaborated with one another. As for the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the 1920s to the 1940s, Hajj Amin el Husseini, he was a friend of Adolf Eichmann, an ardent supporter of Hitler, whom he met and encouraged in his Endlosung (Final Solution): Amin El Husseini even raised several SS brigades from among the Bosnian Muslims.

Doesn’t Israel have a duty to remind people of the Holocaust when so many others are busy – even “fixated” – on denying, or minimizing that greatest atrocity in world history? And isn’t it right for Jews, including Israelis, to want to make sure the Holocaust is not forgotten? The ignorance about it is astonishing. Two-thirds of millennials in America don’t know what Auschwitz was; 41 percent of Americans of all ages have no idea what Auschwitz was. Eleven percent of Americans (and 22 percent of millennials) either have not heard of or aren’t sure whether they’ve heard of the Holocaust at all, and 31 percent of Americans (and 41 percent of millennials) believe 2 million or fewer Jewish people died in the Holocaust. Given those depressing numbers, can Arun Gandhi dare to claim that Jews should get over their supposed “fixation with the Holocaust”? It seems to me that we in the West, and not just Jews, need to pay more, not less, attention to the Holocaust and its significance. Faced with genocidal threats today – from Iran, from Hamas, from Hezbollah – Israelis take those threats seriously, as memories of the Holocaust prompt them to do. They are not “fixating,” as many claim, on the Nazi murders, but have a sober and intelligent appreciation of that monumental atrocity, and a keen desire to avoid its repetition, by relying on themselves in their own state, which is a different thing.