Israel is The Dhimmi That Got Away.
The fundamental basis of the never-ending Arab-Muslim aggression against the Jews of the Middle East is the Muslim religion as outlined in the Qur'an and the Hadiths.
Period. Full stop.
It is not an aggression based upon notions of social justice, as the Palestinian-Arabs, and their friends, would have you believe. In truth, Israel is a social justice Shangri-La compared to the rest of the Middle East.
The Long Arab War against the Jews of the Middle East is a religious war.
And it is within the primary sources of the Islamic faith that we find the basis of this aggression toward the loathsome Infidel, particularly toward those trouble-making Jews.
The Jewish people, however, along with a few Christians, managed to escape dhimmitude - in violation of Islamic theocratic imperatives - with the fall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the creation of the Jewish State of Israel after World War II.
From those days to these, the Jews of the Middle East are free and the Arabs do not like it.
When Muhammad created Islam as an imperial-supremacist religion intent on global expansion, he constituted it as the enemy of the Jewish people, the Christian people, and all other "unbelievers."
Furthermore, it is an astonishing testament to the man's will and intelligence that he damn near pulled it off. Within a mere century of The Prophet's death Muslims were already banging on Europe's door in search of conquest, slaves, and booty.
Please understand, however, that the following criticism are not pointed at Muslims as individuals, but toward the consequences of Islamic doctrine. It is Islam as a theocratic-political ideology, with far-reaching consequences for all of us, that is under scrutiny.
The Qur'an and Muhammad's Will to Power
The Qur'an is an opaque and contradictory book, but there is no question that the spreading of Sharia, and the defeat of the Infidels and "unbelievers," is at its core. What this means, needless to say, is death or conversion for pagans and death, conversion, or dhimmitude for "People of the Book." Jews and Christians hold a higher place within the Qur'anic religious hierarchy and therefore have the honor to choose to live out their lives under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperial rule. This entails the payment of protection money (jizyah) under a system of enforced humiliation and submission to the will of Allah... which is to say, to the will of the Arab theological-political leadership.
It is not, therefore, a coincidence that Islam is famous for its bloody borders and is presently conducting a casual, ad hoc genocide of the Christians of the Middle East and much of Africa. The genocide is casual in the sense that no one, including the Pope, himself, really seems to give a damn and the Arabs conduct it in a here-and-there, sort-of piece-meal fashion.
The reason for the never-ending Arab-Muslim war against the Jewish people, therefore, has virtually nothing to do with Jewish misbehavior toward Arabs and virtually everything to do with the Qur'anic religious imperative to keep "unbelievers" under submission. Many Arabs in the Middle East want Jewish blood for the very same reason that they want Christian blood... because both are Infidel religions who absolutely refuse to bow their heads to The Sword of the Prophet.
The punishment for refusal of submission to Qur'anic law (al-Sharia) is death, sometimes via crucifixion, sometimes via head-chopping, and sometimes, as we read in Sura 5:33, by the chopping off of a hand and a foot from opposite sides of the body.
Indeed, the penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive upon earth [to cause] corruption is none but that they be killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land. That is for them a disgrace in this world; and for them in the Hereafter is a great punishment,
The Christians of the Middle East, including of course the Egyptian Copts, are not guilty of anything other than being Christians and it is for that crime that Muslim extremists - with the approval of their friends - burn down churches in the thousands, kidnap young Christian girls for purposes of rape and / or conversion, and riot against Christians wherever they may be found.
None of his is due to Christian behavior.
The cause is the Qur'an, its insistence on Muslim supremacy, and Muhammad's will to power.
The Dhimmi That Got Away
A primary difference between Jews and Christians in that part of the world, vis-à-vis the perpetual aggression and contempt of Arab-Muslims, is the IDF. The IDF is the lone, sole reason why the Arabs have not driven the Jews "into the sea" as they once promised during a more honest period of their history.
For thirteen long centuries Arab-Muslims had their way with all non-Muslims in the Middle East. In some times and places dhimmitude was better and in some times and places dhimmitude was worse, but it was never better than the very worst of Jim Crow in the early twentieth-century American south.
In Martin Gilbert's In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, we read:
There could be no building of new synagogues or churches. Dhimmis could not ride horses, but only donkeys; they could not use saddles, but only ride sidesaddle. Further, they could not employ a Muslim. Jews and Christians alike had to wear special hats, cloaks and shoes to mark them out from Muslims. They were even obliged to carry signs on their clothing or to wear types and colors of clothing that would indicate they were not Muslims, while at the same time avoid clothing that had any association with Mohammed and Islam. Most notably, green clothing was forbidden...Other aspects of dhimmi existence were that Jews - and also Christians - were not to be given Muslim names, were not to prevent anyone from converting to Islam, and were not to be allowed tombs that were higher than those of Muslims. Men could enter public bathhouses only when they wore a special sign around their neck distinguishing them from Muslims, while women could not bathe with Muslim women and had to use separate bathhouses instead. Sexual relations with a Muslim woman were forbidden, as was cursing the Prophet in public - an offense punishable by death.Under dhimmi rules as they evolved, neither Jews nor Christians could carry guns, build new places of worship or repair old ones without permission,or build any place of worship that was higher than a mosque. A non-Muslim could not inherit anything from a Muslim. A non-Muslim man could not marry a Muslim woman, although a Muslim man could marry a Christian or a Jewish woman.Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010) 32 - 33.
The Palestinian-Arab leadership, and many of their people, are aggressors who portray themselves as victims in order to advance the Islamic religious imperative of Jihad.
The Palestinian-Arabs are also the cudgel that the rest of the Arab world uses against free Israel.
Arabs outnumber Jews in the Middle East by a factor of 60 or 70 to 1. There are about six million Jews surrounded by 300 to 400 million Arabs in the Middle East. Those Arabs are not the least bit happy about Jewish sovereignty on the ancestral Jewish homeland and it is not because of Israel's record on human rights, which is far-and-away superior to their own.
Arab hatred toward Israel is for the simple reason that Islam claims the Jewish homeland as part of Dar al Islam and therefore, according to Islamic religious law, it must always and forever remain part of Dar al Islam.
However, until the Arabs manage to wrest back control of the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people it will remain, like all non-Muslim lands, part of Dar al Harb, "the House of War."
And it is for this reason that Palestinian-Arab mothers are sometimes happy to see their children commit suicide by intifada - by Jihad - in the streets of Jerusalem or Hebron. If they are fundamentalist in their Islamic faith, then they honestly believe that the violent Jihad is a religious obligation and that their dead sons will go to an eternal life of indulgence in Paradise.
Nonetheless, despite chronic and unremitting Arab-Muslim theocratic animosity toward Jews, we are the only indigenous people in the history of the planet to successfully reconstitute a national home upon ancestral land after twenty centuries of diaspora and thirteen centuries of dhimmitude.
We are, indeed, The Dhimmi That Got Away.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.