No! The conflict between the Arabs and the Jews does not go back centuries

(Also published in the Delaware County Daily Times, Thursday, January 15, 2009, p17)

By Dr. Mahmoud S. Audi

Misguided or misinformed, journalists, TV news reporters and anchors, politicians, and innocent lay people, to dismiss the current egregious assault on Gaza as something not to be worried about, have been saying,that the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis “goes back centuries.” It does not. In fact, the Arabs and the Muslims, and the Jews had been the best of citizens of the Arab and the Muslim worlds, including the centuries they had lived together in peace and prosperity in Spain, where they had also suffered together the pains of the Inquisition.
Here, from memory, are some major chronological events and pointers to support the premise of this article:
• Both the Jews and the Arabs are the children of Abraham and they both belong to the same ethnic tribes, the Semites.
• When the Jews fled Egypt with Moses they invaded Palestine and established short lived kingdoms in the conquered land.
• When the Persians expanded their empire to the Mediterranean Sea, they dispersed the Jews away from Palestine. Some of them fled south into the Arabian Peninsula.
• As the Persian Empire weakened, some Jews returned to Palestine and lived in rebuilt and short lived kingdoms.
• During the first century A.D., the Romans dispersed the Jews from Palestine after they had conquered the land east of the Mediterranean Sea. These Jews have become the ancestors of the current European Jews, Arab Jews, Persian Jews, Indian Jews, and other Jews.
• At about seven hundred years after the birth of Jesus, Prophet Muhammad was called upon to carry the message of Islam from God to the world.
• Christian Arabs, Jewish Arabs, and pagan Arabs lived together in Yathrib (the current Saudi Arabian city: Medina). The three communities welcomed Prophet Muhammad when he and his followers fled their home town: Mecca, because his tribe and other Arab tribes refused to accept Islam and vowed to kill the Prophet and his followers. The pagans have converted to Islam, and most of the Christians and the Jews kept their religions; they have become the People of the Book.
• The Prophet of Islam wanted to establish alliances with the two communities to fend against the pagans of Mecca who might invade Medina, but the Jews wanted an exclusive pact with the Prophet and he yielded. However, soon afterwards conspiracies against the young religion started to spawn. They were discovered and eliminated. But they continued. This led the Prophet to declare that there would be no place for the Jews and the Christians in the city. Some of the Arab Jews and the Arab Christians went to what is now known as Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq.
• Later when the Muslim Empire spread throughout the land, the Jews and the Christians went wherever their Muslim cousins and brothers went. They had become among the elite of the Muslim world. Many of them became leading artisans and intellectuals.
• In later centuries the Jews of Europe had become the objects of persecuted in their own countries. They had been despised and put to trial in Christian countries from Russia in the east to France and Spain in the west. They had also been despised in Christian America.
• There were highly publicized trials of Jews in Christian Russia and in Christian France in the nineteen century. That led to a conference of prominent Jewish leaders in Switzerland. The conclusion of the conference was the establishment of Zionism, a political movement, in 1898. The grand goal of the movement is the establishing of the Kingdom of Israel from Egypt to Iraq.
• That year, that conference, and that decision put the Arabs and the Zionists on a collision course that continues to produce violence in that area and in the world.