The claim that “Arabs and Jews lived peacefully before Israel” is one of the most useful myths in modern politics.
Not because there were never peaceful moments. Of course there were. There were friendships, business ties, shared cities, neighbourly decency, and even Arabs who saved Jews during massacres.
But that is precisely what makes the myth so dishonest.
Because “some people were decent” is not the same as “Jews were safe.”
Before Israel, Jews (like Christians) in the land did not live as equal sovereign citizens. Under Islamic rule, Jews were historically dhimmis - tolerated, sometimes protected, but subordinate. Their safety depended less on rights than on rulers, local power, mood, extortion, clerical incitement and the willingness of others to restrain the mob.
Israel Joseph Benjamin, the 19th-century Jewish traveller who visited Jewish communities across Asia and Africa, described the Jews of Palestine in devastating terms. He wrote of “deep misery and continual oppression”, saying they were “entirely destitute of every legal protection and every means of safety”, subject to arbitrary taxes, robbery, plunder and violence. In Hebron, he wrote, Jews had been murdered and plundered, women treated with “brutal cruelty”, and survivors left in misery. That was not "Zionist propaganda". That was a Jewish eyewitness writing decades before the State of Israel existed, and many of the people in the land were religious and were not Zionists.
And then came the pogroms.
Safed, 1834: during a revolt against Egyptian rule, the Jewish community was attacked for more than a month. Homes were looted. Jews were robbed, assaulted and left defenceless.
Jerusalem, 1920: during the Nebi Musa riots, five Jews were killed and hundreds wounded. Amin al-Husseini and other Arab nationalist figures were associated with the anti-Zionist agitation around the festival; Husseini and Aref al-Aref were later sentenced in absentia for incitement after fleeing to Syria.
Jaffa, 1921: riots that began in Jaffa turned into attacks on Jews, leaving 47 Jews dead and 146 wounded. The British Haycraft Commission identified Arab hostility to Jews as a fundamental cause.
Hebron is where the lie dies.
The Jews of Hebron were not aggressive secular Zionist pioneers with rifles and flags. Many were old Yishuv Jews. Deeply religious. Non-Zionist or not politically Zionist in the modern sense. They had lived among Arabs for generations. They believed their neighbours and local Arab notables would protect them. When Haganah representatives offered to help defend or evacuate them before the violence, the leaders of the Hebron Jewish community refused, trusting the local Arab elite.
That trust was repaid with slaughter.
On August 24, 1929, Arab mobs attacked the Jewish community of Hebron. Between 67 and 69 Jews were murdered. Dozens more were wounded. Homes were looted. Synagogues were desecrated. Women, children, rabbis and yeshiva students were killed. Twenty-four of the murdered were students from the Hebron yeshiva; several were American or Canadian. Some victims were tortured or mutilated. British High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor wrote that “the horror of it is beyond words”.
And yes, the comparison to October 7 is unavoidable.
The pattern is chilling: rumours about Jews threatening Al-Aqsa; religious incitement; mobs attacking unarmed Jewish families; murder inside homes; cruelty against the defenceless; and a world eager afterwards to explain, contextualise or minimise the massacre. The 1929 riots were fuelled by claims that Jews were trying to seize Muslim holy sites; Hamas even named its October 7 massacre “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”.
There is one important detail we must include: some Arabs in Hebron did save Jews. Some Jews survived, because they were sheltered by Arab families. It proves individual courage existed. It also proves the larger point: Jewish life depended on whether a neighbour chose to hide you from the mob.
But that is not safety, and not living together in peace.
The Hebron massacre shattered something, especially for religious Jews who had believed that being pious, apolitical and locally rooted would protect them. Many still did not become ideological Zionists overnight. But the basic Zionist argument became harder to deny: if Jews cannot rely on empire, neighbours, clerics, kings or policemen to protect them, then Jews must be able to protect Jews.
That is what Zionism means at its most basic level.
A Jewish state means Jews are no longer permanently dependent on the mercy of others.
Then came the 1930s and 1940s, and the picture became darker. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, became one of the most important Palestinian Arab leaders of the period. He met Hitler in Berlin on November 28, 1941. In the official record, he told Hitler that Arabs and Germany had the same enemies: “the English, the Jews and the Communists”. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum records that he worked as a Nazi propagandist, opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine, and helped spread Axis propaganda in the Arab world.
He collaborated with the Nazis, campaigned against Jewish refugees reaching Palestine, and in 1944 broadcast: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them”, propaganda that spread throughout the Arab world, that never underwent the marshal plan and are now re-importing the same old ideas to Europe.
At the very moment Jews were trying to flee Europe, Britain, betrayed the Jews and the mandate they received from the league of nations and slammed the door. The 1939 White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 over five years and said that after that, further Jewish immigration would require Arab consent. In plain English: Jews fleeing Hitler needed the permission of those collaborating from Hitler to escape the persecution, while Arab immigration was unlimited.
Jewish refugee ships were intercepted. The Struma, carrying nearly 800 Jewish refugees from Romania toward Palestine, was blocked from entering and later sank in the Black Sea in 1942, killing almost everyone aboard. The Exodus 1947, carrying more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors, was intercepted by the British and its passengers were forcibly returned to Europe, including Germany.
So when people say Jews and Arabs lived peacefully before Israel, ask them: peacefully compared to what?
Compared to the Mufti collaborating with Hitler?
Compared to British ships turning Jewish survivors back to Nazi extermination camps?
Compared to centuries in which Jews survived not as equals, but as tolerated minorities whose fate could change the moment power changed hands?
The Jewish lesson from history is memory.
Spain expelled the Jews. Europe emancipated the Jews and then produced Auschwitz. The Arab world once had ancient Jewish communities from Baghdad to Cairo to Damascus, and most of them are gone. Today, Jews are again discovering that even in Europe, police protection, elite sympathy and liberal slogans are not the same as safety.
That does not mean Jews cannot have allies. They can, and they do. It does not mean every Arab was an enemy. Many were not. It does not make every Israeli policy correct.
But it does destroy the infantile fantasy that everything was peaceful until Zionism arrived.
Zionism did not emerge because Jews were bored.
It emerged because Jews studied history and noticed the pattern.
When Jews had no power, they wrote petitions.
When Jews had no army, they buried children.
When Jews had no state, they begged empires to open gates - and the gates closed.
The world keeps asking why Jews need Israel.
The answer is brutally simple:
Because every other arrangement was tried first and failed.
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