veiled4allah: have Arabs or Muslims always hated Jews?

These are the Orientalist premises of the Zionist Right and its American fellow travelers. The reason my comment was so challenging is that it didn't partake of these premises. The premise is that there is an "eternal Arab" or "eternal Muslim" that is defined as essentially fanatical and intolerant and full of hatred toward Jews. These are universal characteristics of this race, and unvarying over time. Of course, if it were true that "Arabs" or "Muslims" partook of this eternal character, then it just wouldn't matter what Israeli hawks do to them. Kill civilian Arab children with helicopter gunship fire? So what if that upsets the Arabs? They are already fanatical and hate-filled, so it just doesn't matter. You can't throw a glass of water into the ocean and thereby cause the tides to rise.

But what if Arabs and Muslims were human beings like everybody else? Wouldn't it be the case that if you punched one in the nose, he would try to punch you back? And if you didn't punch him out, he'd be more likely to greet you politely? And if you tossed his distant cousin out of his house, wouldn't he mind that? Actions have consequences.

What are the facts?

Living as a minority in any society is seldom a picnic, but in fact Jews before the Napoleonic emancipation were substantially better off living in Muslim societies than in Europe.

Medieval Christianity had no category for non-Christians in society. They completely kept Muslims out of Christian-ruled domains for the most part. Whereas perhaps a third of Egyptians in Egypt in 1400 were Christians, no British, French, Germans, etc. were Muslims. The Muslim trading diaspora threw up communities in Hindu Indonesia and Confucian China, and they were perfectly capable of pursuing opportunities in Europe had they been allowed to. They were not allowed to, in some important part because of the Inquisition. (Valencia in medieval Spain; Russia from Catherine the Great; and some post-Ottoman Balkan principalities are exceptions here, in allowing more tolerance for, or at least having to put up with the presence of, Muslims.)

Likewise, for entire centuries in the late medieval period, Jews were completely excluded from Britain, France, Spain, etc. In contrast, Jews had thriving mercantile communities in places like Cairo in the same period. To paraphrase our SecDef: Was it paradise? No. Was it better than being kicked out altogether or forcibly converted to Catholicism? You bet.

So it just isn't true that all Muslims have always hated Jews. In Islam, Jews were considered a "protected minority." They were not equal citizens with Muslims, but then there was no idea of citizenship or of equality in the modern political sense in any medieval society. Jews were in normal times assured of life and property. There were episodes of intolerance and even persecution, but they were not the norm. There was no blood libel in the Muslim Middle East (some Christian episodes of the libel started occurring under European influence in the 19th century). References in Arabic by Muslims to the blood libel as anything but a Western curiosity are as far as I can tell a very recent phenomenon. The protocols of the elders of Zion, a Tsarist forgery that posited a Jewish political conspiracy to rule the world, had no particular resonances in the Muslim world (outside a few radical Muslim cliques) until the past couple of decades.