A common argument goes like this.
Zionist (e.g., Meir Kahane spouting Jabotinsky ideology imbibed in his youth):
Why did the Arabs commit the “Tarpat” Chevron massacre (1929)? There was no Jewish state and no refugees and no West Bank settlements to enrage anyone back then! So, obviously, Arabs hate Jews, period. The solution? To stand up for ourselves.
Anti-Zionist:
So Arabs should have waited until all was lost (from their perspective)?! They were being proactive precisely in response to burgeoning Zionist rhetoric and plans! Besides, if the Arabs are natural antisemites, how come they lived in relative peace with their pre-Zionist Jewish neighbors in the country until that time?
Well, here’s an enlightening excerpt from “Stories of Dogs” by Nathan Weinstock (via Emperor’s Clothes). All bolding of the text added to make a point:
…
What Marx has described here – and all contemporary observers agreed with him – is quite simply that the Jews of Jerusalem (like other Jews in what is commonly called the Holy Land and as was the rule in the whole Moslem world) were reduced to a status of structural and intrinsically discriminatory degradation, that of being “dhimmis.”
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The point of recalling this situation is that it played a role in the birth of and attitudes towards the clash between the Zionist newcomers and the Palestinian peasantry in the “Holy Land.” Away from superficial explanations and fashionable off-the-peg simplifications,[9] a critical look at the origins of the friction between the Arab population [10] and the Yishuv [11] reveals that the first significant conflict between the two communities had nothing to do with agricultural settlements, the purchase of land or the Zionist project as such. The clash broke out following the decision by the pioneer Jews of Sejera in 1908 to dismiss their Circassian guards and replace them with Jews, with the establishment of the Hachomer (Watchmen) organisation modelled on the self-defence units set up in Eastern Europe to combat pogroms. The reason was the same too – to be able to defend their security and organise their own defence without relying on anyone else. It should be emphasised here that the defence in question was directed against pillaging Bedouin and cattle rustlers who preyed on all the villagers, and not against dispossessed farmers. It was precisely the dismissal of the (non-Arab) Circassian guards which brought resentment against the Zionist settlers to a head. Why? Why did the neighbouring rural Arabs feel affected by this change? The explanation is of stark simplicity: dhimmis are destined to live under Moslem protection. So what right could they, who were less than dogs, have to bear arms and ensure their own defence? In so doing they were disregarding their allotted status of submission.
The origin of the confessional brawling between Arabs and Jews which broke out in Jaffa in March 1908 is obscure. On the other hand, the underlying reason for the agitation against the Jews of Hebron (who were not newcomers, but people of the old Yishuv, who were, incidentally, opposed to Zionism) in December 1908-January 1909 – is clear, as Henry Laurens has shown from a study of French diplomatic archives. “The Moslem population was called on to boycott Jewish businesses to put the Jews back in their place.”[12] The conservative inhabitants of the town did not at all appreciate the Young Turk revolution and its promises of Ottoman citizenship. The Jews should not get it into their heads that they were equal to others. This Jewish “insolence” required a ruthless reminder of the rules of the confessional hierarchy; the colonised had to be put back in their place. On top of this, minds were being poisoned by the (basically interchangeable) myths of the Jewish conspiracy and the Masonic plot brought in by European anti-Semitism, which were gradually spreading in the Middle East. The nationalist leader Rashid Rida, for example, considered the Young Turk “Union and Progress” Committee as nothing more than an expression of Jewish and Masonic power. These fantasies continue to flourish to this day thanks to constant reading of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other anti-Jewish ravings of Western origin.
However the most striking fact, judging by the slogans raised, is that the anti-Jewish riots – and it is significant that the attacks were aimed not only at recent immigrants but also (and sometimes mainly) at the old Yishuv which had existed long before the Zionist enterprise, as at Hebron, and even on occasion at the Samaritans, who were not even Jewish – were not driven by opposition to Zionism (property purchase, settlement on land, policy of exclusive employment of Jewish labour). Indeed, anti-colonialist rhetoric was strangely absent from the crowds’ chants. They did not express the aspiration of the masses for independence or a protest against the expulsion of peasants from their land. No. The bloody riots of 1 May 1921 in Jaffa took place to shouts of “Moslems defend yourselves, the Jews are killing your women!”,[13] i.e. by an appeal to a classical archetype of the racist or Southern slave-owner imagination, the exact Middle Eastern equivalent of the obsessive dread encapsulated in the phrase “don’t touch a white woman.”
And on 2 November 1921, anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, what were the slogans yelled out in Jerusalem,[14] by demonstrators armed with clubs and knives in yet another bloody attack on the Jewish population? You might expect slogans expressing the desire of the masses for self-determination or independence. Not at all. Their rallying cry was: “Palestine is ours, and the Jews are our dogs,[15] the law of Mohammed is the sword and the government is but vanity.”[16] Rather than showing a new anti-imperialist awareness, the demonstrators were asserting every Moslem’s inviolable right (“the government is but vanity”) to impose, by the sword, “the law of Mohammed” according to which “the Jews are their dogs.”
This is what people don’t want to hear about.
He also points out pacifist anti-Zionism was no escape (would that some Jews take note!):
To complete my demonstration, it should be noted that the explosions of hatred which would bring bloodshed to the Jewish community in the 1920s were mainly directed not against the rural settlements or urban districts created by Zionist immigrants, but the Jews of the old Yishuv, a partly Arabic speaking community which had been present in the area for decades and tended to be against Zionism for reasons of religious conservatism. Nonetheless, in 1929 in Hebron and Safed, the Arab population poured into the Jewish quarters to slit throats, mutilate, castrate and rape their inhabitants in an outpouring of atrocious barbarity. Unlike the Zionist newcomers, these religious Jews had never thought to take any measure of self-defence in case of attack, so they formed an ideal prey for the killers. But what we should note is that this bloodthirsty fury targeted peaceful neighbours, who had nothing to do with conflicts over the Zionist settlement policy and whose only crime was to be Jews.
So, please, spare us the catch-all explanations proffered by lazy minds claiming that everything can be explained by the injustice suffered by the Palestinian people. What we have here is quite simply the results of the dehumanisation of the dhimmis and the dreadful punishment reserved for those wanting to escape their status. At the start of the twentieth century, the members of the old Yishuv became the companions in misfortune of other non-Moslem minorities such as the Assyrians and Armenians, also suspected of seeking to throw off the yoke of dhimmitude.
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I don’t wish to be misunderstood. It would be absurd to reduce the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which is of unusual complexity, to a single factor, that of dhimmitude. But it would be just as vain to seek to grasp its deep roots without taking into account a structural factor which coloured the Arab perception of the Jew, Israeli or not, from the outset, and continues to do so today. The “Arab rejection” of the Israeli reality and the very legitimacy of a Jewish state in Palestine runs like a red thread through the history of the conflict. This visceral hatred of Israel, the unbearable sense of humiliation which this state arouses cannot, as if often claimed, be explained by the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees. It goes further back: on 15 May 1948, at the very moment when the regular armies of the Arab states crossed the Jordan – and before there was a single Palestinian refugee – the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, declared, “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”[17] And nor does it stem from the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza after 1967, since the entire Arab world had boycotted and refused to recognise the Jewish state, which it demonised and swore to destroy, since its proclamation in 1948.
I don’t think the conflict has “unusual complexity”. Yishmael wants to inherit instead of Yitzchak, and all the rest follows, that’s all (not to mention Mohamedanism).
Another lesson to learn here is it’s important to LISTEN to grassroots protester slogans (I made this point also regarding “חרדים כמו פעם”)!