Jews are dhimmis (II)
Dear Graduate:
You are probably unfamiliar with the word “dhimmi”. For your information, an analogy will make it clear:
“dhimmi”: The status accorded to the Jews in the Muslim countries in Northern Africa and the Middle East since the seventh century Islamic conquests, akin to the status of the Black people under the “Jim Crow laws” in the Southern States of the US.
Almost one million Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab countries in the span of a few years after 1948, dispossessed and converted into refugees. If someone wants to understand what is going on in the Middle East, they have to understand the history of the Jewish refugees from the Arab countries.
Some of you believe, or were taught, that the US is a colonial-settler state. Do not project this (poor) perspective of US history onto the history of the Jewish people. For centuries, Jews were persecuted and pogromed by Christians in Europe and by Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa. Half of the Jewish population of Israel are descendants of Jews who were ethnically cleansed from the Muslim states. The other half are the remains of the European Diaspora after the Holocaust. They decided to stop being passive victims and rebuild their lives in their own historic land. This is Zionism.
The conflict between the Arabs and the Jews is not about borders: Israel is not interested in not even a square inch of Lebanese territory. It is not about the lack of a Palestinian state: The Palestinians rejected a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, with Jerusalem as their capital, proposed by President Clinton in year 2000, and accepted by Israel. The United Nations proposed in November 1947 the partition of the land between a Palestinian and Jewish state, living in peace, side-by-side. The Jews accepted the partition. The Palestinians and the Arab countries rejected the partition, waged war, and invaded Israel when it proclaimed its independence in May 1948.
Since the 7th century, as Arabs conquered vast lands in their expansion from Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, to the whole Middle East and the Mediterranean countries in Northern Africa – what in modern political science would be defined as military conquest and colonization, and the Arabs as the epitome of colonizers – a doctrine was developed whose basic tenet was, and still is: lands conquered by Muslims belong to the Umma (the Islamic Community) and cannot be surrendered. Never. Jews in Muslim countries can, at best, achieve the status of “dhimmis”, a state of constant legal, social, and psychological submission.
This medieval Islamic ideology has shaped the modern relations (or the lack of them, and the endless conflict) between the Muslim world and Israel: Dhimmis cannot have a state: they should be subservient. Or be repeatedly attacked until they are reduced back to their dhimmi status, or physically eliminated, as the Hamas founding covenant of 1988 explicitly states, or as the Ayatollah’s regime of Iran has tried since 1979.
This is the root cause of the conflict between the Muslim world and Israel.
The Jewish perspective of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been systematically suppressed in the academic circles by an unholy combination of leftist totalitarian-type and medieval Islamist antisemite ideologies, that appropriated the “oppressor versus oppressed” narrative, defined the Jews as “oppressors”, and excluded their perspective from class. Lately, Jews are even permissively bullied in classrooms and campuses.
Do not be an intellectual coward: the Jewish perspective of the conflict should be heard, and an open discussion should be held in class.
For an in-depth background about this subject, as well as a path to peace based on the 242 UN resolution from November 1967 updated to present times, check my book “The land is ours: Jews are dhimmis” (September 2026 edition). It is available for free download at the ResearchGate website:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/405240572_The_land_is_ours_Jews_are_dhimmis
It is also available at Amazon, in paperback and Kindle editions).
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The above letter is being sent to many graduate students at US universities. Feel free to copy and paste and send to academicians in Western universities. “If not you, who will be for your people?”
