The missing perspective of the Arab-Israeli conflict

The persecutions and pogroms suffered by the Jews in the Arab countries, from Northern Africa to the Middle East, before and during the 20^th century, and the almost one million Jewish refugees from the Arab countries, have been ignored and deleted from the books and the conscience, both in the Western and in the Arab world. Half of the Jewish population of the State of Israel consists of Jewish refugees from the Arab countries, and their descendants.

Jews lived in the Middle East and Northern Africa from time immemorial. They lived in a strategic place, the transit point between three continents, a coveted place for all the large imperial powers of the time. They were conquered by the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans. They developed a unique philosophy: they believed in one invisible God, when the large empires aggressively promoted idolatry and a multiplicity of gods. Their history was unique: “Remember that we were slaves in Egypt”, parents told to their children during the Passover meal, from time immemorial. This is central to the Jewish ethos. What other people would include in their primordial mythos that they descended from slaves, and the derived moral imperatives regarding the relations between people? This did not sit well with the great powers of the era, for which slavery was a very profitable business, vital for their economies. The Jews wrote the Bible, a unique document telling the history, philosophy, and poetry of the Jews in the Land of Israel.

And then came the Arabs.

From Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula, and from the 7^th century and on, Arabs began a conquest and colonization of vast territories, capturing the whole Middle East and North Africa. The Jews were colonized by the Arabs.

At the end of the 19^th century, the subjugation of the Jews in the Arab countries was total. The internalization of the subjugation was a unique experience of the Jews in the Muslim countries, not shared by the Jews in Europe. The liberalism experienced in Western Europe during the 19^th century, which spread to Eastern Europe as well, at least in the cultural domain, led to the flourishing of a rich Jewish literature and of Jewish movements for social and political emancipation. On the other hand, the centuries-long oppressive dhimmi-condition in the Muslim world, reduced the Jewish expression to the religious sphere only. They had become accustomed to lowering their heads, and accept their fate as natural.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, this Muslim-dominated world saw a mounting pressure for self-determination of non-Muslim dhimmi minorities trapped in their midst, or – at a minimum – their desire to achieve basic equality of human rights. These aspirations were crushed. Examples abound: the Armenian and Assyrian genocides in 1915, the massacre of Assyrians in 1933 in Iraq, the persecution of Copts in Egypt. Only the Jews were able to fulfill their right to self-determination, but this right has been questioned by the Arab and Muslim world, through multiple wars, political isolation, and economic boycotts.

Setting the record straight is not an arid intellectual exercise: Ignoring the history and fate of the Jews in the Arab countries, distorts and impedes the resolution of this conflict, which is not a local conflict between “the Palestinians and the Israelis”, but a regional conflict between “the Arabs and the Jews”. Wrong diagnoses lead to unworkable and failed solutions: the Oslo Accords solution, a detour from the UNSC 242, was tried multiple times and led to nowhere.

The history of the Arab-Israeli conflict is presented today, in the media and academia, mainly from the perspective of the Arab colonizers. My book presents the other side of the coin: the Jewish perspective of the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs.

Covers of the English and Hebrew editions of the book (paperback, August 2024 edition) (courtesy of the author)

The book comes in English, Spanish and Hebrew (August 2024 editions.) They are all available for free download from the ResearchGate website, and they are also available at Amazon, in paperback and eBook formats.

And here are the links for the free-download of the book:

English edition (“The root of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the path to peace”):

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364057784_The_root_of_the_Arab-Israeli_conflict_and_the_path_to_peace

Spanish edition (“La raíz del conflicto árabe-israelí y el camino hacia la paz”):

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364058058_La_raiz_del_conflicto_arabe-israeli_y_el_camino_hacia_la_paz

Hebrew edition (“The Arab-Israeli conflict”):

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/367511825_The_Arab-Israeli_conflict_Hebrew_edition