Not just Palestine, either. There were huge jewish communities all over the Middle East and North Africa. Morocco has an entire city that's blue and was mostly Jewish. Jerusalem itself was home to thousands of jews long before Isreal was created.

It is part of muslim doctrine to treat jews (and christians) as though they are siblings. That's literally in the Koran. Hell, Arabs even protected jews in occupied countries during WWII.

[–] Evilsandwichman@hexbear.net 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Western powers gave us concentration camps (which started before even 1900), they gave us eugenics, and they created the 'Jewish question'. The countries in the Middle Eastern muslim world (or indeed in most non-Western countries) didn't engage in this; I recall an interview with an Iraqi Israeli called Avi Shlaim (spelling?) who even said that European antisemitic literature had to be translated to Arabic because the concept of a Jewish question didn't exist in the Middle East, that there was no antisemitic Arabic literature. He said there were no cultural differences between Iraqi Jews, Christians or Muslims, they were all Arabs who happened to be Jewish, Christian or Muslim.

I like to visit the Arabs subreddit from time to time and someone even posted an excerpt from a book by an Israeli historian who found that while Israeli forces would engage in constant massacres of civilians, that there was no policy of it in the Arab forces they fought; there were massacres from time to time by Arab forces but these were few and far between by independent actors and there wasn't a policy for it. Arab forces would apparently even send out warnings to Israeli civilians that they would be fighting in the area so that the civilians could steer clear.

The kind of horrors that European forces engaged in was not something you saw in the Middle East.

[–] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 5 points 2 months ago

there wasn't a policy for it. Arab forces would apparently even send out warnings to Israeli civilians that they would be fighting in the area so that the civilians could steer clear.

Because civilians (especially children, the elderly, and the disabled) are all off limits in Islam. There's a massive list of rules Muslims have to abide by when conducting war and the Koran is very explicit about what those rules are. Whatever else they may be, theocratic Muslim governments had better behavior compared to their Christian opponents during the crusades. It's why there was never a counter offensive into Europe. Doing so was forbidden.