Why is Israel now a Jewish country when it was once Muslim?

Answer 1

Answer 1

This is a hard question. Israel was previously controlled by the colonial powers. During the second world war, there was a move towards releasing the colonies form under the yoke of their previous owners. This occurred particularly in the case of the German Colonies which were forfeited after the war. Israel was controlled, along with a lot of the middle east, by the British. They were letting go of many of their colonies, including India, South Africa, and Rhodesia at around this time.

Here is where it becomes more complex and an understanding of European and Jewish history becomes important. During the many centuries previous to the 20th Century the Jews were persecuted by many of the European countries who held christian beliefs. Jews were forced into unpleasant occupations and occupations which Christians were not allowed to take (including the position of banker, hence the wealth associated with many Jewish families). However depending on the time during history there were many purges of the Jews, and the inquisition attempted to force them to convert. The Jews, naturally, fled from these issues and ended up in many different countries scattered across the earth. The Jews at this time, still an ethnic group, became known as the diaspora meaning scattered.

When Adolf Hitler came along and began the mass slaughter of the Jews, he was not doing something that was new, he was simply doing things which had been done for many centuries before hand, except he was doing it with German efficiency, and chemical weapons. At the end of the second world war, it became obvious that seeing as the Jews had been persecuted throughout the centuries, and they had had no place where they could call their own, that as colonialism was ending the logical thing to do would be to give them back the lands which they had had before they were scattered from israel at the end of the Roman Empire (c. 200-300).

As a result there was a resolution which gave the Jewish people Israel again, because that had been their homeland, and because the British wanted to get rid of their colonies.

Answer 2

You can ask this about any place in the world which has changed hands between different political groups that endorsed different religions. Why is Turkey majority-Muslim when it used to be the center of the Orthodox Christian Church? Why is Burma majority-Buddhist when it used to be Hindu millenia ago? Why is South Korea predominantly Christian today when it used to be Buddhist and Shenist? The bottom line is that when countries on a map change and people either flee or convert to new faiths, the Demographics shift and societies change.