Did the Arabs and Jews support each other?

Answer 1

Answer 1

Yes the Arabs, whether Christian or Muslim did help the Jews on numerous occasions and the Jews did the same. The Jews assisted Arab and Amazigh Muslims in their conquests throughout the Rise of Islam period such as when the Muslims captured the city of Cordoba in Spain. They approached the Jewish community, gave them weapons, and asked them to be the stewards of the city until the Conquest of Spain was complete. Conversely, the Arabs helped the Jews settle down in the Muslim Empires (Morocco and the Ottoman Empire) after the Reconquest of Iberia by the Catholics. They also worked together against the European Crusaders that attacked anyone that was not Catholic, including Eastern Orthodox Christians.

Jews and Arabs lived peacefully in the Middle East and North Africa for hundreds of years before the establishment of Israel in 1948. Even then, many Arabized Jews fought against the Zionist Jews who cam from Europe.

Arab Jews still live in the West Bank and consider themselves Palestinian, rather than Israeli.

Answer 2

Yes. Historically, Arabs and Jews had decent relations and tolerated each other. Some of their better moments are memorialized in paragraph 1 of Answer 1. However, for much of their history together, it was not an association of equals. The Arabs were superiors and the Jews were inferiors. There were legal requirements for Jews concerning how they were to dress, where they could live, what jobs they could perform, what their testimony and wrongful deaths were worth, what taxes they would need to pay, how they could proselytize, and how they could produce, sell, and consume Alcoholic Beverages.

The reason the Jews supported Arabs, even with all of this discrimination, was that the situation in Christendom was substantially worse. When Europe and the Americas began to give Jews access to equal rights in citizenship, the Jews began to support those regimes over those led by Arabs who continued to enforce the same historical discriminatory laws against the Jews that they had enforced for a millenium. Jews from Europe came to the Middle East and began to educate Jews, leading to them becoming important in government and administration during the colonial period. It was at this point, when Jews in the Arab World became more prominent and powerful than the Muslim Arabs, that Arab tolerance of them unravelled because the Arabs were unwilling to be true equals with the Jews.

As for paragraphs 2 and 3 in Answer 1, some clarifications should be made. The "peace" it discusses refers to an era of segregation and discrimination and while there was minimal bloodshed, it was not anything close to harmony or equality which is implicit in the word peace. Zionism was much debated among Jews of the Arab World. Some agreed with the European position, believing that Jews would never have a place in the Arab-led Middle East otherwise; some disagreed with Zionism because they believed that Jews had a stake in local Arab Nationalism; and others disagreed with Zionism to avoid offending their Arab countrymen regardless of whether they would have actually wanted such a state or not. However, in no circumstance did Jews actually kill each other or join armies and militias to prevent the establishment of a Jewish State. Jews were, by law, prohibited from the armed forces of all seven belligerent nations and the two Palestinian militant groups in the Arab-Israeli Wars. Finally, there are no Jews left in the West Bank except the Settlers. All of the Palestinian Jews fled the Jordanian-occupied West Bank in 1948 and 1949 to avoid attacks from neighboring Arab villages. Aside from the Settlements, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are effectively Judenrein (a German term meaning "devoid of Jews").