For antisemites and fundamentalist thinkers, the hatred of Israel has many causes whose edge cannot be easily taken off and that are not amenable to reason. In this short page, I’ll try nonetheless to follow a partially historical view and see where it may lead. Muslim fundamentalists have their own special theological and political reasons to resent and reject a democratic style of life that Israel has managed to keep so far by choosing to separate religion from politics and civil life. Many Muslims in the Middle East, however, live in countries that are not democracies, far from it. They want to see new democratic regimes come to power as they made so overwhelmingly clear in large revolutionary movements for freedom in Tunisia, Egypt, and many other countries in 2011 and after. But poverty, religion, and the deep trust granted to a party like the Muslim brothers of Egypt, unfortunately help dictatorships and aristocratic regimes inherit power and hold to it. There are nations whose history reaches far beyond Islam, as in Egypt and Iran, who both claim a glorious and imperial past. For many people however, even today, the only avenue is to turn to God and Islam in the hope that justice and peace can be secured that way. Their nations and states are recent creations bound to histories of colonization and exploitation. The only unity and trust that seem workable in these nations, therefore, is within the ummah of Islam, the great community of believers, rather than in national governments.

Regardless of their having a similar political history, however, a number of nations have succeeded in separating religion from politics since the sixteenth century, at least for some ostensibly “enlightened” European kingdoms. It took decades of violence and cruelty in a terrible civil and religious war before practical, hard negotiated solutions could find a way to peaceful relations. But it is also true that those conflicts lost their pathos when the economies of these nations improved dramatically from the sixteenth century on and especially in the nineteenth century when an industrialization that was fueled by enormous oil and gas deposits made it easier for freedom and democracy to spread further (Gaël Giraud, Composer un monde en commun. Une théologie politique de l’anthropocène. Paris: Seuil, 2022). This new freedom and rejection of institutions like the immensely powerful Church couldn’t prevent the new economic forms in Europe or the USA from competing and using military violence to colonize and often bring ruin to local peoples. So-called modern nations did this while presenting this new form of greed under the guise of access to civilizational values and unabated progress.

Israel came into modern existence as a home for dispersed, delegitimized, and surviving victims of a most murderous totalitarianism. It was and still is a Zionist home, a refuge and a return to an ancient story that is irremediably attached to Christianity and Islam. In the thirties and forties, many Jewish immigrants were leery of being associated with colonizing forces. But in spite of this reluctance, Israel was/is also following in the wake of modern nations for whom the process of industrialization and use of power cannot be separated from violence. So, the perceptions that Palestinians have of the nakba are more justified than I could ever estimate. The barbarous murders by hamas are not. And neither is the extreme response by the Israeli government.

My page above is an attempt to understand a few features of the situation of local peoples and states. It doesn’t justify believers to be willing and ready to do what they do. It unerstands the principle of self-defense. But only compassion and a willingness to hear the opponent’s story can hope to close some wounds in time.