[andyfox]

1) Jews did not fare like crap under the Arabs. This is just not true. Every scholar who has studied this, including those, like Bernard Lewis, who cannot in any way be considered pro-Arab and rejects the idea of a "Golden Age" in Jewish-Islamic relations, has come to the same conclusion.

2) Why was it that Herzl did not even mention the Arabs in his manifesto on Zionism? Because A) Arab anti-semitism and mistreatment of the Jews paled in comparison to that of Europe and Russia, and was a non-issue for him; and B) because he knew that the Jews that lived in Palestine before the advent of Zionism lived there largely without the kinds of problems they suffered under Christianity.

3) To say that Zionism deserved to be a response to Arab oppression of Jews doesn't make sense. The vast majority of Jews lived under Christianity and they were persecuted to a far greater extent under Christianity than under Islam. This is not to say that they were not mistreated in Arab lands. But had they been treated as well in Europe and Russia as they were in Islamic lands, there would have been no Zionism. Two excellent works on the subject are Bernard Lewis's The Jews of Islam and Mark Cohen's Under Crescent and Cross.

While, as a Jew, I cannot condone nor accept any kind of anti-semitism (and you may remember me going somewhat ballistic a few years ago when eLROY made what I considered to be vicious anti-semitic remarks), Jewish treatment of the Palestinian natives was a contributing factor to 20th century Palestinian anti-semitism. Zionist and Israeli leaders and scholars of all political stripes, over many years from Ahad Haam to Ze'ev Jabotinsky to Martin Buber to Moshe Dayan to Bennie Morris, who have all considered the Zionism movement to be a morally right and necessary movement for the Jewish nation, have agreed with this conclusion. Condemning only Arab antisemitism and antimodernism without seeing the other side of the coin leads only to oblivion.