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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.

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Jews EVEN TODAY fare like crap in many Arab countries--at least in those countries where they are even allowed to live in the first place! Pre-Israel, Arab riots against the Jews tormented the Jews in the Middle East, and the Jews had to endure unequal laws. Even back in the so-called "Golden Age", Jews had to live as inferior beings in Arab society, with far lesser legal status, lesser rights and lesser privileges.

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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.

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So what? Arab laws today are horribly prejudicial against the Jews--AND WERE SO BACK THEN, too. As of course are the attitudes and customs as well.

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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.

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So what, again? A dog that is beaten only twice a month instead of being beaten every day is still being severely mistreated. The Arabs--and the Arab supremacist attitude, along with the Islamic supremacist attitude--and their corresponding unequal laws and vile treatment of the Jews--is ample reason for the Jews to demand a tiny homeland in their original home, where many of them lived anyway at the time, to be free from such oppression.

Your way of mentioning this kind of stuff is sort of like saying: Jim Crow laws weren't all that bad bad, compared to outright slavery. Well pardon me for saying it, but "whoop-de-doo."

As I've stated before, if the USA had not enacted equal civil rights for blacks, the blacks would have had a moral and practical justification, in my opinion, to demand and receive a fair portion of the United States as their own homeland, to therein be free of such opppression. Likewise, the Jews had a moral right to such a homeland in their ancestral home to be free of European and Arab oppression. So what if, using the metaphor, the Europeans "enslaved" the Jews whereas the Arabs only enforced Jim Crow laws against the Jews? (and actually, laws in many Arab states did and still do infringe more upon Jewish civil rights than did the Jim Crow laws infringe upon black civil rights).

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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.

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Yes Jewish actions exacerbated the problem somewhat. But the root--and fault--of the problem was nearly all of the oppressors: foremost Europeans, yet also, Arabs. And today the Arabs are considerably worse than the Europeans about it.