Israeli military launches attack on Gaza, Israeli media reports

[Mossfern]

33. Treatment of Jews in pre- Israeli Palestine

Bulletin de l’Alliance israélite universelle, year 1910.

The Jewish condition in Muslim societies is governed by the dhimma, which institutes the status of dhimmi for Christians and Jews. A dhimmi is a “protected person” (this is the meaning of the word in Arabic), and as such is an inferior and submissive subject, restrained by a host of discriminatory and fiscal measures. According to historians specialized in Islam, Janine and Dominique Sourdel, dhimma is based primarily on a verse of the Koran: “Fight those who do not believe in God or the Last Day, who do not declare unlawful what God and His Messenger have declared unlawful, who do not practice the religion of Truth, among the holders of Scripture, until they pay the jizya, in compensation for this benefit and because of their inferiority” (Koran, IX, 29). As a result, note the two authors of the A Glossary of Islam, a two-tier society was created: “on the one hand, the level of the masters, distinguished above all by their membership of Islam, and on the other, the level of non-Muslims, who did not enjoy the same rights2“. This society “carried within it the seeds of intolerance which were to characterize, in every era and in every region, the rigorist Muslim states confronted with the problem of religious minorities3“.

In the nineteenth century, a great many accounts of Jewish life in Arab-Muslim lands reveal a condition characterized primarily by contempt. In 1910, a Western traveler to Yemen4 wrote: “The Jew is the beast on whom one beats at any time, for no reason, to calm one’s nerves, to appease one’s anger”. Between Jews and Arab-Muslims, coexistence is fragile, and remains at the mercy of the slightest incident, especially when Jews forget what Muslim society calls “their sense of humility”. Codified violence keeps everyone in their place, at the risk of being accompanied by the spilling of blood.

Based on a study of the archives of Islamic courts in Palestine, Israeli historian Amnon Cohen reconstructs the reality of the condition of Jewish dhimmis before the beginnings of Zionism, based on legal and administrative sources spanning almost six hundred years, from the Prophet to Saladin in the XIIth century. These documents attest to the fact that the so-called “Pact of Umar”, i.e. the codification of the dhimma, “had retained for many generations an indisputable character”. However, contrary to its official name, the “Pact of Umar” is not a treaty signed between two parties. It was not the subject of negotiation, but a constraint exerted on subjugated populations.

https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/pogroms-in-palestine-before-the-creation-of-the-state-of-israel-1830-1948/

Less than 4 paragraphs