the regional conflict between Jews and Muslims is most certainly not a persistent, perpetual, irrational animosity that has stubbornly raged on for millennia.
Using the reductio ad absurdum fallacy is not going to change the fact that what I said is true. Religion in the Middle East is NOT like what it is in the West. In the West religion is something that is private and chosen voluntarily. It is treated as another layer to someone’s identity. That’s not how it works in the Middle East, over there religion IS your identity. You religion defines you, your people, your culture, and your history. It’s something that you can’t escape, especially since secularism is not widely accepted.
Tribalism in the middle east is not ancient thing, it’s still alive and well. I’ve seen this first hand in my home country of Iraq. Things like collective punishments, discrimination on the basis of religion, and people in power prioritizing their own religious and ethnic groups over others or specifically targeting groups they don’t like are all very common.
The point of me saying all this is to say that religion in that part of the world has a different meaning. When people say different religious groups are fighting over there, they’re not fighting for some mythical holy war like you seem to think. They’re fighting for control, power, security, and resources like anywhere else in the world, it just that religion is primary driver to rally people. What this means is that if there’s a conflict, it’s usually between groups of differing religions because religion is what people there use to divide themselves. It’s similar to how Americans viewed race in the 1950s but on steroids.
In this case, Israel/Palestine is a region that’s claimed as the holy land by three major religions. All of which want complete control over it to give their religion legitimacy, which is a lot states in the region use to legitimize their rule. The competition for this regions goes way back and it hasn’t really stopped. Before the two modern states, the Ottoman empire controlled the region, but they had to constantly shift demographics via mass displacements, forced relocations, and migratory restrictions to make sure that the muslims and Turks were on top… and even they still had to deal with a lot of rebellions. Before that, the Malmuk Sultanate and the Ayyubid Caliphate faced a lot of resistance from Jews and Christians in the region and had to carry out a lot of cultural genocide campaigns to Arabize and muslimize them. Before that, the Kingdom of Jerusalem took over the region through the bloody crusades. You get the idea.
This idea that the different religious and ethnic groups in the region were living together in peace and harmony prior to the modern Israel/Palestine conflict is nonsense. It is quite literally propaganda. That’s not historically accurate, that’s not reality. This region was definitely not peaceful in the 19th century, in fact this was when this region was at its bloodiest because that’s when the century the Ottoman Empire started carrying out it’s infamous genocides before it collapsed during WWI. I’m literally from this region (Iraq), and I can tell you that the only people who believe this in this fiction are people who have never been to this part of the world.
Using the reductio ad absurdum fallacy is not going to change the fact that what I said is true. Religion in the Middle East is NOT like what it is in the West. In the West religion is something that is private and chosen voluntarily. It is treated as another layer to someone’s identity. That’s not how it works in the Middle East, over there religion IS your identity. You religion defines you, your people, your culture, and your history. It’s something that you can’t escape, especially since secularism is not widely accepted.
Tribalism in the middle east is not ancient thing, it’s still alive and well. I’ve seen this first hand in my home country of Iraq. Things like collective punishments, discrimination on the basis of religion, and people in power prioritizing their own religious and ethnic groups over others or specifically targeting groups they don’t like are all very common.
The point of me saying all this is to say that religion in that part of the world has a different meaning. When people say different religious groups are fighting over there, they’re not fighting for some mythical holy war like you seem to think. They’re fighting for control, power, security, and resources like anywhere else in the world, it just that religion is primary driver to rally people. What this means is that if there’s a conflict, it’s usually between groups of differing religions because religion is what people there use to divide themselves. It’s similar to how Americans viewed race in the 1950s but on steroids.
In this case, Israel/Palestine is a region that’s claimed as the holy land by three major religions. All of which want complete control over it to give their religion legitimacy, which is a lot states in the region use to legitimize their rule. The competition for this regions goes way back and it hasn’t really stopped. Before the two modern states, the Ottoman empire controlled the region, but they had to constantly shift demographics via mass displacements, forced relocations, and migratory restrictions to make sure that the muslims and Turks were on top… and even they still had to deal with a lot of rebellions. Before that, the Malmuk Sultanate and the Ayyubid Caliphate faced a lot of resistance from Jews and Christians in the region and had to carry out a lot of cultural genocide campaigns to Arabize and muslimize them. Before that, the Kingdom of Jerusalem took over the region through the bloody crusades. You get the idea.
This idea that the different religious and ethnic groups in the region were living together in peace and harmony prior to the modern Israel/Palestine conflict is nonsense. It is quite literally propaganda. That’s not historically accurate, that’s not reality. This region was definitely not peaceful in the 19th century, in fact this was when this region was at its bloodiest because that’s when the century the Ottoman Empire started carrying out it’s infamous genocides before it collapsed during WWI. I’m literally from this region (Iraq), and I can tell you that the only people who believe this in this fiction are people who have never been to this part of the world.