Jews in History — Who Protected Whom
If Muslims are the existential enemy of Jews, why did Jews flee to Muslim lands for safety for a thousand years?
In Jerusalem today, Christian clergy are spat on in the streets.
This is not a historical curiosity. It is a documented, recurring pattern.¹ Ultranationalist settlers in the Old City harass priests, nuns, and monks with such regularity that Israeli President Isaac Herzog met with church leaders in August 2023 to address what he called “very serious phenomena towards the Christian denominations in the Holy Land.”² The Rossing Centre for Education and Dialogue documented 111 anti-Christian incidents in 2023 alone — up from 89 the previous year — including spitting, vandalism, arson, and physical assault.³ Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, responded by declaring that spitting on Christians was “not criminal.”⁴ The Armenian Quarter — one of the oldest Christian communities on earth, present in Jerusalem since the fourth century — is being squeezed by settler-linked real estate projects.⁵ The Christian population of Jerusalem numbers roughly 15,000 today, a fraction of the community that existed a century ago.⁶
The irony is worth sitting with. The state that presents itself as the sole defender of Abrahamic civilisation in the Middle East is presiding over the erosion of two of the three Abrahamic communities in the city all three call holy.
But this article is not about Christians in Jerusalem, except insofar as their treatment reveals something about the narrative we have all been sold.
The dominant narrative in the Western world — the one that anchors news coverage, congressional speeches, think-tank reports, and the entire edifice of Middle Eastern policy — positions Muslims as the civilisational enemy of Jews. It is the recent narrative that makes Israel’s existence feel necessary, its wars feel justified, and its critics feel dangerous. It is so deeply embedded in Western political culture that most people absorb it without ever questioning whether it is true.
It is not true. It is historically illiterate. And its illiteracy is not accidental — it serves a political project that I have been documenting across this series. In “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” I traced the theological infrastructure that captured American foreign policy for a dispensationalist agenda. In “Just for Fun: The War in Iran,” I documented the illegality of a war launched without legal authority and sustained by arguments that collapse under scrutiny. This article does something different. It inverts the historical record that both of those articles operate within — the assumption that Islam and Judaism are locked in an ancient civilisational conflict.
They are not. And the evidence is not ambiguous.
If Muslims are the existential enemy of Jews, why did Jews flee to Muslim lands for safety — not once, but repeatedly, across a thousand years of documented history? Why did the greatest works of medieval Jewish philosophy get written in Arabic, under Muslim patronage? Why did a Jewish scholar at Vanderbilt University open an essay in the Jewish Chronicle with three words that should have ended this debate: “Islam saved Jewry”?⁷
Those are the questions this article answers. The history it recovers is not obscure. It is simply inconvenient for the people who profit from its erasure.
Omar ibn al-Khattab and the Return to Jerusalem
The story begins in 637 CE, when Caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab arrived at the gates of Jerusalem.
The city had been under Byzantine Christian control. The Patriarch Sophronius, realising that resistance against the Muslim armies was futile, agreed to surrender — but insisted that Omar himself come to accept it.⁸ The Caliph travelled from Medina, entering the city in simple garments, sharing a single mount with his servant, taking turns to ride and walk. He was the ruler of an empire stretching from Persia to Egypt. He arrived looking like a pilgrim.⁹
What happened next has echoed through fourteen centuries. Sophronius offered Omar the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to pray in. Omar refused. He understood that if he prayed inside the church, his followers would eventually turn it into a mosque. So he prayed outside. The church still stands.¹⁰ That single act — a conqueror refusing to pray in the holiest site available to him, specifically to protect another faith’s sacred space — encapsulates a principle that has no equivalent in the Crusader record or, for that matter, in the conduct of the state that governs Jerusalem today.
Omar issued the Assurance of Safety — al-’Uhda al-’Umariyya — guaranteeing the Christians of Jerusalem protection of their persons, property, churches, and crosses. The text, preserved in the chronicle of al-Tabari and witnessed by Khalid ibn al-Walid among others, is one of the earliest documents of religious pluralism in recorded history.¹¹
But here is the detail that matters most for this article. The Covenant included a clause, inserted at the insistence of the Christian authorities, stipulating that Jews should not reside in the city. This was not Omar’s demand. It was Sophronius’s — a continuation of a Byzantine Christian policy that had excluded Jews from Jerusalem for five centuries, dating back to Emperor Hadrian’s suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE.¹² The Christians surrendered the city on the condition that their longstanding exclusion of Jews be preserved.
Omar overrode it. He invited the Jews back.¹³
According to historical tradition, around seventy Jewish families resettled in Jerusalem under Omar’s protection.¹⁴ In Jewish writings of the period, Omar is referred to as a “friend of Israel.”¹⁵ The Times of Israel — not a publication inclined toward flattering Islamic history — noted in 2025 that this return, after five centuries of exclusion, “marked a pivotal moment in Jewish history.”¹⁶
The pattern established here would repeat for a thousand years: Muslim rulers restoring Jewish presence where Christian rulers had removed it. It is the first documented instance. It would not be the last.
The Crusaders and What They Did
Before we reach Saladin, we need to understand what the Crusaders did — not to Muslims, but to Jews. Because the dominant narrative treats the Crusades as a clash between Christendom and Islam. It was. But the first victims of the Crusading impulse were not Muslims. They were Jews.
In the spring of 1096, as the armies of the First Crusade gathered across Europe, bands of Crusaders decided that if they were marching to kill the enemies of Christ in the Holy Land, they might as well start with the enemies of Christ at home.¹⁷ The Rhineland massacres that followed were among the worst acts of organised violence against Jews in European history before the twentieth century.
At Speyer, Crusaders killed twelve Jews on the third of May.¹⁸ At Worms, they broke into the bishop’s palace where the Jewish community had taken refuge and slaughtered between 800 and 1,000 men, women, and children who refused baptism.¹⁹ At Mainz, at least 1,000 more were killed, despite the archbishop’s attempts to protect them.²⁰ The violence spread to Cologne, Trier, Metz, Regensburg, and Prague.²¹ Total estimates range from 2,000 to 12,000 killed across the Rhineland and beyond.²² The historian David Nirenberg has written that the events of 1096 “occupy a significant place in modern Jewish historiography and are often presented as the first instance of an antisemitism that would henceforth never be forgotten and whose climax was the Holocaust.”²³
Jewish mothers killed their own children rather than see them forcibly baptised. The Hebrew chronicles record these acts not as desperation but as sanctification — kiddush hashem — choosing death over the renunciation of their faith.²⁴ This is what Christian Europe offered its Jews.
Three years later, in July 1099, the Crusaders took Jerusalem. Muslims and Jews had fought side by side to defend the city.²⁵ When the walls were breached, the slaughter was indiscriminate. The Crusader chronicler Raymond of Aguilers described men riding through the Temple of Solomon in blood “up to their knees and bridle reins.”²⁶ The Jewish population, according to the Muslim chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi, assembled in their synagogue. The Crusaders burned it over their heads.²⁷ A contemporary Jewish letter, written just two weeks after the siege, confirms the destruction of the synagogue, though it does not specify whether people were inside when it was set alight.²⁸ What is beyond dispute is the outcome: the Crusaders eliminated the Jewish community of Jerusalem entirely.
For eighty-eight years, Jews were barred from the city.²⁹ Every time Muslim forces retook Jerusalem, Jews were permitted to return. Every time Christian forces recaptured it, they were expelled again.³⁰ The pattern is not ambiguous. It is not a matter of interpretation. It is the documented historical record, attested by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish sources alike.
This is the civilisation that now presents itself as the protector of the Jewish people.
Saladin and the Return to Jerusalem
In 1187, Saladin retook Jerusalem.
The contrast with the Crusader conquest eighty-eight years earlier could not have been sharper. There was no general massacre. The city surrendered after negotiation with Balian of Ibelin.³¹ Saladin offered ransoms — ten dinars for men, five for women, two for children — and those who could not pay were, for the most part, permitted to leave.³² Thousands were released without ransom at all. The Crusader chroniclers themselves — men with every reason to demonise Saladin — recorded his conduct with something approaching admiration.³³
And then he invited the Jews back.
For eighty-eight years, Crusader rule had excluded Jews from Jerusalem. Saladin reversed the ban. Jewish families, primarily from Ashkelon, resettled in the city under his protection.³⁴ This was not a one-time gesture. It was the resumption of a pattern. In the years that followed, control of Jerusalem shifted back and forth between Crusader and Muslim forces. Each time the Christians took the city, the Jews were expelled. Each time Muslim forces retook it, Jews were permitted to return.³⁵
Saladin’s treatment of Jerusalem’s non-Muslim communities was not an anomaly. It was an expression of the Islamic legal framework that governed relations with the People of the Book — a framework built on Quranic injunction and the precedent set by Omar five centuries earlier. This does not mean it was flawless. No empire’s conduct across centuries is uniformly just. But the framework existed, it was institutionalised, and it produced results that had no parallel in Christendom.
Consider the trajectory of one man.
Moses ben Maimon — Maimonides — was born in Córdoba in 1138, during the golden age of Jewish life under Muslim rule in Spain.³⁶ When the Almohads, a fundamentalist Berber dynasty, conquered Córdoba in 1148, they abolished the dhimmi protections that had safeguarded non-Muslim communities. The Maimon family was forced to flee.³⁷ This is an important caveat: Muslim rule was not uniformly tolerant. The Almohad period represents the most significant counter-example in the historical record, and honesty requires naming it directly. Maimonides’ family spent years in exile — in southern Spain, then Fez, then Palestine — before settling in Fustat (Old Cairo) in 1166.³⁸
There, under the Ayyubid dynasty founded by Saladin, Maimonides flourished. He became court physician, first to al-Qadi al-Fadil, Saladin’s chief secretary, and then to Saladin himself.³⁹ He served as the head of the Egyptian Jewish community. He wrote his greatest philosophical work, The Guide for the Perplexed, in Judeo-Arabic — the literary form of Arabic used by Jewish scholars throughout the Islamic world.⁴⁰ When Richard the Lionheart reportedly invited Maimonides to become his personal physician, Maimonides declined. He stayed in Cairo.⁴¹
Sit with that for a moment. The greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval world — a man whose influence on Jewish thought is compared to that of Moses himself — wrote his masterwork in Arabic, under Muslim patronage, in the court of the man who had just retaken Jerusalem from the Crusaders. He was offered a position in the Christian West and chose to remain in the Islamic East.
The Almohad persecution that drove Maimonides from Córdoba is real, and this article does not minimise it. But the trajectory of his life tells the larger story: he fled one Muslim regime and found safety, patronage, and intellectual freedom under another. He did not flee to Christendom. He fled from it — or rather, from the Holy Land that Christendom had turned into a place where Jews could not live.
The Golden Age — Al-Andalus
Maimonides was not an anomaly. He was a product of something much larger.
For roughly three centuries — from the mid-900s to the mid-1200s — Jewish intellectual, literary, and scientific life reached heights under Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula that had no parallel anywhere in the medieval world. Historians call it the Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain. It happened under Islam. Not in spite of it.⁴²
The roll call is staggering. Solomon ibn Gabirol, philosopher and poet. Judah Halevi, whose poetry is still recited in synagogues today. Abraham ibn Ezra, mathematician and biblical commentator. And Samuel ibn Naghrillah — Samuel ha-Nagid — who rose from a spice shopkeeper in Málaga to become the grand vizier and military commander of the Muslim kingdom of Granada.⁴³ A Jew commanding Muslim armies. For nearly two decades, he led Granada’s forces in battle, secured its borders, and expanded its territory — all while serving as the head of the Jewish community and producing some of the finest Hebrew poetry since the Bible.⁴⁴ Try to imagine a comparable position for a Jew in medieval Christendom. You cannot, because it did not exist.
David Wasserstein, the Jewish studies professor whose essay anchors this article, put the relationship plainly: Jewish cultural prosperity in the medieval period operated largely as a function of Muslim cultural prosperity. When Muslim Arabic culture thrived, so did Jewish culture. When Muslim culture declined, so did Jewish culture. The cultural capital created under Islam then served as the foundation for later Jewish cultural revival in Christian Europe.⁴⁵
The Jews of Al-Andalus wrote in Arabic. They composed poetry in Hebrew using Arabic metres. They studied philosophy, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics within the Islamic scholarly tradition. They did not merely survive under Muslim rule. They flourished in ways that reshaped Jewish civilisation permanently.
This article does not pretend that Al-Andalus was a paradise. It was not. The 1066 massacre of Jews in Granada — triggered by political resentment against Samuel ha-Nagid’s son Joseph, who had succeeded his father as vizier — killed hundreds and destroyed the Jewish community of the city.⁴⁶ The Almohad invasion of the mid-twelfth century ended the tolerance entirely, forcing conversions and driving Jewish and Christian communities into exile.⁴⁷ These are facts, and they belong in the record.
But the comparative question is the one that matters. What was happening to Jews in Christian Europe during the same centuries? The Rhineland massacres. The blood libel. The ghettos. The expulsions — from England in 1290, from France repeatedly, from one territory after another.⁴⁸ The forced conversions. The Inquisitions. The pogroms. A systematic, institutional, centuries-long campaign of persecution that would culminate, eight centuries later, in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Set the imperfect tolerance of Al-Andalus beside the systematic persecution of Christendom. The comparison is not close. It is not even in the same category.
The Ottoman Centuries and the Kol Nidre
When Christian Spain finally completed the Reconquista in 1492, the new Catholic monarchs moved immediately from territorial unity to religious uniformity. On the thirty-first of March, Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Alhambra Decree, ordering every unconverted Jew to leave Spain by the end of July.⁴⁹ The choice was conversion, exile, or death. An entire civilisation — the Jewish community that had flourished for centuries under Muslim rule — was uprooted in a single decree.
Where did the expelled Jews go?
To the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Bayezid II sent the Ottoman navy to evacuate Jews from Spain.⁵⁰ He issued a firman — an imperial decree — to every governor in his European provinces, ordering them not only to admit the refugees but to welcome them. He threatened with death anyone who mistreated the arriving Jews.⁵¹ And he reportedly mocked Ferdinand for the decision: “You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler — he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”⁵²
Tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews settled across Ottoman territory — in Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Izmir, and throughout the Balkans. They brought with them skills, languages, and commercial networks that enriched the Ottoman economy for centuries.⁵³ A Jewish community writing for +972 Magazine — an Israeli publication — noted in 2018 that Bayezid’s policy of welcoming Jewish refugees stands in documented contrast to the modern State of Israel’s treatment of non-Jewish refugees.⁵⁴
The Ottoman millet system provided the legal framework. Under this system, recognised religious communities — Jewish, Christian, Armenian, Greek Orthodox — governed their own civil and family affairs, maintained their own courts, ran their own schools, and practised their faith freely, under the protection of the Ottoman state.⁵⁵ It was not equality in the modern liberal sense. Jews and Christians were dhimmis — protected non-Muslim subjects — not citizens with identical legal standing. But the system provided something that had no equivalent in Christendom: institutional, legally guaranteed religious coexistence.
And here is where we must address the Kol Nidre.
Kol Nidre is not technically a prayer. It is a legal formula, recited in Aramaic on the eve of Yom Kippur — the holiest night in the Jewish calendar.⁵⁶ It annuls vows made between the individual and God. The text predates the Inquisitions by centuries, and scholars debate its precise origins.⁵⁷ But its emotional power — the reason it has become the most recognisable moment in the Jewish liturgical year, the reason grown men weep when the cantor’s voice rises through the three repetitions — is inseparable from its association with forced conversion.
Throughout the medieval period, Jews across Christian Europe were given a choice that was no choice: convert to Christianity or suffer persecution, expulsion, or death.⁵⁸ Those who converted under coercion — the anusim, the conversos, the people the Spanish called marranos — continued to practise Judaism in secret. And when Yom Kippur came, they would make their way to hidden gatherings to recite Kol Nidre, seeking release from vows they had been forced to take under threat to their lives.⁵⁹
This formula exists because of Christian persecution. Not Muslim persecution. It carries within it the memory of centuries of coerced conversion, inquisitorial torture, and the desperate preservation of Jewish identity against a civilisation that was determined to erase it.
The next time someone tells you that Islam is the historic enemy of Judaism, ask them about the Kol Nidre. Ask them which civilisation made that prayer necessary. And then ask them which civilisation provided the refuge when the prayer was not enough.
“Islam Saved Jewry” — and the Charge Against the Record
The argument of this article is not original to me. It was made by a Jewish scholar, in a Jewish publication, on the basis of Jewish and Islamic historical sources.
David J. Wasserstein, the Eugene Greener Jr Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, published an essay in the Jewish Chronicle on the twenty-fourth of May 2012, adapted from his Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.⁶⁰ His thesis was direct: when the Prophet Muhammad was born in 570 CE, the Jews and Judaism were on the path to oblivion. Christianity had become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, and with that dominance came systematic legal degradation, forced conversion, and the steady erasure of Jewish communal life across the Mediterranean world. Had Islam not arrived, Wasserstein argued, the separation between western Judaism and Babylonian Judaism would have intensified until both were extinguished — one by Christian assimilation, the other by oriental obscurity.⁶¹
The Islamic conquests of the seventh century changed everything. Within a century of Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, Muslim armies had conquered almost the entire world in which Jews lived, from Spain to the eastern frontier of Persia. The result, Wasserstein wrote, was a transformation of Jewish existence in legal, demographic, social, religious, political, geographical, economic, linguistic, and cultural terms — all for the better.⁶²
Wasserstein was careful to note that the status of dhimmi — protected non-Muslim subject — made Jews second-class citizens in Islamic law. But he was equally careful to note what that status replaced. In Visigothic Spain, shortly before the Muslim conquest in 711, Jews had seen their children removed and forcibly converted to Christianity, and had themselves been enslaved. Second-class citizenship, Wasserstein observed, “was a far better thing to be than not to be a citizen at all.”⁶³
This is the point where critics of Islam will raise the charge they always raise: dhimmitude. The argument, as deployed by counter-Islam commentators, runs something like this: the dhimmi system was a form of institutionalised oppression; the jizya was a punitive tax designed to humiliate non-Muslims; and the entire framework proves that Islam is inherently hostile to non-Muslim minorities.
The argument depends on ignorance — either the ignorance of the person making it, or the ignorance they are counting on in their audience.
Here is what the dhimmi system actually was. Under Islamic law, non-Muslim communities recognised as People of the Book — primarily Jews and Christians — entered into a contractual arrangement with the Muslim state.⁶⁴ In exchange for the jizya tax, the state guaranteed their protection, their property, their freedom of worship, their right to govern their own civil and family affairs through their own courts, and their exemption from military service.⁶⁵ Muslims, by contrast, were required to pay zakat — the obligatory wealth tax that constitutes one of the five pillars of Islam — and were subject to conscription.⁶⁶ The jizya was levied only on able-bodied adult men of financial means. Women, children, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, monks, and the mentally ill were exempt.⁶⁷ If dhimmis served in the Muslim military, they were exempt from the jizya entirely.⁶⁸ And — critically — if the Muslim state could not fulfil its obligation to protect its dhimmi subjects, the jizya had to be returned. Caliph Omar himself set this precedent, returning the jizya to a Christian tribe when he could not defend them from Byzantine attack.⁶⁹
Was the system abused? Of course it was. Corrupt rulers throughout Islamic history weaponised the jizya, extracting excessive payments, humiliating dhimmi populations, and violating the contractual protections the system was designed to guarantee.⁷⁰ These abuses are documented, and they are real. But they are abuses of the system — violations of Islamic law, not expressions of it. The distinction matters. When a corrupt tax collector in the Abbasid Empire extorted a Jewish merchant, he was breaking the dhimma contract, not fulfilling it. When the Almohads abolished dhimmi protections entirely, they were repudiating the established Islamic legal framework, not implementing it.
The counter-Islam commentators who cite these abuses as evidence that Islam is inherently hostile to minorities never apply the same standard to their own civilisational tradition. They do not argue that the Inquisition represents the essence of Christianity, or that the transatlantic slave trade — conducted under the Doctrine of Discovery, a papal bull — defines the Christian relationship with non-European peoples. They treat Christian atrocities as aberrations and Islamic protections as facades. The double standard is not accidental. It is the mechanism.
The honest comparison — the one the critics will never make — is between the dhimmi system at its best and Christendom at its best. And even at its most imperfect, the dhimmi system provided Jews with legal protections, communal autonomy, and physical safety that medieval Christendom did not offer at any point in its thousand-year history.
Bernard Lewis, the historian most frequently cited by Western conservatives on matters of Islam, put it plainly: many dhimmis found the change from Byzantine to Arab rule to be a welcome relief, “both in taxation and in other matters,” and some among the Christians of Syria and Egypt “preferred the rule of Islam to that of Byzantines.”⁷¹
The Inversion
So how did we get from there to here? How did the civilisation that sheltered Jews for a thousand years become, in the Western imagination, their eternal enemy?
The answer is not complicated. It is a political project, executed over the last century, and it required the erasure of the history this article has just documented.
The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was driven by European Jewish refugees fleeing European Christian persecution. The Zionist movement was born in Europe, in response to European antisemitism, and its founders were explicit about this. Theodor Herzl did not write Der Judenstaat because of Muslim persecution. He wrote it after witnessing the Dreyfus Affair in France — a Christian country.⁷² The Holocaust that made the case for Israel undeniable was perpetrated by a Christian civilisation, in the heart of Christian Europe, with centuries of Christian antisemitism as its foundation.
But when those European refugees arrived in Palestine, the conflict that resulted was reframed — not as a colonial displacement of an indigenous population by European settlers, but as a civilisational conflict between Jews and Muslims. The Nakba — the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1947–49 — was buried beneath a narrative of ancient enmity.⁷³ The people who had protected Jews for a millennium were recast as their eternal oppressors. And the civilisation that had actually persecuted them — Christendom — rebranded itself as their guardian.
The role of Christian Zionism in cementing this inversion is documented in my earlier article, “Holy War.”⁷⁴ The evangelical movement that now constitutes Israel’s most powerful support base in America — Christians United for Israel, with over ten million members — is driven by a theology that instrumentalises Jews as prophetic stage props. The short-term interests align: evangelicals want Israel supported; the Israeli right wants American backing. But the long-term theology is, at its structural core, antisemitic — it envisions Jewish conversion or destruction at the Second Coming.
The irony is breathtaking. The civilisation that persecuted Jews for a thousand years now presents itself as their protector — against the civilisation that sheltered them. And most people in the Western world have absorbed this inversion without ever questioning it, because they have never been taught the history that this article has laid out.
The Language of Genocide
This inversion does not operate only at the level of historical narrative. It operates at the level of language — the language being used right now, by the leaders of the state that claims to speak for the Jewish people.
On the ninth of October 2023, two days after the Hamas attack, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed,” he said. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”⁷⁵
On the twenty-eighth of October, as the ground invasion began, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed IDF soldiers: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”⁷⁶ In the Hebrew Bible, the commandment regarding Amalek is unambiguous: destroy everything — men, women, children, infants, livestock.⁷⁷ South Africa cited this statement in its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.⁷⁸
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “total annihilation” of Gaza.⁷⁹ President Isaac Herzog declared that there were no innocent civilians in Gaza — that the entire population bore responsibility.⁸⁰ Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested dropping a nuclear bomb.⁸¹
These are not fringe voices. These are the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister, the Finance Minister, and the President of the State of Israel.
Amnesty International reviewed 102 statements by Israeli government and military officials issued between the seventh of October 2023 and the thirtieth of June 2024. Of these, the organisation identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for or justify genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent.⁸² In December 2024, Amnesty International formally concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.⁸³
If the standard for judging a movement is the most extreme language of its leaders — and it is, when the movement in question is Palestinian — then apply that standard equally. The leaders of the State of Israel have used language that meets every threshold for genocidal intent. This is not my assessment. It is the assessment of the world’s largest human rights organisation, based on 296 pages of evidence, 212 interviews, and analysis of visual, digital, and satellite imagery.
Who Protected Whom
This article has asked one question: if Muslims are the existential enemy of Jews, why did Jews flee to Muslim lands for safety for a thousand years?
The answer is in the historical record. Omar invited the Jews back to Jerusalem when the Christians had excluded them for five centuries. The Crusaders slaughtered Jews on their way to the Holy Land and burned them alive in their synagogues when they arrived. Saladin retook Jerusalem and invited the Jews to return — again. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval world, wrote his masterwork in Arabic, under Muslim patronage, and declined an offer from the Christian West. The Jews of Al-Andalus produced a golden age of culture, poetry, and philosophy under Islamic rule that had no equivalent in Christendom. When Christian Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the Ottoman Sultan sent his navy to rescue them and mocked the Christian king who had driven them out. And through it all, the Kol Nidre — the most sacred formula in the Jewish liturgical year — carried within it the memory of Christian persecution, not Muslim persecution.
This is the history. It is not ambiguous. It is not contested by serious scholars. And it is being systematically erased by people who need you not to know it — because if you knew it, the entire narrative that sustains unconditional Western support for the State of Israel would collapse.
The next time someone tells you that Islam is the enemy of the Jewish people, ask them one question.
Who protected whom?
And watch how fast they change the subject.
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James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Endnotes
¹ Nir Hasson, “Jews Spit at Christian Pilgrims in Jerusalem’s Old City,” Haaretz, 2 October 2023. Video footage of the incident during Sukkot went viral, prompting rare condemnations from Israeli officials.
² “Israeli President Slams Rising Attacks Against Christians as a ‘True Disgrace,’” CBN News, 12 August 2023. Herzog met with leaders of the Orthodox and Catholic churches of the Holy Land.
³ Rossing Centre for Education and Dialogue, “Attacks on Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem,” annual report, 2024. The centre documented 111 incidents in 2023, up from 89 in 2022, including 47 physical assaults, the majority targeting clergy identifiable by religious garb.
⁴ “Spitting on Christians in Jerusalem ‘Not Criminal,’ Says Ben Gvir,” Middle East Eye, 4 October 2023. Settler activist Elisha Yered, under house arrest for suspected involvement in the killing of a Palestinian teenager, called spitting on Christians “an ancient Jewish custom” on X (formerly Twitter).
⁵ “Violence Against Christians Is on the Rise in Israel,” Armenian Weekly, 11 September 2025. The report documents repeated attacks on the Armenian Orthodox Convent and settler-linked land grabs in the Armenian Quarter.
⁶ “Christians in Jerusalem Under Attacks from Israeli Settlers,” WAFA, 3 October 2023; Middle East Monitor, 4 October 2023. The figure of approximately 15,000 Christians in Jerusalem today is cited in multiple reports. During the British Mandate, Christians constituted roughly 11 per cent of the total population of Palestine.
⁷ David J. Wasserstein, “So, What Did the Muslims Do for the Jews?” The Jewish Chronicle, 24 May 2012. Adapted from the Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. Wasserstein is the Eugene Greener Jr Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University.
⁸ The siege and surrender of Jerusalem is documented in multiple sources. See Maher Y. Abu-Munshar, Islamic Jerusalem and Its Christians: A History of Tolerance and Tensions (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), pp. 85–89. The date is variously given as 637 or 638 CE depending on the source.
⁹ The account of Omar’s humble arrival — sharing a single mount with his servant, taking turns to ride and walk — is widely attested in Islamic historical tradition. See al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk (History of the Prophets and Kings).
¹⁰ The refusal to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of the most consistently reported details of Omar’s entry into Jerusalem, attested in both Islamic and Christian sources. The Mosque of Omar, built near (not inside) the church, marks the site where he prayed instead.
¹¹ The text of the Assurance (al-’Uhda al-’Umariyya) is preserved in al-Tabari’s chronicle. For scholarly discussion of the various versions and their authenticity, see Abu-Munshar (2007), pp. 85–95. Scholars debate the precise wording of the document, with some later versions considered embellished, but the core provisions — protection of persons, property, churches, and religious practice — are broadly accepted as authentic.
¹² Emperor Hadrian banned Jews from Jerusalem (then renamed Aelia Capitolina) following the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–135 CE. Byzantine Christian authorities maintained this exclusion. See Shlomo Pereira, “638 — The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Promise Caliph Omar Would Not Keep,” The Times of Israel, 22 October 2025.
¹³ The clause excluding Jews from Jerusalem appears in the Covenant text but is understood by scholars as a concession to the Byzantine Christian authorities rather than an expression of Islamic policy. Omar’s decision to override it and invite Jews to return is documented in both Islamic and Jewish sources. See Pereira (2025); Abu-Munshar (2007).
¹⁴ The figure of approximately seventy Jewish families is drawn from historical tradition. See “Islamic Conquest of Jerusalem: A Brilliant Lesson in Tolerance, Justice and Humanity,” Al Mujtama Magazine, which cites the tradition that Omar instructed a Yemeni Jewish convert to Islam to bring Jewish families to settle in the city.
¹⁵ Pereira (2025): “In Jewish tradition, Caliph Omar is viewed as a tolerant and benevolent ruler, referred to in some Jewish writings of the time as a ‘friend of Israel.’”
¹⁶ Pereira (2025): “The return of Jews to Jerusalem after five centuries of exclusion marked a pivotal moment in Jewish history.”
¹⁷ Robert Chazan, In the Year 1096: The First Crusade and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996). Chazan’s work is the standard scholarly treatment of the Rhineland massacres. See also the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle, a Hebrew account written approximately fifty years after the events.
¹⁸ “Rhineland Massacres,” Wikipedia, citing primary sources including Albert of Aachen and the Hebrew chronicles. The Bishop of Speyer intervened and sheltered the remaining Jewish community; he had the hands of some of the attackers cut off as punishment.
¹⁹ At least 800 Jews were killed at Worms on 18 May 1096. The Crusaders broke into the bishop’s episcopal palace where the community had taken refuge. See the Worms massacre entry in the Jewish chronicles and Chazan (1996).
²⁰ The Mainz massacre of 27 May 1096 killed at least 1,000 Jews (some estimates say 1,100). Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz attempted to shelter the community but was overwhelmed. See Haaretz, “This Day in Jewish History: Crusaders Massacre the Jews of Mainz,” 27 May 2014.
²¹ The violence extended beyond the Rhineland to Cologne, Trier, Metz, Regensburg, and Prague. In Regensburg, the entire Jewish community was forcibly baptised in the Danube. See “Rhineland Massacres,” Wikipedia, and Chazan (1996).
²² Estimates of total deaths range widely. The Historica Wiki entry cites “between 2,000 and 12,000 Jews.” The variation reflects the difficulty of establishing precise figures from medieval sources. Even the lower estimate represents a catastrophic loss for communities numbering in the thousands.
²³ David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). The passage is also cited in the Wikipedia entry on the Rhineland massacres.
²⁴ The Hebrew chronicles — particularly the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle, the Mainz Anonymous, and the Eliezer bar Nathan Chronicle — record numerous instances of Jewish self-sacrifice (kiddush hashem) during the 1096 massacres, including mothers killing their children to prevent forced baptism.
²⁵ “Massacre of Jerusalem (1099),” Wikipedia, citing multiple sources: “Jewish Jerusalemites defended their city from the besieging Christians, fighting side-by-side with Muslim soldiers until the Crusaders breached the walls.” See also the Muslim History Chronicles account of the siege.
²⁶ Raymond of Aguilers, eyewitness account, cited in Andrew Sinclair, Jerusalem: The Endless Crusade (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995), pp. 55–56.
²⁷ Ibn al-Qalanisi, Dhail Tarikh Dimashq (The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades): “The Jews assembled in their synagogue, and the Franks burned it over their heads.” Cited in Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 64–66.
²⁸ A contemporary Jewish communication, identified by Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein from the Cairo Geniza, was written approximately two weeks after the siege. It confirms the destruction of the synagogue but does not mention people being inside during the burning. The discrepancy between Muslim and Jewish accounts is noted in multiple scholarly treatments. See “Siege of Jerusalem (1099),” Wikipedia.
²⁹ For eighty-eight years (1099–1187), Jews were barred from Jerusalem under Crusader rule. See the MuslimMatters article “Islamic Jerusalem: ‘We Will Drive the Jews into the Sea’” (Part 2 of 3), 24 July 2009.
³⁰ “Each time the Christians conquered the city, the Jews were expelled, and restored when the Muslims re-conquered it.” MuslimMatters (2009), citing H.A.R. Gibb and Harold Bowen.
³¹ The siege lasted from 20 September to 2 October 1187. Balian of Ibelin, one of the few surviving Crusader nobles, negotiated the surrender. See “Siege of Jerusalem (1187),” Wikipedia, and John Man, Saladin: The Life, the Legend and the Islamic Empire (London: Bantam Press, 2015).
³² The ransom terms are documented in multiple Crusader and Muslim sources. Saladin agreed to release 7,000 of the poorest inhabitants for a lump sum of 30,000 dinars after Balian argued that 20,000 could never pay individually. See “Siege of Jerusalem (1187),” Wikipedia.
³³ Saladin’s conduct was widely noted by Western chroniclers. The World History Encyclopedia entry on Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem describes the event as one in which his “triumph was far less violent than that of the medieval knights of the First Crusade, and for this, he has been endlessly romanticized by Muslims and Christians alike.” See Syed Muhammad Khan, “Saladin’s Conquest of Jerusalem (1187 CE),” World History Encyclopedia, 18 May 2020.
³⁴ “After recapturing the holy city, Saladin allowed the remaining Jews in the Holy Land, mainly from Ashkelon, who had somehow remained alive despite the Crusaders’ enthusiastic efforts to change that situation.” Quora response citing Baha al-Din ibn Shaddad and Ibn al-Athir. See also MuslimMatters (2009): “Just as Caliph Umar had reversed the Christian ban on Jewish settlement, so too did Saladin allow the Jews to return.”
³⁵ MuslimMatters (2009): “During the next few years, Jerusalem shifted between Muslim and Christian control: each time the Christians conquered the city, the Jews were expelled, and restored when the Muslims re-conquered it.”
³⁶ Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon) was born in Córdoba in 1138 (some sources give 1135). See “Maimonides,” Encyclopaedia Britannica; “Maimonides,” Wikipedia.
³⁷ The Almohads conquered Córdoba in 1148 and abolished dhimmi status, forcing Jewish and Christian communities to choose between conversion, exile, or death. See “Maimonides,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. This represents the most significant episode of religious persecution under Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula and is an essential caveat to any argument about Muslim-Jewish coexistence.
³⁸ Maimonides’ family spent approximately a decade in southern Spain, then moved to Fez (c. 1160), then to Acre in Palestine (1165), and finally to Fustat (Old Cairo) in 1166. See “Maimonides,” The Great Thinkers (thegreatthinkers.org/maimonides/biography).
³⁹ Maimonides was appointed court physician to al-Qadi al-Fadil, Saladin’s chief secretary and regent of Egypt, around 1174. He subsequently served Saladin and, after Saladin’s death in 1193, his son al-Afdal. See Fred Rosner, “The Life of Moses Maimonides, a Prominent Medieval Physician,” Einstein Journal of Biology and Medicine, citing primary sources.
⁴⁰ The Guide for the Perplexed (Dalālat al-Ḥāʾirīn) was written in Judeo-Arabic — Arabic written in Hebrew script — and completed around 1190. It was later translated into Hebrew by Samuel ibn Tibbon. Wasserstein (2012) notes that “much of the greatest poetry in Hebrew written since the Bible comes from this period” of Jewish cultural flourishing under Islam.
⁴¹ The tradition that Richard the Lionheart invited Maimonides to become his personal physician, and that Maimonides declined, is widely reported but not fully verified by primary sources. See Rosner (Einstein Journal) and “Maimonides,” Jewish History (jewishhistory.org). The tradition is included here as it is commonly cited; even if apocryphal, Maimonides’ choice to remain in Cairo under Muslim patronage rather than relocate to Christendom is historically documented.
⁴² The term “Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain” is standard in Jewish historiography. See the Encyclopaedia Judaica entries on Spanish Jewry; María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Little, Brown, 2002). Menocal’s account has been criticised by some scholars as overly optimistic, but the core claim — that Jewish culture reached extraordinary heights under Muslim rule in Iberia — is not contested.
⁴³ Samuel ibn Naghrillah (993–1056), known as Samuel ha-Nagid (”Samuel the Prince”), served as grand vizier and military commander of the Taifa of Granada under its Zirid Berber rulers. See “Samuel ibn Naghrillah,” Wikipedia; “Samuel ha-Nagid,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes his career as “the highest achievement of a Jew in medieval Muslim Spain.”
⁴⁴ Samuel ha-Nagid commanded Granada’s Muslim armies for approximately eighteen years (1038–1056). He led campaigns against rival taifa kingdoms including Almería, Seville, and Málaga. His Hebrew war poetry, composed on the battlefield, is considered among the finest of the Golden Age. See “Samuel ha-Nagid,” Encyclopaedia Britannica; E.I. Weinberger, Jewish Prince in Modern Spain: Selected Poems of Samuel ibn Nagrela (1973).
⁴⁵ Wasserstein (2012): “Jewish cultural prosperity in the middle ages operated in large part as a function of Muslim, Arabic cultural (and to some degree political) prosperity: when Muslim Arabic culture thrived, so did that of the Jews; when Muslim Arabic culture declined, so did that of the Jews.”
⁴⁶ The 1066 Granada massacre followed the assassination of Joseph ibn Naghrillah, Samuel ha-Nagid’s son, who had succeeded his father as vizier. The massacre was triggered by political resentment rather than purely religious hostility, but it resulted in the killing of a large number of Jewish inhabitants. See “Samuel ibn Naghrillah,” Wikipedia; “1066 Granada Massacre,” Wikipedia.
⁴⁷ The Almohad dynasty conquered much of Al-Andalus from the 1140s onward, abolishing dhimmi protections and forcing conversions of both Jews and Christians. This was the most significant episode of religious persecution under Muslim rule in Iberia. See “Almohad Dynasty,” Encyclopaedia Britannica; “Maimonides,” Wikipedia.
⁴⁸ The Edict of Expulsion of 1290, issued by Edward I, expelled all Jews from England. Jews were not formally readmitted until 1656 under Oliver Cromwell. France expelled its Jewish population multiple times, including in 1182, 1306, and 1394. See “History of the Jews in England,” Wikipedia; “History of the Jews in France,” Wikipedia.
⁴⁹ The Alhambra Decree was signed on 31 March 1492 by Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. Modern estimates of the number expelled range from 40,000 to 200,000. See “Expulsion of Jews from Spain,” Wikipedia; “Alhambra Decree,” Wikipedia.
⁵⁰ “Bayezid II sent out the Ottoman Navy under the command of admiral Kemal Reis to Spain in 1492 in order to evacuate them safely to Ottoman lands.” See “Bayezid II,” Wikipedia; “Sultan Bayezid II Welcomes Jewish Refugees from Spain,” History of Information (historyofinformation.com).
⁵¹ “Bayezid addressed a firman to all the governors of his European provinces, ordering them not only to refrain from repelling the Spanish refugees, but to give them a friendly and welcome reception. He threatened with death all those who treated the Jews harshly or refused them admission into the empire.” See “Bayezid II,” Wikipedia.
⁵² The quote is widely attributed to Bayezid II in multiple forms. The version cited here follows the Wikipedia entry on Bayezid II and the Alhambra Decree: “You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!” See also “When the Sultan Took in Jewish Refugees,” +972 Magazine, 25 January 2018.
⁵³ Sephardic Jews established the first printing press in Constantinople in 1493. Jewish communities in Thessaloniki, Istanbul, and Izmir became major centres of commerce and scholarship under Ottoman rule. See “Ottoman Lands Provided Safe Haven for Sephardic Jews Expelled from Spain,” Anadolu Agency, 2022.
⁵⁴ “When the Sultan Took in Jewish Refugees,” +972 Magazine, 25 January 2018. Written by a Jewish author of Sephardic origin, the article explicitly contrasts Bayezid II’s refugee policy with the modern State of Israel’s treatment of African asylum seekers.
⁵⁵ The Ottoman millet system granted recognised religious communities (millets) autonomous governance over their own civil and family affairs, including marriage, divorce, inheritance, and education. The system lasted from the fifteenth century until the late Ottoman period. See “Millet (Ottoman Empire),” Wikipedia; Stanford Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York: New York University Press, 1991).
⁵⁶ “Kol Nidre,” Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Kol Nidre (Aramaic: ‘All Vows’), a prayer sung in Jewish synagogues at the beginning of the service on the eve of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement).”
⁵⁷ The text of Kol Nidre appears as early as the ninth-century prayer book Siddur of Rav Amram Gaon. Its origins are debated. Historian Joseph S. Bloch suggested it may have originated during the Visigothic persecutions of Jews in Spain (seventh century). See “Kol Nidre,” Wikipedia; “A Brief History of the Kol Nidrei Prayer,” Reform Judaism (reformjudaism.org); Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, “Moses Annuls a Vow,” The Jewish Press, 12 March 2020.
⁵⁸ Forced conversions of Jews occurred throughout medieval Christendom, including under the Visigoths in seventh-century Spain, during the Rhineland massacres of 1096, and culminating in the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition specifically targeted conversos suspected of practising Judaism in secret. See “Kol Nidre,” Wikipedia; “The Curious Case of Kol Nidre,” Commentary Magazine.
⁵⁹ While most scholars agree that Kol Nidre predates the Spanish Inquisition, the association with forced converts is well established. “It is probably true that ‘secret Jews,’ in various times and places, did utilize Kol Nidre as a means of absolving themselves from vows made under coercion.” Commentary Magazine, citing historian Joseph S. Bloch. The Chabad.org article on Kol Nidre notes: “While this story is beautiful, it’s not historically accurate, as the prayer predates the Inquisition by centuries. However, some suggest that the conversos popularized the text.”
⁶⁰ David J. Wasserstein, “So, What Did the Muslims Do for the Jews?” The Jewish Chronicle, 24 May 2012. The article was adapted from Wasserstein’s Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion, delivered at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London.
⁶¹ Wasserstein (2012): “Had Islam not come along, the conflict with Persia would have continued. The separation between western Judaism, that of Christendom, and Babylonian Judaism, that of Mesopotamia, would have intensified. Jewry in the west would have declined to disappearance in many areas. And Jewry in the east would have become just another oriental cult.”
⁶² Wasserstein (2012): “Within a century of the death of Mohammad, in 632, Muslim armies had conquered almost the whole of the world where Jews lived, from Spain eastward across North Africa and the Middle East as far as the eastern frontier of Iran and beyond. Almost all the Jews in the world were now ruled by Islam. This new situation transformed Jewish existence.”
⁶³ Wasserstein (2012): “This should not be misunderstood: to be a second-class citizen was a far better thing to be than not to be a citizen at all. For most of these Jews, second-class citizenship represented a major advance. In Visigothic Spain, for example, shortly before the Muslim conquest in 711, the Jews had seen their children removed from them and forcibly converted to Christianity and had themselves been enslaved.”
⁶⁴ The dhimma was a contractual arrangement under Islamic law. The word literally means “protection.” See “Dhimmi,” Wikipedia; Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
⁶⁵ The Pact of Umar stipulated that Muslims must “do battle to guard” the dhimmis and “put no burden on them greater than they can bear.” See “Jizya,” Wikipedia; “Jizyah,” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
⁶⁶ Zakat is obligatory for all Muslims of financial means and constitutes one of the five pillars of Islam. Dhimmis were exempt from zakat but subject to jizya. The two taxes served parallel functions within the Islamic fiscal system. See “Islamic Taxes,” Wikipedia.
⁶⁷ “The tax was to be levied only on able-bodied males, and not on women or children. The poor who were dependent for their livelihood on alms and the aged poor who were incapable of work were also specially excepted, as also the blind, the lame, the incurables and the insane.” Sir Thomas Arnold, cited in “Does Islam Oppress Dhimmis?” (alislam.org). See also “Jizyah,” Encyclopaedia Britannica: “The non-Muslim poor, the elderly, women, serfs, religious functionaries, and the mentally ill generally did not pay any taxes.”
⁶⁸ Sir Thomas Arnold documents multiple instances of dhimmi communities exempted from jizya in exchange for military service, including the al-Jurajima tribe (a Christian community near Antioch) and frontier tribes in Persia. Similar exemptions existed under Ottoman rule. See “Does Islam Oppress Dhimmis?” (alislam.org).
⁶⁹ Caliph Omar returned the jizya to a Christian Arab tribe when he was unable to protect them from a Byzantine military attack. This precedent established the principle that the jizya was conditional on the state’s fulfilment of its protection obligations. See “Jizyah,” Encyclopaedia Britannica; “Jizya,” Study.com.
⁷⁰ Abuses of the jizya system are documented throughout Islamic history. Norman Stillman described the tax burden on some dhimmi populations as “crushing.” The Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil imposed additional restrictions on dhimmis in the ninth century. The Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire saw instances of enslavement for non-payment. See “Dhimmi,” Wikipedia; “Jizya,” Wikipedia. These abuses are violations of the Islamic legal framework, not expressions of it — a distinction the counter-Islam commentariat consistently fails to make.
⁷¹ Bernard Lewis, cited in “Dhimmi,” Wikipedia and “Does Islam Oppress Dhimmis?” (alislam.org): many dhimmis “found the new yoke far lighter than the old, both in taxation and in other matters, and that some even among the Christians of Syria and Egypt preferred the rule of Islam to that of Byzantines.”
⁷² Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896, following his coverage of the Dreyfus Affair in France as a journalist. The Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful conviction of a Jewish French army officer on charges of espionage — crystallised Herzl’s conviction that Jewish assimilation in Europe was impossible.
⁷³ The Nakba (”catastrophe” in Arabic) refers to the displacement of approximately 700,000–750,000 Palestinians during the 1947–49 war. The figure is cited by UNRWA and is broadly accepted by historians on both sides, though the causes and responsibility remain contested. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
⁷⁴ James S. Coates, “Holy War: How Evangelical Christianity Captured American Foreign Policy,” Fireline Press, 18 March 2026.
⁷⁵ Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defence Minister, 9 October 2023. Reported by Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, The Times of Israel, HuffPost, and Human Rights Watch. Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, called the statement “abhorrent” and a “call to commit a war crime.”
⁷⁶ Benjamin Netanyahu, address to IDF soldiers, 28 October 2023: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” Reported by NPR, NBC News, The Christian Post, Common Dreams, and others.
⁷⁷ 1 Samuel 15:3: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” Netanyahu’s office stated he was quoting Deuteronomy 25:17 (”Remember what Amalek did to you”), not 1 Samuel 15. Both passages concern Amalek; the distinction is contested. See NPR, 7 November 2023; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 16 January 2024.
⁷⁸ South Africa cited Netanyahu’s Amalek statement in Section 101 of its application to the International Court of Justice, filed December 2023. See “International Court of Justice in The Hague Genocide Proceedings,” Israel Democracy Institute; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 16 January 2024.
⁷⁹ Bezalel Smotrich’s statement calling for the destruction of Gaza is documented in the Amnesty International report and in multiple media sources. The precise wording varies across translations.
⁸⁰ Isaac Herzog, President of Israel, 13 October 2023: “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.” Widely reported, including by The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Middle East Eye.
⁸¹ Amichai Eliyahu, Heritage Minister, suggested in a radio interview that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was “one of the possibilities.” He was suspended from cabinet meetings but not dismissed from his position. Reported by The Guardian, BBC News, The Times of Israel, November 2023.
⁸² Amnesty International, “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, December 2024, 296 pages. The organisation reviewed 102 statements by Israeli government and military officials between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024, identifying 22 that provided direct evidence of genocidal intent.
⁸³ Amnesty International formally concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Secretary-General Agnès Callamard stated: “Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.” See amnesty.org, 5 December 2024.