David Harris recently had a thought-provoking article on Huffington Post (link), entitled "It's not about Israel." I received a copy by mail and then checked the site to be sure that what I received had not been selectively edited. It had not.
Before I go further, let me say that I hold no animosity toward Arabs as a whole, nor toward the Islam religion. One of my sons is hosting a Moslem girl from Indonesia as an exchange student for a year. She's a delightful person who has sung in church choirs and plans soon to participate in a Jewish Passover seder. When I lived in Toledo I had many contacts with business owners who were Arabic immigrants; on average they were more fair and conscientious in their dealings than the majority of entrepreneurs.
Looking back 500 years, it was Moslems who preserved ancient writings and employed medical knowledge handed down from the Greek and Roman empires. The Christian church of that time destroyed great intellectual and historical works, and forbid the practice of medicine. When the Jews were expelled from Spain, it was a Moslem nation, present-day Turkey, that took them in and protected them.
Things change.
When I consider the role of Israel in the Middle East, I recall my experiences living in the Deeeep South for a while during the days of hard-core segregation. Wealth and power was mostly in the hands of a relatively small segment of the white population. A white person born into a poor family was typically destined to stay poor his entire life, exploited in numerous ways by the over-privileged. Yet dirt-poor white southerners directed their anger, not toward those who overworked and underpaid them but toward the blacks, who, they were told, wanted to take their jobs, steal their cars, and run off with their daughters. The blacks, who had even less power and money than poor whites, were the threat. I assume you know how the black population was treated as a result, so no need to expound.
In the Middle East, Israel fills the role that the black population filled in the south in segregation days. All the violence and political unrest in the Middle East is Israel's fault. Unlike southern blacks, however, Israel isn't poor or powerless, and every time its neighbors have tried to annihilate it, Israel has given them a first class ass-kicking.
Never mind, though: Every young Arab who blows himself up for the noble goal of killing Israeli children is a young Arab who won't be storming the palace. Every Arab pundit who rails against those uppity Jews who dare to hold a tiny bit of land with no oil is not railing against a king on his gold toilet seat whose subjects have too little food and no rights.
Harris points out that it is not Israel's fault that Iraq and Iran fought each other for eight years at a cost of a million lives, that Syria slaughtered 10,000 of its own citizens in 1982, that the Baha'i are persecuted in Iran, and much more.
Unfortunately, many world leaders join in scapegoating Israel, directly or by innuendo, while "the courageous Arab authors of the annual Arab Human Development Report have not." Instead, they have pointed to the malignancies of repression, ignorance, and inequality for the ongoing misery of the masses in the Middle East.
One can legitimately question specific policies of the Israeli government, just as we can disagree with much that comes out of Washington D.C. Hower, those who join in the blanket condemnation of Israel, including apostate Jews who seem to think it fashionable, are doing their own little bit to further that misery.