Myth: Jews and Arabs have always hated each other.

“Jews and Arabs have always hated each other.”

The claim does real work in public argument. It tells the listener that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a 20th-century dispute over land, sovereignty and refugees but a millennia-old religious blood feud, which makes the conflict sound eternal, unsolvable and nobody’s particular fault. It is also, in a mirror-image form, used by Islamist groups to root today’s war in scripture rather than politics. Both versions collapse under the historical record.

Where the claim comes from

The framing has two separate origins. The first is theological, and it is documented. Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant of 18 August 1988 quotes a hadith in which stones and trees call out, “O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him,” except the gharqad tree, “the tree of the Jews.” The covenant presents this as evidence the war against Jews is eternal and religiously mandated, not a modern border dispute over the West Bank and Gaza. That is a founding movement in the current conflict explicitly asserting, in writing, that the hatred is ancient and permanent.

The second origin is journalistic convention rather than a single author: Western press coverage of the Middle East since the 1970s has repeatedly reached for phrases like “age-old enmity” or “biblical rivalry” to describe what is, on the record, a nationalist conflict between Zionism and Arab nationalism that only crystallized in the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. It is a lazier explanation than the real one, and it erases the specific decisions, wars and treaties that actually produced the conflict. See who started the wars for that record.

The record, era by era

The strongest version of the claim is not invented. Under classical Islamic law, Jews and Christians held dhimmi status: protected but subordinate, taxed through the jizya, and bound by restrictions codified in texts like the Pact of Umar, which barred building new synagogues, riding horses, or bearing arms. The Qur’an’s ninth chapter directs fighting “People of the Book” until they pay the jizya “in a state of subjection” (Quran 9:29). In Muhammad’s own lifetime, the Banu Qurayza, a Jewish tribe in Medina, was besieged in 627 CE and, per Ibn Ishaq’s early biography, its men were executed and its women and children enslaved after a surrender. Later centuries brought real massacres: Granada in 1066, Fez in 1465 and 1912, and in the 20th century the 1929 Hebron massacre and the 1941 Farhud pogrom in Baghdad, in which mobs killed roughly 180 Jews over two days. Between 1948 and the early 1970s, some 850,000 Jews left or were expelled from Arab countries.

That record is real, and this wiki does not soften it. But it is not the whole record, and it is not evidence of a fixed, unbroken hatred. Under the Umayyads and Abbasids, Jewish scholarship flourished in Baghdad and Cairo; the physician and philosopher Maimonides served in Saladin’s court in Cairo after fleeing Almohad persecution in Spain, writing his major works in Judeo-Arabic. In Muslim Spain from the 10th to 12th centuries, Jewish courtiers such as Samuel ibn Naghrilla rose to be vizier of Granada, and Hebrew poetry, philosophy and science reached a height not matched again for centuries, the period generally called the Golden Age. When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II sent ships to bring them in, reportedly remarking that Ferdinand had impoverished his own kingdom to enrich the Ottomans’. Sephardic and later Mizrahi Jewish communities in Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo and Sana’a lasted continuously for well over a thousand years, through long stretches with no persecution at all. A relationship that produces Golden Age philosophy in one century and a pogrom in another is not “always” anything. It is a subordinate but often stable coexistence, punctuated by real violence, most of it tied to specific political crises rather than constant background hatred.

Who pushes it today

Two very different camps invoke the claim, for opposite purposes. Islamist movements descended from the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas foremost among them, cite it to root the present war in 7th-century scripture, making any territorial or political compromise irrelevant to a struggle they present as theological and eternal. Western commentators and headline writers, by contrast, invoke “ancient hatred” as a shrug: a way to describe the conflict as tragic but timeless, which quietly excuses the specific actors, the 1948 war, the 1967 war, the terror campaigns and the failed negotiations, that actually produced it. A related, opposite distortion appears on some pro-Palestinian platforms, which claim the reverse: that Jewish-Arab relations were purely harmonious before Zionism supposedly imported hatred from Europe. That version is equally false; it erases the dhimmi system, the jizya and the Farhud, and treats antisemitism in the Islamic world as a modern import rather than a documented, older feature with its own history. It runs the same logic in reverse: pick one era, erase the other.

The real persecution, and why it doesn’t add up to “always”

The historical record includes genuine, sustained subordination of Jews under Islamic law and specific massacres that were not aberrations invented by later propagandists. Modern claims that “the Nazis invented antisemitism” fail for the same reason this myth fails in reverse; see the myth that the Nazis invented antisemitism for the parallel case on the European side. What the record does not support is a straight line of constant hatred running from Medina in 627 to Hebron in 2026. It supports a mixed, cyclical history: centuries of protected coexistence and cultural flourishing, interrupted by real persecution tied to specific rulers, riots and wars, followed by the entirely separate, 20th-century national conflict between Zionism and Arab nationalism that produces today’s headlines. Flattening all of that into “always hated” serves people who want the present conflict to feel unsolvable rather than explained.