From 1917, but even before that, there was a lot of pressure in the West to create a state for the Jews as their homeland. In a secular way, to give back to them the Holy Lands that God had given them under Moses.On 14 May 1948 that happened. But it happened in part thanks to a new movement amongst the Jews, known as Zionism – a homeland for the Jews. That movement had started in Europe (particularly Russia) and from the 1880s onward it had started to draw Jews back to their God Promised Land in response to that new idea. From my previous programmes you’ll know that there has always been large numbers of Jews living in what is now Israel, and they had been returning there almost continuously for over a 1,000 years.The Arab argument against creating a separate state for the Jews, was that the Jews did not need a country of their own. They said that the Muslims and the Jews had lived peaceably together for hundreds of years in all of the Muslim countries, so why stir things up – and has the creation of Israel stirred things up.That seems to be an important point, I think. So in this and the next programme I’m going to trace the history of how well, or otherwise, the Muslims and the Jews got along before the Zionist movement that said the Jews needed a homeland of their own.Once we’ve had a look at that we’ll have a pretty good idea of how well they got along before the idea of Zionism started and whether the Jews really did not deserve to have a separate homeland when they could live as equals among the Muslims.Tag words: Jews; Holy Lands; Moses; Zionism; Arab; Muslim; Jacob Sappir; Even Sappir; Yemen; Necbuchadnezzar; Cyrus the Great; dhimma; Mohammad; Mamluks; caliphs; Babylonian Captivity; al-Hakim of the Fatimids; Redeemer of Mankind; Golden Calf; Ten Commandments; HZ Hirschberg; A History of the Jews in North Africa; Edward Lane; Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians 1833-1835; Kanush al-Ghauri; mellah; hara; Maghrebi; Torah; David Littman; Jews Under Muslim Rule in the Late Nineteenth Century; Almohads; Moses Maimonides; Epistle Concerning Apostasy; Ibn Shoshan; anti-semitic; Charles de Foucauld; Reconnaissance au Maroc; William Shaler;