One of the biggest problems in discussions about Israel is that most people have never heard of the Cairo Geniza.
And yet it may be one of the most devastating pieces of evidence against many of the myths surrounding the conflict.
The Cairo Geniza was a storage room in a synagogue in Egypt where Jews deposited old documents for nearly a thousand years. When scholars finally examined its contents, they discovered roughly 300,000 manuscript fragments dating from the 9th to the 19th centuries.
Not religious texts - Real life:
Letters.
Contracts.
Tax receipts.
Court cases.
Business records.
Marriage agreements.
Personal correspondence.
In other words, not propaganda.
Not nationalist history.
Not modern politics.
The actual paperwork of ordinary people living a thousand years ago.
And what does it show?
First, it destroys the claim that Jews are foreign colonists with no historical connection to the land.
The Geniza contains countless references to Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, Safed, Ramle, Acre, and other towns throughout the Land of Israel.
Before the twentieth century.
Before Herzl.
Before Zionism.
Centuries before any of those things existed.
The documents show Jewish pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem, donations being sent to Jewish communities there, rabbis corresponding with scholars in the land, and families moving between Egypt and the Land of Israel.
The connection never disappeared.
It never had to be "invented."
Second, it shows that Jewish identity remained tied to the land even after centuries of exile.
The Jews of Cairo, Baghdad, Yemen, Morocco, and Spain did not view Jerusalem as some distant historical curiosity.
They viewed it as the center of their civilization.
A place they prayed toward.
A place they supported financially.
A place many hoped to return to.
Long before modern nationalism was invented.
Third, it destroys the fantasy that Jews and Muslims lived in some utopian age of perfect coexistence before Zionism arrived and ruined everything.
The Geniza records periods of cooperation and prosperity.
But it also records jizya taxes, discrimination, legal inequality, extortion, restrictions, persecution, and the vulnerability of Jewish communities living as dhimmis under Islamic rule.
The reality of a subordinate minority.
Forth, the Geniza also challenges another popular myth: that Hebrew was a "dead language" resurrected out of nowhere by Zionists.
The Geniza contains countless Hebrew documents - letters, contracts, legal rulings, religious texts, poetry, and correspondence between communities separated by thousands of miles.
For centuries, Jews used Hebrew as a common civilizational language connecting communities from Morocco to Iraq and from Yemen to Jerusalem.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda did not resurrect a dead language. He transformed an ancient, continuously used literary and religious language into a modern spoken one.
The Cairo Geniza proves that Hebrew never disappeared. It evolved, adapted, and survived long before modern Zionism emerged.
Fifth, it reminds us how sparsely populated and underdeveloped much of the region was before modern times.
The Land of Israel was not some densely populated "Palestinian" nation-state waiting to emerge. It was part of a larger Ottoman and earlier Islamic world, with small communities of Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze, Bedouins, and others living across the region, that was vastly abandoned.
Perhaps most importantly, the Geniza reveals something that infuriates modern anti-Zionists:
The Jews never left history.
The Jewish people did not disappear from the land.
They did not forget Jerusalem.
They did not suddenly arrive from Europe one day and invent a connection.
The connection is documented continuously across centuries by the people who actually lived it.
It proves that the story told by activists - that European Jews arrived in a foreign land with no roots there - is historically indefensible.
The Cairo Geniza is thousands of voices speaking across a millennium.
And together they tell a story that modern ideologues desperately wish did not exist:
The Jewish connection to the Land of Israel was not created by Zionism.
Zionism was created because that connection never died.
The claim that âArabs and Jews lived peacefully before Israelâ is one of the most useful myths in modern politics.
Not because there were never peaceful moments. Of course there were. There were friendships, business ties, shared cities, neighbourly decency, and even Arabs who saved Jews during massacres.
But that is precisely what makes the myth so dishonest.
Because âsome people were decentâ is not the same as âJews were safe.â
Before Israel, Jews (like Christians) in the land did not live as equal sovereign citizens. Under Islamic rule, Jews were historically dhimmis - tolerated, sometimes protected, but subordinate. Their safety depended less on rights than on rulers, local power, mood, extortion, clerical incitement and the willingness of others to restrain the mob.
Israel Joseph Benjamin, the 19th-century Jewish traveller who visited Jewish communities across Asia and Africa, described the Jews of Palestine in devastating terms. He wrote of âdeep misery and continual oppressionâ, saying they were âentirely destitute of every legal protection and every means of safetyâ, subject to arbitrary taxes, robbery, plunder and violence. In Hebron, he wrote, Jews had been murdered and plundered, women treated with âbrutal crueltyâ, and survivors left in misery. That was not "Zionist propaganda". That was a Jewish eyewitness writing decades before the State of Israel existed, and many of the people in the land were religious and were not Zionists.
And then came the pogroms.
Safed, 1834: during a revolt against Egyptian rule, the Jewish community was attacked for more than a month. Homes were looted. Jews were robbed, assaulted and left defenceless.
Jerusalem, 1920: during the Nebi Musa riots, five Jews were killed and hundreds wounded. Amin al-Husseini and other Arab nationalist figures were associated with the anti-Zionist agitation around the festival; Husseini and Aref al-Aref were later sentenced in absentia for incitement after fleeing to Syria.
Jaffa, 1921: riots that began in Jaffa turned into attacks on Jews, leaving 47 Jews dead and 146 wounded. The British Haycraft Commission identified Arab hostility to Jews as a fundamental cause.
And then Hebron, 1929.
Hebron is where the lie dies.
The Jews of Hebron were not aggressive secular Zionist pioneers with rifles and flags. Many were old Yishuv Jews. Deeply religious. Non-Zionist or not politically Zionist in the modern sense. They had lived among Arabs for generations. They believed their neighbours and local Arab notables would protect them. When Haganah representatives offered to help defend or evacuate them before the violence, the leaders of the Hebron Jewish community refused, trusting the local Arab elite.
That trust was repaid with slaughter.
On August 24, 1929, Arab mobs attacked the Jewish community of Hebron. Between 67 and 69 Jews were murdered. Dozens more were wounded. Homes were looted. Synagogues were desecrated. Women, children, rabbis and yeshiva students were killed. Twenty-four of the murdered were students from the Hebron yeshiva; several were American or Canadian. Some victims were tortured or mutilated. British High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor wrote that âthe horror of it is beyond wordsâ.
And yes, the comparison to October 7 is unavoidable.
The pattern is chilling: rumours about Jews threatening Al-Aqsa; religious incitement; mobs attacking unarmed Jewish families; murder inside homes; cruelty against the defenceless; and a world eager afterwards to explain, contextualise or minimise the massacre. The 1929 riots were fuelled by claims that Jews were trying to seize Muslim holy sites; Hamas even named its October 7 massacre âOperation Al-Aqsa Floodâ.
There is one important detail we must include: some Arabs in Hebron did save Jews. Some Jews survived, because they were sheltered by Arab families. It proves individual courage existed. It also proves the larger point: Jewish life depended on whether a neighbour chose to hide you from the mob.
But that is not safety, and not living together in peace.
The Hebron massacre shattered something, especially for religious Jews who had believed that being pious, apolitical and locally rooted would protect them. Many still did not become ideological Zionists overnight. But the basic Zionist argument became harder to deny: if Jews cannot rely on empire, neighbours, clerics, kings or policemen to protect them, then Jews must be able to protect Jews.
That is what Zionism means at its most basic level.
Not supremacy.
Not conquest.
Not revenge.
A Jewish state means Jews are no longer permanently dependent on the mercy of others.
Then came the 1930s and 1940s, and the picture became darker. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, became one of the most important Palestinian Arab leaders of the period. He met Hitler in Berlin on November 28, 1941. In the official record, he told Hitler that Arabs and Germany had the same enemies: âthe English, the Jews and the Communistsâ. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum records that he worked as a Nazi propagandist, opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine, and helped spread Axis propaganda in the Arab world.
He collaborated with the Nazis, campaigned against Jewish refugees reaching Palestine, and in 1944 broadcast: âKill the Jews wherever you find themâ, propaganda that spread throughout the Arab world, that never underwent the marshal plan and are now re-importing the same old ideas to Europe.
At the very moment Jews were trying to flee Europe, Britain, betrayed the Jews and the mandate they received from the league of nations and slammed the door. The 1939 White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 over five years and said that after that, further Jewish immigration would require Arab consent. In plain English: Jews fleeing Hitler needed the permission of those collaborating from Hitler to escape the persecution, while Arab immigration was unlimited.
Jewish refugee ships were intercepted. The Struma, carrying nearly 800 Jewish refugees from Romania toward Palestine, was blocked from entering and later sank in the Black Sea in 1942, killing almost everyone aboard. The Exodus 1947, carrying more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors, was intercepted by the British and its passengers were forcibly returned to Europe, including Germany.
So when people say Jews and Arabs lived peacefully before Israel, ask them: peacefully compared to what?
Compared to Hebron?
Compared to Safed?
Compared to Jaffa?
Compared to the Mufti collaborating with Hitler?
Compared to British ships turning Jewish survivors back to Nazi extermination camps?
Compared to centuries in which Jews survived not as equals, but as tolerated minorities whose fate could change the moment power changed hands?
The Jewish lesson from history is memory.
Spain expelled the Jews. Europe emancipated the Jews and then produced Auschwitz. The Arab world once had ancient Jewish communities from Baghdad to Cairo to Damascus, and most of them are gone. Today, Jews are again discovering that even in Europe, police protection, elite sympathy and liberal slogans are not the same as safety.
That does not mean Jews cannot have allies. They can, and they do. It does not mean every Arab was an enemy. Many were not. It does not make every Israeli policy correct.
But it does destroy the infantile fantasy that everything was peaceful until Zionism arrived.
Zionism did not emerge because Jews were bored.
It emerged because Jews studied history and noticed the pattern.
When Jews had no power, they wrote petitions.
When Jews had no army, they buried children.
When Jews had no state, they begged empires to open gates - and the gates closed.
The world keeps asking why Jews need Israel.
The answer is brutally simple:
Because every other arrangement was tried first and failed.