Very informative post. Thanks! Goes without saying that Europe has quite a history of anti-Semitism to live down, but not sure why that applies to my original post.

For the geography governed by the nation known as Israel to be "a non-Western Muslim nation", a great deal of history would have had to unfold differently than it actually did...

Not really. Had the Arabs won any one of the several recent wars of Zionist extermination they have attempted this past century, the territory now known as Israel would be a Muslim nation right now. Most likely a small piece of one of the other larger Arab nations, with the Palestinians being treated as crappily as they always were. Israel has been damn lucky so far.

Getting back to your alternate history proposal, Tom... Suppose "the Jewish state" had been established elsewhere than the Levant. There would be no Arab/Israeli conflict; the economy of the region would be dependent on religious tourism, and might likely wish to protect that valuable trade by exhibiting tolerance for minorities of all kinds.

It would be interesting to speculate on where else a Jewish homeland could have been built, even assuming the Jews were willing to write off thousands of years of history and settle somewhere else.

One hopes that if the entire area was Muslim that we infidels would still be allowed into Jerusalem. I have my doubts. I don't see a lot of non-Muslims touring Mecca.

The point I was trying to make is that oppression, massacres, conquest of territory, and abuses of minorities routinely committed by Muslim nations are just as routinely ignored, both by other Arab and/or Muslim nations, leftists around the world, and the United Nations. Why these acts are universally considered crimes against God and Man when committed (or supposedly committed) by Westernized Jews defies any other explanation other than sheer bigotry.