That's an incredibly reductive oversimplification. The modern state of Israel exists due to the political Zionist movement which began in the 19th C and the sympathy for the Jewish people following Nazi Germany's eugenicist attempt to wipe them out.
A couple of millennia before that, you had the conflicts of the competing tribes and civilizations in the Fertile Crescent, which resulted in the Jewish diaspora.
Religion has typically been weaponized to justify one group of people taking control of resources and land from another, but it has rarely been the root cause per se.
No? Muslims hate Jews because Zionists have been trying and succeeding in taking their homes for a hundred years. The Islamic position is and has always been "Jews hate you and will try to bring you down but no war crimes because they're people of the book".
I don't think so. Religion and ethnicity are convenient pretexts for stealing resources from one another or enslaving another culture for material benefit.
Go right back to the time of the Crusades, in the Rhineland massacres Christians were killing Jewish people and looting their homes. Someone always stands to gain.
Go right back to the time of the Crusades, in the Rhineland massacres Christians were killing Jewish people and looting their homes.
Around the year 800, many Saxons were killed, tortured or forcibly baptised on the orders of Charlemagne, which German paganism could hardly cope with. Every religion has its violent phase.
Sure. From memory the only one I've noticed not having violence is Jainism.
But I don't think religion causes the violence. I think it's a useful tool to manipulate people into violence. What is happening in Israel/Palestine is about land and arms deals and power elites using wars to cement their political power.
I originally typed 'Arguably the worst thing we've done' but the more I think on it, humans are generally terrible.
If it wasn't religion, it'd be racism, sexisim, geography based hate, abilisim, left handedness, phrenology, etc etc etc. Religion is just another lubricant to placate docile individuals, and justify the actions of hate focused individuals
I'm certain we could all live together in peace, but we're so tribalistic that the second anyone says their group is better than X because Y the majority of the population seems to lap it up at nearly any expense.