>
>> Religious hatred in the Middle East has been going on for a couple thousand years.

I'm not sure that it has.
Israel was created by the UN in 1947. Some people trace the current conflict back to Balfour in 1917 when the Brits supported the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine with the breakup of the Ottoman empire. The notion of Zionism didn't even exist until the late 19th century.

Before Israel was created, except for some pockets of other people here and there that region was basically composed of people of one faith, Islam. Copts and Jews lived in relative peace.
There were clashes between sects and tribes, but no more than there were throughout the rest of the world during the past couple of thousand years.