To be honest, while I do NOT think that Zionism is the main cause of hatred toward Jews in the world, there IS historical evidence pointing to the declaration of the State as a trigger for anti-Jewish rioting in Arab lands. For example, there’s an excellent chapter in Matti Friedman’s awesome book on the Aleppo Codex which talks about the instigation of the riot in which the shul containing the codex was destroyed, along with much of the Aleppan community- the riot began as a direct result of the 1947 UN recognition of Israel in Flushing Meadow. Admit that it can’t be pleasant to see you not exactly best buddies getting land that you thought your coreligionists were supposed to get. That’s not to say that relationships between the Arabs and Jewis in Syria before the riot were all that rosy, but increased aggression DID result from the declaration of the State.
However, personally, looking at patterns in history, I would say (and this is just my opinion from observation and a LOT of obsessive reading- this is just my thing 🙂 ) that while the State might have instigated anti-Jewish feeling, so did pretty much every good thing that ever happened to the Jews or any bad thing that ever happened to the non-Jews. Think about the Black Death. A third to a half of the European population is dying painfully. Not as many Jews seem to be dying (whether it’s because they really did have better hygiene and it helped or whether their deaths just weren’t as noticeable in the scheme of things due to heir small numbers), so what happens? A wave of pogroms. Communities were decimated as a result.
Either way- no matter what, whether Israel’s creation did aggravate the Arabs and cause them to turn against us more (though they definitely weren’t strting from scratch, even if that’s so) or not, right now we’ve got a state, and there’s nothing we can do about it except for support it and make sure that our 6 million acheinu kol beis Yisrael living there are supported and not harmed. (And yes, Health, I’ve heard about your plan to turn the State over to Turkey, and a while back I already told you what I thought about it.)