Where Blood Kin Fight (1)

Israel and Palestine

If the Middle East were a tinderbox, Israel and Palestine would be the fuse.  Their protracted hostility as we know today has been there for more than fifty years.  One can glean though that their ancient history renders their hostility to be just as ancient.  Who, then, are the Israelis and Palestinians, and why are they such a sensitive world issue?

The origins of Israelis and Palestinians have been subject to conjecture and debate for more than a millennium.  There was Abraham who had two sons, one by his wife Sarah and the other by Hagar, a princess who served him as a slave. Sarah bore Isaac, Hagar bore Ishmael.

In the Bible Abraham is asked by God to sacrifice Isaac, which Abraham obeyed but was stopped by an angel. In the Koran this story is said to have a version, as Abraham’s dream, and implies that the son to be sacrificed was Ishmael.

Thus did this clincher of the two versions come to pass: The offspring of Isaac are the Israelis and that of Ishmael are the Palestinians.  The Israelis are Jews, the Palestinians are Muslims. They are blood relatives, so to speak.

Why these two nations descended of Abraham have been at loggerheads and their countries the flashpoint in the Middle East today may be ascribed to a confluence of history, colonialism, warmongering, and the sheer tenacity of two nations that only wish to survive.

Though it stems from disputes over lands they occupy on which so much of their respective identities as nations depend, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is much more than a war of territory.  There is religion.  And cultural chasm.

Of Religions and Race

The Israelis are Jews, the believers of Judaism, and are the descendants of the Hebrew people. Today’s Israel was part of Palestine before the latter was partitioned, circa 1940s.

The term “Israelites” is in the context of the Bible’s Old Testament.  It refers to the Hebrews in the kingdom of Israel, the ancient kingdom named after Jacob, son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham, who changed his name to Israel.  Today, Jews who are in Israel are called “Israelis.”  Clearly, ‘Jew’ refers to a religion, ‘Israeli’ refers to a nationality.

The Arabs meanwhile are any of the Semitic people native to the Arabian peninsula and are now settled throughout the nations of the Middle East and North Africa.  The state of Israel as it is presented today on the map is surrounded by Arab states.

On the other hand, Semites by tradition are a race said to be the descendants of Shem, the biblical Noah’s son. The race belongs to the Middle East as the Middle East belongs to this race that includes the ancient Hebrews, Moabites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldaeans, Phoenicians, and Canaanites. It is the Semites who founded the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Thus, Israelis and Palestinians belong to the same Semitic race, have the same ancient beginnings with Noah and Abraham, and share both burden and brilliance of their mingled history.

Over a thousand years before Christ, the Philistine (Palestina in Greek) and Israelite tribes conquered Canaan.

The Philistines were a seafaring people who founded city-states on the Palestinian coastal plain in the 12th century BC. They and the Israelites warred in the 11th to 10th centuries BC. It was this war that made the term “Philistine’ derogatory for Hebrews. They used it for anyone who was intellectually and artistically uncivilized.

King David reigned after the Israelite conquest of Jerusalem and made it the capital of a united Jewish kingdom. When his son Solomon died, the kingdom split. Israel became the Northern Kingdom while Judea with Jerusalem and the south became the Southern Kingdom. The two kingdoms fell to Assyria and Babylon centuries later.

Then Babylon fell, and the Jews were allowed to return to Judea.  Subsequent centuries had rulers like Alexander the Great, Ptolemy of Egypt, and Antiochus. They ruled changing territorial configurations of what is now known as the Middle East.

The Romans came at around 61 BC. Over forty generations after King David, one of his descendants, Jesus, was born. And crucified some 33 years later.
Two Jewish revolts against the Romans in AD 70 to 130 were crushed.  Judea was renamed Palestina and Hadrian Caesar banned Jews from Jerusalem.

Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the 3rd century. By the 6th century Islam was founded when Mohammed had the Hjira or Hegira, the prophet’s flight from Mecca to Medina in AD 622 when he and his followers were persecuted. Islam became the major religion of the Arabs.

(2006)