The saddest part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it’s a family affair.
Genetic studies on Jews in Israel and Arabs in Palestine show that they are genetic cousins with common ancestors within the last few thousand years.
People spend a lot of time trying to distinguish them as enemies, but their populations are more closely related than people in Northern versus Southern Europe.
They fight over who lived where, when. It makes archaeology in the region dangerous. You can get killed for finding the wrong pottery in the wrong place.
The genetic studies show the archaeology doesn’t really matter. All the Semites have lived in the areas we now call Israel and Palestine for as long as we can find old bones to study. Their genes mixed so much before and after the fall of Rome, that no one can tell the difference of who lived where and when. All the cemeteries have a mix of the all the semites from almost every period in history.
Speaking of semites, the term Anti-Semitism makes no sense and has a horrible history.
Both the Palestinians and the Israelis are considered Semites.
The term Anti-Semitism was an attempt to covert a religious prejudice into a race-based one. The Germans who coined the term Anti-Semitic (and committed a lot of the anti-semitic acts) were trying to list the Jews as a distinct “race.”
There were not a lot of Arabs and Palestinians in Germany in the 18th Century, so they threw out semitic as an anti-Jewish term and didn’t consider other populations of Semites.
It was all part of that Eugenics movement that got everything wrong about race that it possibly could and led to the crazy ideologies the Nazis tried to impose on Europe, the Middle East and anywhere else the SS could go. It was also a way to go beyond persecuting the Jews for just their religion. Lots of Jews dropped the religion for a wide variety of reasons, but apparently killing people for their beliefs wasn’t good enough for the Nazis… they had to go after their “bloodlines” too.
In fact, science has shown that “race” as we know it does not really exist. Humans are so closely related and share so much DNA that we can trace origins by region, but there’s really no concept of race. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/
Race is a political invention. Mostly coming from those nasty Eugenics people who wanted to prove they were the master race and made up bullshit reasons that slavery was good, European colonizers were good and that pigment influenced character. (In case you don’t know, all of that is bullshit).
While I detest Anti-Semitism (the hatred of Jews), and I hate the term since it has always been terribly inaccurate, I must say in modern America in the latest conflict, it may be good for us all to remember that Anti-Semitism is hatred for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. That hating any of these people leads to violence and has been getting innocent people killed.
If the people share much of the same DNA, and they have shared the land for centuries, what is driving the wars? Religion of course. The irrational beliefs in evidence-free books that tell often made-up stories and believe them word for word.
Religion is driving the settlers to push into the West Bank and kill Palestinians in their way. It drives much of the most extreme actions by Israel to dominate the region and push for a greater Israel. It’s the only country in the world that will not list its borders. Because drawing lines brings on fights inside Israel about what “God has given them.”
Religion is driving the Palestinians to suicide missions and killing Jews just to kill Jews. Religion drives the other Arab states to push for the destruction of Israel and that Islam must be the dominate religion of that land.
They fight over land. They fight over temples, churches and mosques. And mostly they fight over whose book has the best fiction.
When you see the history of wars and conflict that religion (and religion alone) has brought to this region, it’s easy to see we would all be better off without any religion on the planet. (or at least keeping religion completely out of the political and military decisions).
We would all do well to put those books aside, remember how closely we are all related and find a way to share the land that has always been shared.
If we measured our common fortunes by genetic code, there would be no incentive to kill each other… or other species. Then what would out species do with our excess energy?
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Feed the world, explore space, cure cancer…
Wonderful, informative essay, Kieran. I wish I understood why human beings rage against each other as opposed to offering a helping hand. I don’t think it’s religion. Faith is supposed to fill your heart, not empty it.
Suppose to… but…
Some of the best humanitarians I’ve met or heard about ironically were/are atheists or agnostics who’d make better examples of many of Christ’s teachings than too many (whom I, a believer in Christ’s miracles, refer to as) institutional ‘Christians’ [i.e. those apparently most resistant to Christ’s fundamental teachings of non-violence, compassion and non-wealth].
Conversely, some of the worst human(e) beings I’ve met or heard about are the most devout believers/preachers of fundamental Biblical theology.
If it wasn’t Big Religion behaving cruelly or murderous, a different form of fanatic/extremist belief system likely would take its very problematic place. One need only look at the example of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge concept of the righteous society as a very scary case.
Still, if I may somewhat be the devil’s advocate, I can see how there could be no greater perceived justification for, or the-end-justifies-the-means motivator of, inhumane/immoral behavior than ‘the Almighty hath willed it!’
Either way, I’ve long viewed humankind, as individuals and collectively, as not being very good at moderate thinking and means.
Pol pot, Stalin and Mao do show you don’t need religion to be mass murderers. Any vision of Utopia on earth usually ends in tragedy. But I’d say the visions of an afterlife are worse. It motivates individuals to kill not just huge political movements.
Race and religion -attempting to divide people since there was people. “My sky dude is better than your sky dude, let’s kill!” Ridiculous!
-Butterpants
My comment instantly disappeared when I hit the “Reply” button. I suspect WP’s censoring algorithm might have sent it to the Spam locker.
Hush your dirty mouth. Censored.
You write and then press “Send” [underneath and to the right] to post or submit your piece.
Calling Palestinians ant-semites never made sense to me. I remember reading about a genetic study of Palestinians from Hebron and the conclusion was many of them were probably descended from Jews who had converted to Islam. Sadly, it’s been a tragic conflict for decades and the Israelis also bear blame.
The House guest lived in Jerusalem for a few months. She went with some Palestinian Christian friends to clear land their family had owned in the West Bank for 80 years but they weren’t allowed to do anything with by the Israelis. While they were there, settlers from a kibitz showed up. One had a submachine gun and one who raised a ruckus was a guy from New York. They summoned the police who then ticketed the Palestinians for being on their own land.
Yeah. Those “settlers” seem a lot like the Americans who “settled” the west, the way looters “settle” a store.
While some identifiable groups have been brutally victimized throughout history a disproportionately large number of times, the victims of one place and time can and sometimes do become the victimizers of another place and time.
Indeed, people should avoid believing, let alone claiming, that they are not capable of committing an atrocity, even if relentlessly pushed.
Contrary to what is claimed or felt by many of us, deep down there’s a tyrant in each of us that, under the just-right circumstances, can be unleashed; and maybe even more so when convinced that God is on our side.
Especially when we believe god is on our side.
*kibbutz (damn autocorrect)
The world is on fire, literally and figuratively. [I myself have been inexplicably angry over the last few years.] Collectively, we humans are hopelessly prone to the politics of scale and differences, both real and perceived, especially those involving color, nationality, race and religion.
It’s plausible that if the world’s population was somehow reduced to just a few city blocks of seemingly similar residents, there’d eventually be some form of notable inter-neighborhood hostilities.
Still, from within ourselves we, as individuals, can resist flawed yet normalized human/societal nature thus behavior.
Perhaps relevant to this are the words of sociologist Stanley Milgram [of Obedience Experiments fame/infamy]: “It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.”