The Deep, Enduring Roots of the Mideast Conflict

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The Arabs work from a completely different worldview from ours, and so logic that appeals to us will not work with them.

We could tell the Arabs that Jews are native to the land, and the Arabs will reply that the average Ashkenazic (European) Jew is more European than Mideastern.

Jewish men had started moving to Europe long before the first-century Jewish war.  And these Jewish men often married European women.  We Westerners see these Ashkenazic Jews as Jews, but the Arabs see them as European invaders.

Ironically, because women were kept at home in those days, many Palestinians (especially the Christians) might have a quantum of Jewish DNA in their bloodline, which is doubly ironic as the rabbis trace Jewish identity through the female line, which many Ashkenazic Jews seem to lack.

Ah, but you say: what about Sephardic Jews, who are half or more of Israel today?  True!  But not in 1947, when the vast majority of Israelis were Ashkenazic.  The Jews were seen as invaders.

But what about those Sephardic, Yemenic, Mizrahic Jews today?  The Arabs would probably see them as Arabs who changed religion.

Again, the Arab does not interpret the world as the Westerner does.

We might refer to the Palestinians as Arab invaders — as some pro-Israeli advocates do — but the problem is that we misinterpret Islamic invasions as if they operated similar to the settlement of America, where the English settlers rarely intermarried with the natives.

A better example would be the Spanish settlers, who intermarried all the time, producing a large mestizo race, where large sections of the population can trace their ancestry back to the indigenous population, even if they identify as Latin or Spanish.  Though part-Spanish, these mestizos are also partly indigenous.

The Muslims acted like the Spanish.  The first generation of invading men took local women, producing half-Arabs, so to speak, who were raised Muslim.  These newly minted Muslims married more local women, until you had a population that over time became Muslim but remained largely genetically local.  Their Y-chromosome DNA might trace back to Arabia, but their majority autosomal DNA was local.  Egypt is an example.  It took centuries of this process to convert the ancient Copts, but it eventually did, and the Egyptians now wrongly consider themselves an Arabic nation.

So it is with many Palestinians, who see themselves as a national subset of Arabs.  Ironically, neither Jew nor Palestinian is of pure stock.

Critics will point out that the Palestinians did not have a concept of a nation-state, but were rather tribal.  Neither did the original Hebrews, who were also tribal.  It was centuries before David united them, but they still knew they were Jewish.  And the Palestinians know who they are.

This conflict will not yield so easily because it goes back to the dawn of human history…literally back to the time that Jacob cheated Esau of his blessing (Gen. 27:34-36).  The local Arabs are partly descended from Esau (also called Edom), and though the Muslims have forgotten the accurate details of the story, they have kept a sense that a distant injustice was done to them, which filters through the distortions of Islam.

While Jacob is clearly favored in Scripture, the Bible does admit that Jacob did defraud his brother of the blessing.  Jacob took matters into his own hands, rather than wait on God to settle it out.  And that is what is playing out down to this very day.  (This Jewish video delicately relates the story.)

Jacob versus Esau is a Hatfield-McCoy feud on steroids.

If nothing else, the Mideast conflict confronts the world — a hyper-secular world — with the uncomfortable truth that God still orders history, not men.  Man could not have imagined a return after 1,800 years, and certainly not in this fashion…to finally settle an old feud, because of a divine promise.  Who keeps a promise after 1,800 years?  Not man.

In the meantime, though we disagree with Islam and Palestinian terrorism, we have to take into account that the Palestinians see themselves as the aggrieved party, and they do have a point, though they muddle up their own history.

The only one who came close to understanding this was Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and even he underestimated the depth of the conflict.

Because this runs so deep, only God may be able to settle it.

Image via Pxfuel.

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