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A Primer on the Middle East
The Arab – Israeli Conflict
By Scott Rohter, October 2011

In a letter to the editor dated October 18th 2011, Sarah Ruth writes, “It is pure bunk to say that there never was an Arab country called Palestine.”  Actually, there never was an Arab country called Palestine, not in the Middle East, and not anywhere else in the world!  That statement happens to be historically true.  The key words here are Arab country. Approximately five thousand years ago, there was a non-Semitic, non-Arab people living in the general area of the Gaza Strip, called Philistines.  Their language was similar to Hebrew, but they were not descendants of Shem (one of Noah’s three sons) so they were not Semitic. They certainly were not Arabs!  The Philistines were a people descended from Ham, who was another one of Noah's sons. They lived along the south eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, in what is present day Israel, and they were closely related to the Canaanites who lived farther inland, and to the Phoenicians who lived farther north along the coastal plain of what is today called Lebanon.  None of these ancient people were Arabs.

The Phoenicians were a sea-faring people who went on to colonize North Africa, and founded the great civilization, that we call Carthage, which was the rival of Rome.  Remember how Hannibal and his army on elephants invaded Europe?  That was the Carthaginians, whose ancestors were the Phoenicians, and the relatives of the Philistines!  These people waged war with Rome continually until they were utterly defeated, and practically speaking, all trace of these ancient people has been lost from history.  Carthage was once the rival of Rome, and the wars between Carthage and Rome are called the Punic Wars.

The Philistines, the Phoenicians, and the Canaanites are not the only peoples to have disappeared from history.  The Minoans, the Hitites, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and even the ancient Egyptians have all disappeared from history!  The people who occupy Egypt today are mostly Arabs, who have been transplanted there after the Muslim conquests of North Africa.  They are not related to the ancient Egyptians, who developed a civilization there without equal that lasted for over five thousand years! The ancient Egyptians were not a Semitic people like the Arabs who live there today! They were a Hamitic people (descended from Ham). The Arabs who live there today are not related ethically, culturally, historically, or linguistically to the ancient Egyptians. The ancient Egyptians have also disappeared from history just like the Philistines, or at least their culture, language, and civilization has. We can only read about them in books!

Now if you pay close attention, you might actually learn something that you didn't know about the conflicted history of the Middle East.  The Hebrews, which is an English word, derived from the ancient word 'Ebrim', or 'Evrim', moved into the area occupied primarily by the Canaanites, and the Philistines, and over the succeeding years they subdued these tribes and created their own civilization and culture there, which thrived for over a thousand years, until they were conquered by the Babylonians, and forcibly removed from their country! But they returned and rebuilt their little kingdom and their civilization, under the reign of the Persian King Darius. And they enjoyed almost another 1000 years of sovereignty, until another foreign occupier came along in the form of the Romans, and conquered them again, and subjugated them after a bloody rebellion in which approximately one half of the ‘Jews’ were killed, and one half were enslaved and driven out of their land!

As further punishment for their rebellion, the Romans renamed the land, which had been known for thousands of years as Judea and Samaria. They called it Philistia, or Palestina instead, to forever sever the connection between that land and its Jewish inhabitants! There were no more Philistines, just as there were no more Phoenicians and no more Canaanites!  Ever since then, the name of that general area of the world has been known as Palestine, which is an English translation of the Greek word Palestina or Philistia. It comes to us from the Hebrew word Pelesheth. Many years later the Persians, and then the Arabs, and the Turks, and the British subsequently took turns at occupying this part of the world.  But there never was an independent Arab country called Palestine in that part of the Middle East, where the ancient Jewish Kingdoms had been, or anywhere else in the world for that matter!  Allegedly the Romans sowed salt over the land, which made it largely unproductive.  It was merely a geographical area that was designated Palestine on the maps, following the Roman tradition.  It remained largely a desolate and forgotten province under Roman, Persian, Arab, Turkish, and finally British occupation.  During all of this time, both Jews and Arabs lived there together, but not in any great numbers.  And there never was a sovereign country established there again, until the return of the Jews in large numbers during and after World War II, and the re-creation of their homeland in 1948.  The new name that was chosen for the new country that was reborn on a small part of their ancient lands, was Israel.  The name Israel was chosen to embrace all of the returning children of the Patriarch Jacob, whose name was also Israel.  He was the grandson of Abraham, who was also the father of the Arab people, who are my distant cousins!

One terrible consequence of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. was that in the 7th century when Muhammad lived, there was not a large Jewish or Christian presence in that part of the world!  So there were no Jewish or Christian scholars around to help the young Muhammad understand the Holy Scriptures.  As a result, there were frequent misunderstandings and distrust that developed which have led to an almost permanent state of hostilities between Islam, and the other two Abrahamic faiths: Christianity and Judaism.  Oh, if Rodney King could only have his wish. If we could all just learn how to get along together! 

But the struggle in the Middle East is not just over culture and religion! It is also over land and water! There is not enough of either!  And it is a struggle over learning how to share these two precious resources.  Muslims control a vast area of the world, composed of 21 different countries that is larger than the United States of America, or China, and almost as large as Russia!  It stretches from China on the east, to Spain on the west, and from Bulgaria on the north, to Nigeria on the south.  There is already a country that is home to the Arabs of Palestine! It is called Jordan!  Seventy percent of Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs! It is more logical to change the name of Jordan to Palestine, then it is to further divide and destroy the tiny little, separate nation of Israel.  The logical boundary line between Palestine and Israel should be the Jordan River, not some random line drawn over hill and dale right through the heart of Israel, in order to comply with United Nations demands!  No Arabs need to be displaced from the region, and they don’t even need to move more than fifty miles, until we can all learn how to live together again in peace.

Why can’t the Arabs of the Middle East find some room in their hearts, to allow their cousins the Jews, to be welcome back home in their own homeland? And why can’t they make some room in one of their many lands to accommodate a few million more Arabs? It seems rather selfish to me, and stingy, considering the fact that they occupy such a vast swath of the earth’s surface, and they can’t even allow a small, non-Arab, non-Muslim presence in their midst, to exist in peace as a sovereign nation!  They should try being a little more like the patriarch Esau, who welcomed his cousin Jacob back after a long absence, rather than a bunch of Jew-haters!  After all, they actually did move in and occupy Jewish land, and they took over territory that didn’t belong to them, after the Roman conquest of the Jews in 70 A.D.  Didn’t they?

And just to make my point even more clear, my maternal great grandmother's maiden name was Rubinsky, which mean that she was a Polish Jew who traced her ancestry all the way back to the tribe of Rueben. Today the land that belonged to the tribe of Rueben is occupied by Palestinians and by present day Jordan! Jews don't want Jordan back, but at least they need to have a whole country with defensible borders! They need a country that is not fragmented, or cut in half by unreasonable United Nations demands, just in order to please my very wealthy, selfish, and short-sighted cousins!

"A journalist has no better friend than the truth." - Scott Rohter                                Share