COUSINS ! Israelis Are Home And Just One Of The Family

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

Israel has been back home after trying to get back there since the year 70.  It's been a tough road to travel on, but has made it back among people that have been their cousins since being there for more than the past 3,000 years.   Let me introduce you to some of her distant cousins.  

Israel and Judah are now called Israel -Judea and Samaria or as some say, Israel and the West Bank.  The surrounding kingdoms are still Egypt and Lebanon, Arabia;  but now we have Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, even Sinai that's part of Egypt as the land has been renamed.  The land of Philistines became Israel and Judah. 

Philistine city States:  Mediterranean people from Asia Minor and Greek islands, reached Palestine in waves,, one settling south of Beersheba in Gerar and came into conflict with Abraham and Isaac.  

Kingdom of Edom, also called Idumea, is a country of SE Palestine, also called Mount Seir, mountainous and easily fortified with fertile land.  The Edomites were of Semitic origin, traditionally descendants of Esau, lived by hunting. 

Kingdom of Moab, country of Southern Transjordan, kindred to the Israelites, being traditionally descended, like the Ammonites, from Lot.  Their language was akin to biblical Hebrew.  Their land was originally captured from the Rephaim or Emim.   

Kingdom of Aram Damascus or Dammesek, is now called Syria.  After the division of Solomon's kingdom, it constituted a constant danger to Israel which it frequently exploited in its recurrent disputes with Judah.  It joined the kings of Israel, Judah and Syria and fought against Assyrians in 853, 848, 845 BCE.  By 733-732 BCE, the country was plundered,, people exiled and it ended as an independent state, just like Israel in 721 BCE.  

Nabatu Tribes would be the Nabateans, people of Arab extraction who occupied Edom in the 6th century BCE, making Petra their capital.  Originally typical nomads, they learned to develop agriculture under almost desert conditions by elaborate system of water conservation.  They fostered the caravan trade.  They had a chain of agricultural settlements across the Negev.  They were subdued by the Romans in 63 BCE and their country was annexed by106 CE and became the Provincia  Arabia.  The Nabateans developed a remarkable Arab-Hellenistic culture in Petra.  

Phoenician States; people of Syria, language akin to Hebrew, Tyre one of cities,  became a city in Lebanon.  

Can you find Israel?  It's pink along the Mediterranean Sea-middle of the map on the left side.  Above is Lebanon in yellow and Syria is purple.  Jordan is green below Syria.  

Israel is simply a cousin among her other cousins.  She started off as a child of Abraham born in Ur of the Chaldees, and moved to Canaan, living among the Canaanites.  Later she moved to Egypt, but came back to Canaan 400 years later. DNA proves that the people of the Middle East are all related to each other, some being closer than others to the Israelites;  today's Jews of the tribe of Judah.

We all have the history and some still do, (1) of being tribal people, tribes that prove to have been existing as empires before Europeans ever thought of being, and lasting as some are today still as tribal people.  Israelites were made up of 12 Tribes.  Since 70 CE, we have been stateless,  with Judah the remaining active tribe since 597, and 586 BCE when taken to Babylon.   We were all active tribal people, something we have in common.  Many Arabs are still active tribal people, even with taboos of not mixing with other tribes, such as the people of Gaza.                                     

How Abraham treated strangers who came by his tent;  offering them food and water.  His father was Terah of Ur of the Chaldees on the Euphrates River of Mesopotamia. A man born before his time,  Abraham died at age 175 according to ancient math symbolism.  He was said to be the prototype of humility and kindness, yet could be like a general and fight battles.  He lived at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE.   

Being from Abraham, we all have one sociological value that is the same;  (2) we all believe in One G-d.  Israelites have been believing this since Abraham who lived 4,000 years ago. They were the first to believe in One G-d.  The rest of Abraham's descendants, the Arabs, listened carefully to another prophet born in 570-died in 632;  Mohammad, who also taught of One G-d. That was 1,352 years ago.

Abraham at his tent when Hagar and Ishmael , ancestor of the Arabs, walked by.  His birth father was Abraham.  Hagar had been Sarah's handmaid, probably from Egypt.  

The one physical thing we have in common (3) is our DNA because we came (4) from the same land. More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years.Two of three branches of  Jews, the Ashkenazis and the Sephardis, were forced to live outside in the Diaspora for a period of time before returning, but that was as it was supposed to happen, to pick up more ideas of developing.  They were the ones chosen to become educated; to learn, to build to have their minds expanded. Today everyone is enjoying the results;  cell phones, TV, electricity benefits, heat and cooling methods, water methods, health benefits; advanced education.

It just so happens as our story relates, that the Israelites were the first to  undertake to break away from the protocol of the world and believe as Abraham did, in one G-d, one power that was unseen but felt in our hearts and souls. Israelites, later called Jews, were so adamant about it that they have lived through many epochs of punishment during the Dark Ages of Europe  that led to the Spanish Inquisition, all through the development of Christianity in Europe through the Popes of Rome and into the belief of Luther bringing on a different avenue of Christianity.  All through these periods,  Jews held fast to their original belief  that itself grew and became more polished with each generation.  

So there the Jews have returned to their homeland, their original homeland with one mindset for all:  One G-d.  

It's time that the Palestinians realize that Israel is not the enemy; that there is  no good reason to feel that Jews are interlopers from another planet.  They are not brothers but cousins, like everyone else.  It's time for Hamas and Fatah to realize this fact.  Egypt has;  Jordan has, the Gulf states, have.  Jews are right next door to a people more stiff-necked than themselves;  those still calling themselves Palestinians.

It wasn't that long ago that the Palestinians were interlopers to the land of Eretz Yisrael, for they emigrated there from Syria, Iraq, Iran, foreign roots from many other places other than Palestine.  

As it turned out, it was Arabs who were displacing the returned Jews and the Jews whose families had never left during the 70 CE destruction of Jerusalem.  After all, it was Jerusalem which was so devastated, not the rest of Judah or even the wasteland of Israel.  

For every Arab refugee who left Israel in 1948, there was  a Jewish refugee who fled or was expelled from his Arab birthplace at the same time---today's much discussed Mizrachi-Sephardic majority in Israel who found no other place to live except Israel-the New State of Jews.                                

Violence on Temple Mount against Jews being there...

Only when the Palestinians have realized that the hatred they feel for their returned cousins is of misplaced anger at themselves will there be peace between the two peoples.  The Palestinians were suckers to trust and believe in their leaders who used them as pawns in a game of chess, ready to sacrifice them as in the olden days of human sacrifice without even shedding a tear over them.  They didn't know who the Jews really were, their lost cousins returning home and ready to share with them what they brought back with them;  education, knowledge, finances, foods, ...the list can go on and on. In 1973, legendary Israeli diplomat Abba Eban famously quipped: "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."  They've been that stubborn.  I suppose the Christians could also say that of the Jews in not converting to Christianity. We're both stiff-necked people:  Jews about our own religious beliefs and Palestinians about their political beliefs.  

Israelis marrying;  it's enough that Ashkenazis are marrying Sephardis or Mizrachis, the Jews are mixing it up again.  It's only once in a blue moon that you see a Palestinian and a Jew marrying, happening rarely in Judea-Samaria areas.  

 Being very traditional and tribal, all Arabs and Jews share another thing; (5) they do not marry outside their tribe.  Therefore, the Jews are not ready to marry into their cousins' families, nor are the Arabs ready to marry into the Jews.  This is great for all, except the DNA may suffer, so they had better watch it.  Since both are an endogamous society, they will have to mix with others at a point, and the Arabs can do this as their numbers are huge while there aren't that many Jews in the world.  But it's another point I see that both share, considering their proximity to one another.   

Update: 10/8/2022

  https://www.science.org/content/article/jews-and-arabs-share-recent-ancestry#:~:text=More%20than%2070%25%20of%20Jewish,the%20last%20few%20thousand%20years.

Tanakh, the Stone Edition

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

tribes: http://edocs.nps.edu/npspubs/institutional/newsletters/strategic%20insight/2008/robinsonSep08.pdf

JBS, Rabbi Golub with interview of PhD on Arab studies-tribal non-mixing, esp with Gazans, on YouTube, Dr. Mordechai Kedar

Book:  From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters

https://www.newsweek.com/palestinians-never-miss-opportunity-miss-opportunity-opinion-1531588