If you grew up in the United States, it’s likely that you have often heard Americans - when referring to conflict in Palestine - say something to the effect of:
“Well, Jews and Muslims have fighting over that land for thousands of years. They hate each other and there’s no way we’ll ever have peace there.”
I think you all be surprised to learn that Americans are complete dumbasses when it comes to history, because this notion of Jews and Muslims struggling in eternal conflict over a piece of land is an absolute myth.
Up until the last hundred years or so, then stretching back to Roman Empire times, Jews and Muslims (and Christians) have lived together in Palestine. From the third or fourth century CE until the emergence of Islam, Jews and Christians both lived there (oftentimes it was Jewish people who converted to Christianity). After Islam emerges then you had three groups living there, in various proportions, with the Muslim proportion steadily getting larger over the centuries; and there really doesn’t seem to be intra-group conflict beyond a sort of baseline for humans.
Of course there was conflict and war. You had Turks and Crusaders and others fighting plenty of wars in the area. But it doesn’t seem to me like there was any more amount of war in Palestine during that time than there was, say, in the Rhine Valley. And also, just because there are wars doesn’t mean that there is conflict between groups of people. In general, it seems like for centuries, Jews, Muslims and Christians occupying the same space in relative peace seems to be the norm. Even up until before the Balfour declaration, there were a number of Jewish people living alongside Muslims in Palestine. But importantly, the Jewish people in Palestine didn’t seek to dominate, but to either mind their own business quietly in their community, or even with a sort of shared Palestinian identity with their Muslim neighbors.
Co-existence has been the historical norm there, not conflict.
As best as I can tell, this whole notion of “they’ve been fighting forever” comes from one specific source: Evangelical Christians. It’s because that group believes that roughly 4,000 years ago, the only humans alive were Noah and his family. Then in a few generations, Jacob and Esau fought over a birthright and then those two literally became the first ancestors of Jews and Muslims, respectively. There’s some verse in there about “always struggling against each other” or something. These Evangelicals then go on to believe everything else in the Old Testament - despite the overwhelming historical evidence - is literally true. That the Jewish people were slaves in Egypt and then conquered Palestine (there’s no evidence for Jews being slaves in Egypt and most historians believe the Jewish people emerged out of the larger Canaanite people, not as something separate from them). These Evangelicals can then excuse genocide if not encourage it since it’s inevitable anyway (and in that they side with Israel, because they’re all racist pieces of shit).
Once again, Evangelicals making the world worse for everyone.
All of the “it’s sooooooo incredibly complicated that no one can really say for sure” framing is just part two of decades of strategic zionist gish gallop.
Remember, if a social problem is difficult to solve, that means nobody should ever even attempt to solve it.
There’s also the begged question of, why is continuing the status quo the proper course when the situation is “it’s very complicated.”
just part two of decades of strategic zionist gish gallop
Closer to ten decades.
yup that’s the idea, and it’s gotten especially wild in the internet age. Everywhere you turn online it’s just like a shotgun blast of bullshit
I was 3 days ago old when I found out that Palestine vs Israel wasn’t a dispute that was thousands of years old.
Thanks, imperial core propaganda.
When Spain ethnically cleansed all Jews from its territories in 1492 the Ottoman Sultan offered to take them all in. Even sent the Spanish Monarchs a letter saying that by expelling the Jews they were impoverishing their kingdom and by taking them in he was enriching his.
Interestingly most of those Jews ended up in what is now Greece and not what is now israel.
I honestly think this is a myth that’s a sort of half remembered truth that get spun into the actual myth that Jews and Muslims have been fighting over the area for a thousand years, when in fact it was Jews and Canaanites, Jews and Assyrians, Jews and Philistines, Jews and Babylonians, Jews and Seleucids, and finally Jews and Romans, and then throw in a little crusader confusion into the mix where crusaders fought jews, muslims and christians, and you can start to see why someone who doesn’t know anything might think it’s been the same struggle for millennia.
To wit, if you ask anyone what religion any of the ‘Persian’ empires that ran around the Levant followed, you aren’t likely to hear “Zoroastrianism” as the answer.
I would draw a line after the Romans and call everything after an entirely different state of affairs.
turns out the approximate birthplace of civilization has a lot of history
Jean Jacques-Rousseau: I can’t believe you’ve done this.
It almost makes sense to think this from a European perspective because they’re the ones consistently causing problems. First Romans, then Crusaders, then British Imperialists, and now an explicitly Eurocentric zionist project.
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Let there be no compulsion in religion, for the truth stands out clearly from falsehood. So whoever renounces false gods and believes in Allah has certainly grasped the firmest, unfailing hand-hold. And Allah is All-Hearing, All-Knowing.
لَآ إِكْرَاهَ فِى ٱلدِّينِ ۖ قَد تَّبَيَّنَ ٱلرُّشْدُ مِنَ ٱلْغَىِّ ۚ فَمَن يَكْفُرْ بِٱلطَّـٰغُوتِ وَيُؤْمِنۢ بِٱللَّهِ فَقَدِ ٱسْتَمْسَكَ بِٱلْعُرْوَةِ ٱلْوُثْقَىٰ لَا ٱنفِصَامَ لَهَا ۗ وَٱللَّهُ سَمِيعٌ عَلِيمٌ ٢٥٦
对于宗教，绝无强迫；因为正邪确已分明了。谁不信恶魔而信真主，谁确已把握住坚实的、绝不断折的把柄。真主是全聪的，是全知的。
-Surah Al-Baqarah 2:256
This was revealed to the Prophet (愿他安息) when the Jews and the Christians got converted by force. Qimi must be protected. So there are many qimi who fought against invaders. In Europe muslims were not allowed and were fought away.
They weren’t all Arabs either, with Assyrians, Armenians and Kurds etc. Saladin was Kurdish himself
Is that something people think about the Crusades I thought Islam being a very interethnic faith was pretty common knowledge
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A lot of people use Arab and Muslim synonymously and don’t know the difference
Those Evangelicals would be very upset if they could read.
Jews and muslims were brothers past the last ten decades :'( ,
Nice postOh look it’s liberals mythicizing history to prevent any challenge to the status quo. They love doing it by framing certain dominant groups as inherently flawed to incidentally excuse discrimination.
I think you all be surprised to learn that Americans are complete dumbasses when it comes to history,
Wut? No!
just because there are wars doesn’t mean that there is conflict between groups of people
I think that’s the exact opposite, but I get what you’re saying in context: war may also indicate intra-group conflict, Muslims vs Muslims rather than Muslims vs Jews.
or the wars might be nation-states rather than cultures. zionism created this problem and nothing israel does is meaningfully a continuation of previous conflicts.
Jews and Muslims have fighting over that land for thousands of years
A statement that only makes sense if you don’t know that Islam was founded in 610 CE.
“Well I was rounding up, OK?!”
And adding an s apparently lol
christians and jews fought over jerusalem a lot longer than muslims and jews ever did.
i thought it was jews and babylonians fought each other in the iron age, then jews and romans in late antiquity, then christians and muslims in the middle ages, then under the ottomans abrahamic faiths coexisted in jerusalem, but with a muslim majority. but my history knowledge here is probably incomplete. When were jews and christians ever fighting each other over jerusalem? I’m pretty sure the history of jews vs christians is the history of jews being minorities in europe and suffering pogroms, with very little in the way symmetrical warfare.
the christians ruled Jerusalem under the romans and as romans with the jews expelled for 5 centuries until the Persians and then 'Umar let them back in. add in a century and a half for Crusader rule where the christians expelled the jews again.
that’s a damn sight longer than the israeli colonial project’s made a conflict with muslims. the vast majority of muslim rule was amicable, starting out as it did with the reversal of the roman exile.
and this is entirely within the levant, Christians are the antisemitism world champions when you include europe, the most crocodillian of tears are coming from them as they yell about muslim antisemitism
Christians are the antisemitism world champions when you include europe, the most crocodillian of tears are coming from them as they yell about muslim antisemitism
100%
i thought it was jews and babylonians fought each other in the iron age
Well the Babylonians enslaved the Jews but also the Babylonians fought everybody.
It was the Neo-Babylonians. They wore shades and leather dusters.
yep very much a conflict that started in the last hundred years. For one thing the Ottomans ran the place for a while and they wouldn’t have tolerated an active warzone
The earliest Zionist migrations to Palestine took place in the 1880s (First Aliyah). Conflict was relatively minimal though compared to post WW2.
There were forms of early Zionism that just entailed non-Palestinian Jews migrating to Palestine when individually possible, with no settler project, no objective of establishing a Jewish ethnostate, and no efforts to displace the Palestinians. A major reason it existed is because Jews were generally safer in Palestine than they were in Europe.
There have been migrations of Jewish people to Palestine at various times going back to antiquity. The people who did that for personal economic reasons, to escape persecution or out of a religious desire to live in/near holy places weren’t early or proto Zionism.
Zionism refers only to Jewish nationalist projects which sought to construct a Jewish national identity centered around a homeland in Palestine, born out of (and in reaction) to the rise of nationalist movements across Europe. The first decades of Zionist migration were a patchwork of different private projects to purchase land and establish communities, with relatively small numbers of people. They intended to build a nation or by definition they weren’t Zionists, but prospects like ethnic cleansing to fully realize that national project would have seemed pretty theoretical while they were still only the 3rd largest religion there after the Muslims and the Christians, all under Ottoman rule.
Zionism refers only to Jewish nationalist projects which sought to construct a Jewish national identity centered around a homeland in Palestine, born out of (and in reaction) to the rise of nationalist movements across Europe.
This is true today, but in the early formation of the idea - before Herzl’s version came to be the only version - that wasn’t true. Although maybe those were more proto-Zionisms, and you could resonably argue that Herzl was the first to truly formulate Zionism into a coherent political objective, making it colonial from the start. It’s about where you draw the line at the start of Zionism. Did the movements calling for Jews to immigrate to Palestine without the colonial project (pre-1897) count as Zionism, or did they just influence the later settler movement Herzl and co. established at the turn of the century?
The point I was trying to make, basically, was twofold:
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Reinforce OP’s argument that Jews and Muslims (and Christians) peacefully coexisted in Palestine before the establishment of the Israeli state by demonstrating that it was seen as a safe haven for European Jews during intense periods of reaction and anti-Semitism in Europe.
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Illustrate that there was a path for Jews to make their home in Palestine without a settler colonial project before Herzl’s Zionism took over the entire project.
I understand what you’re getting at, that saying proto-Zionism or early Zionism wasn’t entirely or exclusively a settler project could potentially give cover for the exclusively colonial Zionism that has been in practice for a hundred years. I wouldn’t fight to call those early movements Zionism because you’re right.
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YOU - “Okay, I’ll ask – who are the Semenese?”
MEASUREHEAD - “THE SOUTH ISLAND RACE, HAPLOGROUP A4A. WE ARE THE RIGHTFUL MASTERS OF THE INSULINDIAN ARCHIPELAGO. WE DESCEND FROM THE AREOPAGITES OF ANCIENT PERIKARNASSIS AND ARRIVED HERE 4000 YEARS AGO. MILLENNIA BEFORE YOU.”
MEASUREHEAD - “WE ARE THE FUTURE. THAT IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW.”
YOU - “So you were born and raised on the islands, before you moved to Revachol?”
MEASUREHEAD - “I AM A DESCENDANT. THE NARROW STREETS OF ULUNBUIR ARE WITH ME IN MY GENETIC DREAMS, I SEE YOUNG SEMENESE WOMEN WALK INTO THE GREY MASS ON ILE DU FANTÔME, WAITING ON IMMACULATE CONCEPTION FROM THE PALE.”
YOU - “So… you did not come from the islands?”
MEASUREHEAD - “NO.” He cranes his head. “I HAVE HEARD ABOUT IT. ON THE RADIO.”
I love how every so often he says something really interesting (Are the Semenese descended from Perikarnassis?) and you doubt yourself before going “nope, completely full of shit”. Reminds me so much of the Neoreactionaries and right-wingers hopped up on Baudrillard and all their attempts at pseudohistory.
Haha I’m a sucker for some Measurehead dialogue.
Wait what? The Jewish slavery in Egypt thing isn’t true? That doesn’t sound right
After a century of excavations trying to prove the ancient accounts true, archeologists say there is no conclusive evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt, were ever enslaved, ever wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years or ever conquered the land of Canaan under Joshua’s leadership. To the contrary, the prevailing view is that most of Joshua’s fabled military campaigns never occurred–archeologists have uncovered ash layers and other signs of destruction at the relevant time at only one of the many battlegrounds mentioned in the Bible.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50481-story.html
The Babylonian exilic canonical tradition and it’s consequences and so on and so forth.
The Bible (old and new testament) says so much shit that just isn’t substantiated in archeology.
I have no idea why evangelical Christians take it literally. It’s obviously supposed to be a bunch of instructions, parables and moral tales, yet they think everything in the old testament actually happened…
I think even that’s giving it too much credit: the Old Testament is a compilation of folklore and mythologized history. There doesn’t have to have been a purposeful motivation behind the things it got materially wrong, it’s just a snapshot of what its authors believed at the time. I wouldn’t even speculate that it was politically motivated fraud like chunks of the New Testament and even more of the Apocrypha, though that’s also a possibility when it comes to historical mythmaking if one looks at more recent things like America’s civic cult and the myths about the Founding Fathers.
Yeah the Bible is not a historically accurate document, who could’ve guessed?
Seriously I do not understand why the evangelicals take the old testament as a literal retelling of history.
No, like straight up, I was taught in school that it was a real thing that happened, it was public school and I live in a blue state wtf
And the reason for it is so fucking obvious. It was written and codified in exile with the literary class mostly confined to Babylon’s cities. Of course they wouldn’t write “and then my current captors enslaved us and fuck those dudes am I right?” The Exodus is first attested in some for 200 years before the Babylonian captivity, and becomes a firm part of Judaism when Judaism first exists, that being during the exile and after the kingdom of Israel was destroyed
Yeah the Bible is not a historically accurate document, who could’ve guessed?
It is actually a useful historical reference for the later periods it discusses, but all the old stuff is pure mythohistory nation building propaganda and creating an ancient origin for monotheism. That’s because it was written over like a thousand years by many different people with many different contexts and objectives. It’s not even really a single thing.
