Jews and Arabs share a common ancestry:a threadbare hope of talks when the killing stops
It has happened before. It could happen again
The antagonism between the Arab world and Israel has shrunk to its irreducible core: a contest between two peoples with a common ancestry over a strip of land held to be holy by many (but not all) on both sides.
In any case, a strip from which neither can escape because it is all they have.
This strange unity under the now mostly extinct term ‘Semites’ (the antonym is ‘Aryan’) is what lends a searing poignancy to the terror unleashed by Hamas on Israeli civilians and the terrible wrath to come of a vengeful Israel.
It may offend adherents on both sides to acknowledge, but this forever war between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is, in part, a conflict between siblings tied together since antiquity by a common linguistic ancestry and, to some extent, a shared regional culture.
Threadbare it may be, perhaps even broken. But the shared inheritance of a people whose paths have crossed, diverged and crossed again over the millenia is a reality - albeit one drowned out by a fratricidal war now spiralling out of control.
This may sound prosaic at a moment such as this. But it’s worth reminding ourselves of what the two sides have in common as well as what divides them.
Arab and Hebrew are both Semitic languages. Islam and Judaism also share deep roots. Moses who led the Jews out of Egypt to the Promised Land, is the most frequently mentioned individual in the Quran. Both are secular staunchly monotheistic religions with common practices: fasting, alms giving, ritual purity, the separation of men and women in the case of muslims and orthodox Jews, dietary laws.
Israel is united in the face the slaughter by Hamas. But for how long?
Then there’s the fact that the land of Israel, unwelcome as it may be to some, sits comfortably, even naturally in an arid, biblical landscape bounded by the desert and the sea. It’s hard to imagine any place on earth that speaks so powerfully to the frontier character of Israeli settlers.
Travel overland (in the days when you could) from, say, Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt up the Sinai peninsula to the border crossing at Taba. Then into Israel and up to Jerusalem. Then cross the Allenby Bridge (on foot) over the river Jordan into the Hashemite kingdom.
Travel down to the Red Sea resort of Aqaba that sits alongside its Israeli mirror image Eilat - like East and West Berlin. Perhaps drive back via historic Palmyra in Syria, now defaced by ISIS, Aleppo ( now flattened by Bashar al-Assad) and on to Damascus and Beirut.
What strikes you most are the similarities not the differences.
At the end of the 1973 October war Egyptian and Israeli negotiators met at kilometre 101, the UN-manned checkpoint on the road from Suez to Cairo. An encampment of sand-swept tents guarded by blue-helmeted UN troops served as neutral territory.
An Egyptian and an Israeli general in an open tent finalised a disengagement agreement between the two sides hammered out by Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State.
They did not shake hands but as I watched, along with the rest of the international press, my overwhelming impression was how alike they were.
Almost exactly four years later Egyptian President Anwar Sadat travelled to Jerusalem where he met, among others, former Israeli premier Golda Meir, the driving force behind the 1967 war and the occupation of the Sinai, the West Bank and Gaza.
Four years after that in 1981, also on October 6 , Sadat was assassinated by Islamists. Then in 1995 after the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians Israel’s Prime Minister was shot (in the back) by a right-wing extremist, a student of law no less.
The recent history of the Middle East is filled with such moments of high hope and pitiless anguish. So far it’s the fanatics, those who emphasise the otherness of their opponents, betrayers of the true faith, that have prevailed.
A nation divided will not win a war. In these dark hours Israel and the Jewish diaspora have united to face down this existential threat. Hamas has achieved that much with its monstrous incursion.
But it has also exposed Benjamin Netanyahu’s gross failure, despite repeated warnings by his military, to protect his nation.
Netanyahu has been a uniquely divisive leader. Whether in pursuit of his own ambitions or simply to stave off his corruption charges he has divided and weakened Israel with a mixture of lazy thinking and hubris. He thought he had it covered.
Israel is not homogenous. Israelis come in all shapes and colours, literally and politically: liberal, orthodox, far right, left wing, Ashkenazis (European jews) Sephardim or Mizrahis (oriental jews), some out of the deeply conservative Stetls of eastern Europe, Arab jews, Ethiopians, Kurds and so on.
The majority however are Sephardim or Mizrahi, in other words jews whose ancestry from biblical times lies not in Europe but in the Middle East and North Africa.
Josh Drill, a young American emigré from New Jersey, who served in Israel’s elite Golani brigade, grew up with a strong Jewish faith and an unwavering belief in the superiority of Zionism. He has since tempered his views and become an advocate for greater democracy in Israel. Netanyahu’s government, he says, has been “barreling towards becoming a dictatorial regime.”
Drill characterises the recent judicial reforms aimed at limiting the power of the country’s supreme court as an attempt to consolidate power in the hands of an extreme ultra-religious right-wing faction. He fears, he says, for “my Arab Israeli friends, my LGBT friends, women and for the status of the occupied territories.” He is not alone.
Netanyahu’s days are numbered. And so, one hopes, is the leadership of Hamas. Co-existence let alone peace with Hamas is impossible. Supporters of a two-state solution must understand this.
But it is worth reflecting through the agony and the fear on all sides that the basis for co-existence between Arab and Jew is there should anyone wish to reach for it.
This may be a naïve even a forlorn hope. For the time being a red mist hovers over the region. Israel is mourning its dead. Gaza will mourn many more. Any talk of reconciliation let alone peace is hollering at the storm.
But like Daniel Barenboim whose ‘musical bridge’ between Israeli and Palestinian musicians offers hope at the very margins surely the only path to peace is through justice and equality.
Back in the early 2000s Harry Ostrer, Director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine, authored a ground breaking study on the genetic origins of Jews and Arabs in the region. “ They are all” he said” children of Abraham. And all have preserved their Middle Eastern genetic roots over 4,000 years.”.