Pretty unlikely. The conquests of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians and Babylonians pretty much wiped out the local population, and by the time the Persian kings gave the Jews permission to return to Judah en masse, the Samaritans, an entirely new peoples, were the main inhabitants. And there is still a distinct, though small, population of those, so I don’t know if many of them were converted to Islam in the early days, or if they kept separate all these centuries and the Arabs are completely imports from Arabia, post-Muhammad. But I doubt they go back to the original, original Canaanites.
The DNA evidence says there is great genetic continuity across the Levant, the stories in the religious texts are by the genetic evidence great exagerations in terms of the degrees of change of the mass of the population.
And no the “arabs” meaning the mass of the arabic speakers are not imports from Arabia, that is myth again as the genetic evidence demonstrates.
Obviously not. I think it’s obvious to anyone with a smidgen of education that the current inhabitants of the Middle East are the same Aramaic/Coptic/whatever-speaking inhabitants who lived there before the Caliphate; when most people say “Arabs”, they mean Arabic speakers, and nothing more.
That said, the Middle East, and Israel in particular, are the crossroads of the world, and many people from many places have migrated to and from there over the millennia. No Palestinian is “purely” the descendant of the original inhabitants of the region - and no Jew is, either.
I was speaking of the type of nation Israel has chosen to be, whether they have faced it or not - if they do indeed claim all of the West Bank, as some here have assured us they do, then they take all of its residents as well. If there’s only a single state there, then it’s one that practices apartheid. Just like white South Africans, they can choose either ethnic supremacy or democracy but they cannot claim both. The Bantustan approach didn’t work there either, as you know.
Yes Alessan but … unofrtunately as we see several times in this very thread it seems not obvious as many persons claim or like to imply the opposite where several posters seem to think the current Arabes are immigrants from the Arabia. The replly of Cmkeller for example seems to indicate he has the false understanding that some how the populations were replaced which the DNA says did not in truth happen.
There is of course no pure bloods and it is very sterile discussions on both sides when they try to use such arguments.
Actually, I think the reason behind the use of such words has far more to with modern politics.
Arab national consciousness is a very recent phenomenon. People in Lebanon and Syria may now call themselves Arabs but their ancestors from 150 years ago identified themselves either by their religion or where they came from. They spoke Arabic(or at least a dialect of Arabic) but didn’t think of themselves as Arabs. Similar to the way people in Haiti or the Ivory Coast may speak French(or at least a dialect) but don’t view themselves as French.
However, in the late 19th Century many in the Levant and elsewhere started to identify themselves as Arabs. This was especially prominent among Christians and was largely an attempt to create unity particularly against those viewed as outsiders, the Ottoman Empire, Europeans etc.
Now, by the time Ottoman Empire was broken up following the end of WWI, most of the Arab speakers in the region viewed themselves as “Arabs” but didn’t really view themselves as “Palestinians”, “Iraqis”, “Transjordanians” etc.
In fact, in testifying before the Peel Commission in 1936, Amin Al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who is now viewed as the Father of Palestinian Nationalism by Palestinians said the British should never have set up “the Palestinian Mandate” separate from Syria since as far as he was concerned they were all Syrians.
And during Israel’s War for Independence the Palestinians Arabs referred to their military forces as “the Arab High Command” and “the Arab Liberation Army”.
None of what I’m saying is meant to strengthen the old Israeli talking point that the Palestinians don’t exist or they’re an invention to shame the Jews but the position that they were just part of a great Arab masses and that “there are 22 Arab nations so what’s wrong with just 1 Jewish nation!” is somewhat understandable.
That I think is why Eban would have referred to them as “the Arabs” rather than “the Palestinians”. He certainly wouldn’t want to strengthen the case for the creation of a Palestinian state.
That’s a little like saying “Hispanics come from Spain.”
Dominicans and Hondurans are Hispanics and certainly some are descendants of Spanish descent but many if not most are descendants of the original Indian inhabitants or African immigrants or both.
Most Arabs in Morocco are probably descendants of original inhabitants who became “Arabacised” and the same is true of man of the Levant Arabs.
The idea of the linguistic ethnicity indeed is a 19th century european invention.
The word Arab at that time had the connotation of bedouine. Indeed in my dialect, there is a form of the word that still has the meaning of “uncultured ignorant rural idiot”
The identity before the importation in the late 19th century was the mixture of the religion and the tribe or the region (if there was the difference) or the city area. You can see it in the form of the modern family names adopted with the modern state bureaucracy, and the frequence of the regional name like al basri or al iraqi or al fasi.
But this is not really different from the creation of the European national identities, except some decades later and not very successful for the pan arab effort.
I didn’t say Arabs come from Arabia. I said Arabs originated in Arabia. I’m standing by that just as I would stand by saying that Hispanics originated in Spain. There are obviously now plenty of Arabs and plenty of Hispanics living outside of the regions where their ancestors started out.
Really? Because the stories in the religious texts actually accord well with the notion that all the local tribes are somewhat related…just not by way of Canaan. Arameans, Ishmaelites, Edomites, Moabites and Ammonites are all descended from Abraham or his brothers, like the Jews. To say that people are Arabs is not to say they are not genetically related to the other sub-populations in the region. Quite the contrary.
Maybe not, but they don’t contradict anything known about the demographics of the area. They say that all these locals are descended from the same genetic stock, just like the DNA studies do. It’s just that (according to the texts) the origin of it is Semitic, not pre-Judaic Canaanite.
It worked out great here in the U.S. with the Native American tribes.
We “gave” them reservations while still basically claiming those regions as part of our nation, shoved them in, and meanwhile spread around everywhere outside those boundaries, then slowly encroached inward, shrinking the reservation borders and ignoring all of our treaties with them.
I don’t see that much of a difference between our history and that of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the ever increasing Settlements, frankly. It’ll lead to a one-state solution, but I think it’ll be largely condemned by historians.
The Wikipedia summary of “Canaanite” in the Bible is that it refers to the Amorites (who were a group of people that migrated Southwest from an area near the Syria/Iraq/Turkey border about 800 years before the Old Testament was written) and those were not a group that were descended from Abraham, according to the Bible. And so the Conquest of Canaan was a giant murderfest of them.
The problems with that:
The Amorites largely worshiped the same gods as the people who were in the Jordan Rift Valley, spoke a related language, etc. Canaanites are today considered to be everyone South of Turkey, East of Egypt, West of Sumer/Babylon, and North of Arabia.
Abraham is described as coming from an area near the Syria/Iraq/Turkey border. The tale of his migration appears to be the tale of the Amorites migrating 800 years before the Old Testament was written. The mountain that Noah ended up on, for example, is in Eastern Turkey - Amorite land. Ancient Israelite mythology would seem to strongly indicate that they are Amorites themselves.
There are no wars that can be seen in the archaeological record that would match up with an Israelite conquest of the Jordan Rift Valley. It’s currently believed that the Israelites were a Southern group of Canaanites that migrated up into the valley area and peacefully rose to the top of the heap over the course of many generations, eventually becoming the ruling class.
Basically, the Bible is inconsistent. After Abraham, it talks about Moab splitting off and Edom splitting off, etc. and we see kingdoms start some centuries after the Amorite immigration into the Jordan Valley, just off the edge of the Valley. That seems to match archaeology. But the Exodus from Egypt doesn’t match anything in the archaeological record. A Canaanitic people were expelled from Northern Egypt, after conquering it, and later Egypt took over the Jordan Valley and made it a vassal state, from which they were freed. Neither matches the story. As said, the Bible is only occasionally correct.
(B) What does any of that matter today, unless you’re trying to make a case that “they” have no right to be somewhere and should be happy with whatever “we” the rightful residents allow them to have. There is not a good set of precedents for that one working out well, btw.
I’m not going to argue the general historicity of the Bible. Of course, as my religious affiliation on this board is well-known, I believe it, and could argue it elsewhere, but I’m not interested in hijacking this thread. My point was only in response to Ramira, who implied that DNA studies that show common ancestry across the Levant region run counter to the Bible’s assertion that the Israelites were a distinct population from the Canaanites who they supplanted in Palestine. All I am saying (here) is that indications of common ancestry in the Levant and Arabia do not contradict the Biblical narrative, because the Biblical narrative implies common ancestry as well, i.e., from Abraham’s family.
Except many people whom we call Arabs or Hispanics today have 0 ancestors from Arabia or Spain, respectively. That’s the problem. It’s like saying people who speak English originated in England. Many did not. “Arab”, as used today, means “Speakers of Arabic”, not “descended from folks originally from the Arabian peninsula”.