May 23, 2024
Troy D. Smith
“A History of Israel and Palestine, Part 1”
A history of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, with
sufficient context to give you a good idea of the full picture… I don’t even
know where to begin.
The other day I saw a quote from a politician who was angry
that people were calling Israelis “occupiers” of Palestine. They aren’t
occupiers, this person said, they OWN it, because it was promised to them in
the Bible (the “Promised Land”, literally). Well, even that is not as simple as
it seems. So, I guess the place to start is (at least near) the beginning
-between four to five thousand years ago. (I really wish I could include a lot
of maps in this! You can find them fairly easily online, though, if you look.)
No, wait, let’s start a couple of thousand years before even
THAT… with the ancient people of Sumer. The Sumerians were the first known
civilization in the world, and were located in Mesopotamia -specifically, what
is now southern Iraq. One of their cities was named Ur (or Uruk) -which should
be familiar to you Sunday School scholars out there, for reasons we’ll get to. Ur
was one of the cities where writing first developed, around 3000 BCE. The
civilization itself had started forming as early as 5500 BCE. A massive
ziggurat was built in Ur around 4000 BCE, and a white temple erected atop that
by 3500 BCE; it is likely that, a thousand years later, the Egyptians based
their pyramids on such Sumerian ziggurats.
By 3000 BCE, the Sumerians had neighbors, who had possibly
migrated northward from the Arabian peninsula: the Semitic people. “Semitic”
refers to a language group. The word itself was invented in the late 1700s by
European scholars, to describe these groups of people who spoke similar
languages and thus must have had the same origins. Those scholars used the
biblical name Shem (one of the sons of Noah), as in descendants of that branch
of humanity as they understood it at the time.
Some Semitic people lived in cities, while many were nomads.
They traveled on donkeys and herded sheep, trading with the city-dwelling
Semites. One of those cities was called Akkad. ALL cities in Mesopotamia were,
more accurately, city-states, each with its own king. Until the arrival of
Sargon the Great, king of Akkad, around 2300 BCE. Sargon conquered several
nearby Semitic cities, and used his growing army to conquer all the Sumerian
cities… building what was probably the first true empire in the world. Those
Sumerian cities -including Ur -became Semitic cities. Eventually, the Akkadian
language dominated most of Mesopotamia, while a different Semitic language
group occupied The Levant, which is northeast of the Arabian Peninsula. The
Levant includes modern Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon,
and Syria.
The Semitic cities of the ancient Levant became well known
for their purple dye, which was prized by all their neighbors for many
centuries and was made from mollusks indigenous to that part of the
Mediterranean coast. In fact, the ancient Greeks called those Semites Purple
People… or Phoenicians. Akkadians also called them Purple People, but in their own
Semitic language: ka-na-na-um. People of
Canaan. Canaanite would branch off into several Central Semitic languages,
including Phoenician, Arabic, and Hebrew. Historians refer to the Bronze Age
people as Canaanites, then call them Phoenicians in the Iron Age, starting
around 1200 BCE.
Most historians and Bible scholars believe the Hebrews were
one of several Canaanite groups living in the Levant in the third millennium
BCE. Not only the language, but much of the culture, of the ancient Hebrews was
very similar to their neighbors. They were certainly all Semitic. According to
the traditions of several different religions originating in the area, it was a
Semitic man living in the (formerly Sumerian, by then Akkadian) city of Ur
around 2000 BCE who took his family and flocks west to the land of Canaan. His
name was Abram, or Abraham, and he had two sons (with different mothers): Isaac
and Ishmael. Those sons (again, according to tradition) would become the
ancestors, respectively, of the Jewish and Arabic people. Whether one chooses
(as I’m sure many readers do) to regard those names as historical, or if one
chooses to view them as symbolic, the conclusion is the same: Jews and Arabs
have the same ancestors.
So what happened?
Only four thousand more years of history to cover! Stay
tuned!
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee
Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE
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