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.

    • joseph [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      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

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        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…

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Vncredleader@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        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

      • jack [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        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.