Having just commemorated the third anniversary of the attack on Israel, when Hamas beat, tortured, raped, and killed 1,200 Israeli civilians while taking another 251 hostages, it is natural that emotions are high. Yet much of the outrage seems to be directed at the Jews, who are now called ‘colonizers’ and held responsible for the violence in the Middle East.
It is this word, colonizer, that I have been trying to focus on over the past month as we have traced the origins of the two principal peoples in this struggle. One of the main themes has been that this region was not colonized just once, but instead experienced successive waves of conquest, migration, and cultural change over the centuries. During this time, the people who originally inhabited the area were absorbed into dozens of other peoples, creating what we in America might call “a melting pot.”
By the time the Roman Empire began to collapse, the Jewish population had experienced major expulsions. Many Jews had been expelled from Jerusalem and scattered throughout the Roman Empire and into Europe, although Jewish communities continued to exist elsewhere in the region. An estimated 15-25% of the Jewish population remained in other parts of what is Israel today. These people could trace their lineage back to the ancient Levant.
As for the other population groups in the region, many of whom are ancestors of today’s Palestinians, it is harder to assign them a single name. The original Canaanites had been absorbed into dozens of other peoples who had come to the region through migration, conquest, or colonization. The best term to call these people after the Romans is simply Byzantine. Much of the population was Christian and spoke Greek or Aramaic. Part of this mixture, by the way, included Jews who had converted to Christianity.
All of this changed around 630 AD, as a new wave of colonizers swept across the region. Islam began in the early 7th century in the Arabian Peninsula, where the Prophet Muhammad preached a new monotheistic religion that he understood as connected to the traditions of the Jews and Christians. Islamic tradition traces the Arabs to Ishmael, the son of Abraham, and Muslims believed they worshiped the same God as Jews and Christians. After Muhammad’s death in 632 AD, Arab Muslim armies expanded rapidly beyond Arabia, conquering territories held by the Byzantine and Persian empires and bringing the area now called Israel under Islamic rule.
Arabs mixed with the existing population, and over the centuries Islam gradually became the dominant religion while Arabic became the principal language. This transition was not immediate or complete, as Christians and Jews continued to live in the region. Under various Muslim rulers, these religious communities were generally permitted to practice their faiths, although they often faced special taxes and restrictions.
The first major Muslim dynasty to rule the area was the Umayyads, which established its capital in Damascus, in what is today Syria. Jerusalem remained an important religious center. The Umayyads constructed the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine built on the Temple Mount, the site of the ancient Jewish temples which were destroyed centuries earlier, making it a holy site to both Jews and Muslims. Today, only the Western Wall remains from the Temple and is adjacent to Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Umayyads were followed by the Abbasids, who ruled from Baghdad, in what is today Iraq. Later, the Fatimids, based in Egypt, also ruled the region.
In 1099 AD, European Christian Crusaders arrived. They captured Jerusalem and established Crusader states in parts of the eastern Mediterranean. However, Crusader control was never absolute throughout the region. In 1187 AD, Muslim leader Saladin defeated the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin and recaptured Jerusalem. He established the Ayyubid Dynasty, which was eventually replaced by the Mamluks, based in Egypt. Throughout these centuries, the population continued to include Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Samaritans, although Muslims had become the dominant religious community.
The next major imperial conquest came in 1516 AD, when the Ottoman Empire took control of the region. The Ottomans were Muslims, but they were Turkish-speaking rulers whose empire was centered in Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, Turkey. They governed the area for approximately 400 years, until the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire sided with the Central Powers and ultimately collapsed. The Middle Eastern nations, as we think of them today, did not yet exist in their modern political form. The Roman name ‘Palestine’ continued to be used to describe the region geographically, but it did not correspond to a political entity.
Under Ottoman rule, the population included Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians, as well as Jewish communities and the smaller Samaritan community. By the outbreak of the First World War, the ethnic makeup of the Muslims living there was broadly similar to that of Palestinians today. They had deep genetic roots in the ancient Levant. According to an article published in “Cell Press,” a multidisciplinary publishing house for several scientific journals, present-day Palestinians have roughly 50% of their DNA ancestry connected to ancient populations of the Levant.
That did not, however, mean there was a clearly defined political entity as Palestine in the modern national sense. People lived in the region known geographically as Palestine, but they generally identified through their religious communities, local affiliations, or their status as Ottoman subjects. Ethnically and ancestrally, there was no sharp dividing line between Muslims living in what is today Palestine and those living in, say, Jordan. Those distinctions developed later after the First World War, as new political boundaries and nationalism helped define the identities of people living in the region.
As for the Jews who lived in the region since ancient times and had survived the expulsions, their ethnicity had survived much more intact, as they tended to isolate themselves more and keep their original religion.
However, that makeup is very different from today’s Jews as the Zionist movement was shaping in Europe and it would soon bring thousands of new Jews back to what they considered their homeland.
James Finck is a professor of American history at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. He can be reached at james.finck@swoknews.com. Thanks to the Southwest Ledger and the Lawton Constitution for sharing his column.
