Something I think a lot of Americans probably don’t know is that Arabs are considered by themselves and other groups in the Levant to mythologically be descended from Ishmael in the same way that Jews are considered by ourselves and other groups in the Levant to be descendants of Isaac and in particular Jacob (aka Israel). While every American knows about the Binding of Isaac, in Islam there is a story of the binding of Ishmael. The Samaritans, who were an offshoot of early Jews and have their own separate books, record the Jews and Samaritans as descendants of Isaac and the Arab people as descendants of Ishmael. Some interpretations of the Torah and archaeological history say that Midian, where Moses fled to after killing the slave driver, was an Ishmaelite tribe, making his wife Tzipporah an Arab woman who married into the Hebrew tribe and brought many of her people with her to settle together in HaAretz Israel. Our own religious text might imply that Arabs settled the Levant at the same time as Jews, together as a family. (Other interpretations are that Midian was Ethiopia and Tzipporah was Black. Which also has a lot of legitimacy to it.)
Jews and Arabs lived together on the same land for so long that our mythologies which were passed down orally for so many centuries nobody could even remember where they came from, record our two peoples as being siblings in origin born from the same patriarch and to have intermarried our tribes and settled together.
AND THE BRITISH FUCKING RUINED ALL OF THAT AND IT PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH AND NOW RACIST FUCKWADS CANT EVEN IMAGINE US NOT WANTING TO KILL EACH OTHER AND WONT EVEN CONSIDER A TWO STATE SOLUTION LET ALONE A MORE JUST ONE STATE SOLUTION
This. So much this.
We have so much shared history and stupid colonialism came in and pitted us against each other when we could be such strong allies.
And this isn’t just my being angry at “white people”. So many people in the Muslim community forget that a lot of our prophets were Jewish. And that the Prophet Mohamed was taken in and protected by a Jewish community in Medina when he and the first Muslims fled persecution from Arab tribes.
So much of our shared history shows us aiding and supporting each other. We came to agreements and taught each other so many things.
WE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE FRIENDS