At the heart of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, anthropology matters as much as history

Who is indigenous to Israel and Palestine: Jews or Arabs? The answer depends on how we interpret history. Radically diverse starting points invoked by both parties have led to the terrible conflict we are witnessing.

Starting with the past century, we can count backwards to see what history tells us. As both the Christian-European and Muslim-Ottoman colonial empires collapsed in the 20th century, the modern nation-states of the Middle East and North Africa were created, including 37 Muslim-majority countries and one Jewish-majority country.

The Muslim countries have been celebrated while the Jewish state has repeatedly been attacked. Following the Holocaust, in which more than 60 percent of European Jews were killed, the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 brought hope for Jews, despair for Arabs.

Both groups saw themselves as legitimate heirs to their shared land, and both claimed the 70-mile-wide strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, based on their histories. The Peel Commission in 1937 and the United Nations in 1947 proposed dividing the land between Jewish and Arab residents of Palestine. (The Peel report highlighted the Jews’ rights to the land because of their “ancient historic connection.”) Jewish leaders accepted both plans; Arab leaders rejected them.

Despite this asymmetry in realpolitik, if we start the clock in 1947-48, we are hard pressed to say which group was “indigenous”: both had lived in the land for centuries, and the UN recognized the claims of each.

To go back further, the term “Palestinian” entered English and other European languages in the 1870s to refer to the land’s Jewish and Arab inhabitants alike. Between 1882 and 1914, responding to growing antisemitism and violent pogroms across Europe and North Africa, more than 75,000 Jews returned from across the diaspora to settle in their ancestral homeland, while from 1932-39, another 247,000 Jews arrived as refugees from the growing threat of Nazism.

To go back earlier still, in A.D. 638, Arabs arrived in Palestine and conquered the indigenous Jews living there. For the next 1,300 years or so, Arabs and Jews lived side-by-side. They shared businesses and intermarried, while various empires ruled their shared homeland.

When Christian Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099 to reclaim it from the Muslims, they killed Arab and Jewish Palestinians alike, unable to distinguish between them. Because they lived together and intermarried for so long, DNA samples taken today from indigenous Jews and Arabs can be difficult to distinguish. The so-called “Jewish” Cohen gene is even found in the Arab population.

Before that, some 3,000 years ago, Jews established a northern kingdom of Israel (or Samaria) and a southern kingdom of Judah in roughly the same space as contemporary Israel. These survived as independent states for the next 280 or so years. From then on, the land attracted a diverse series of invaders with names familiar from ancient history texts: Assyrians, Babylonians Persians, Greeks and Romans, followed by Arabs, Seljuk Turks, Egyptians and others. Jews famously became a globally diasporic people, because they were regularly chased from their Middle Eastern homeland by these invaders.

In the early second century A.D., invading Romans defeated the rebellious Jews and changed the province’s name from Judea to Syria Palaestina. As this name change suggests, Palestine was never a country, but always a province of a distant empire.

Earlier again, Jews and Muslims (as well as Christians) revere the Jewish patriarch Abraham. All agree that the monotheistic god they all worship bestowed the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea upon Abraham and his descendants. Jews and Muslims disagree as to who his true descendants are.  

Jews trace their ancestry to Isaac, son of Abraham by his wife, Sarah, thus prioritizing the matrilateral line for legitimacy. Muslims trace their ancestry to Ishmael, son of Abraham by Sarah’s handmaiden, Hagar, thus prioritizing the patrilateral line for legitimacy.  

This dispute over genealogical legitimacy, joined with the fact that neither a Jewish nor an Arab autonomous state has existed in the land since the Romans defeated the Jews in A.D. 135, set the stage for one of history’s greatest conflicts. The region’s last colonial power, the British, worked with the United Nations to create a partition plan to divide the land between the longtime heirs (the Jews) and their long-time neighbors (the Arabs), the modern era of conflict started. 

Clearly, the current hostilities hinge on how we interpret history. Given that Jews and Muslims disagree on that history, whose version should prevail?

That’s where anthropology can add its analysis to history. With its insistence on listening to all parties, anthropology reminds us that history is not just a set of facts but a selection, a telling — and often a politicizing — of those facts. When groups choose different starting points and narrate those facts differently, conflict results.

If politics assumes a zero-sum game, only one group can win while the other loses. That formula precludes equitable solutions. A win-win rather than winner-take-all solution offers the only fair path forward. The conflicting histories invoked by Jews and Arabs signals that a two-state solution is the only strategy that is both historically valid and culturally viable.     

A two-state solution presupposes the legitimacy of both groups’ historical claims for indigeneity in Palestine, and it insists on acknowledging those dual claims. Once we relinquish the zero-sum model, a two-state solution becomes viable, based on the lived reality of both groups that have historically shared this space. And, as they have done before for centuries (and in relative peace), history reminds us that they can do so again.

Alma Gottlieb is a cultural anthropologist and who has published nine books about Africa, religion, child-rearing and anthropology, and professor emerita of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ron Duncan Hart is director of the Institute for Tolerance Studies, a cultural anthropologist, former dean of academic affairs and author of “Jews and the Arab World.”