9,000 Years Old!

In the news, Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, has declared that the Palestinian people have a 9,000 year old legacy. Gee, that makes them the ORIGINAL owners of the land of Israel, and the Jews a bunch of Johnny-come-lately usurpers. Where in blazes did Mahmoud Abbas come up with 9,000 years? 

Well, the archaeologist in me can tell you that he’s obviously looking at the estimated age of the oldest city in the Palestinian Authority, and in fact the oldest city on the planet – Jericho. You know, where Joshua fought that battle and the walls came tumbling’ down… Sure enough, archaeologists do in fact date Jericho all the way back to 7,000 BCE. It’s well older than human “civilization” itself, which only dates to a little over 3,000 BCE (the ancient barley-beer-drinking Mesopotamians being the first to develop writing). I’ve personally been to Jericho many times, but that was in the “good old days,” before the “peace process.” I’ve stared at the remains of the neolithic tower, excavated in the 1950s by British archeologist Kathleen Kenyon. It’s one of those sights that actually gives you goosebumps, at least in the days when there was free and open access to Jericho. 

Abbas’s claim is that his people, today’s Palestinian Arabs, are the direct descendants of those ancient Jericho-dwellers, later expelled by the Jews, who, everyone knows, invaded the land in ancient times. But wait a doggone minute! NEWS FLASH: There were no Arabs in those days! The earliest records of “Arabs” are from the first few centuries BCE., certainly no earlier than the 800s, at earliest.  I know that’s a shock to those who link the Arabs of today to the biblical Ishmael, but that’s a bit like calling Silvio Berlusconi the lineal descendant of Julius Caesar. I don’t find the “Arabs” per-se mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Now, King Herod the Great (the nasty guy who ruled when Jesus was born) fought with them and gave them a big bloody nose. But even King Herod was “recent” history compared with the Jewish people. 

Get off it, Abbas. Face it, “Palestine” was a creation of the Romans, and it had nothing to do with today’s Palestinian Arabs. Were the Canaanites the distant ancestors of Abbas’s clan? Truth be told, the Canaanites and all their friends – Philistines, Phoenicians, Amalekites, Midianites, Hivites, Kenites, Termites… -:) – did exactly what every other ancient culture did. They went extinct! The ancient near east was conquered, not just by Israelites, but by Egyptians, Syrians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans… It shouldn’t surprise anybody that they disappeared. What should really surprise us is that the Jews, alone among all the ancient peoples on the planet, survived … and thrived. Now that’s a story! 9,000 years, Mahmoud? SHUT UP!