Assume, if you will, that every Anglo-Saxon on the planet, even those who are now of mixed ancestry, decided that he had a natural and God-given right to return to his ancient homeland, which the Anglo-Saxons left 1,600 years ago: Denmark (and adjacent North Germany).  The present natives — who are distant cousins of the ancient Anglo-Saxons — would probably be upset.  There might be a degree of resistance.

True, some of those present natives might prefer the returning Anglo-Saxons to the immigration of Muslims, but that aside, the present-day Danes and Germans would not appreciate it if the Anglo-Saxons returned to take over and impose the English language as the norm, refusing to intermarry.

If that is far-fetched, imagine if every Gael on the planet decided to return to his ancient homeland: Galicia, in Northwest Spain.

If the above two examples seem preposterous, then you might begin to understand how the Arabs must have felt when the Jews started coming back en masse after 1,800 years, which is even longer ago than the Anglo-Saxon diaspora.

And these Jews would restore a religion altogether different from Islam or the older versions of Christianity.

Now, I am sympathetic to Israel.  However, that is because I am Christian and Western.  Many of the Christian and semi-Westernized Maronites of Lebanon were also pro-Israel.

The key was a Christian and Western outlook.  Without it, Zionism seemed like a hokey excuse for Western imperialism, which is why Gandhi opposed Zionism.  Apart from a biblical worldview, there was, and is, very little to justify Zionism.  No one returns to a homeland he left after almost two millennia.

The Turks are not going back to Central Asia, and the Greeks are not going back to Anatolia, though they would like a return to Constantinople (which was stolen from them 600 years ago).  The Croats are not going back to Iran, and while the Gaels (Irish) may get Ulster back, they have long since given up any hope of a claim on Gaelic portions of Northwest Scotland.

To fully understand the endurance of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, we have to understand just how preposterous Zionism must seem to the Muslim Arab.  The only Zionist who attempted to do this was Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who wrote:

Culturally [the Arabs] are five hundred years behind us ... but they are just as good psychologists as we are. ... We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims ... but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine, as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico, and the Sioux for their rolling Prairies.

The Arabs work from a completely different worldview from ours, and so logic that appeals to us will not work with them.

We could tell the Arabs that Jews are native to the land, and the Arabs will reply that the average Ashkenazic (European) Jew is more European than Mideastern.

Jewish men had started moving to Europe long before the first-century Jewish war.  And these Jewish men often married European women.  We Westerners see these Ashkenazic Jews as Jews, but the Arabs see them as European invaders.

Ironically, because women were kept at home in those days, many Palestinians (especially the Christians) might have a quantum of Jewish DNA in their bloodline, which is doubly ironic as the rabbis trace Jewish identity through the female line, which many Ashkenazic Jews seem to lack.

Ah, but you say: what about Sephardic Jews, who are half or more of Israel today?  True!  But not in 1947, when the vast majority of Israelis were Ashkenazic.  The Jews were seen as invaders.

But what about those Sephardic, Yemenic, Mizrahic Jews today?  The Arabs would probably see them as Arabs who changed religion.

Again, the Arab does not interpret the world as the Westerner does.

We might refer to the Palestinians as Arab invaders — as some pro-Israeli advocates do — but the problem is that we misinterpret Islamic invasions as if they operated similar to the settlement of America, where the English settlers rarely intermarried with the natives.

A better example would be the Spanish settlers, who intermarried all the time, producing a large mestizo race, where large sections of the population can trace their ancestry back to the indigenous population, even if they identify as Latin or Spanish.  Though part-Spanish, these mestizos are also partly indigenous.

The Muslims acted like the Spanish.  The first generation of invading men took local women, producing half-Arabs, so to speak, who were raised Muslim.  These newly minted Muslims married more local women, until you had a population that over time became Muslim but remained largely genetically local.  Their Y-chromosome DNA might trace back to Arabia, but their majority autosomal DNA was local.  Egypt is an example.  It took centuries of this process to convert the ancient Copts, but it eventually did, and the Egyptians now wrongly consider themselves an Arabic nation.

So it is with many Palestinians, who see themselves as a national subset of Arabs.  Ironically, neither Jew nor Palestinian is of pure stock.

Critics will point out that the Palestinians did not have a concept of a nation-state, but were rather tribal.  Neither did the original Hebrews, who were also tribal.  It was centuries before David united them, but they still knew they were Jewish.  And the Palestinians know who they are.

This conflict will not yield so easily because it goes back to the dawn of human history...literally back to the time that Jacob cheated Esau of his blessing (Gen. 27:34-36).  The local Arabs are partly descended from Esau (also called Edom), and though the Muslims have forgotten the accurate details of the story, they have kept a sense that a distant injustice was done to them, which filters through the distortions of Islam.

While Jacob is clearly favored in Scripture, the Bible does admit that Jacob did defraud his brother of the blessing.  Jacob took matters into his own hands, rather than wait on God to settle it out.  And that is what is playing out down to this very day.  (This Jewish video delicately relates the story.)

Jacob versus Esau is a Hatfield-McCoy feud on steroids.

If nothing else, the Mideast conflict confronts the world — a hyper-secular world — with the uncomfortable truth that God still orders history, not men.  Man could not have imagined a return after 1,800 years, and certainly not in this fashion...to finally settle an old feud, because of a divine promise.  Who keeps a promise after 1,800 years?  Not man.

In the meantime, though we disagree with Islam and Palestinian terrorism, we have to take into account that the Palestinians see themselves as the aggrieved party, and they do have a point, though they muddle up their own history.

The only one who came close to understanding this was Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and even he underestimated the depth of the conflict.

Because this runs so deep, only God may be able to settle it.

Image via Pxfuel.