Orthodox Reflections

By Nicholas – member of the Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America

Gaza is a mess, says President Donald Trump, so the best thing to do is remove the Palestinians from Gaza and send them to Egypt and Jordan. The subtext of this proposal is that Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike, are Arabs. So living anywhere among other Arabs is good enough for the likes of them.

From CNN:

President Donald Trump indicated Saturday that he had spoken with the king of Jordan about potentially building housing and moving more than 1 million Palestinians from Gaza to neighboring countries, a remarkable proposal from a sitting US president.

Just a few days later, President Trump doubled-down by announcing that the U.S. will take over and “own” the Gaza strip. Meaning, one would imagine, that the U.S. would then be responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and their expulsion to surrounding nations.

There are many practical and moral problems with the President’s proposals. Those would definitely be worth discussing in detail at some point. However, here we will discuss just one very important question, inadvertently raised by Trump’s proposals, the answer to which can completely change how Americans view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East.

Are the Palestinians, particularly the Christians, Arabs?

To examine that question, we need to look at what we could term the Standard Zionist Historical Narrative concerning the history of Jews from the 1st Century till 1948. The standard narrative starts with a belief that the Romans in 70 A.D., after putting down a Jewish revolt, destroyed the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem and expelled the vast majority of surviving Jews from Israel.  Thus begins the “Jewish exile” or “diaspora” as the Jews became a “people without a land”. Of course, everyone has to acknowledge that at least a portion of the Jewish population remained in Israel, as there were enough Jews around to fight the Romans in the bar Kokhba Revolt from 132-136 A.D. The Romans are said to have killed hundreds of thousands Jews in quelling that revolt. Many Jewish survivors were exported as slaves. Jews were expelled from Jerusalem.  The population of Israel is believed to have collapsed in the aftermath of the revolt. The Romans renamed the area Syria-Palestina, which makes anyone living there at the time into the first “Palestinians”.

Whatever was left of the local population after the expulsion from Jerusalem, so the narrative continues, was completely destroyed by the Arab conquest in the 7th Century. According to Jewish historian Ben-Zion Dinur, “the ceaseless penetration of the desert people into the country, their amalgamation with its alien (Syrio-Aramaean) elements, the capture of the agriculture by the new conquerors and their seizure of Jewish lands” changed the population of the land then known as Palestine into an Arab dominion. Gone was whatever was left of the descendants of the Israelites. The indigenous population had been replaced by Arab invaders, whose descendants are the Palestinians we know today.

Today it is an article of faith for many Christians that Rabbinic Jews are the biological descendants of Abraham, and that Palestinians are the descendants of Arab colonizers.  The following statement by Dr. James Hutchens, president of Christians for Israel, is typical of the Christian Zionist (often Dispensationalist) point of view. Hitchens, and his fellow Christian Zionists, not only deny the existence of a valid Palestinian identity, they also frequently display utter contempt for Arabs in general (which he expressly believed Palestinians to be). As is typical of his ilk, Hitchens is also apparently completely ignorant of the historically significant Christian presence within the Palestinian community:

First let us clarify who the “Palestinians” really are. The notion of a distinct “Palestinian people” with a language, culture and religion of its own, is a creation of Yasser Arafat and nurtured by the surrounding Arab nations after their ignominious defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. The so called “Palestinian” people are, in reality, Arabs whose mother tongue is Arabic, whose religion is Islam, and whose culture is shared by most of the 22 surrounding Arab countries. There simply is no distinct Palestinian entity.

So if the Palestinians, even the Christians, are just “Arabs”, then why not find a new place for them to live among some of the “22 surrounding Arab countries”? For many reasons, of course, but let’s focus in on one of the biggest. A reason so important, that it completely destroys Christian Zionism, particularly in its Dispensationalist form. The Standard Zionist Narrative is completely false. The Palestinians, particularly the Christians, are not Arabs. They are Arabicized descendants of the ancient Israelites. They are, literally, the Children of Abraham.

To confirm this, let’s first look at the true history of the Jews from the destruction of the 2nd Temple through the Arab invasion.  There was no mass expulsion of Jews after 70 A.D. The Romans had no such policy of uprooting entire populations, and no such capability even if they had wanted to. Prior to the later 20th Century, most people seem to have actually known that fact. Israel Belkind, one of the first Zionists who settled in Palestine in 1882, wrote:

“The land was abandoned by the upper strata, the scholars, the Torah men, to whom the religion came before the country. Perhaps, too, so did many of the mobile urban people. But the tillers of the soil remained attached to their land.”

The Jewish peasants stayed in their villages after 70 A.D. and continued their lives the same as always. Why would an occupying power wish to strip productive farmers of their lands and livestock, only to send them where and make them do what? It is not just modern tales of a Roman expulsion that are way overblown. Nebuchadnezzar, in the Bible, was said to have left the land of Israel empty as he took the population away captive to Babylonia. However, we now know from archaeology that only the administrators and cultural elites were taken into exile. The farmers stayed in Israel, even during that infamous “Babylonian Captivity”.

As it turns out, the farmers always stay.

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It is true, however, that between 70 A.D. and the 4th / 5th Centuries the Jewish population of Roman Palestine did decline substantially. Only, that wasn’t because of emigration or because Jewish farmers were dying in their fields. It was because a large part of the population became Christian. Jerusalem, after all, is where the Christian Church had been founded by Judeans following the Resurrection of Christ. By the 4th Century, Jerusalem was predominantly a Christian city. At the first Christian Council in Nicaea in 325 A.D., participation is recorded from Christian communities in Gaza, Jabneh, Ashqelon, Ashdod, Lod (Lydda), Beit She’an, Shechem, Gadara and elsewhere. This trend of conversion to Christianity continued, and strengthened, over the next few centuries.

The decline in the number of Jews in Roman Palestine directly coincided with the conversion of many of them to Christianity. Their descendants still live in Israel and Israeli-occupied territories to this day. There was no expulsion of the Jews. 

St. George was originally built in the 4th Century, rebuilt in the 12th Century, and most recently reconstructed in 1931. The original Church predated the Muslim invasion by some 300 years. 

Prior to the hardening of the Zionist narrative in the mid 20th Century, the true history of the 1st to 7th Centuries was largely acknowledged by Jewish historians, including two of the founders of the modern state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Ben-Zvi. In 1918, these two (a future Prime Minister of Israel and a future President) wrote a sociohistorical book entitled Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present. They wrote it first in Hebrew, then translated it into Yiddish in order to reach a wider Jewish-American audience. The book was successful and well researched. Its statistical material and bibliographic sources were impressive. This is what Ben-Guion and Ben-Zvi had to say about the so-called Jewish expulsion from Israel:

To argue that after the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus and the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt Jews altogether ceased to cultivate the land of Eretz Israel is to demonstrate complete ignorance in the history and the contemporary literature of Israel . . . The Jewish farmer, like any other farmer, was not easily torn from his soil, which had been watered with his sweat and the sweat of his forebears . . . Despite the repression and suffering, the rural population remained unchanged” (Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present, Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi, 1979; in Hebrew, translated by Sand, p.198).

Did anything change when the Arabs arrived in the 7th Century? Did teaming hordes of Arab invaders displace the descendants of the Israelites (Christian and Jewish), thereby taking the land of Palestine for themselves? Not at all. Palestinian Christians and Jews were not swept away by masses of migrants from the Arabian Desert. The Arab conquerors had no such policy of population displacement, and no means to enforce one even if they had wanted to. The Muslim army that swept out of Arabia between 638 and 643 A.D. to conquer Palestine was a relatively small force. The largest estimate of its strength is forty-six thousand troops, most of whom were later sent on to other fronts in the continuing war against the Roman Empire. The permanently stationed troops did bring in their families from Arabia. They also undoubtedly seized some land to accommodate settling them. But the numbers are simply too small to have resulted in much change to the local population.

In short, there is absolutely no evidence that the Arab invasion replaced the local population of Palestinians with Arab colonizers. It is true that, in the long term, both the Jewish and Christian populations suffered steep declines. The use of languages other than Arabic also fell by the wayside. It really shouldn’t be a mystery why that occurred. Over time, many Christians and Jews converted to Islam and adopted Arabic language and culture. Even those who retained their Christian or Jewish religions would have conformed to their surroundings for personal benefit. 

More from Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi on this below:

The fellahin [Arabic-speaking Palestinian peasants] are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century A.D. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers, and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations, the Arabians did not engage in farming . . . They did not seek new lands on which to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their whole interest in the new countries was political, religious and material: to rule, to propagate Islam and to collect taxes (Ibid., p.196).

The Arab conquerors also had a keen interest in collecting taxes, which only non-Muslims such as Christians and Jews had to pay. Given the benefits of converting to Islam, is it really surprising that many peasant Christians and Jews converted to the new religion? Especially since the Islamic god was presented as being much like the Christian and Jewish ones, with Islam even awarding Jesus the status of a prophet. This tax policy was so successful in driving mass conversions, that it had to be modified later as the treasury was running empty. There were too few “unbelievers” left to pay enough taxes to keep Muslim rulers financially solvent.

There are other historical reasons to believe in the continuity of the Palestinian population, despite the Arabization that occurred. Many Hebrew place names continued to be used by the local population, even though governing authorities from Rome to the Arabs had tried to replace them. A good number of burial places are joint Muslim and Jewish cemeteries. The local Palestinian Arabic dialect has many Hebrew and Aramaic words found in neither literary Arabic nor other Arabic vernaculars. Further, Palestinians have not historically defined themselves as Arabs. Palestinians are documented as referring to themselves as Muslims or fellahin (farmers), while referring to the Bedouin as Arabs.

This historical evidence is clear and compelling enough, but in the 21st Century we can now also make use of DNA analysis to further confirm the identity of Palestinian Christians. The DNA results confirm what Zionist historians once freely admitted. Most peoples of the Middle East, including the Palestinians, are not Arabs. Rather, modern residents of many Middle Eastern nations are largely descendants of the indigenous peoples of those areas who were culturally Arabized. DNA indicates that Palestinian Christians are 88-97% Israelite. Along with the Samaritans, they are the most closely related population in the world to the ancient Israelites. Palestinian Christians are the closest thing on Earth today to the “Children of Abraham”, not Rabbinic Jews from Poland, Ukraine, and Russia who are largely descendants of historical converts to Rabbinic Judaism from outside of Palestine.

In addition to Palestinian Christians, many Palestinian Muslims are also descended from the Israelites. Historical DNA analysis shows that the Palestinian Muslim genetic pool started to change around the 13th Century. By contrast, the Palestinian Christian gene pool appears stable from that point on. Palestinian Christians could only marry other Palestinian Christians, as conversion from Islam to Christianity was punishable by death. Muslims could, of course, marry freely. This leads to dramatic variations in the percentage of Israelite heritage among Palestinian Muslims, particularly by region. Some Palestinian Muslims have as high as 90% Jewish/Israelite ancestry while others have as low as 15%. Over all, it appears that the West Bank is approximately 70% Jewish/Israelite in genetic origin.

Palestinian Christians, just to reiterate, are somewhere between 88-97% descended from the people of Israel. God’s Chosen People. The people through whom Christ was Incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. That fact is going to be shocking for a lot of Americans.

Funeral service held at St Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza City for Christian victims of the Israeli bombardment of the church complex on October 20, 2023. The Church was originally built in 425 A.D.

Even more shocking will be that the average Palestinian Muslim in the West Bank has more Israelite DNA that does Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father was born in Warsaw and whose real last name is Mileikowsky. (To learn about the history of conversions of non-Israelites to various forms of Judaism, and the true origins of the Jewish “diaspora”, please read this article.)

Based on all these facts, here are some important conclusions:

1. Palestinians exist, have existed by that name since the 2nd Century, and are the native inhabitants of the land we now call Israel and the occupied territories (Gaza and West Bank). There are also Palestinians living in exile around the world and natively in parts of the country of Jordan, an area that seems to have historically once had an Israelite majority population.
2. Palestinians are not Arabs. Many of the peoples surrounding them (Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrians) are also not really Arabs. They have been culturally Arabized over centuries of Arab rule, but they are no more Arabs than the Scottish or Irish are English, despite the impact of hundreds of years of linguistic / cultural influence. Removing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, and then plopping them in the middle of another “Arab” nation, would have roughly the same effect as transplanting whole Irish cities into central England. Chaos is going to ensue.
3. Palestinian Christians, and many Muslims as well, are the actual descendants of the Israelites – the Children of Abraham. Rabbinic Jews, by and large, are either not descended from the Israelites, or are so to a markedly lesser degree. (Some Middle Eastern Jews are as closely descended from Israelites as many West Bank Palestinian Muslims, but are still much less so than Palestinian Christians.) This fact absolutely destroys Christian Zionism, particularly of the Dispensational variety, which believes dogmatically that modern Rabbinic Jews are the descendants of Abraham, to whom all the Old Testament covenants and prophecies still apply. How can Rabbinic Jews have a right to land occupied by biological descendants of Abraham? Especially when a significant portion of those descendants of Abraham embrace Jesus Christ? By converting to Christianity, they somehow lost their covenant with God? A covenant that belongs to people that not only are not descended from Abraham, but who embrace a religion that is younger than Christianity and which is a complete rejection of Christ? Rabbinic Judaism is not the Mosaic religion (no animal sacrifice), and is explicitly anti-Christian. Widespread awareness of these facts will be a death blow to entire Evangelical denominations.

President Trump is the most pro-Zionist president of all time. That is one of our chief challenges when dealing with him going forward. A large percentage of Americans are Christian Zionists, frequently because of belonging to Evangelical denominations that teach some form of Dispensationalism. Trump could easily lead such people towards solutions to the Palestinian “question” that would be horrific in nature. Any peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict must include justice for the descendants of the ancient Israelites, the original inhabitants of the land. Any proposal involving expulsion, continued occupation, or anything short of real freedom must be rejected. Fortunately for Orthodox Christians, the truth and God are both on our side.