i want to react to columbia's instant shift in policy in reaction to trump's threats by side-stepping the issue. in fact, the administration likely agreed with trump in the first place and was happy to use the threats as an excuse to change course in a way it probably wanted to do anyways. trump is giving them an excuse.
are palestinians arabs? are they indigenous people? who are they exactly?
the genetic studies indicate that the palestinians are directly descended from the hebrews that lived in the period during antiquity. this has been interpreted by many as a fact that requires a rewriting of history, but that is not true; it is a fact that requires the reassertion of written history and the discarding of the attempts to rewrite history that developed out of 1960s and 1970s social movements, which is the true revisionism. the genetics have undone the recent post-wwII, largely post-1970, revisionism and reasserted the narratives from the classical, medieval and early modern periods. the hard science of genetics has actually upheld the importance and primacy of written history and undone the attempts to rewrite and revise that history that developed in the 1960s and 1970s.
what the older histories state is that the hebrews were largely converted to christianity after the destruction of the temple and the "expulsion of the jews" (which was overstated. more jews stayed and converted to christianity than left for europe or iran.), that they remained christians deep into the middle ages and early modern period and that they were only converted to islam by force in the late middle ages and early modern age, largely after the year 1700. they then became arabs in a process referred to as "arabization", in line with the islamicization. this happened across north africa and the middle east through different stages, over a long period. the carthaginians of north africa were quick to convert to islam, whereas the hebrews, assyrians, armenians and other indigenous groups in the middle east were actually very slow to convert, and in the end faced attempts at genocide in the 19th and 20th century for refusing to do so. this is actually ongoing; it's what isis is trying to do, and what hezbollah is in a real sense all about, in it's vicious persecution of the remaining christians in lebanon.
if the palestinians are indigenous, it's because they're converted hebrews, not because they are arabs.
are the palestinians arabs at all?
well, this word "arab" has had shifting meanings through time, and it's important not to conflate the word "arab" as it exists today with the word "arab" as it existed 2000 years ago.
the roman sources clearly distinguished between regions it called arabia, which were the areas in the middle east under roman occupation, and the peoples that lived in what we today called the arabian peninsula, which is where islam originated, who they called "saracens". the people in the roman arabian provinces were actually largely of greek extraction, but had integrated with the canaanite/hebrew/phoenician branch of semitic culture. for example, the nabatean kingdom of petra was a hybrid greek-hebrew region that spoke a language similar to hebrew and worshiped the greek god zeus. the romans called these people "arabs" and the people that lived to their south, along the coast of the red sea, "saracens". the saracens spoke a language more similar to arabic, and were the northernmost expansion of a people that have an origin point in yemen and ethiopia. these saracens were described in the roman sources as barbarians, occasionally fought wars with the romans, were at times conquered by the romans (there was a roman province along the red sea that it called arabia, but was in a region that saracens lived) and at times fought as mercenaries in the roman armies as distinct units from the arabs/ghassanids. the migratory bedouins on the direct boundary of the empire were called arabs.
the people that spread islam in the 7th century were not arabs but saracens. it is worth noting that the islamic history as we know it was not actually written until hundreds of years later, and by syrians initially and then kurds, not by saracens. these syrians would have been a mix of greeks, romans, persians, kurds, assyrians, hebrews and arabs and had little cultural or ethnic association with the saracens that spread the religion via the sword. these histories gloss over the distinction between arab and saracen made in the roman sources, for the precise reason that they were intended to generate the historical fiction of a united semitic race called "arabs", which did not exist at that point, but was generated into reality by the fabricated islamic history, which occurred in conjunction with a massive "translation event", in which islamic theologians scrubbed the secular greek texts (which they controlled because they controlled the land with the libraries, most importantly in egypt) for ideas that were inconsistent with islamic theology and then rewrote or burnt the ones that they didn't like. this is described in islamic history as a "translation event", but it was actually a giant process of historical revisionism under the guidance of vicious islamic fundamentalism, and it resulted in the alteration or destruction of virtually the entire greek cannon of history, science and philosophy. we only retained a small percentage of classical writing, and had to translate it back from severely distorted arabic translations. they wouldn't let christians access the greek sources until after they'd scrubbed and distorted them and translated them into arabic, first. it's for that reason that the renaissance didn't really pick up until after the fall of constantinople, which resulted in a mass migration of byzantines back to rome and the reintegration of ancient greek texts back into roman civilization, which the byzantines had themselves hoarded and prevented access to (although, the fact is that the latins and germans couldn't speak or read greek, anyways).
so, the term "arab" was initially the roman description of it's most south-east provinces, the areas south and east of judaea, and was inhabited by greco-canaanite tribes who were essentially hellenized jews or hellenized phoenicians. the people that lived to the south of these hellenized jews or phonecians, along the coast of the red sea, were called "saracens" by the romans and are the people that spread islam in the 7th century. however, their history was not written until the 9th-11th centuries, and by syrians and kurds (who were not saracens) that had been converted to islam, and sought to generate a falsified history to create a new empire using the roman name for the area, arab. this process of arabization occurred alongside the process of islamification, from roughly the years 1000-1700, with the levant actually being the last area to be islamicized and consequently arabized.
something else that the roman sources, and in fact some of the early islamic sources as well, are clear about is that the people that spread islam (the saracens, not the arabs) were black. the romans knew the difference between tanned and black. shakespeare, in his description of othello, might not have; the roman historians did. they had provinces in africa. they knew the existence of ethiopia. when the romans describe the saracens as "pitch black" or "as dark as the night", that should be taken literally and seriously. mohammad probably did not actually exist but, like jesus, was probably a fictional character. nonetheless, the people that came out of the desert in the 7th century and walked into the vacuum left by the end of the roman-sassanid wars were africans. they were ethiopians.
this makes sense based on what we know about genetics and linguistics, which places the urheimat of the saracens as in yemen, and indicates the saracens had previously migrated across the red sea from ethiopia into yemen. the roman-ethiopian conflict isn't well studied and is largely forgotten but it's every bit as important as any of the other roman border conflicts. the romans conquered egypt and moved south up the nile, to be blocked by the nubians and ethiopians somewhere in modern day sudan, as the greeks, persians and egyptians had been before them. however, they sent christian missionaries into ethiopia, who were quite successful. when europeans made contact with ethiopians, they couldn't conquer or enslave them because they were christian and the papal bull that gave them authority to conquer and enslave the rest of africa indicated they could only enslave and conquer non-christians. because they were christian, ethiopia maintained independence from european colonialism until mussolini tried to conquer it in the 1930s. the roman sources initially described islam as a christian heresy that developed on the arabian peninsula, and that also makes sense.
the classical history consequently describes an african black people moving north from ethiopia via yemen with a new religion called islam that probably began as an ethiopian coptic christian heresy and walked into the vacuum of power left in the middle east by the heraclean wars and converted an elite of hellenized jews and persians before being very quickly absorbed into the population. this is a modern example of the "elite replacement" model developed by the archaeologist jp mallory, which would appear to be the best way to describe how these things actually happen in real life.
the terms arab and saracen have different meanings in the latin and greek histories up until about the year 1500, after the end of the reconquista. they then become used interchangeably, but they were not initially the same thing and initially referred to different ethnic groups and geographic regions, with the arabs being the largely light-skinned hellenized semites in the roman controlled regions, who were most similar to hebrews and canaanites, and the saracens being the dark-skinned muslims outside of roman control, with an origin point in yemen and ethiopia, and who successfully invaded the area called arabia by the romans in the 7th century.
it follows that the palestinians are indigenous hebrews that were colonized by converted syrians and egyptians to the african/saracen religion of islam and had an islamic identity violently enforced upon them, and then were consequently "arabized", but not until as late as the year 1700. this is what the classical, medieval and early modern histories say, which was revised after world war two by archaeologists using questionable methods and a lot of magical thinking to develop a new history of peaceful coexistence, to eject the old history of war and conflict. this revisionism has now been upended by the genetics, which has reasserted the value of history, and the genetics should be seen as the type of evidence that has greater priority, over the archaeology. currently, these pro-palestinian protests are operating on the debunked revisionist histories made by archaeologists pushing magical thinking, to uphold the revisionism presented by islamic theologians. a school like columbia should make sure it is getting this right and is advancing modern theories, not the discarded ideas of late twentieth century archaeology or, shockingly, of dark age islamic theology.
what does that mean, functionally?
it means that palestinian nationalism is a fraudulent concept and that if palestinians want to celebrate their indigenous identity, they should do so by rejecting arab and muslim colonialism and reembracing their indigenous hebrew ancestry. as it is, palestinian groups pushing the primacy of islam are guilty of advancing colonialism in the region, not of fighting against it, and they should be called out for and condemned for their hypocrisy and ignorance. certainly, white european socialists should not be confused or misled and should assert and understand the facts. the role of an institution like columbia must be in asserting and teaching the facts and not in obscuring or confusing them, to advance ignorance and backwardsness.
