Blood Brothers or Cruel Enemies?
Ishmael is identified as the father of the Arabs, an ancestor of Prophet Muhammad.
His half-brother Isaac is the ancestor of both Prophet Moses and Prophet Jesus.
The stories of the two great founding fathers, Ishmael and Isaac, are remarkably similar in both Islam and Judeo-Christian traditions.
Ishmael and Isaac were the sons of Abraham. It is through Abraham that the three world religions — Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — trace their lineage. Together, these religions are often referred to as the Abrahamic faiths.
In the Old Testament (Genesis 16:1–16; 17:18–26; 21:1–21) —
Abraham’s wife Sarah was initially unable to bear children and therefore gave Abraham her maidservant Hagar to conceive an heir. Abraham slept with Hagar, and she bore a child. Ishmael was born and brought up in Abraham’s household.
Some 13 years later, however, Sarah conceived Isaac, with whom God established his covenant. Hagar and Sarah began to show contempt for each other; they responded by treating each other harshly.
Sarah asked Abraham to expel Ishmael and his mother, saying, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”
Her demand was painful for Abraham, who loved Ishmael. Abraham agreed only after God told him that “in Isaac your seed shall be called”, and that God would “make a nation of the son of the bondwoman,” Ishmael, since he was a descendant of Abraham (Genesis 21:11–13).
Abraham then told Hagar to flee his home and go into the desert region between Abraham’s settlement and Shur. Isaac became Abraham’s sole heir. Abraham loved both his sons and was laid to rest by both.
Ishmael, commonly regarded by both Jews and Arabs as the progenitor of the Arabs, is considered a messenger and a prophet (rasūl nabī) in the Qurʾān (e.g., 19:54).
Findings from several studies
Jews and Palestinians share a deep attachment to the same sliver of contested land, a shared appetite for hummus, and a common tradition of descent from the patriarch Abraham.
Several major studies published in the past few years attest to these ancient hereditary links. At the forefront of these efforts are two researchers:
Harry Ostrer, professor of pediatrics and pathology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, and
Karl Skorecki, director of medical and research development at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa.
The two scientists published extensive analyses of the genetic origins of the Jewish people and their Near Eastern ancestry.
According to their studies, Jews are the genetic brothers of Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and they all share a common genetic lineage that stretches back thousands of years.
“Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham, and all have preserved their Middle Eastern genetic roots for over 4,000 years,” says Harry Ostrer.
Ostrer’s research on “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,” published in The American Journal of Human Genetics, sampled 652,000 gene variants from each of 237 unrelated individuals from seven Jewish populations: Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek and Ashkenazi.
These sequences were then compared with reference samples from non-Jews drawn from The Human Genome Diversity Project, a global database of genetic information gathered from populations across the world.
In Skorecki’s study on the genome-wide structure of the Jewish people, published in the journal Nature, he and his fellow researchers sampled tens of thousands of genetic variants from the genomes of 121 individuals hailing from 14 Jewish Diaspora communities.
They compared these variants with samples drawn from 1,166 individuals from 69 Old World non-Jewish populations.
More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years.
Statistics of Causalities
1948–49 — — — -First Arab Israeli War — — —6,373 Israelis / 10,000 Arabs
1951–55 — — — -Palestinian Insurgency — — 967 Israelis / 5,000 Palestinians
1956 — — — Suez War — — — — 231 Israelis / 3,000 Egyptians
1967 — — —The Six-Day War — — — — 776 Israelis/ 18,300 Arabs
1967–70 — — War of Attrition — — 1,424 Israelis/ 5,000 Egyptians
1973 — — — —Yom Kippur War — — 2,688 Israelis/ 19,000 Arabs
1982 — — — First Lebanon War — — 1,216 Israelis / 20,825 Arabs
1987–93 — —Palestinian Intifada — — 200 Israelis/ 1,162 Palestinians
2000–04 — — Al-Aqsa Intifada — — 1,100 Israelis / 4,907 Palestinians
2006 — — — — Gaza conflict — — — 11 Israelis/ 402 Palestinians
2007 — — — Second Lebanon War — — — 165 Israelis / 1,954 Lebanese
2008–09 — — First Gaza War — — —14 Israelis / 1,434 Palestinians
2012 — — — Operation Pillar — — —6 Israelis/ 158 Palestinians
2014 — — —Gaza War — — — 73 Israelis/ 2,251 Palestinians
2021 — — —Israel–Palestine crisis — —13 Israelis/ 274 Palestinians
2023 — — -Israel — Hamas War — — — 23,843 after 100 days
Cost of war
A report by the Strategic Foresight Group estimated the opportunity cost of conflict for the Middle East from 1991 to 2010 at $12 trillion.
The report’s opportunity cost calculates the peace GDP of countries in the Middle East by comparing the current GDP to the potential GDP in times of peace. Israel’s share is almost $1 trillion, with Iraq and Saudi Arabia having approximately $2.2 and $4.5 trillion, respectively.
Is there any solution?
At the heart of this conflict is a basic idea that both sides believe:
The Israelis believe that they are entitled to the land now known as Israel, while the Palestinians believe that they are entitled to the land they call Palestine. Unfortunately, both sides claim the same land; they simply call the land by different names.
For religious Jewish Israelis and religious Muslim Palestinians, the belief is deeper still, for both sides believe that God (called Jehovah by the Jews and Allah by the Muslims), gave them the land, and that to give it away or to give it up to another people is an insult to God and a sin.
The history of the conflict is much more complex, the religious and historical differences are very important to this story. They have been fighting for over 100 years, and each war, each death, each act of terrorism, only deepens the hatred and the reluctance to give in to the other side.
So now, what you say?
Are the Israelis and Palestinians blood brothers or cruel enemies?
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