Dear Self-Hating Arabs
Denying your identity & affiliation and internalizing divide & conquer strategies is bad for your health & your homeland.
There is a familiar refrain by now which is based in fanciful mythologies to justify colonial dispossession, that all Arabs are Muslims & that Arabness in this region only arrived with the 7th-century Muslim conquests. The people talking about “Arab imperialism” are probably banking on the fact that most Anglo speakers don’t know much about the history or peoples of the region. I don’t know what Arab empire they are talking about, but it’s not one from the last 500 years.
This nonsensical parroting is despite archaeological evidence that attests to the existence of complex Arab political entities throughout the Arabian continental plate millennia before the Muslim conquests of the 7th century; the Nabateans, Abgarids of Osrhoene, the Kings of Hatra, the Arab Queens of Qedar & Palmyra, Obodas & Imru’ al-Qays.
The Zionist narrative that “Palestinians do not exist, they are just Arab invaders” has been expanded & applied to the whole Arab world so that we now hear “Arabs do not exist (outside of the Gulf vassal states), they are the product of Arab invasions.”
The dispossession of Palestinian Arabs is the prototype for the dispossession of the masses throughout the Arab world, from Libya to Iraq, Yemen to Syria.
Biblical mythology has completely inverted & distorted the understanding of the history of the people of this region (mythology from a historical standpoint). While Arabic toponyms in Palestine have preserved the meaning and roots of the ancient Canaanite, the Hebrew names that replaced them are largely either drawn from the Bible or mimic the sounds of the Arabic words, a partial or complete mimicking order to give the new name a Hebrew character. Indeed, even the Zionist conquest of Palestine was modeled after that of the biblical Joshua ben Nun.
This is how colonists establish mythology to justify their conquest. by denying the material existence & continuity throughout the history of the population they seek to dispossess & appropriating whatever local history they can as exclusively their own.
Dear Arabs, if someone tells you to go back to Arabia, be sure to ask them which one.
In Cassius Dio’s account of Trajan’s campaign, (1st century) we hear about an Arabia stretching from north of Edessa to somewhere north of Ctesiphon. At Edessa, Trajan met with an Arab ruler. Xenophon’s Arabia extends from the Khabur to al-Hit. We remember Eratosthenes including the central Gazira in his Arabia. We hear about an Arabia on the shore of the Euphrates opposite Dura. It is governed by an Arab who must have been a Parthian official. These Arabs seem thus to be documented during a very long time, & there seems to be solid evidence for a continuous Arab presence in this area, which makes it well deserve the designation Arabia, ‘Arab land’.”
(note that: Edessa = Urfa in Turkey, Ctesiphon = Salman Pak in Iraq, the Khabur = a river in Turkey & Syria, al-Hit = Hit in Iraq, Gazira = Jazira region of Syria, (currently occupied by US-SDF) Qinnarsin = al Eiss in Syria, Singara = Sinjar in Iraq).
Babylon (Bab-il, “the gate of God”) itself was in the “Arabia” in Iraq described above, the whole of the Arabian continental plate shares common religious, cultural & linguistic roots.
People mindlessly repeat that “Arabs only belong in Arabia” without knowing that there are multiple historical Arabias in the writings of antiquity. This one in Iraq, Syria, & Turkey is just one of them.
There would thus originally have existed several ‘Arabias’, settlements of the ‘Arab. The earliest one appearing in our documents is Dumah. From the neo-Babylonian period, we also hear about an Alu ša Arbāya, ‘town of the Arabs’, near Nippur in lower Mesopotamia.
The 3rd major Arab area is between Palestine & Egypt where there is a trace of Arab settlement in the time of Tiglath Pileser iii. Arabs are referred to there in the time of Esarhaddon, but they appear in full light in days of the Achaemenids when it was visited by Herodotus.
This region was the origin of the Arabic alphabet, in Obodas/’Abdeh in the Palestinian Naqab.
A 4th Arabia is described by Xenophon in 401 BCE but may already be referred to in texts from the time of Cyrus the Great. It stretched between the Khabur & the Euphrates Rivers & was probably limited to the north by the Sinjar Mountains.
A 5th Arabia is documented in Transjordan near the Gabal ad Durūz or Bashan [Syrian Golan Heights]. There seem to be several different regions of Arab settlement in this part of southern Syria documented at least from the time of Alexander the Great. The Arab tribe of the Itureans are certain to have emerged from the Gabal and stretched into the Palestinian Galilee. This is the region where we find the tomb of Imru’ al-Qays, ‘King of all ‘Arab’.”
The most important of the Arabias was the 3rd one [ie. between Egypt & Palestine]. It seems that this Arabia was in some way established by the Achaemenid rulers. It is evident that the Arabs there were closely united with the Empire & played a crucial strategic role, situated as they were between Egypt, Asia, & western Arabia. A scrutiny of the sources has shown that this Arabia survived the downfall of the Achaemenid Empire, withstood the attacks of Alexander the Great & was even able to preserve its independence until CE 106.
Herodotus (6th century BCE) writes of the city of Cadytis (Gaza) that it “belongs to the Syrians of Palestine” & that the seaport on the coast between Cadytis & Ienysus (Khan Yunis) “belongs to the Arabioi (Arabs).”
When according to the Old Testament Abraham passed through Jerusalem in about 1900 BCE, the city had been a holy place for an appreciable time. We are told the Patriarch received a blessing from Melchizedek (Arabic: ‘the truthful King’) King of Salem, ‘priest of the most High God. ‘Uru-Salimmu’ is a form found in some cuneiform inscriptions & ‘Ur-Salem’ was found in the Tel el-Amarna tablets which were sent by Abd-Hiba, the Arab governor of Jerusalem during the 14th century BCE, and by rulers of other towns, to the Pharaoh of Egypt.
The building of the second temple in Jerusalem is attributed to the Roman client king, Herod the Great, whose father was Idumeaen & whose mother was Nabataean, both Arab tribes, the first of which having been forcibly converted to Judaism under the Hasmonean Kingdom.
This all begs the question, why has this history been hidden? It is because the imperial mantra of divide and conquer works, and this is how empire targets our unity in preparation for the implementation of sectarian satellite states. Whenever they talk about birthing a “new Middle East” I hear war drums. They called it “the new World” built on genocide & slave labor. When they say they want a “new Middle East” this is what they mean too. Imperialist academia & media have done their job misinforming the masses.
Saudi Arabia is not the home of Arabism or Arabs. Palestine & Greater Syria are, both historically (& pre-Islamic conquests) & today. Syria is the beating heart of Arabism.
I strongly disagree with making any parallels between the American conquest of the “New World” & the Arab presence in the “Old World,” which is at least as ancient as the Assyria of the 8th century & is mentioned in Assyrian inscriptions from that time. Arabs are as indigenous to Bilad Asham as its other peoples, it is imperative we do not accept a narrative that paints them as usurpers or colonists. This is an imperialist & Zionist narrative used to dispossess the Palestinians and is contradicted by material evidence. Iraqi Baathist Arabism practiced by a now-defunct government is not the only possible iteration Arabism can take in Iraq, Arabs & Arabism are an integral part of Iraq, just as Assyrians & Assyrianism are, there is always work to do in ensuring the expression & protection of all.
Heroes, my people are heroes. Even as they try to extinguish, us wrap us up in dark shrouds so no can see, I see the brightest light, beaming from your eyes, generated by minds, hearts, souls who remember & who will never forget, until all wrongs are righted, all rights restored.
