Jews and Arabs are not enemies by accident
Jews and Arabs are not enemies by accident; they are enemies because they are brothers. Both claim Abraham, both stake their lives on the desert God who tolerates no rivals, both cut the flesh of their sons in the same covenantal ritual, both outlaw pork with the same stubborn pride.
Their tongues are so close that Hebrew and Arabic could almost be dialects of the same ancestral speech. Their laws—halakha and shari‘a—bind every movement of the body, every bite of food, every intimate act, until life itself becomes a courtroom. Their sacred geography overlaps like a wound that will not close: Jerusalem for one, Mecca and Medina for the other, and in between a thousand contested stones where each side insists God spoke only to them.And yet, instead of recognizing themselves in each other, they rage with denial. The Jew calls himself Sarah’s child, the Arab swears he is Abraham’s heir, and both hurl curses across the same sand. They denounce one another as impostors while living mirror lives—monotheists obsessed with law, obsessed with purity, obsessed with male authority. The hatred is not born of difference but of resemblance.
They are reflections in a cracked mirror, unable to admit their likeness, preferring centuries of blood to a moment of recognition. The feud of Isaac and Ishmael never ended; it simply changed its weapons. What we call the Arab–Jewish conflict is not a clash of civilizations but a family quarrel carried to the edge of apocalypse—a rivalry so intimate that each side would rather destroy itself than confess it sees its own face in the other.
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