Middle East History

As a follow-up to the previous post, I want to address another issue - where did the Palestinian Arabs indeed come from? If they weren't inhabitants of ancient Israel, how did they get where they are now?

First, about Arabs in general. Many people have the misperception that the entire Middle East and North Africa is made up of "Arab countries" - nations where virtually the entire population are ethnic Arabs who speak the Arabic language. In reality, this is not so. Just for starters, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey are not and have never been Arab countries. Israelis are predominantly Jews who speak Hebrew, Iran consists mainly of ethnic Persians who speak Farsi, Turks are their own ethnic group who speak Turkish, and Afghanistan consists of numerous non-Arab tribes (the largest being the Pashtuns) who have their own languages and cultures.

Furthermore, even within countries that are actually considered to be Arab nations, the label is often quite superficial. The majority populations of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya are Berbers who were conquered by Arabs in the Middle Ages and forced to accept Arab language, culture, and religion. (More on that subject here.) Throughout most of its history (until the 1975-1990 civil war that saw millions of Christians flee to other countries), Lebanon was a Christian-majority state descended from the ancient Phoenicians. Iraq, meanwhile, contains a substantial minority of non-Arab Kurds, while Egypt is home to a sizeable number of Christian Copts (the descendents of the original ancient Egyptians).

Arabs, in fact, are not indigenous to any of the above countries; they initially came from the Arabian Peninsula, and from there only. That's why they're called Arabs to begin with - because they're from Arabia. The only true native Arab countries are those within the peninsula: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait.

As for the rest of the "Arab" countries, they were forcibly conquered in the name of Islam during the Middle Ages. Think the European powers were the only colonizers back in the day? These two maps show the reality:

Arab Conquest of North Africa
Arab Conquest of Middle East

So that's how so much of the Middle East became "Arab" - through colonization little different than that of the European and other empires. A conquest, I might add, that took place about two thousand years after the first Jewish kingdom in Israel.