Quote:


Well that's your opinion, we consider ourself a people. And the only definition of 'a people' that's really relevant is their own self-identifying one.

Also prior to the British invasion, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon & Syria were pretty much one single unit of land. They have been so for well over 1000 years, culturally, ethnically, linguistically etc.

Quote:


How so? Arabs are the most Middle Eastern people there is. Arabic settlements in Palestine stretch back well over 2500 years, from the earliest Sabaic trading posts that were established in Gaza to facilitate the incense trade, through the Nabataean kingdoms that ruled over much of what is today Palestine, Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia, to the Muslims that have inhabited ALL of the Middle east for 1400 years now.

Compare this to the Jews, who were themselves just a tribe of Arabs anyway originally that moved around the Middle east, and had a kingdom or two in parts of Palestine that they invaded and conquered from the Canaanites, for no longer than about a 400 year unbroken stretch.

Quote:


As did the Canaanites and Hebrews most likely. There's no doubting the Semitic peoples probably originated in the deserts of the Arabian peninsula, and in fact Canaan is merely the northern most part of the peninsula anyway, but that adds weight to my argument, not yours

This fact is abundantly clear when one studies the Semitic languages comparatively, and notices that older variants of Hebrew for instance are much much more Arabic-like. As are many other Canaanite dialects (Hebrew merely being a dialect of the Canaanite group of languages) such as Ugaritic, which is very Arabic-like in it's phonology, grammar and morphology.

Quote:


Close, more like the Canaanites and Hebrews and Aramaeans and Assyrians etc. were all just bedouin Arabs who migrated out of the peninsula over the past 3000-5000 years and settled amongst the coast dwelling peoples of the mediterranean and in Mesopotamia. Many Middle-eastern archaeologists have noticed this pattern of waves of migration out of the peninsula, which continues even until modern times, as nomadic bedouins slowly assimilate into the settled coastal regions.

Quote:


This is just nonsense. Revisionism at it's finest. As I mentioned Sabaic incense traders from Yemen were the first Arabs from the historical records to setup settlements in Palestine, about 2500-3000 years ago. After them came the Nabataeans, and after them the Ghassanids and after them the Mudlims. This is historical fact, which you can even read about on Israeli government websites like this one from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website.

Quote:


You seriously need a history lesson. The Jews were invaded by the Babylonians and transported out about 500 B.C. they later returned and were vassals of other empires, but not self-ruling until about the first century C.E when the Romans razed Jerusalem and expelled them. They did not have any major presence there from that time until the early 20th. century.

Please read up a little. When the Muslims arrived in Palestine in the 7th. century, the inhabitants of Palestine were Christian Arabs & Byzantines, not Jews. Only a few small scattered communities of Jews existed there at the time.

Quote:


Before you take that history lesson, you'd better take a reading and comprehension lesson.

You claimed the Jews had an unbroken 3000 year history there, I corrected you, to show it was indeed broken. Not to mention the other 1800 or so years after the Roman expulsions and it ends up that your 3000 years has been reduced to about 1000 years, broken in the middle and half of it as vassal states, not even an independant sovereign state.

Quote:


Yes, and they were permitted to rebuild the temple, and exist as a vassal of Persia, as they remained until Alexander and then they became vassals of the Greeks. In other words, precisely as I recounted above.

Quote:


Why is it impossible? The Soviets did it to Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia etc. It's not impossible at all.

Quote:


That's completely illogical. Settled, agricultural peoples don't migrate into deserts and become nomads. The Arabic way of life, language, culture etc. are quite clearly the primitive Semitic form. The Hebrew, Phoenician, Assyrian, Aramaean languages and cultures are quite clearly mixed with other non-Semitic elements which resulted in them becoming very simplified and 'corrupted'. Jews today can barely even pronounce about 1/3 of the original Semitic sounds, and their alphabet has been reduced from the full 29 letters down to 22, resulting in merging of vocabulary and confusion of sounds. This is simple linguistic fact, and it tells us a lot about the way the history of the region unfolded.

Arabic is the purest Semitic language alive, Hebrew on the other hand is a complete mish-mash formed from millenia of foreign influence and simplifications and corruptions due to their migrating OUT of the ancestral Semitic homeland.

abu_rashid wrote on Aug 30^th, 2010 at 8:56pm:


At the time, Arabia wasn't a desert 4000 years ago, when the Sabaean Kingdom existed in what is now Yemen....

The oldest culture so far found in the Arabia Penisula is the Sabaean, which dates from 2000 B.C
In comparison, the oldest city so far found in Mesopotamia (the Tigris/Euphrates basin) is dated at around 5400 B.C...some 3000 years earlier than the earliest Sabaean city....

So, unless the Arabs from the Southern Arabian Penisula discovered time travel, they are the descendants, NOT the ancestors of the Sumerians....

Quote:


It's a simple fact that compared to Arabic, Hebrew is a very "evolved" language. It lost many of the original Semitic features like grammatical cases, dual number, and about 7 of it's sounds completely merged into others and became lost well over 3000 years ago. This was proven with the discovery of Ugaritic, a language which is closely related to Hebrew, yet which retains many features in common with Arabic.

Quote:


Because most of the changes occurred prior to the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, by which time the written language was standardised. But still many changes have occurred since then, and although your uncle may read the scrolls, it's very doubtful he can read them the way their authors would've read them, because several sound mergers and shifts have occurred even since then. I can read them as well, and my Arabic-accented pronunciation of them would probably be closer to the original than a modern day Hebrew speaker's rendering.

Quote:


Hebrew did not grow out of Aramaic, the two of them probably came from a common ancestor language. Because Jews spoke Aramaic for many centuries, that's probably why there is a lot more similarity between them.

Hebrew orthography (writing) has not changed much for about 2000 years, but the spoken language definitely has. And even the orthography can be deceptive, because Hebrew often doubled up letters, so sin/shin for instance use the one letter, and in the early centuries B.C ayin also doubled as ghayin, a letter which has now disappeared from Hebrew speech altogether. So for instance the city called Ghazzah (which we spell gaza in english) is spelt with an ayin in Hebrew (in the Bible) but originally it was pronounced ghayin, as is witnessed by the fact that Greek translations of the Bible spelt it gaza, and that in Arabic it's spelt with a ghayin. There are numerous cases of these same kinds of degradation of Hebrew phonemes. This is well documented, and is certainly not my 'theory'.

Quote:


Not quite sure what you mean by this... can you elaborate? With Hebrew letter names instead of just Latin letters?

Perhaps you mean the Semitic 'th' which has merged into shin in Hebrew but taw in Aramaic? But which Arabic still retains as a separate letter 'tha'?

abu_rashid wrote on Aug 27^th, 2010 at 10:06pm:



Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle and won't go back in.
The Jewish State has been in existence for over sixty years and many in Israel today were born there, so going back to wherever is not an option.

abu_rashid wrote on Aug 29^th, 2010 at 2:09pm:


If only it was so eh.
Were they one people during the Black September massacres of 1972 when Palestinians were slaughtered in their tens of thousands by the Jordanians.
Or was it when the Jordanians last year refused to recognise dual citizenship passports for those in the West Bank.
Perhaps they are one people whilst the Lebanese still today discriminate against the Palestinians in their work opportunities, or like the Saudi's treat them as lowly paid coolies.
Even their brothers, the Egyptians are assisting the Israeli's to keep the terrorists in their box called Gaza.
Maybe it was when the Iraqi's deported them all last year was a sign of Muslim brotherly love?
One people?
Their is no truth in that statement I'm afraid.