Arabs Are Those Who Forgot Their Roots

From Russians to Arabs: How Assimilation Becomes Amnesia and Denial

In my previous articles, Arab Identity Laundering and Why Arab Identity Laundering?, I described a curious shift: the word Arab has quietly become a liability, particularly among UNRWA registrants.

In its place appears a rotating cast of substitutes: Canaanites, Phoenicians, Philistines, Israelites who converted, and, most prominently, the infinitely elastic label Palestinian. We are told this is “historical rediscovery.” It is nothing of the sort. What we are witnessing is Arab Identity Laundering — the systematic removal of a modern, inconvenient identity and its replacement with something older, nobler, and, above all, non-Arab.

This laundering does not deny Arab presence. It denies Arab responsibility — the responsibility that comes with historical continuity. The modern Arab identity, weighed down by political failure, moral defeat, and historical stagnation, is quietly shed. In its place stands a costume stitched together from extinct civilizations that can no longer speak back.

This is not remembrance. It is evasion.

Extinction Is Not the Same as Assimilation

A popular move in these narratives is to declare that “Arabs are just a cultural label,” while the real people — Canaanites, Phoenicians, Philistines — never disappeared. They merely “assimilated.” Their DNA, we are told, still lives on.

This is true — and irrelevant.

Yes, people assimilate. They always have. But assimilation does not preserve identity; it replaces it. When culture, language, memory, and self-identification dissolve, what remains is biology — and biology is not belonging.

As I argued in Blood Is Not Belonging, biological persistence is not cultural continuity. We live in an age obsessed with blood. DNA tests, ancestry charts, haplogroups. This biological fetishism masquerades as indigeneity while hollowing identity of its only meaningful content. Blood without memory. Bones without continuity. A sterile laboratory result elevated into a civilizational claim.

Identity is not inherited through chromosomes. It is transmitted through language, law, stories, norms, and self-understanding. When those break, the identity ends — even if the descendants remain.

To confuse biological persistence with cultural continuity is not history. It is mythology with footnotes.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: are Arabs those who forgot their roots?

The Russian Mirror

This is where the Arab case becomes clearer when viewed through a different mirror: Russia.

The idea of a unified “Russian people” is itself a relatively late construction, formalized largely in the modern era. Before that, identification in the Russian lands was primarily religious, not ethnic.

There is a saying that Russians are those who forgot their roots. In a narrow historical sense, it is true — not as an insult, but as a description of assimilation.

The same can be said of Arabs. Arabs, too, are those who forgot their roots.

This does not mean disappearance. It means absorption. Names changed. Languages shifted. Identities ended. Biology remained behind.

Extinct peoples like the Merya, Muroma, Meshchera, and other Finno-Ugric peoples, including Baltic and Volga Finnic groups, did not vanish into thin air. They were assimilated. Their descendants now call themselves Russians. Their languages died. Their identities ended. Their names survive only in chronicles and place names.

No serious person argues otherwise.

But here is the key question: what would happen if modern Russians began rejecting the Russian identity and declaring themselves Merya, Muroma, or Meshchera — all at once, selectively, depending on which sounded oldest or most indigenous that week?

Imagine Russians in Yaroslavl insisting they are Meryans. Russians in Murom declaring a Muromian identity. Russians in Ryazan flirting with Meshchera ancestry — all regardless of when their ancestors arrived, all armed with vague DNA claims and archaeological citations.

Everyone immediately recognizes this as absurd — even though genetic studies consistently show that most Russians carry substantial Finno-Ugric and Baltic ancestry. DNA has never been enough to resurrect an extinct people. Identity does not work that way.

The reason is obvious.

No one expects Russians to deny being Russian in order to exist legitimately.

That expectation appears only elsewhere.

Cultural Presence Is Not Retroactive Ownership

A Crimean Tatar proverb, born of lived experience, captures the logic behind the absurdity of retroactive ownership with devastating clarity:

Don’t plant a birch tree in your yard — a Russian will come and say, ‘This is my land.’

In modern form, it scarcely needs reinterpretation:

Don’t sing Russian songs — a Russian will come and say, ‘Russian songs were sung here; this is my land.’

This is not hypothetical. Variations of this logic have been voiced explicitly by Russian officials to justify the invasion of Ukraine and to assert claims over neighboring countries.

The proverb is not an ethnic insult. It is a diagnosis of a mechanism: the transformation of cultural presence into retroactive entitlement.

A song becomes evidence. A tree becomes proof. A trace becomes a claim.

This is the same logic at work in identity laundering. Ancient ruins are discovered, and suddenly modern populations declare themselves the owners of those civilizations — not through transmission, but through proximity; not through continuity, but through selective inheritance.

Time collapses. History flattens. Responsibility evaporates.

Dar al-Islam, Dar al-Harb — and the Russian Parallel

A useful lens for understanding this logic appears in Dalia A. Lauer’s article Middle East Jewish-Muslim War(s), which discusses the classical division of the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb.

In classical Islamic jurisprudence, the world is divided into two domains: the House of Islam, where Islam is dominant and Islamic law prevails, and the House of War, where it does not.

Dar al-Islam is considered a realm of peace because submission has already been achieved. Dar al-Harb is not defined by active fighting, but by unfinished submission. Any territory not governed by Islam—or once governed by it and now lost—falls into this category. In this framework, conflict is not an anomaly. It is the default condition until the boundary shifts.

Crucially, the term “place” is elastic. It can refer not only to states, but to cities, neighborhoods, institutions, even schools. Expansion does not begin with armies. It begins with presence.

This is where the analogy matters.

Presence as Claim

Before military force, there is daʿwah—invitation, normalization, soft submission. Cultural markers precede legal ones. Demographic presence precedes sovereignty. The logic is simple: once presence exists, entitlement follows.

This is not unique to Islam.

Russian imperial expansion has long operated on a strikingly similar principle, stripped of theology but identical in structure. Russian language, Russian culture, Russian speakers appear—and retroactively become the justification for political control. What begins as presence is reframed as ownership. What begins as coexistence is reclassified as historical right.

This is precisely the logic captured by the Crimean Tatar proverb: cultural trace becomes proof, proof becomes claim.

The difference is not moral character. It is doctrinal clarity. Islamic jurisprudence names the division explicitly. Russian imperial ideology leaves it implicit. But the mechanism is the same.

The same logic can be observed, in diluted and non-military form, in contemporary mass migration into Western societies. Long before any question of law or sovereignty arises, cultural presence establishes itself: visible religious symbols, linguistic enclaves, parallel norms, and public rituals. None of this constitutes conquest. But it does follow the same structural sequence: presence first, normalization second, claims last.

This does not require intent, coordination, or ideology on the part of individuals. It is a social dynamic, not a conspiracy. Cultural markers, once normalized, are easily reinterpreted as evidence of belonging — and belonging, in turn, becomes the basis for demands of recognition, accommodation, and permanence.

A paraphrase of the Crimean Tatar proverb captures the underlying logic succinctly:

A hijab was worn here; this is my land.

Why This Produces Alignment

This structural similarity helps explain a recurring geopolitical pattern: Russian and Arab regimes have repeatedly aligned against Israel since its inception, despite cultural, religious, and ideological differences.

The alignment is not based on affection. It is based on compatibility.

Israel represents a direct negation of both logics. It is a small, non-expansionist state that rejects demographic presence as entitlement, and continuity as conquest. It breaks the assumption that time, numbers, or cultural traces inevitably mature into sovereignty.

For systems built on the opposite premise, that is intolerable.

What Laundering Actually Does

Identity laundering is not about honoring ancestors. If it were, it would respect continuity, boundaries, and transmission. It does none of those things.

It does something else entirely.

It allows a modern population to:

• reject the identity it actually inherited,
• escape the moral and historical weight attached to it,
• claim prestige without responsibility,
• assert indigeneity without continuity,
• inherit antiquity without memory.

Dead peoples are ideal for this purpose. They make no demands. They do not contradict. They cannot object.

Living identities do.

The Moral Boundary

It is entirely legitimate for individuals to join living peoples, adopt living cultures, and integrate into existing identities. That is continuity.

But continuity is not unilateral. It presupposes acceptance. Some living peoples formalize integration through explicit and demanding processes of entry; others are closed by definition and accept no newcomers at all. In both cases, the rule is the same: belonging is conferred by the living culture itself, not self-declared by the individual or asserted by an external group.

Continuity is not unilateral. It presupposes acceptance, and different peoples enforce that acceptance in different ways.

Some large composite identities, such as Russians and Arabs, historically expanded through cultural osmosis — absorption of language, norms, and often relatively easy religious conversion. Assimilation occurred informally and continuously, without a discrete gatekeeping moment.

Other peoples impose a formal and demanding path of entry. Jews are a clear example: giyur is not cultural drift but a rigorous, supervised process comparable to naturalization, often taking years and requiring sustained commitment.

Still others are closed by definition. The Druze accept no converts at all.

These models differ radically in openness, but they affirm the same principle: belonging is conferred by the living culture itself, not self-declared by the individual.

What is dishonest is something else entirely: the resurrection of extinct peoples as personal identity props — especially all of them at once, regardless of ancestry, arrival time, or cultural transmission. Canaanites, Phoenicians, and Philistines cannot object to having their identities hijacked. Neither can the Merya, Muroma, or Meshchera.

So yes — Russians and Arabs are those who forgot their roots. Not because they failed, but because assimilation worked, most often by force rather than by choice. Identity moved forward, not backward.

Assimilation is not a crime. Denying it is.

Identity is not something you dig up. It is something you carry.