The Blogs: The Canaanite Question

Masada street in Haifa has a bohemian stretch of bars, and you can meet some interesting people there with a diverse range of ideas. Amongst Arabs that I met on Masada, a defiant Palestinian identity is the prevailing mood. However one evening I was talking with an easygoing Arab fella in his mid 20’s and he said that he viewed himself as a Canaanite, rather than an Arab Israeli or Palestinian. I was already familiar with the Hebrew Canaanite movement of the 1940’s, but to hear this sense of affiliation from such a person was intriguing. It got me thinking on broader, more lateral lines how the narratives that are presented as the basis of historical origin can sometimes intersect.

If we accept, with some degree of plausibility, that the Arabs and Jews who currently inhabit the historical Land of Israel are, to some extent, mutually descended from the ancient Canaanites, what implications might this have for our understanding of the contemporary conflict? Is it merely an interesting intellectual exercise, or can something more concrete and actionable be derived from it?

You could argue that any common ancestry is so remote that it has no relevance today. Far too much has happened in the intervening centuries to assume that a shared ancient origin necessarily carries any meaningful implications for how people understand their identity, belonging, or political claims presently. Discovering in your seventies that you have a distant relative, after a lifetime of living entirely separate lives, does not suddenly make that person your brother or sister. The relationship may be historically interesting without fundamentally altering the lives you have built independently of one another.

But perhaps the analogy can be taken further. What if the discovery is not simply that two individuals share a distant ancestor, but that both have inherited competing stories about that ancestor—stories that have subsequently shaped their identities, their claims to a particular place, and their understanding of one another?

This is the case with the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews. One possibility – Biblically based, is that they can be traced back to the sons of Abraham. Jacob the son of Isaac, branched off to the twelve tribes of Israel. And Isaac’s half brother Yishmael had twelve sons also, who formed clans that spread throughout Arabia. The Torah posits Isaac as the chosen successor to the Divine mission, while the Qur’an has Yishmael in this venerated position

Another alternative sees the ancient Israelites and Arabs who dwelt in this region as emerging from a proto Canaanite culture. A third possibility views much of the current population of Israel as essentially an admixture of descendants of the ancient Israelites. Each of these theories are fascinating in their own right, carrying interesting implications through which to view the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It may be the case that aspects of each theory bares truth simultaneously.

If successive populations adopted new religions, languages and identities while retaining some degree of biological continuity with earlier inhabitants, to what extent should we think of the history of the region as one of population replacement, and to what extent as population transformation?

The isolated ancient community of Samaritans may shed light on this aspect of the region’s demographic balance. Until the 6th century, the Samaritans were the majority population in Samaria. Scholarship seems to suggest that the community diminished first due to forced conversion to Christianity under the Byzantines, and later adoption of Islam for more practical reasons like economic incentives. This sequence could be indicative of more general shifting demographic trends. That Israel always held a core population, which are the common ancestors (in part) of subsequent ethno-religious groups that followed. There were also other nationalities residing in Israel, like the Philistines and during the Hellenic period the Greeks. But with the passage of time these groups became subsumed into the core population.

Both Jewish and Palestinian histories can plausibly be understood as containing elements of continuity with the ancient populations of the southern Levant, alongside substantial cultural, demographic and historical change. Like that night with the Arab chap who regarded himself as a Canaanite, it would be heartening to discover (or create) a substantial movement of people on both sides of the divide who would likewise embrace a broader identity which would connect them with the opposing side of this polarizing conflict.