I’ve held off writing a post about about Israel since it is such a polarizing topic. The history of Africa and the Middle East is so complex and layered.

What most Westerners know about Israel is the ongoing war with Palestine. Little is known in the non-Semitic world about Judaism and who the Israelites actually were. But even less is known about who the indigenous people of that region were and that they were African.

Mark S. Smith’s The Early History of God is a dense read, but one of the most important points he makes is that the Israelites evolved out of Canaanite culture. I got a subscription to Scribd a few years ago in the hopes of finding scholarly articles on the Canaanites, but most of what I found was more allegorical than historical.

The Canaanites were not conquered by the Israelites, as is often misinterpreted in Christian texts. Turns out, the Canaanites had a long, diverse history dating back to their African Natufian ancestry.

Because Judaism as a religion is so tied to the Canaanites, that’s my focus in this post.

It took some digging but I did find a fairly recent book written by historian Victoria Kabeya. The book is entitled: From Canaanites to Afro-Palestinians: Crushing the African Legacy of the Levant.

The Levant is present day Israel-Palestine. The Natufians were the early African settlers of the Levant between 13,000BCE – 9,800 BCE. Kabeya writes that the Levant existed long before the Middle East was even conceptualized by the West. It was considered part of Northeast Africa.

By the middle Bronze Age (2100-1500BCE), A Canaanite group called The Hyksos conquered lower Egypt, which would result in later Egyptian colonization of the Levant. The story from the Bible about Joseph and the Exodus never really sounded factual to me and there’s a reason for that. It was appropriated from the story of the Hyksos. The Israelites entered Canaan about 350 years too late for this story to be true.

Israel was the name born out of Yisra, the Semitic word meaning “to fight”, and El, the central Canaanite god. The full translation is often: “He who strives with God”.

Yahweh, the more commonly known god of Judaism, was the storm god of the desert surrounding the land of Canaan until around 1200-1000 BCE.  When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE, the Israelites chose Yahweh as their absolute Creator and central god.

Judaism has such a rich history, but a lot of it has been distorted. Particularly in the eyes of the rest of the world. Like the crisis we all feel sometimes: why does who I used to be even matter?

When thinking about the African diaspora, it makes the conflict in Israel-Palestine way more complex. Once Egypt was colonized by the Greeks, the exploitation of African culture began a destructive path that never really ended. Kabeya writes:

“…the Greeks, especially under Ptolemy, did enjoy the exploitation of the African material resources in both Egypt and Canaan, becoming one of the most powerful and wealthiest areas at the time, as long as 201 BCE. Yet, though the Canaanites were totally crushed, the Jews of the region were the ones who organized the most against the colonial brutality of the Greeks and Romans later on….The revolt led to the recapture of Jerusalem from Antiochius IV in 164 BCE, with Palestine becoming a part of Judea in its entirety.”

Kabeya’s point is that the colonization of the Levant throughout the millennia- from the Greeks, to the Romans, the Turks, the Arabs, the Christians and in more recent times, the Zionists – caused centuries of turmoil. And no one seems to remember that it was African people who were colonized first.

When the Romans banished the Jews from the region in 135CE and renamed it “Syria Palaestina”, the population became a mix of Greeks, Romans and Christians. Then when the Arab Muslims conquered Jerusalem in the 7th century CE, the old Roman ban was actually overturned, allowing Jews to return. While a melting pot, too many disparate groups claiming rights to that land led to an endless reframe of who actually belonged there.

Like most of North Africa and the Middle East, Arabic colonization changed the landscape dramatically. Then European colonization changed it even more. I can’t not mention that this tiny little region of the world is also known as The Fertile Crescent. Everyone has wanted a piece of it at some point.

While Netanyahu I think we can all agree has gone way too far, we can see why the conflict is so devastating; how Israel has abused its wealth to have an upper hand, behaving like the colonizers that once victimized them. If the land was given back to Africa as a kind of mea culpa, it wouldn’t erase the pain of everything that’s happened. But if this continues, there will either be no Palestine or no Israel.