The Jewish people have a keen sense of history. Arthur Koestler once wrote, “We all know that the Jews cling to the past with a tenacity unequaled in the history of any other people.”
It’s admirable! But their vision lacks a sense of how the future differs from the past.
How do regions evolve?
Cultural and ethnic homogenization across regions of the world is a phenomenon that has been noticed for many millennia.
Any keen student of history will tell you how all regions around the world are converging into more homogeneous ones. Many factors, like trade and urbanization, are culprits.
Trade creates lingua francas (dominant second languages used in trade, then in diplomacy). For example, Swahili, which became the language of commerce on the East African coast between the 11th and 15th centuries, exerted pressure on and eventually eliminated many local languages.
India has already lost 220 languages since 1961. Nigeria is about to lose 50 minority languages, and China is about to lose 25 languages.
The world is losing languages at an incredible pace — it’s projected that by 2050, 90% of the world’s 7,000 languages will be almost gone.
The significance of languages is that they’re vehicles of cultures. Once a language is gone, its oral history reaches the end of its life, and its identity and value systems transfer to the more current and authentic values of the dominant culture.
As for ethnicities, urban centres have always driven ethnic mixing.
Alexandria, Rome, and Baghdad were ancient melting pots where racial lines blurred and “vague races” emerged from intermarriages. And if lineage has always reigned supreme, and patriarchs didn’t care about the race of their wives, it’s impossible to cling to any racial significance.
Convergence and homogenization of cultures and ethnicities have always occurred, and continue to do so. Everywhere. All the time.
The Middle East's great convergence
The ancient Middle East and North Africa were very diverse, from the various Amazigh languages in North Africa to the Coptic language in Egypt, to the large variety of Semitic languages of the Fertile Crescent and Arabian Peninsula, and beyond.
The convergence started locally in every homeland by eliminating local diversity. Aramaic rose to prominence as the lingua franca in ancient times. It spread throughout the Levant, becoming the primary language of the peoples, replacing their indigenous languages.
Then came Greek—or rather, Hellenistic—culture.
That’s when “cultural homogenization” of the entire Middle East really took off. Hellenization and racial vagueness were so pervasive that we don’t know if Claudius Ptolemaeus, the great astronomer, mathematician, and geographer, was Egyptian or not, although he was born, lived, died, and was educated in Egypt.
Greek was so important to everyone in the region that the Christian Gospels were written in Greek rather than in Aramaic, the local spoken language.
Then “Arabic,” upon its arrival, furthered the homogenization that Greek had begun and continued on a path toward a more profound cultural homogeneity that we know today in the region.
“Arab” people remain ethnically very diverse—from Moroccans to Egyptians to Omanis—with incredible diversity in cuisine, languages, traditions, clothing styles, and even religions. It’s even clearer when we understand that during the peak of Pan-Arabism, Egyptians, Amazigh, Nubians, Druze, and even many Arab Jews were among its supporters.
Modern spoken “Arabic” isn’t a monolith; it’s each country’s mix of native structure and phonetics enriched with Arabic, blended with some Turkish, Persian, European, and soon, Mandarin influences.
That’s modern “Arabic”, a regional hybrid, whatever its name. In recent decades, its continuous convergence has been shaped by the Egyptian dialect.
Sure, there were always uprisings by ethnic or religious nationalists during times of weakness. But once peace returned, the tide of homogenization resumed, pushing even farther than before.
And Palestine was always part of the region, in lockstep with its changes.
A closer look at the ancient Jewish identity
Even the ancient Jews themselves have continuously evolved.
During the time of Jesus, when the Second Temple was still standing, Palestine was still inhabited predominantly by Jews. Despite that, commoners in most of it had stopped using Hebrew and had turned to the regionally dominant language, Aramaic.
As Hebrew survived mainly as a language of liturgy, it wasn’t even the second language for Jews; that was Greek! It was necessary to speak some of it to handle trade and even literature.
Jewish culture, too, changed a lot over the centuries, especially in Jerusalem, where almost all the elite turned to Greek culture, as did the rest of the region. Make no mistake, this wasn’t Roman or Greek influence; it was the Middle East’s own Hellenistic culture, thriving across the entire region from Persia to Egypt.
Fundamentalists like the Pharisees and Zealots (the Jewish “Jihadis”) didn’t slow down this evolution.
The Maccabean Revolt offers the clearest proof: a military attempt to resist regional Hellenistic influence that culminated in the Hasmonean dynasty, intended to restore traditional Jewishness to the land.
Yet even the Hasmoneans couldn’t escape the regional tide of homogenization, although they tried to cling to their religious symbols. They even embraced Greek names and titles and started a wave of Hellenistic art and architecture. King Herod the Great carried that homogenization even further.
Cultural homogenization was simply inevitable. Hellenistic Jews were subject to the same historical forces that created Romano-Jewish and later Arab-Jewish identities.
The inevitable evolution of the modern Israeli state
Let’s assume—hypothetically and without any evidence showing its possibility—that modern Israel, in its current form of the Zionist project, has succeeded in eliminating the Palestinian nation by means of ethnic cleansing, built the Third Temple, and expanded its geographic territory to its “Promised Borders.”
And even then, Israelis managed to crown their success with total normalization with every single state in the region. Peace reigned, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Then what?
The evolution of the modern Israeli Jewish state will inevitably obey the regional “cultural homogenization” law of nature. Its population will gradually adopt the regional culture—a modern “Arabic” one, or whatever the region evolves into.
The regional hybrid will surely absorb some Hebrew contributions, just as Arabic absorbed Persian, Turkish, and Amazigh elements before. And modern Israelis won’t disappear; they’ll become Arab Jews again.
And the fact that the region is at peace and fully normalized will even accelerate this evolution tremendously. Trade, intermarriage, conversion, migration, and life itself make it inevitable.
Now, are Israelis strategically thinking of their future? Is the plan to freeze the Hebrew language and culture in time indefinitely?
The revival of Hebrew is a rare achievement. But can six million Hebrew speakers achieve regional cultural dominance over 400 million Arabic speakers? Can 1.5 percent of the region’s population compete with one of the world’s five most spoken languages? The demographics say no.
Israel has remarkably strong cultural and governmental links to the West, and its modern nation-state has a powerful military and intelligence apparatus.
Again, all are remarkable achievements. But they’re not intrinsic strengths; they rely on a fragile, unilateral dependence on Western powers.
The cracks between Diaspora Jews and Israel are showing, and they’re especially hard in the West. It will soon reach the leadership of Diaspora institutions within a generation, with possibly catastrophic consequences for this dependence.
As for the US, it is pivoting from the Middle East to China’s Indo-Pacific region. Furthermore, what are the odds that the MENA region remains a perpetually backward periphery, with no flourishing industry nor economic or soft power to project?
A “startup nation” with a national academy, compulsory education system, and formidable control over borders—these defy the forces of regional convergence. But can such institutions alone cut Israel off from its region and the world’s cultural influences?
How long will they resist songs of Fairouz or Amr Diab? To what lengths will they go to resist appealing to the huge Arab markets? Trade, tourism, and arts will eventually blend even the most estranged neighbours.
No modern nation can isolate itself from influences, except perhaps North Korea. But Israel’s entire model depends on engagement with the world. Maybe war allows temporary distance from “the Other,” but when peace finally comes, is Israel prepared for the integration it will bring?
Israel cannot escape geography. Its future identity will be shaped by its neighbours, whether through conflict that cannot last forever or through cooperation.
The Zionist historical paradox
One can easily see that modern Israelis are fighting a futile historical battle, forcing their way through the region by wading through a sea of red blood of half a billion locals, to achieve an elusive dream of building a homeland that stands apart from the region, only to have their descendants eventually become part of the region as Arab Jews again.
How much blood will the Israelis spill before they accept what history has always shown: nations survive by coexistence, not by isolation?
What a waste of lives and resources in useless wars, for nothing!
Maybe this distinct “Jewishness” thrives better in a Diaspora, but not when you pin it down to a geopolitical entity. Perhaps a rigid sovereign state contradicts what this perceived Jewishness truly is.
Together, they can grow into the shared, modern MENA culture already forming—a living civilization that could once again make this ancient region a beacon of renewal of its ancient glory.
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*The writer is an Egyptian business chief executive, explorer of history, geography, and culture.
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