We Were NOT Supposed to Kill Each Other

We chose to forget the facts of history to blind ourselves.

If you strip away the slogans, the politics, and the fear, the story of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is not just one of conflict. It’s also a story of coexistence — of people who once shared language, food, markets, and streets, long before the world began telling them they were enemies.

For centuries, Jews, Christians, and Muslims — the ancestors of modern Israelis and Palestinians — lived side by side in the towns of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. They traded goods, celebrated births and weddings, mourned deaths, and shared a common sense of belonging to a land that was sacred to them all.

Before the modern conflict , there was a community

Under the Ottoman Empire (1517—1917), Palestine was part of a vast, multicultural territory governed through what was known as the Millet system. This system granted each religious community autonomy to govern its own internal affairs — education, family law, and worship — as long as they recognized the authority of the Sultan.

Jews and Christians were known as dhimmi, or “protected people.” While not fully equal under the law, they were free to worship, run their own schools and courts, and participate in economic life. This protection, imperfect though it was, stood in stark contrast to the persecution Jews faced in much of medieval and early modern Europe — from pogroms to expulsions in England (1290), Spain (1492), and later Russia and Eastern Europe.

Many of the Jews living in Ottoman Palestine were part of the Old Yishuv — deeply rooted communities that spoke Arabic, Hebrew, and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). They dressed like their Muslim and Christian neighbors, ate the same foods, and even used the same greetings.

Arab Palestinians sometimes referred to them affectionately as awlad al-balad — “sons of the land” — or yahud awlad al-arab — “Jewish Arabs.” The shared sense of belonging ran deeper than religion; it was tied to the soil, the language, the rhythm of life.

A long tradition of migration and return

The Jewish story in this region was never a linear one. Waves of emigration and return were constant across the centuries. From the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans to the Jewish dispersions across North Africa and Europe, communities formed everywhere from Poland to Yemen. By the 1200s, large numbers of Jews had already settled in Europe, contributing to the sciences, trade, and culture — even as they remained vulnerable to persecution.

When the Ottoman Empire weakened and finally collapsed after World War I, Jews again sought refuge — this time from intensifying antisemitism in Europe. Many of them found their way back to the same ancient land their ancestors had left. What they found, however, was not the peaceful coexistence of the Ottoman period, but a region about to be reshaped by foreign powers and competing national ideologies.

When outsiders drew the lines

In 1917, the British captured Palestine from the Ottomans during World War I. With the Balfour Declaration, Britain promised to support “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine — while also promising not to harm the rights of the existing Arab population. It was a contradiction that could not hold.

The British Mandate (1917 — 1948) deepened divisions instead of healing them. As Jewish immigration increased, fueled by both hope and desperation in the face of European antisemitism, local Arab fears of dispossession grew.

British colonial rule — with its policy of divide and control — further inflamed tensions.

Violence erupted in waves, including the 1920, 1921, and 1929 periods, as well as the Arab Revolt from 1936 to 1939. What had once been neighbors now faced each other with suspicion. The seeds of division were being sown not just by local conflicts but by global politics, colonial strategies, and the trauma of Europe’s wars.

Terror, revolt, and the road to partition

By the 1940s, Palestine had become a powder keg. Jewish underground groups like Irgun and Lehi (Stern Gang), frustrated by British restrictions on Jewish immigration after the Holocaust, launched attacks against British forces.

One of the most infamous of these was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. The explosion — targeting the British administrative headquarters — killed 91 people. It was an act of terror that reflected the desperation and radicalization of the era, and it marked the beginning of the end of British control.

When Britain finally withdrew in 1948, the United Nations proposed splitting the territory into two states: one Jewish, one Arab, with Jerusalem under international administration. Jewish leaders accepted. Arab leaders rejected. The result was the war of 1948 — and the birth of the State of Israel.

For Jews, it was a miracle of rebirth after centuries of exile and the horror of the Holocaust.

For Palestinians, it was al-Nakba — “the catastrophe” — the loss of their homeland, and the beginning of decades of displacement and statelessness.

Two people, one history — and ONE FORGOTTEN TRUTH

Here’s the painful irony: the same two people who now see each other as existential enemies once shared the same streets, markets, and songs.

They have more in common than they often realize. Both trace their roots to the same soil, speak related Semitic languages (Arabic and Hebrew), and carry overlapping cultural traditions — from cuisine to family structure, from expressions of hospitality to reverence for prophets.

They have both suffered deeply from the weight of foreign control — first by empires, then by colonial powers, and now by the lingering consequences of those outside designs.

If both sides truly studied their own intertwined history, they might see that their current tragedy was not inevitable. It was engineered  by those who used religion and ethnicity as tools of control, and by global powers that carved the Middle East to serve their own interests.

What history demands of us now

We can’t change the past, but we can learn from it. History shows that coexistence is not a fantasy — it is a fact. Jews and Arabs did live together in peace for centuries. They respected, traded, and learned from one another. Their conflicts today are not ancient hatreds; they are modern wounds.

The tragedy is not that these two people are destined to fight. It’s that they’ve forgotten they weren’t supposed to.

Peace will never come from outside pressure or political deals alone. It will only come when both  — and the world watching them — rediscover the humanity that once bound them together.

Because peace is not a foreign concept in this land, they have not found the purpose they once left behind and were blinded by.