A Tale Of Two Siblings
Over at The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan posted a wrenching picture of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian demonstrators. A series of clashes has followed the Israeli decision to add “The Tomb of the Patriarchs” to their national register; the site is part of a complex called the Ibrahimi Mosque, sacred also to Muslims. The Middle East is not a sandbox where sharing happens.
And so two nations continue a senseless, gruesome intolerance of the other, each rallying to ancient symbols in their holy land that name the same ancestors. The Jews’ patriarch is the Muslim’s Ibrahim/Abraham.
Abraham, a guy mostly concerned with sex and sheep, would not believe the shit going down in his name.
The Jews claim Abraham as their founder, so the Christians have to, too, and the Muslims have a direct link through Abraham’s son with Hagar, Ishmael. Abraham’s very Jewish son Isaac and Ishamel were half-brothers, so we’re actually all half-brothers and half-sisters with one another if you go in for the Bible and the Quran.
Why the hell can’t we love each other or at least pretend to get along at the dinner table — and make room for everyone there?
The fight over this particular revered building is a very old one. We’ve been trading it back and forth between religions for whole eras, squabbling sibs indeed. But these days the relics of dubious history are being fought over by flesh-and-blood people who have bled each other dry with disuse and contempt. Some of them have semiautomatic weapons.
How strange that the fathers they claim to honor are shared, and would surely turn away in horror from the awful view, just as Abraham did when his God told him to stab Isaac to death on a mountain (God was only kidding).
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Tags: abraham, hagar, ibrahim, isaac, ishmael, israel, israelis, palestine, palestinians, peace in the middle east, the ibrahimi mosque, the tomb of the patriarchs
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