Arabs Are Those Who Forgot Their Roots |
In my previous articles, Arab Identity Laundering and Why Arab Identity Laundering?, I described a curious shift: the word Arab has quietly become a liability, particularly among UNRWA registrants.
In its place appears a rotating cast of substitutes: Canaanites, Phoenicians, Philistines, Israelites who converted, and, most prominently, the infinitely elastic label Palestinian. We are told this is “historical rediscovery.” It is nothing of the sort. What we are witnessing is Arab Identity Laundering — the systematic removal of a modern, inconvenient identity and its replacement with something older, nobler, and, above all, non-Arab.
This laundering does not deny Arab presence. It denies Arab responsibility — the responsibility that comes with historical continuity. The modern Arab identity, weighed down by political failure, moral defeat, and historical stagnation, is quietly shed. In its place stands a costume stitched together from extinct civilizations that can no longer speak back.
This is not remembrance. It is evasion.
A popular move in these narratives is to declare that “Arabs are just a cultural label,” while the real people — Canaanites, Phoenicians, Philistines — never disappeared. They merely “assimilated.” Their DNA, we are told, still lives on.
This is true — and irrelevant.
Yes, people assimilate. They always have. But assimilation does not preserve identity; it replaces it. When culture, language, memory, and self-identification dissolve, what remains is biology — and biology is not belonging.
As I argued in Blood Is Not Belonging, biological persistence is not cultural continuity. We live in an age obsessed with blood. DNA tests, ancestry charts, haplogroups. This biological fetishism masquerades as indigeneity while hollowing identity of its only meaningful content. Blood without memory. Bones without continuity. A sterile laboratory result elevated into a civilizational claim.
Identity is not inherited through chromosomes. It is transmitted through language, law, stories, norms, and self-understanding. When those break, the identity ends — even if the descendants remain.
To confuse biological persistence with cultural continuity is not history. It is mythology with footnotes.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: are Arabs those who forgot their roots?
This is where the Arab case becomes clearer when viewed through a different mirror: Russia.
The idea of a unified “Russian people” is itself a relatively late construction, formalized largely in the modern era. Before that, identification in the Russian lands was primarily religious, not ethnic.
There is a saying that Russians are those who forgot their roots. In a narrow historical sense, it is true — not as an insult, but as a description of assimilation.........