Blood Brothers: Palestinians and Jews Share Genetic Roots

[Jack Ryan]

"Confronted by the violence sweeping over Israel, it can be easy to overlook the things that Jews and Palestinians share: a deep attachment to the same sliver of contested land, ... a common tradition of descent from the patriarch Abraham, and, as scientific research shows - a common genetic ancestry, as well.
Ostrer’s research on “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era,” published in The American Journal of Human Genetics, sampled 652,000 gene variants from each of 237 unrelated individuals from seven Jewish populations: Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek and Ashkenazi. These sequences were then compared with reference samples from non-Jews drawn from The Human Genome Diversity Project, a global database of genetic information gathered from populations across the world.
Each of the Jewish populations, they found, “formed its own distinctive cluster,” indicating their shared ancestry and “relative genetic isolation.”
... Ostrer’s team also identified two major groups of Jews: Middle Eastern Jews (Iranian and Iraqi) and European/Syrian Jews. The split between these two groups of Jews occurred some 2,500 years ago.
... In addition, a “compact cluster” of Yemenite Jews “overlaps primarily with Bedouins but also with Saudi individuals.” Ethiopian and Indian Jews are more closely related to their own neighboring, host populations.
... Are these genetic ties between Jews, Palestinians, Bedouin, and Druze important in a contemporary context? “It doesn’t matter to me personally,” Skorecki says, “since I think that global human identity supersedes all other considerations.”

Source

[JW Insider]

2 hours ago, Jay Witness said:

a common tradition of descent from the patriarch Abraham, and, as scientific research shows - a common genetic ancestry, as well.

When I was taking a few semesters of Hebrew in college, I was surprised at the level of prejudice among Jews. Rabbi Acker, who taught the first two semesters, would curse out Israelis from Palestine who came in for an easy "3 credits" because they already spoke Hebrew and shouldn't have gotten into the beginning classes (Hebrew 101 and 201). To the rest of the class, he would call them "dirty" etc. But the most surprising thing was that several non-Israeli Jewish-American students already knew the Hebrew sentence for "To kill an Arab is a blessing" which accidentally came up when someone was trying to remember the Hebrew word for "blessing." Rabbi Acker chastised the person who brought it up saying that it was "Anti-Semitic" which resulted in a clamor of disbelief. He explained that in the Bible, the Arabs were Semites just like the Jews, therefore prejudice against Arabs was anti-Semitism.

[TrueTomHarley]

My father, who threw the baby of God out with the bathwater of Catholicism, would frequently express dismay over that region. 'How can they not get along? Put a Jew next to an Arab and you can't tell them apart,' he would say.

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

Hmmmm ... " Blood Brothers: Palestinians and Jews Share Genetic Roots"  .....

I think there was a lot of clandestine crossings over the Jordan River in the dead of night to Fatima's Tent !