Arab and Jew markers persist across even opposed political agendas

Evidence

Beyond a horridly all too familiar and inescapable “cycle of violence,” what is it that maintains the distance and kindles the enmity between the Arab and the Jew? What purposes are served by, what are the reasons for, the naturalization of this distance, the naturalization of the opposition, of the enmity between Arab and Jew, one that, as prominent narratives would have us believe, goes back to ancient biblical times, the ineluctable legacy of “the Middle East,” a region and a land eternally ravaged by war and conflict? How did the ostensible markers of Arab (an “ethnic” marker) and Jew (a “religious” one) come to inscribe themselves so forcefully on modern discourses of the most varied kind-political, religious, cultural, and so forth-even when accompanying distinct or even opposed political agendas, caveats and sophisticated critiques and debunkings? — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 36

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• QUESTION: Poses the core research question — why do ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’ as markers survive critique and attach to opposite politics? Worth tracing how Anidjar answers it.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how ‘ethnic vs religious’ labelling gets deployed rhetorically to naturalize systemic conflicts as ancient and inevitable.

Related

• The Arab-Jew opposition is a naturalized modern construction (similarity 0.90)
• Every rival framing of the conflict reinscribes unexamined Jew-Arab distinctions (similarity 0.83)
• The Jew-Arab opposition is a sedimented historical product, not a natural lexical given (similarity 0.82)
• The categories of Jew and Arab jointly constitute the Western concept of the enemy (similarity 0.81)
• Christendom collapsed Jew and Arab together while insisting on their difference. (similarity 0.81)
• Distinctions between enemies are actively performed, not naturally given (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Christendom both conflated and opposed Jew and Arab in its classifications. (similarity 0.80)
• The Jew and the Arab name the theological-political question of Europe (similarity 0.79)
• Hegel’s paired treatment of Jews and Muslims shaped later theory (similarity 0.79)
• The Jewish-Arab enmity is fundamentally a European invention, not an indigenous one (similarity 0.79)
• The enemy is a single relational category spanning the Jew-Arab divide (similarity 0.78)
• The Jew-Arab enmity is structured by a history longer than its colonial phase (similarity 0.78)