The Israel No One Expected—A Tribal Nation:

Why Westerners are Blind to the Reality of Soil and Tribal Survival

The Paradigm

As I finished this post, I realized that I was falling into a classic Western trap. I’d ended my thoughts on the Middle East with a hopeful Western worldview, a pastoral conclusion that sounded like so many other peace-seeking Western voices: “Let us pray that one day, more rational voices will arise, allowing Israelis and Arabs to get along and share the land.”

I was acting like President Dale in the 1996 film Mars Attacks! played by Jack Nicholson. In the film, the U.S. President stands before an invading Martian who is governed by a completely different law of survival—one that includes a bizarre and wicked sense of humor.

The President delivers a beautiful monologue begging for unity asking kindly, "Why can't we all just get along?"

For a moment, it looks like this plea for peace works. The Martian Leader appears visibly moved, shedding a single tear as he reaches out to shake the President's hand. But then the extended hand detaches, crawls up the President’s body, and stabs him in the back. A small Martian flag pops out of the President's chest as he collapses, while the invader laughs maniacally: “Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack!”

Jack Nicholson as President Dale in Mars Attacks!

Mars Attacks! is a darkly humorous satire of the naive Western worldview, where peace means we all simply “get along.”

I can’t help but be reminded of the 2000 Camp David debacle where President Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat sat down to negotiate a settlement to the ongoing conflict. Reflecting on the collapse of the talks, Clinton later said, "I regret that in 2000 Arafat missed the opportunity to bring that nation into being and pray for the day when the dreams of the Palestinian people for a state and a better life will be realized in a just and lasting peace." In other words, Clinton flawlessly mirrored the fictional President Dale. He offered an apparently rational solution, expecting an adversary—operating on an entirely different frequency—to share the crayons.

Israeli president Ehud Barack, US President Bill Clinton, and PLO Leader Yasser Arafat

Now, before my kind readers freak out with this comparison, I must issue a disclaimer: I’m not proposing that the people of the Middle East (including Israel!) are mechanical Martian monsters. Rather, I want to highlight how alien other cultural, theological, and political ways of problem-solving are to our naive Western comprehension.

Mars Attacks! pokes fun at us Westerners who completely misunderstand how the rest of the universe thinks. And although it may appear that I am choosing Arafat to play the role of the Martian alien, you will see below that Jews of Arab countries are actually far more suitable for that part in our Middle Eastern movie.

Israel: A Tribal Sanctuary

         Ezekiel 34:13

I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land.

Note: The Book of Ezekiel was primarily written in Babylon between 593 and 571 BCE during the Jewish exile.

Although the United States is a “melting pot” of diverse peoples, we are not a group of separate tribes like the Middle East. By contrast, the Middle East is a region of competing tribes, jockeying for position and power, where relationships to the land are thousands of years old.

The Jews are one of these ancient tribes. Jewish families have lived continuously in countries like Iraq, Yemen, and Morocco for over 2,500 years—dating back to the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE.

Centuries later, when the Roman Empire destroyed the Second Temple, it shattered the geographic center of the nation, forcing the 'tribe of Israel' into another global diaspora. Their identity survived—not by having an established state infrastructure—but because the metaphysical essence of the Temple belief system moved into individual Jewish homes. Without the physical structure of the Temple, the Jewish family and synagogues became safe havens for Jewish religious and cultural life.

During this new diaspora, Jews maintained their identity within many overarching cultures—Spanish, German, French, Russian, and Polish. For over two millennia, they also continued living in places like Baghdad, Cairo, and Sana'a, where they spoke regional dialects of Arabic as their native tongue and were thoroughly integrated into the cultural fabric of the Arab world.

Mainline Christians often make the mistake of grouping all Israelis under the umbrella of Western individualism because Israel calls itself a democracy. We have all heard the common campus accusation that Israeli Jews are white European colonialists who came to conquer a land to which they had no relationship. This argument implies that Jews living in Poland and Jews living in Spain shared the same Western political cultural base—erasing the fact that the Jewish tribe maintained its distinct identity despite horrific stressors, pogroms, and the Holocaust.

You can see the clash between textbook Western colonialist ideals and the reality of the soil in the history of the early secular Zionists who pioneered the First Aliyah—the first wave of Jewish immigrants between 1881 and 1903. These Jews built the original Kibbutz movement. They thought they could escape the ancient scripts of stateless exile, ghetto vulnerability, and perpetual defense by going “home” to their ancestral beginnings.

Early 1900's Zionist Farmers

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Zionism

What the Zionists took from European influences was not a colonialist plan to transform the Middle East into a capitalist country. Instead, they were deeply influenced by European Socialist ideas; they were eager to build a utopian, borderless worker’s paradise where land could be shared equally.

These were not the colonialist objectives of the overarching European empires. Zionist settlers bought their land legally from willing Arab sellers; they were not out to colonize anyone. This is where the campus protesters completely miss the mark.

The Zionists also wanted to reinvent the Jew as a modern, universalist farmer. But the soil immediately pushed back against their European textbooks. The brutal physical reality of Arab raids and random shootings of Jews working the fields forced these utopian socialist communes to become militant in order to protect their legally purchased land. They built heavy watchtowers, handed out rifles, and transformed their peaceful farming collectives into fortified, militarized border outposts. The soil demanded a weaponization of their utopia.

Israel is explicitly a tribal sanctuary designed to protect a collective people—a reality so foundational that the term “a Jewish state” was explicitly written into the original 1947 UN Partition Plan. Unfortunately, the surrounding Arab countries rejected this arrangement. When Israel was established in 1948, Arab states actively reclassified their indigenous Jewish citizens not as neighbors, but as a dangerous fifth column—labeling them as Zionist spies, conspirators, or traitors to justify their asset seizures and stripped citizenships.

When this massive exodus occurred between 1948 and the early 1970s, these Jews of Arab countries spoke only Arabic and were deeply steeped in Arab culture. Yet they were targeted as betrayers in their native countries simply because Israel was created. An estimated 850,000 to 900,000 of these Middle Eastern Jews were forced out of their ancestral homes.

Their sudden, mass expulsion mimics the tragic historical pattern seen across Western history, such as the Edict of Expulsion in England in 1290 or the Spanish Inquisition in 1492, where thriving, loyal Jewish communities were suddenly demonized and evicted overnight to fund state treasuries.

Between 1948 and 1951, Israel took in 650,000 of these refugees, but it was not a happy welcome. The establishment running the country—post-Holocaust Jews from Europe—looked down on them, shunting them into bleak refugee transit camps (ma'abarot) and treating their language and culture with deep disdain. This raw internal friction is the crucible that forged the unyielding realism Westerners now witnesses on Israeli soil.

The Shift

Besides misreading the intentions of the Zionist pioneers, the West doesn’t understand that a massive, ancient diaspora of Middle Eastern Jews was waiting in the wings—and their sudden arrival permanently altered the color and soul of the Israeli nation.

It’s important to remember that—like the Zionist settlers from decades before, European Jews looked at a post-Holocaust removal to the Middle East as a fundamental move back to their ancestral homeland—not as a colonial strategy to transform that region into a cookie cutter version of South Africa under the Boers or India under the British Empire.

It’s true that many European Jews were well-educated, professional, and once-propertied citizens of European and Russian countries. But the Western misperception of conquering colonialists erases the true face of Israel. Over half of Israel's Jewish population today consists of Mizrahi Jews—Jews of Arab countries who were born and bred in the region.

Let’s put that Mars Attacks! scene into this context. Imagine the Israeli President is the old-guard, European elite of Israel, begging for a Western-style treaty. Standing right behind him are the Mizrahi Jews, telling him to stop talking about sharing. They know the neighborhood because they lived there for centuries and were betrayed. They know that in the Middle East, Western compromise is not seen as noble. It is seen as weakness. “Ack! Ack! Ack! Ack!”

Within this multi-faceted Jewish tribal narrative, who is running Israel today and how does this affect Western perspectives?

Stay tuned.