Consulting my Scofield Reference Bible, the "new and improved edition" of 1917, the origin of the Arabs is explained in Genesis 16 and 17. It seems quite clear that the Jewish people are defined mostly by their culture, and that all revolves around the Covenant between the Lord God and Abraham: and if this is true, then the quarrel now on-going is between the two bloodlines of this blessed prophet, and that they each have a claim to the right to live in Palestine, or in whatever area can be lawfully be described as the ancient lands of Canaan, between the river of Egypt and the Euphrates River.

As was posted, "Someone else mentioned that the conflicts in the Middle East really are between 'brothers.'" Half-brothers is what they are, these Jews and these Arabs.

As was posted, "Shem's lineage begat Terah who begat Abram, Nahor and Haran (Haran was Lot's daddy). Terah took Abram and Lot and some others 'from Ur of the Chaldes, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran' which must be where Abram's brother Haran had staked his claim. Then Abram got word from God to move 'unto a land that I will shew thee.' Eventually Abram 'dwelled in the land of Canaan, and Lot dwelled in the cities of the plain [Jordan].'" In Chapter 15 of Genesis, we learn what plans the Lord God has in mind for Abram --

"And behold, the word of the Lord came unto him, saying ... Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, 'So shall thy seed be.'

"And he believed in the Lord: and he counted it to him for righteousness."

Following the blood sacrifice of a heifer, a she-goat, a ram -- all three years old -- and of a turtle-dove and young pigeon, Abram spends the rest of that day and the night at the altar. He falls into a great sleep and experiences both terrors and joy in the messages of the Lord: and at the conclusion of this experience, the Lord God makes a Covenant with Abram, in those long hours, and with "a smoking furnace and a burning lamp" nearby. And the covenant was a simple one.

"Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:" Then the tribes which are apparently presently in residence in that land are named -- "the Kenites, and the Kenizites, and Kadmonites. And the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims. And the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites."

That is the beginning of the creation of the Covenant between the Lord God and Abraham. In Chapter 16 of Genesis the Egyptian Hagar, a handmaid to the wife, Sarai who is barren, is given to Abram to be his wife (the word concubine is not used). At this point Abram has been ten years in Canaan. She conceives and this immediately puts her into conflict with Sarai. She runs away. But an angel of the Lord meets her at a well and counsels her to return to Sarai, saying "I will multiply thy seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude."

Then the angel of the Lord counsels her that she is to bear a son named Ishmael, as a reward for the rebuke she suffered from Sarai and then this incredible message is given to her, and the promise is made to her about her nascent son --

"And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man and every man's hand against him, and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren." The Bible indicates after this passage that Hagar calls the name of God and that the Lord speaks directly to her, or has been speaking to her, even if it is through an angel at the beginning.

And after that, thirteen years pass, Abram again receives a new part of the Covenant, his name is changed, and so on. Then he is informed that even though he is approaching 100 years of age, and his Sarai approaching 90, they will conceive and she will bear a child named Isaac. And Isaac is to receive the Covenant as well, while Ishmael's progeny become "a great nation" with "twelve princes" that he will beget. But not the Covenant, he will not receive that nor any portion of that legacy.

The Lord God tells Abraham, in Chapter 18, that "all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him".

Right now it is hard to see what blessings can come to "all the nations of the earth," as the descendants of Ishmael contest for control of that land between Egypt and the Euphrates, with the people of Isaac, who was half-brother to Ishmael and who was named by the Lord God to carry forward the Covenant.

The Arabs of Palestine are mostly the descendants of people who migrated to that area approximately 106 years ago, and their numbers have grown in tandem with those of the Jewish settlers who began returning or seeking to return to that area more than a hundred years ago. As the Israelites have returned from the Diaspora, the opportunities for Arabs to work on their farms and in their businesses has also returned and improved every one's lot in this life. But apparently these mundane considerations are not enough to motivate the leaders of these blood relatives to cease and desist when it comes to killing and revenge-seeking.

Whether or not the Jews who are now in Israel are the true descendants of Isaac is another problem entirely. There are good reasons not to waste a lot of time on that kind of speculation. The present day and the current situation is not a static one, but it is clear and in evidence that Jewish lawyers, professors, physicians, financiers and political leaders -- including the Hollywood aristocracy -- are the supporting pillars of the Clinton administration. They do a lot of the actual work, they provide its structure. They pay the freight and the bills of lading. They created the concept of "abortion as a right," and have enforced it with their carefully crafted legislations and their courtroom assaults on Christian values and christian influences in the public schools.

Those are political considerations. There are others.

Furthermore, with a network of support which stretches all the way from Fleet Street to Wall Street, the government of Israel exhibits all of the strengths that could have been predicted by the evolution of the Kuwaiti royal family (al-Sabah), or the ripened fruits of Hong Kong in the 1990s. At the time of the Gulf War, over half of the assets of the Kuwaiti regime were located outside of the Emirate, itself a creation of Britain.

Its physical location was fortuitous for the oil wealth but its real power was in the invisible realm of law, international finance, and communications. All driven by money changing.

The same could be said of Hong Kong, which is another creation of British influence and power from the era of Cecil Rhodes and the Victorians. Its absorption into China as a fully-formed, modern, electronic city-state -- with vast assets held in other countries and connected by family ties -- raised China from a condition of being semi-backward to being mainstream, and in parallel with both the United States and Great Britain.

The Kuwaiti royals had relied on their money to buy off Saddam Hussein and it had worked for a long while. They had hired the Palestinians in great numbers to provide them with an instant, well-educated middle level of bureaucracy. Everybody was flush for a time. The Kuwaitis had Indian cooks and Malaysian maids and everybody there with Palestinian ties was sending money to the folks in Gaza or in Lebanon, or directly to Yassir Arafat.

Two hundred and seventy-five years ago, the land of Kuwait itself hardly even existed. It was all tidal pools and shallow water. But the oil was always there under the sand, the marsh, the shallow waters. In a similar way, Israel has developed itself into a modern electronic super-state, small in land area but immensely powerful in the invisible realm! Their miracle is not really the miracle of transforming the deserts ....

Their miracles are provided by banking interests tied to the electronic super-power of Israel; these families are enormously wealthy, and they can buy influence both in the media and in the culture -- and that is exactly what they have done!

Furthermore -- who can deny their power in the entertainment industry, it when Katzenberg, Spielberg, Geffen, Goldberg and Wasserstein who are the titans that carry William J. Clinton on their shoulders? And who had placed Mickey Kantor as their liason for the super-secret trade deals that Clinton had to negotiate on behalf of Goldman, Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street arbitrage, junk-bond, nouveau-riche crew?

And how much more blatant can Al Gore be, by parading his beloved daughter about the countryside, now that she is married to a Schiff, of the Jacob Schiffs of little fame and much fortune?

Perhaps it cannot be said that all of the Arabs in this world are truly the descendants of Ishmael, but about one hundred million of those who live nearest to Palestine, certainly are. Perhaps it cannot be said that all of the Jews scattered around the world in the past five hundred years (since they were kicked out of Spain), are truly the descendants of Isaac, but many millions of them surely are! And that has to include those tall, gangly, dark-skinned Jews -- the Falasha -- brought out of Ethiopia and into the mixed up world of pale Russians and swarthy Moroccans and pushy, aggressive Americans (coming straight from Galicia, themselves, in many cases, by two generations), in Israel now.

As was posted, "the details are not clear, but yes, it does look like it could be said that conflicts in that part of the world could be between brothers or between lineages of the two women, whoever they are."

Hagar the Egyptian's son was blessed by the Lord God with twelve princes in his line. Given that both the Palestinian Arabs and the Sephardic Jews spent centuries intermingling and interbreeding with the Greeks, the Turks, the Berbers, the Vandals and the Visigoths, it ought to be obvious that there isn't a "pure" ethnic type there. Lots of Berbers have green eyes and so do many Arabs. Then there is that curly, gorgeous "Hittite hair" so prominent in Assyrians and Persians.

Sarah's son by Abraham was blessed by the Lord in the eventual creation of the twelve tribes of Israel, and therein hangs a mighty fine mini-series. They have equal claims to share in the wealth of what was once Canaan, and is now Palestine/Jordan.

Those who lawfully hold the Covenant of Abraham are entitled to rule the City of Jerusalem with regards to the demands of the Lord God, but not to misrule it and not to rule it with the purpose of disenfranchising their blood relations, their half brothers, their cousins, their kith and kin.