An Abraham for Everybody

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It's been five years since the signing of these Accords and Donald Trump still can't shut up about AHB-ra-hahm. Neither can we, but it's really not just us and Trump who are obsessed. To prove the point, we went into the world’s most heavily militarized religious theme park, also known as the Old City of Jerusalem and asked some locals - both Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Israelis - to explain to us why the Abraham Accords are named after Abraham.

As you would certainly expect if you’ve listened to Episode 1, Palestinians were extremely critical of the Accords while Israelis were mostly quite jazzed about them. But despite this clear disparity, everybody had the same answer to our main question: the accords are named after Abraham because he’s the grandfather of the Jews and the Arabs, which makes us cousins. Of course what that means is up for interpretation, but the basic identification was a constant.

All this wouldn’t be worth demonstrating if this podcast was in Arabic or Hebrew. But it’s in English and it’s pitched at a European and North American audience, for which this is far from obvious. As we also discuss in this episode, outside the Middle East, Abraham is usually understood in a very different way, not as a literal genealogical grandfather but as more of a symbolic progenitor, and not only of Judaism and Islam but also of Christianity. 

So if you think you’re observing this drama of ancient, unfathomable familial hatreds from the outside, think again. You’re in it. With Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson. Let that sink in.

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