The usage of "Arab" seems so generic it's often hard to be sure when it's appropriate without a degree in anthropology. Though if Haman was Persian then, yeah. There's so much inertia there that the nomenclature is frustrating, hence "anti-semitic" has come to mean "racist against Jews" despite the fact the majority of Semitic cultures aren't Jewish. Or Hebrew; whatever. Of course, the majority of Jews aren't Hebrew... sigh... yeah, OK, I get your point on that score.

Meanwhile, whether or not Purim refers to a real event or not is rather moot at this stage and for my purpose in raising it: How far back does the OBSERVANCE of Purim stretch even if the events never took place? People act like the strained relations between Jews in Canaan (good choice of term, IMHO, since I have a host of issues with referring to the region by a name derived from a group Jewish texts claim fell victim to genocide 3000 years ago) is some kind of novel thing, yet whatever historical reality lies in tales of conflict between Isaac, Ishmael and their descendants, the STORIES have been around nearly as long as western civilization, indicating that even if some Jew and "Arab" made them up out of whole cloth the animosities are still a lot older than the Balfour Declaration or the Six Day War. By an order of magnitude, if not two.

For the sake of argument, let's say there was no historical Abraham, that there was never any Ishmael to mock Isaac or a Sarah to kick him and his mother out of the family, that Haman never tried to wipe the Jews off the face of the Earth, that the Samaritan woman who complained to Jesus that the Jews wouldn't let her people use the well dug by their shared ancestor is just a story. Even if they're ALL just stories (even the ones in a Muslim tradition that goes back to the 7th Century) they're centuries old stories, so the suggestion that this whole thing is just about evil Israelis pushing innocent Palestinians off their native lands with European and American aid is worse than disingenuous. It's not just naive, it's willfully ignorant, purblind. If it's about any evil Israelis taking Palestinian land by force, it was evil Israelis like Moses, Joshua, Gideon and David, and it's a bit late to do anything to help the actual Palestinians. If none of that ever happened, the Jews and Arabs have BELIEVED it happened for longer than Islam has existed. Personally, my bet is the modern "Palestinians" are basically Samaritans, which would essentially make them non-Jewish Hebrews, but I don't know enough about them to be sure of that.