I was going to wait and see but such a grossly lying title of a post as ‘Be Human; Support Palestine’ tipped me over the edge!
I will start here with some fairly recent historical background.
1695:
An Ottoman census shows Hebrew surnames still make up a majority of
Jerusalem residents and a large chunk of what some still call ‘Judea’.
What happens next? Here it comes.
1834:
A local uprising is put down in typical Ottoman fashion. I doubt
whether you want the details of what that means. In any case, the land
is so depopulated that the Ottomans offer free land to any Ottoman
veteran who will come and settle in present-day Israel/Palestine, be
they Turkish, Macedonian, Epirean, Egyptian or Bosnian.
1868: Mark Twain publishes Innocents Abroad and relates how sadly depopulated and dessicated the Holy Land was then. He has no reason to lie.
1882: Even before modern Zionism began, Jews start returning to the Land of Israel.
1894: Modern Zionism begins when Theodor Herzl, reporting from Paris for a Viennese newspaper, hears a mob yelling, “A mort les Juifs!”
(Death to the Jews!) in the wake of the trumped-up conviction of
Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason and his mind starts to mull over the
ramifications.
Between 1900 and 1920 was when Jews started returning
to their ancient land in a more organized fashion. They bought all the
land on which they settled. Usually they paid twice "first with money
and then with sweat and blood." They decided they would work the land
themselves rather than be overseers. Still, they brought new life to a
moribund land and, as they did, Arabs started coming in from neighboring
areas.
In 1920, in the wake of World War I and the final collapse of
the Ottoman Empire, the British were ‘given the mandate’ over, by
agreement among the powers and between Prince Faisal and Chaim Weizmann,
the area which was to be the Jewish National Home. Originally, it
included the area now known as the Kingdom of Jordan.
However,
Jew-hating elements in the British High Command found a way to frustrate
this: they supported a Jew-hater from the powerful Husseini clan for
Mufti of Jerusalem. Haj Amin el-Husseini had fought in the Ottoman army
and saw the return of the Jews as the biggest obstacle to his quest for
despotic power.
He also knew what ‘buttons’ to push to rouse the Arab
population — much the same buttons as Southern politicians used to push
to rouse up the peckerwoodies to vote for them. They’re doing it now,
too.
Google and read a section of ‘dhimmi’ laws under Muslim rule
and tell me how different it is (or, more likely, similar) to Jim Crow
laws ans customs not only in the South, but throughout most of the
country. Then google and read what LBJ said to a young Bill Moyers and reflect on the universality of the wicked joy of having someone to look down on!
So,
what have we here so far? first, a land so largely denuded that the
Ottomans had to offer free land to refill it. Second, it wasn’t refilled
to much of an extent. Third, exiles returning with new technologies.
Fourth, a clan who saw them as a threat to their power and whose head
knew how to get the locals foaming by telling lies about the returnees
meaning to simply turn the tables as opposed to crafting a bigger table
for everyone in the land.
From 1920 to 1948, 100,000 more Arabs than
Jews entered the Palestine Mandate. This was because the British pretty
much let Arabs come and go as they pleased as opposed to the tight
regulations they put on Jewish immigration.
The 1930s is where the
‘turn’ starts. Before 1940, nearly every Jewish community had its
anti-Zionists and in some communities they were quite numerous. After
1945, they were gone — many murdered and gone up the chimneys. But when
the Jews of Germany at first and then of Austria, Czechoslovakia and
Poland sought refuge, no nation would take them. Repeat: no nation wanted more Jews.
This
is something that no large number of Jews will ever forget — or
forgive. Not for at least a thousand years. I for one say Jews are right
to trust no one else with their safety and protection. And I do say the
same as regards the native peoples and nations of the Americas and
Oceania — that is, Australia and New Zealand. I also say the same
regarding our own fellow citizens of African heritage. And had Rommel
won at El Alamein and gone on to Palestine, El-Husseini would have had
the extermination camps in the Dothan valley which he wanted to build
and operate. So those who follow him are not as guiltless as they whine and wail; nowhere near the case!
There
are many things in Israel of which I don’t approve, most of which have
to do with racism of lighter-skinned people against darker-skinned. But
most Jews and Arabs are the same olive shading. Besides, are we saying
Jews should be more than human? Especially when we set the bar as low as
many of us do for their Arab cousins? Read what brother Eldridge
(Cleaver) had to say about Jews and Arabs after living in Algeria for
seven years!
Let’s jump ahead to 2006, to the last real deal that
Abbas killed between Israel and Fatah. Israel offered him 95% of what he
asked for. And when Abbas told the then-Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia
(now the late king) about it, the prince threw up his hands and
expostulated, “You actually turned this deal down?! That’s it! We can’t support you anymore; you’re on your own!!”
As
Jewish life and culture points back to what some call Eretz Israel and
that it’s a settled fact that Jewish genomes, including the Ashkenazic
genome, are still at least 75% Levantine Semitic, I consider Jews as the
oldest indigenous people to their land.
And arising from that, I
have an invitation to make and a pair of questions to address to the
howlers against these particular facts. The invitation arises from the
first question, which is this: Do you think that indigeneity has an
expiration date, or that it ‘wears off’ after a certain period of time?
If you do, I invite you to take that interesting little notion either to
any Native powwow or, say, a Maori luau and see what happens then!
Second
question is this: If Israel is a ‘European colony’, then how is it that
Jews returned thither from elsewhere in the Middle East consistently
vote Likud or even further right instead of, say, for the Arab
List? I’d really like to know.
Finally, I’d like to say that I
applaud any and all sincere efforts to ‘weave’ peace between Jews and
Arabs in the land ‘from the ground up’. I suspect the current government
looks coldly on such attempts, in which I feel the government is making
a serious mistake. Bibi’s been too close with Kachites and their like
for way too long. All the more respect from me for those who seek to
‘weave’ real peace in the face of coldness and hostility from both the
current Israeli government and the PA.
But too much of what I’ve lately read might as well have been ripped from the pages of the Protocols. So I must speak the truth now.
