You left out a lot of context: Oslo, Arafat, Camp David, Intifad I and II, PLO terrorist attacks at the Olympics, airline hijackings, Pizza shops. Lebanon? Black tuesday? Jordanian annexation of the West Bank recognized by no one but the UK? Glossed over the War of Independence (which was supposed to be the War that pushed the jews into the Sea) in one sentence. Worse than useless, IMO.
I will add; One cannot mention this drama of woe without the obligatory Scorpion 🦂 & 🐸 Frog
As it happens…
The Scorpion just lost its main Sponsor all along at noon today.
Yes from 1949 and the creation of UNWRA. Yes. All along.
Let’s see how the Scorpion does really all alone now.
“We Germans write fat volumes about Realpolitik but understand it no better than babies at a nursery. But you Americans understand it far too well to talk about it.”
On the DNA front, it would seem that the Palestinian one would be rather more selection dependent than the Jewish side for a simple reason: the deliberate decision by the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century to relocate Balkan Muslims to offset Jewish immigration.
Arabization, from today’s vantage point, was an imperial exercise to wipe out local customs, tradition, language and thereby identity, subsuming it into a larger and imposed “Arab” identity. I’m not passing judgement on the process, just pointing out that it’s not as benign as it might otherwise appear. Such impositions were often violently resisted and even today, among the Berber and Kabyle of North Africa, resentment still festers centuries later.
As for the effects of WWI, first, the Arab efforts to support the British against the Ottomans, specifically their romanticization with TE Lawrence, is greatly exaggerated. The Aaronsohn spy ring arguably provided as much if not greater support to the effort.
In the end, the territorial dispensation of the former Ottoman lands in the Middle East, passing through the newfangled and racist idea of Mandates rather than colonies, resulted in today’s map which has 99.75% of the lands under Arab rule and the remainder under Israeli governance.
One question, never posed, is why was it deemed just in an era of “self-determination of peoples” that the overwhelming bulk of land taken from the imperial Ottomans be handed over, with one exception, to the prior imperial overlord rather than the resident indigenous groups. In American terms, the equivalent would see California returned to Spain rather than the resident Native American Indian tribes.
Putting aside the international law arising from the Mandate for Palestine, that land was partitioned unilaterally by Britain in its capacity as Mandatory Power and against the opposition of the League of Nations Mandate Committee in 1923 when about 78% was closed to Jewish immigration and settlement and handed to the Hashemites (who had been expelled from Arabia, having lost a power struggle with the Al Saud claim which renamed the placed after itself). That excluded Mandate land was named Transjordan but is nothing other than East Palestine. After its illegal seizures of part of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria in 1948-49, the last two bits were renamed “West Bank” and the country itself became Jordan.
To clarify, the UN’s 1947 partition proposal that was adopted constituted a second proposed partition of the remaining Mandate lands and much of that set aside was the Negev desert. The Jews accepted the solution while the Arabs rejected it unanimously and went to war to wipe out the Jews and conquer this last piece of Ottoman territory. As we know, they failed.
It is critical to recognize that the Arab rejection of Jewish sovereignty was and remains rooted in an interpretation of Islamic theology that does not allow for lands conquered by Muslims to revert to non-Muslim control. The theory applies to not only Israel but to Spain and Portugal (Al Andalus) and the Balkans as well.
It was left to the Soviet Union in the ‘60s to recast this religious war into one more palatable to a post-religious West. That was the point of emergence of the PLO as a “national liberation” movement. It mattered not that the PLO had the unique distinction among national liberation movements to not only have no indigenous name for their so-called ancient homeland but, in their 1964 Charter, to have expressly renounced any sovereign right to the very lands it now claims.
While the article was meant as an overview and recognized the complexity, these issues among others need to be considered. The one thing that’s incontrovertible, though, is the article’s assertion that the Jews are the oldest continuously residing population on the land, making them the indigenous population.
What makes the Arab-Israeli conflict unique, however, is the intentional redefinition of terms and concepts (most notably “refugee” and “occupation” and more recently “apartheid” and “genocide”) in favor of the Arab position whose net effect is to keep this one conflict on a slow boil until, one assumes, the Arabs are finally capable of bringing their genocidal project to fruition.
Why the world community accepts such double standards when it comes to Israel is the real question - but the answer, it seems, bears little to no relation to what is just and fair and has far more to do with the fact that Jews are part of the equation.
The claim that the Arabs of Palestine (“Palestinians”) are a deeply rooted, continuous population in the Levant with ties to ancient inhabitants such as the Canaanites warrants closer examination. While the idea of a continuous lineage is politically appealing, historical evidence points to a much more complex narrative, one that suggests a significant portion of the Arab population in Palestine arrived much later in history.
The most significant influx of Arabs into Palestine occurred during and after the Islamic conquest of the 7th century CE. Prior to this period, the region was predominantly inhabited by Jewish and Christian communities, with no substantial evidence of a continuous Arab presence. The Arab conquerors introduced their language, culture, and religion, fundamentally reshaping the demography of the region. However, this was an event of colonisation, not the return of an indigenous population.
Fast-forward to the Ottoman era (1517–1917), and we see a further reshaping of Palestine’s demographics. The Ottomans often settled Algerian and North African troops and their families in the Levant, including Palestine, as a reward for their military service. These communities, while assimilated over time, represent a clear break in any argument for a purely ancient Arab lineage in the region. Moreover, the Ottoman Empire encouraged migration to Palestine as part of its administrative and economic policies, leading to an influx of populations from across the empire.
During the British Mandate period (1917–1948), economic opportunities further attracted migrants from neighbouring Arab regions, including Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. Infrastructure projects such as the construction of the Damascus-to-Cairo railway, agricultural development, and trade expansion created a magnet for economic migrants. These were not long-standing residents reclaiming ancestral lands but rather individuals seeking opportunity in a newly developing economy.
Finally, the modern Palestinian identity is a relatively recent construct, emerging primarily in the 20th century in response to political pressures, particularly the establishment of the State of Israel. While the Palestinians of today undoubtedly carry mixed ancestries, the narrative of a continuous, unbroken connection to ancient populations is not supported by historical or archaeological evidence. This notion that Palestinians are direct descendants of the ancient inhabitants of the region, uninterrupted by migration or conquest, is a romanticised oversimplification. Instead, the Arab population of Palestine is the product of waves of migration and conquest, particularly following the Islamic invasion and later Ottoman policies. Recognising this reality does not negate their identity or legitimacy, but it does challenge the narrative that Arabs have been the region’s dominant population for millennia. No amount of history rewriting or DNA wishy-washy interpretation can change this
This is an important topic. Who are the Palestinians? Who are the Israelis? I read two books by Daniel Gordis shortly after Oct. 7. Here are three facts about Israeli Jews that you might find interesting.
1. Mizrachim Jews make up a majority of Israeli Jews.
2. Jews immigrated to Israel largely from North Africa, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran.
3 Jews are predominantly on the political right. They represent a socially, culturally, and politically conservative force in Israel.
I'd say the ultimate causes are technological: if no printing press and paper then no nationalism, if no nationalism then no Zionism, if no Zionism then Jews never leave Europe.
The Arab-Israel conflict is fundamentally a European conflict, that's why Europeans care about it so much more than, e.g. the contemporaneous genocide and war in Sudan.
(I mean European in the racial sense here, so America counts.)
Seems like this should be the sane Wikipedia skeleton upon which to base sane discussion and analysis,
Unfortunately, sanity “becomes” more like an elusive Platonic ideal given the trauma based emotional stakes involved. But (then again) trauma based emotional patterns (of representations and reactions) were hard baked into the animal brain (and therefore earlier forms of the animal mind) millions of years before the emergence of processes that underly what (in humans?) are experienced as language and mathematics.
Given the trauma based triggers and emotional minefields (as only one set of considerations), it makes sense to defer any forays into more recent developments involving the genocidal antics of Biden and Netanyahu (which was one of the names of my favorite pre-code, unfilmed” Blue Vaudeville partner acts), but the linkage to the junior genocide in Ukraine in is more than apt. Subscribing (since 10/6) to Haaretz is to experience the living legacy of the Israel/Judahite prophetic tradition though it will take generations (and seculae) for the shame and guilt of these soul sucking crimes to reverberate through the Judeo Christian (including secular liberal) traditions which strive (perhaps in Sisyphean stolidity) to reify the POSSIBLILTY that humans might somehow be more than monkeys who can train themselves to use machine guns, flush toilets, … and ALSO to program their “remote controls” for picking porn streams, directing drone strikes, and generating our AI replacements.
You left out a lot of context: Oslo, Arafat, Camp David, Intifad I and II, PLO terrorist attacks at the Olympics, airline hijackings, Pizza shops. Lebanon? Black tuesday? Jordanian annexation of the West Bank recognized by no one but the UK? Glossed over the War of Independence (which was supposed to be the War that pushed the jews into the Sea) in one sentence. Worse than useless, IMO.
Uh gee David great article
I don’t know if this post is a win..
😂
There’s no win on this issue except to not play.
Observe- all the above comments are pissed off.
I will add; One cannot mention this drama of woe without the obligatory Scorpion 🦂 & 🐸 Frog
As it happens…
The Scorpion just lost its main Sponsor all along at noon today.
Yes from 1949 and the creation of UNWRA. Yes. All along.
Let’s see how the Scorpion does really all alone now.
“We Germans write fat volumes about Realpolitik but understand it no better than babies at a nursery. But you Americans understand it far too well to talk about it.”
— A Berlin professor to Walter Weyl
On the DNA front, it would seem that the Palestinian one would be rather more selection dependent than the Jewish side for a simple reason: the deliberate decision by the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century to relocate Balkan Muslims to offset Jewish immigration.
Arabization, from today’s vantage point, was an imperial exercise to wipe out local customs, tradition, language and thereby identity, subsuming it into a larger and imposed “Arab” identity. I’m not passing judgement on the process, just pointing out that it’s not as benign as it might otherwise appear. Such impositions were often violently resisted and even today, among the Berber and Kabyle of North Africa, resentment still festers centuries later.
As for the effects of WWI, first, the Arab efforts to support the British against the Ottomans, specifically their romanticization with TE Lawrence, is greatly exaggerated. The Aaronsohn spy ring arguably provided as much if not greater support to the effort.
In the end, the territorial dispensation of the former Ottoman lands in the Middle East, passing through the newfangled and racist idea of Mandates rather than colonies, resulted in today’s map which has 99.75% of the lands under Arab rule and the remainder under Israeli governance.
One question, never posed, is why was it deemed just in an era of “self-determination of peoples” that the overwhelming bulk of land taken from the imperial Ottomans be handed over, with one exception, to the prior imperial overlord rather than the resident indigenous groups. In American terms, the equivalent would see California returned to Spain rather than the resident Native American Indian tribes.
Putting aside the international law arising from the Mandate for Palestine, that land was partitioned unilaterally by Britain in its capacity as Mandatory Power and against the opposition of the League of Nations Mandate Committee in 1923 when about 78% was closed to Jewish immigration and settlement and handed to the Hashemites (who had been expelled from Arabia, having lost a power struggle with the Al Saud claim which renamed the placed after itself). That excluded Mandate land was named Transjordan but is nothing other than East Palestine. After its illegal seizures of part of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria in 1948-49, the last two bits were renamed “West Bank” and the country itself became Jordan.
To clarify, the UN’s 1947 partition proposal that was adopted constituted a second proposed partition of the remaining Mandate lands and much of that set aside was the Negev desert. The Jews accepted the solution while the Arabs rejected it unanimously and went to war to wipe out the Jews and conquer this last piece of Ottoman territory. As we know, they failed.
It is critical to recognize that the Arab rejection of Jewish sovereignty was and remains rooted in an interpretation of Islamic theology that does not allow for lands conquered by Muslims to revert to non-Muslim control. The theory applies to not only Israel but to Spain and Portugal (Al Andalus) and the Balkans as well.
It was left to the Soviet Union in the ‘60s to recast this religious war into one more palatable to a post-religious West. That was the point of emergence of the PLO as a “national liberation” movement. It mattered not that the PLO had the unique distinction among national liberation movements to not only have no indigenous name for their so-called ancient homeland but, in their 1964 Charter, to have expressly renounced any sovereign right to the very lands it now claims.
While the article was meant as an overview and recognized the complexity, these issues among others need to be considered. The one thing that’s incontrovertible, though, is the article’s assertion that the Jews are the oldest continuously residing population on the land, making them the indigenous population.
What makes the Arab-Israeli conflict unique, however, is the intentional redefinition of terms and concepts (most notably “refugee” and “occupation” and more recently “apartheid” and “genocide”) in favor of the Arab position whose net effect is to keep this one conflict on a slow boil until, one assumes, the Arabs are finally capable of bringing their genocidal project to fruition.
Why the world community accepts such double standards when it comes to Israel is the real question - but the answer, it seems, bears little to no relation to what is just and fair and has far more to do with the fact that Jews are part of the equation.
The claim that the Arabs of Palestine (“Palestinians”) are a deeply rooted, continuous population in the Levant with ties to ancient inhabitants such as the Canaanites warrants closer examination. While the idea of a continuous lineage is politically appealing, historical evidence points to a much more complex narrative, one that suggests a significant portion of the Arab population in Palestine arrived much later in history.
The most significant influx of Arabs into Palestine occurred during and after the Islamic conquest of the 7th century CE. Prior to this period, the region was predominantly inhabited by Jewish and Christian communities, with no substantial evidence of a continuous Arab presence. The Arab conquerors introduced their language, culture, and religion, fundamentally reshaping the demography of the region. However, this was an event of colonisation, not the return of an indigenous population.
Fast-forward to the Ottoman era (1517–1917), and we see a further reshaping of Palestine’s demographics. The Ottomans often settled Algerian and North African troops and their families in the Levant, including Palestine, as a reward for their military service. These communities, while assimilated over time, represent a clear break in any argument for a purely ancient Arab lineage in the region. Moreover, the Ottoman Empire encouraged migration to Palestine as part of its administrative and economic policies, leading to an influx of populations from across the empire.
During the British Mandate period (1917–1948), economic opportunities further attracted migrants from neighbouring Arab regions, including Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. Infrastructure projects such as the construction of the Damascus-to-Cairo railway, agricultural development, and trade expansion created a magnet for economic migrants. These were not long-standing residents reclaiming ancestral lands but rather individuals seeking opportunity in a newly developing economy.
Finally, the modern Palestinian identity is a relatively recent construct, emerging primarily in the 20th century in response to political pressures, particularly the establishment of the State of Israel. While the Palestinians of today undoubtedly carry mixed ancestries, the narrative of a continuous, unbroken connection to ancient populations is not supported by historical or archaeological evidence. This notion that Palestinians are direct descendants of the ancient inhabitants of the region, uninterrupted by migration or conquest, is a romanticised oversimplification. Instead, the Arab population of Palestine is the product of waves of migration and conquest, particularly following the Islamic invasion and later Ottoman policies. Recognising this reality does not negate their identity or legitimacy, but it does challenge the narrative that Arabs have been the region’s dominant population for millennia. No amount of history rewriting or DNA wishy-washy interpretation can change this
This is an important topic. Who are the Palestinians? Who are the Israelis? I read two books by Daniel Gordis shortly after Oct. 7. Here are three facts about Israeli Jews that you might find interesting.
1. Mizrachim Jews make up a majority of Israeli Jews.
2. Jews immigrated to Israel largely from North Africa, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran.
3 Jews are predominantly on the political right. They represent a socially, culturally, and politically conservative force in Israel.
My source:
https://substack.com/@scottgibb/p-139480296
I'd say the ultimate causes are technological: if no printing press and paper then no nationalism, if no nationalism then no Zionism, if no Zionism then Jews never leave Europe.
The Arab-Israel conflict is fundamentally a European conflict, that's why Europeans care about it so much more than, e.g. the contemporaneous genocide and war in Sudan.
(I mean European in the racial sense here, so America counts.)
Seems like this should be the sane Wikipedia skeleton upon which to base sane discussion and analysis,
Unfortunately, sanity “becomes” more like an elusive Platonic ideal given the trauma based emotional stakes involved. But (then again) trauma based emotional patterns (of representations and reactions) were hard baked into the animal brain (and therefore earlier forms of the animal mind) millions of years before the emergence of processes that underly what (in humans?) are experienced as language and mathematics.
Given the trauma based triggers and emotional minefields (as only one set of considerations), it makes sense to defer any forays into more recent developments involving the genocidal antics of Biden and Netanyahu (which was one of the names of my favorite pre-code, unfilmed” Blue Vaudeville partner acts), but the linkage to the junior genocide in Ukraine in is more than apt. Subscribing (since 10/6) to Haaretz is to experience the living legacy of the Israel/Judahite prophetic tradition though it will take generations (and seculae) for the shame and guilt of these soul sucking crimes to reverberate through the Judeo Christian (including secular liberal) traditions which strive (perhaps in Sisyphean stolidity) to reify the POSSIBLILTY that humans might somehow be more than monkeys who can train themselves to use machine guns, flush toilets, … and ALSO to program their “remote controls” for picking porn streams, directing drone strikes, and generating our AI replacements.
Very interesting, David!