A tiny lesson in the History of the Middle East: Israel

My wife came to me with a story that a person at our church gave a lecture on the Holy Land…a.k.a. Israel. Then she told me the people coming out of the presentation were saying things like, “I didn’t know the Jews were so evil.” or “It’s hard to believe what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians who are just trying to feed their families.” and “sure they throw bombs, aren’t they justified given what has happened to them.” I’m sure she was paraphrasing here but the end result of the entire presentation was about the evils of the state of Israel and how it should really belong to Palestine…except this person is a layman, using typical liberal and Hamas arguments that are easily disproven.

The fact of the matter is that I often listen to liberals whine about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the country of Israel. Listen hard enough, or actually just listen, and you will hear someone talking about the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, or Israel is illegally occupying the territory and country of Palestine, etc. What it all boils down to is that Israel bad, Palestine good, as the evil Jewish invaders seek to push all the peaceful Palestinians out of their rightful country. Well, now it is time for a history lesson on the region.

When arguing their point the opposition often brings up this visual. However, this map series is dishonest; made up of four or five maps, the message of the series is clear: The Jews of Palestine have been gobbling up more and more “Palestinian land,” spreading like some sort of plague that overcomes the land.  Fact Time.

The state of Palestine didn’t exist until 1988, when the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization founded in 1964), established the “state” with the flag and coat of arms, all the trappings. Never mind that the PLO had been declared a terror organization in 1987, they established a state. Nevermind that the state they established was the already occupied by the country of Israel…of course this state wasn’t even recognized by the United Nations as a non-member observer state until 2012. Up until that time the PLO’s “state” was only a thing on paper, a magical, fictitious land like Narnia, Westeros, or The Shire. A country named Palestine NEVER existed until 2012 when it was recognized by the same body that partitioned and recognized the State of Israel in 1948.  So the nation of Israel is 64 years older than the “nation” of Palestine.

The fact of the matter is that the entirety of the middle east didn’t exist as we know it until after WWI. There was no Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabi, Qatar, Egypt etc.. it was all the Turkish Ottoman Empire from 1798-1918. Really, you can blame WWI and T.E. Lawrence, yes Lawrence of Arabia. He was a british officer during WWI who united the vast arab tribes on the Sinai Peninsula to revolt against the ottoman empire between 1916-1918. After WWI he helped split the Ottoman empire into OETAs (occupied enemy territory administrations) after the fall of the empire. This empire started in 1299 and controlled nearly all of the middle east, and it was carved up by the western powers like a thanksgiving turkey with no regard to ethnic lines, religious groupings, alliances, or again, etc. Is it any wonder the whole region is some kind of S&^% show?

And yes, there was no Israel prior to 1948, but there had been a Jewish presence in that region of the world for over 4000 years.The historical Jewish right to a homeland in Palestine was first recognized by the modern international community (and by Great Britain, which had gained control of the region from the Ottoman Empire during World War I) in the Balfour Declaration in 1917, the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, the Treaty of Paris in 1919 at the end of WWI and the League of Nations Mandate of 1922. All of these documents preceded the Nazi Holocaust by decades, thereby disproving more recent claims according to which Israel’s creation was justified not by thousands of years of Jewish history, but rather only by the Holocaust.

Before that time, that entire region was Syria, which was part of the Ottoman Empire…not an individual state. The area became Mandatory Palestine, an area under British protection from 1920-1948. When the U.N. did finally partition the area for a Jewish State in 1948, they set aside land for both a Jewish and an Arab state…the small areas listed on that last map. Israel has worked to stay within their borders, but several times the angry arabs that live there have tried to break out of their borders and usurp land that rightfully belongs to Israel. Despite the fact that all Israel wants to do is live in peace. But a tiny bit more on the non-entity that Palestine is….palestine is a reference to an area, a vast area, and not a people…again these were ottomans in the empire…not palestinians.

The word Palestine or a derivative thereof first appears in the 5th century B.C. when Herodotus called the entire area of the region that now includes Syria, Israel, and Lebanon…Palaistine. In the 2nd century the Romans crushed the Shimor Bar Kokhba revolt in 132 AD (by the way this was a Jewish revolt in Judea…not an arab in sight for this one) and the Romans renamed the area Palaestina to minimize the Jewish identification with their promised land (Israel). Centuries later, leading up to Israel’s independence in 1948, it was common for the international press to label Jews, not Arabs, living in the mandate (British ruled Mandatory Palestine) as Palestinians. It was not until years after Israeli independence that the Arabs living in the were called Palestinians. The word never applies to arabs until after 1967 when they adopted the word in an attempt to create a class of people who had been robbed of their land by the terrible Jews.

This conflict has never been about the occupation of “Palestine,” instead it is about the actual existence of the Jewish state of Israel. Israel has accepted a two state solution many times as long as there would be an end to hostilities, but the Arabs (a.k.a palestinians and every other middle eastern country) reject that solution. They don’t want to live in peace the want to live without Israel existing and this is why they attempt to twist the truth about the actual Israel-Palestine conflict and turn it into an actual thing, when in fact it is hardly anything at all.

 Further Reading:

Fromkin, David. A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922. H. Holt, 1989.

Peters, Joan, and Mary Woods. From time immemorial: the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine. Vol. 84. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

There is no White Privilege

Both my children have now asked me, merely weeks apart about this “white privilege” they keep hearing about at school. My first question was of course, are you hearing this bullshit from your teachers? Thankfully, they have only been hearing this bullshit from other children, leaving me to believe that either the education system here either hasn’t bought into the whole self-hate thing, or it just hasn’t caught on with the administration as the new hip trend to pander towards.

In fact, when I question my kids about the kind of kids they’re hearing term from the response is other white kids, mostly rich kids….or at least upper middle class where we’re from anyway. This is what I told my kids and really what you should tell yours and yourself for that matter.

White privilege is a lie. The term was made up by Peggy McIntosh in 1988 when she coined it for an article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh and yes it is another pile of self-hating bullshit.

I told my children the whole premise of white privilege is that dumbasses everywhere believe that as white people we get special privileges that benefit us (white people) beyond what non-white people get under the same circumstances. As soon as I gave that definition to my children they could smell the hypocrisy coming off of it.

My daughter asked if she was so privileged why did someone (non-white), who is a straight D student, get a bigger scholarship to college than she did to attend the same university. I told her that her privilege was so ingrained that affirmative action was there to make sure that people of color had at least an equal chance of getting into a school and later a job they were qualified for instead of giving it to the first white person that came along. (Don’t get me wrong there was a time and a place for affirmative action, it just hasn’t been necessary for over 20 years in America) Then she asked if they were qualified why would they need extra help with preferential treatment. Again, she is starting to get it.

I then explained that White privilege, along with Critical Race Theory, and post traumatic slave syndrome (I s%^& you not, that is a real….something) are the ideology of the liberal left and false theories designed to explain away the real reasons for the failure of black communities across the U.S., mainly government dependency.

These theories aren’t about racism which we know still exists, they aren’t about injustice in the school systems or the justice system for that matter. It is the explanation that white people have it better because of the hue of their skin and black people will never be able to overcome the legacy of slavery. No, what black people aren’t overcoming is the legacy of government dependency that has seen the creation and rise of the separation of races, the rise of single parent black families relying on government assistance in section 8 housing, with an abortion clinic on every other corner. Don’t blame white privilege, blame the war on poverty waged by President Johnston for creating more poor people now than in the mid-sixties.

That is not to say that the war on poverty affected only blacks, it affected white people to, just in disproportionate numbers because the liberal party machine was busy targeting their voting block and what better way to do it than pander to the people in large concentration in urban centers rather than the more plentiful but scattered people in rural America. More bang for the buck that way, but go to dirt poor West Virginia and dare tell them they have white privilege.

I told my children their whiteness, and mine for that matter, never purchased anything. I had to work for a living, I had to find my own way, pay for my schooling, etc. Nothing ever happened to me for free because I was white. In fact, I was too white, too middle class, and just smart enough not to qualify for any assistance when I went to college and I didn’t whine about it. White privilege is a lie, a racial red-herring. My children don’t expect that they will be fawned over and given preferential treatment because they are white. What they do understand is that people who use the white privilege buzz word will either treat them badly, attempt to shame them because of their race (where have we seen this before), or ignore them because of their assumed privilege.

Suddenly, being white is the problem not being on the government dole. Being conservative makes you part of the KKK despite its legacy and rise in the Democratic party. Asking to cut out of control spending, reign in abused welfare programs, and show some fiscal responsibility in America makes you the devil instead of someone concerned about the future of the country. I told them all of this because liberals, especially closet racist liberals want to keep shaping the narrative to paint the average white American as the problem and ignore the statistics on black on white crime (caused by white privilege), black poverty, gang violence, drug use, etc.  and make victims of an entire race that was basically defrauded by the liberal political machine in exchange for continues votes for the democrats.

In the words of LBJ, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

That was then, the war on poverty defrauded black America, this is now where the false narrative of “White Privilege” is being used to duck the issues and problems caused by the war on poverty.

White privilege…is…a…lie.