I love your post. I want to assure everyone here that I am
*NOT* an expert on Palestine, and know very little about it. Still, I feel that I've read about it much more than about anyone else here. To be clear I know little about it, though.
If anything I think that I have the advantage in that since I read about it in the Beforetimes, I had access to better information that people do now because what little information I have is based upon the writings of historians. By contrast, most people on Bluelight will not have been able to find Palestine on a map before this phase of the Continual War. Ergot most of what they know about the region will have been written by
*journalists*, not by historians. In other words, most people have zero access to reasonable information about Palestine. Search engines are no help, they're flooded with people's blogs, usually written by hotheads.
So I want to devote some space to correcting the most common and most glaring of misperceptions.
- In a sense, there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Palestinians are a type of Egyptian.
- Egyptians hate Palestinians more than about anyone else does, Egyptians consider Palestinians to be pretty much the worst type of Egyptian.
- Palestinians and Samaritans and Jews all pretty much arrived in that area around the same time and all claim to have common ancestry. Meaning that it is difficult to mount an argument that one side got there before the others that doesn't sound more laughable than plausible.
- Many Palestinians are culturally Jewish, meaning they reject the beliefs of their suburban neighbors and have voluntarily taken advantage of Israeli resettlement programs and moved into the city. They speak Hebrew and their kids go to Jewish schools. I have not seen their views represented in the media, ever.
- While Palestinian Arabs are indeed native to the area, they are "native to the area" to the same extent that they are native to the entire Arabian penninsula, a vast and generally empty space with strong farming potential. They were not traditionally camped outside of Jerselum, for example. Migratory in nature.
But the most laughable fiction published about the Palestinians, the one that best serves as an indicator that an author has no comprehension of the subject and is merely another reactionary, is the fiction that Muslims and Jews are traditional enemies. Muslims and Jews cohabited the middle east for about a thousand years of relative indifference. The first time that Jews and Muslims interacted with a level of complexity that would require anything like the label of "race relations," was when Muslims bailed Jews out of the Spanish Inquisition. His Majesty the Sultan was of the opinion that Jews were hard workers so he deliberately imported them into the Muslim Empire.
This marked the begining of a period of some 500 years alliance between Muslims and Jews. Muslims and Jews fought failthfully on the same side during World War I, for example. Trouble only really started in like the 1950's. So Jews and Arabs have been at war for less than a hundred years. Certainly not ancient enemies.
I want to thank you again for your excellent and high quality post. It is a shame that most laymen participating in these discussions say things and seem to hold points of view that generally fan the flames of conflict rather than pacify.
