[The Conquistador]

THE MID EAST
by Howard S. Katz
10-12-09

There are very few weeks that go by in this day and age without some news item about the turmoil in the Mid-East between Israelis and Arabs. In part this is due to the fact that the media have made a decision to feature and over-dramatize this area of the world. There are similar incidents of low-level violence (short of outright war) in many areas of the world. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, for example, have been waging a full scale war for over 30 years (until this past May), and it was almost never mentioned.

For another part, the troubles in the Mid-East are a perfect example of the philosophy of peace and the manner in which it leads to almost continual violence. And finally they are a very good example of the way in which the media today will report almost any event via a succession of lies. That is, first one lie is told. In the world of the "respectable" media this lie then becomes sacrosanct, and anyone who questions it is met with a campaign of vilification and hate. Then the lie becomes a basic "fact" in the narrow world of media figures, and soon another lie is laid on top of it, and then another lie and another lie, etc. I can deal with what I call this onion of lies (because they lay over each other like the layers of an onion) in the field of economics by simply making predictions of the future. Since my view of reality (in economics) is correct, I am able to make correct predictions about the future, and this past week's explosion in the price of gold and fall in the U.S. dollar (which is making my subscribers very happy) is one example. Events, however, are more confusing and difficult to predict in the field of human relations. Things are not as black and white, and often both sides of an issue will claim, after the fact, that their predictions have proven correct.

Be that as it may, I would like to explore the Arab-Israeli conflict and try to untangle the onion of lies which the media has created.

The first, and most important, point is that there are no Palestinians. And indeed, it is only via a severe twisting of history can there be said to have ever been a Palestine. If you read the Bible (Catholic, Protestant or Jewish), it provides us with our earliest history of that region, and the name by which it is known is not Palestine. It is Canaan. After the Israelite invasion circa 1250 B.C. the land is known as Israel or Samaria (in the north) and Judah or Judea (in the south) These names are used until the defeat of the Jews in their second revolt against Rome in 135 A.D. At that time, the Jewish population is forcibly removed from Judea and scattered through the Roman Empire. The Romans rename the territory Palestine, meaning land of the Philistines. The Philistines, as you know, are the people of Delilah and Goliath who fought the Israelites at the time of King David. They were Greeks, not Arabs, and had disappeared long before 135 A.D. (By the way, the Philistines are a very interesting people and not at all the bad guys we read about in the Bible. They were also known as the Sea People and were the first people known in history to use iron weapons, i.e., to enter the Iron Age. They fought their way down the coast of Asia Minor and attacked Egypt while Moses and the Israelites were wandering their 40 years in the wilderness. Egypt was the super power of the day, but the Philistines came within a hair's breath of defeating them, after which they settled down on the western coast of Canaan. The poor Canaanites were then caught between the Philistines (the coastal people) attacking from the west and the Israelites (the mountain people) attacking from the east, all leading up to the famous battles which are described in the Bible.

So the name "Palestine" was a fraud made up by the Romans, and it was never very much accepted by the (few) people who lived in the territory. For example, if you study the Crusades, you find the country being referred to as The Holy Land, not as "Palestine." When the Crusaders were driven out, by Saladin (1138-1193 A.D.), and the land reconquored for Islam, it was resettled But since Saladin was a Kurd and hated Arabs, he did not use any Arabs in the resettlement of The Holy Land. (And in fact the entire mid-East was Christian from the 4th century A.D. until the Muslim conquest. These people were conquered by the Arabs and converted to Islam, but they are not ethnically Arab. An Arab is a person who comes from Arabia. To call such people Arab today simply refers to the fact that they speak Arabic and has nothing to do with their ethnicity.)

The Turks conquered the land in 1517 A.D. and returned to the name Palestine. However, they were better at conquering than governing. The residents were driven off the land and the population reduced to a very low level. Karen Armstrong reports:

"Peasants began to leave their villages to escape from rapacious pashas....In 1660 the French traveler L. d'Arrieux noted that the countryside around Bethlehem was almost completely deserted, the peasants having fled the pashas of Jerusalem." [Karen Armstrong, Jerusalem, One City, Three Faiths, (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 342.]

This set up the situation which led to the modern Zionist movement. An 1840 census recorded the population of Jerusalem as 10,750. [Karen Armstrong, p. 352.] The modern city is about ¾ million. I have seen an estimate for the total Arab population of the Turkish province of Palestine in the mid-to-late 19th century as 65,000.

Mark Twain visited The Holy Land in 1867. He reported:

"We never saw a human being on the whole route [meaning the section from the Sea of Galilee to Mount Tabor]....There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere....Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes...Jerusalem itself [whose population Twain put at 14,000] is become a pauper village." [Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (New York, Grosset & Dunlap, 1911), pp. 371, 397, 438, 439.]

In short, the basic assumption reported by the modern media when dealing with any Arab-Israeli issues - that there was a viable nation of ethnic Arabs who lived in a place called Palestine for a long period of time prior to the Zionist movement - is another lie.

In the late 19th century, Theodore Hertzl began a movement to urge European Jews to return to Zion. Zion was the mountain in Jerusalem on which the ancient Temple had been built, and Hertzl used the term to refer to the entire territory of Judah/Israel. This movement to return to Zion was called Zionism. It began slowly in 1880 when the country was still under Turkish rule. However, the Turks were defeated by the British, who took control in 1918.

One problem that most modern writers on the Mid-East have to face logically but try to bury is, since there were so few Arabs in the country in 1880, how come there are so many today? Where did they come from?

The answer is that;, when the British took over, they had greater respect for people's freedom. They allowed more Jewish immigration into the country. Many of these Jews then hired foreign (Arab) labor (at higher than prevailing wages for the Mid-East). Arabs flocked into "Palestine" to get these high-paying jobs, and these were the people who began to object when the Jews created the state of Israel in 1948. Basically they were transient labor with no real ties to the land. One of the real injustices of the situation (never mentioned by the media) was the refusal of the surrounding Arab countries to take back their own citizens after 1948 when they indicated a desire to return home. These were the people who later wound up in camps supported by the U.N. (which means by your tax money). The media blamed their plight on the Israelis and used it to stir up hate.