I thought I would but a little more flesh on the rather bare bones description of the Arab-Israeli conflict that I wrote about last time. Because it seems like the hate and vengeance that emanate from both sides goes back a long, long ways, to early biblical times, perhaps as much as 4000 years ago. If one believes that both the old and new testaments are anything more than fable, mythology and superstition, then the old hatreds started with Abraham, who is considered to be the father of the Hebrew nation. It seems that Abraham had, with his wife Sarah, a son named Isaac, who started the Jewish state. But for reasons too absurd to go into detail here, Abraham, the old goat, also decided to fool around with one of the servant women, and in the process, produced another son named Ishmael. It finally dawned on his wife Sarah that this was not a kosher situation; so she ordered Abraham to expel both mother and child from their living quarters. Neither would also get any of Abraham’s inheritance. Ishmael would then go on to father the Arab nation, while, as I’ve said, Isaac would be the founder of the Hebrew nation. From that point on, the hatreds, wars, mass murders, slaughters of innocent people, destruction, etc. between the two peoples would become fully launched.
Now as I’ve stated many times before, I’m not a big believer in the veracity of either sets of bibles, since they were both written by man, not God. They make for some interesting folklore and myths, but it’s unlikely that many of the events described, especially in the old testament, actually took place. For example, the Israeli government has spent tens of millions of dollars looking for the slightest shred of evidence that Moses ever existed, let alone parted the Red Sea, and has come up with nothing but a dry hole. So let’s fast forward a couple of thousand of years to the time that Jesus walked this planet. It was also a time when the mighty Roman Empire conquered the state of Israel, which then resulted in most Jews being driven from their homeland, and relocating mostly in Europe. (As we all know, the Roman Empire, some centuries later, would also subsequently fall to the barbarians at the gates.) Over the next 2000 years, European Jews were then subjected to severe persecution and pogroms by most European nations, (think of the Spanish Inquisition) which finally culminated in the blackest and most evil pit of all, known as the Holocaust. The Nazis would slaughter about 6 million European Jews during that pogrom, before the WWII nightmare would finally end. After the war, most leading nations, as represented in the U.N., felt that the Jews now deserved their own homeland where they would be safe from persecution.
In the late 19th century, an Austrian Jew named Theodor Herzl had put forth the idea that all the displaced Jews of Europe should be able to return to their biblical homeland in the deserts of the Mid-East, as a way to escape anti-semitic persecution that was rampant throughout Europe at the time. This concept became known as Zionism, and the first Zionist Congress met in Switzerland in 1897 to formulate strategies and plans to accomplish this goal. After WWII the Zionist movement gathered momentum and, as I’ve said, almost all world powers were in agreement in the establishment of the state of Israel. Bur there was fierce opposition coming from one quarter, and that was from the Arabs living in those Mid-Eastern deserts that would become the Jewish state.
In 1947, at the urging of President Harry Truman, the U.N. general assembly voted in favor of a 2 state partition of those biblical lands in the desert. One state would be Palestinian, and the other would Jewish. Fighting between both sides broke out almost immediately, and in 1948, when Israel officially declared independence, 4 Arab countries invaded the new state. By some miracle, Israel was able to win that early on-slaught, and a cease-fire was declared in 1949. But as the title to this piece states, old hatreds never go away. In 1967, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan attacked Israel once again in what would become known as the 6-day war. Israel would win that war too, and in the process acquire all of Jerusalem (which had been partitioned), the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. But the Arabs weren’t finished by a long shot. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day, in 1973, Egypt and Syria once again sprung a surprise military attack on an unprepared Israel. That one came within a hair’s breath of success. Israel eventually found the resilience to fight back this latest Arab attempt to “drive the Jews into the sea,” and again won that war. It was at that point that the Arabs realized the futility of outright armed invasion. Instead, they would try a new tactic of brutal, murderous slaughter of Israeli civilians, known as terrorism, which I described in some detail in my previous entry. What I didn’t mention last time was that these terrorist tactics also included lobbing rockets with explosive warheads into Israeli towns, which is still on-going to this day.
The entire state of Israel is about the size of Delaware. When George W. Bush became President he visited Israel and was given a helicopter tour over the whole state. It was pointed out to him that at its narrowest point Israel is only 9 miles wide. “Nine miles,” he exclaimed. “There are some driveways in Texas that are longer than 9 miles.” But within this small strip of land in the desert, there has been a never-ending sea of hatred, bloodshed, death, destruction and misery that has evolved over thousands of years. With no end in sight. And yet the far left-wing in this country and throughout Europe, especially in academia and other so-called intellectual circles, want to establish economic and scholastic boycotts of everything Israeli. Because, obviously, all this hatred and bloodshed is all Israel’s fault.
The problem with this left-wing ideology is that when one is a determined ideologue, he or she will make the facts fit their belief system instead of the other way around. So like their blood brothers on the far right, its not about what occurs in reality; its all about making a life-long commitment to a certain ideology, no matter how false the premises of that ideology may be.
realityincorporated 