I want to kiss you, Gairloch.
Bzzzzztt… The Palestinians have nothing at all to do with the ancient peoples of Canaan… They are Arabs, mostly come to Palestine/Israel over the past 200 years or so.
Yes, there were people here before Abraham. But they aren’t here anymore.
It’s not like I’m saying the ancient Israelites were nice to their neighbors, or anything. If at all, they did a far better job at genocide than many a modern attempt 
(Hey, that’s my legacy and I’ve got to live with it…) But any way you look at it - whether it’s the “Earliest surviving landlord” or the “Meanest guy with a gun” logic you use - we’re here, and we’re here to stay. So let’s stop hearing about the poor disenfranchized Palestinians, OK? At least as long as nobody brings up the poor disenfranchized American Indians for statehood at the same time? Not to mention those of Mexican heritage who may someday want Texas back?
Having said all that, pragmatically I still think the Middle Eastern problem will only be solved by a compromise - almost certainly some variant of the Two-State solution. But not because anyone “desrves” it - rather just because, in the long run, I (and many other israelis) think that this type of solution will best serve our own interests
And being,probably, the “right” thing to do for a group of people who, by and large, just want to bring home enough to fill their plates is a Very Good Thing, too. Being “nice” to my neighbors beats being mean anyday. It’s not like I enjoy knowing about the conditions the Palestinian have to live under. It’s just that I will support my country doing what is necessary to keep me safe from the fringe idiots who are, essentially, the ones wrecking life for the majority of Palestinians.
It’s not like I’m out to ruin life for anybody out there because I hate their guts. It’s just that we will do what we need to survive first, and we will be nice to our neighbors second.
Dani
I say Gairloch? Excellent post. But is that true? I mean, as in, a clinical archealogical sense? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disputing your post in any shape or manner - I’m genuinely asking now as a fellow Doper who is truly interested in the facts - not just the religious bullshit.
Is it true? That there are verifiable estimates that at least 3 or 4 thousand years ago, that there was a civilisation in the Palestine region up to a million strong? Called the Canaanites, and they were basically slaughtered by the Israelites coz Moses thought he had God on their side? Far out! If that’s true, I gotta say it really puts an entirely different spin on things from my point of view.
Please tell us some more. Perhaps our good man Tamerlane would care to post about this too because I reckon that’s an extraordinary bit of history which has obviously been deliberately swept under the carpet.
No One Special? I just read your post, and it was an excellent post too. Yes, I agree, compromise is definitely the answer. Being “bullheaded” will do no one any favours it seems to me. I liked your magnanimity too. A quality in short supply in your part of the word I rather think.
I liked the one liner someone mentioned earlier about “the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity…” that about sums it up really. I get the hint that whilstsoever there is still at least ONE Palestinian voice demanding the complete destruction of Israel, then any chance of compromise is, in itself, going to be compromised.
Out of interest, does anyone have any FACTUAL demographic timelines of what the populations in Palestine were say, 500 years ago, 200 years ago, and 100 years ago?
Listen to yourselves. You are trying to make cogent arguments about current politics based on a 3000 year old piece of desert poetry of uncertain veracity. We don’t see debates on whether the Irish Catholics or the Irish Protestants were there first and thus entitled to the land. Or if we do see these debates (like the Albanians in Kosovo), they are glossed over because there ain’t a damn thing we can do about them.
The same is true of Israel. Let’s ignore everything that happened before today. The situation right now is that there are 4-5 million Israelis and 3-4 million Palestinians. The Israelis (mostly Jews but Christians and Muslims as well) wouldn’t be happy living under a Palestinian leadership. The 4 million Palestinians aren’t happy living under Israeli leadership. The only solution here is for each party to withdraw and live separately. The history is bloody and complicated and therefore best ignored. South Africa is doing it; Ireland is trying to do it. Croatia hasn’t, and it is a huge mess.
The land also defines this debate, but really, the land is irrelevant. The 1967 cease-fire line is just as arbitrary as the 1973 cease fire line as the 1948 UN partition line as the 2001 Taba negotiation border. There needs to be a line drawn that is fair and maintainable. Money will probably have to change hands because repatriation of Palestinians into Israeli land is as possible as repatriation of Iraqi Jews into Iraq.
The Israelis aren’t going anywhere, at least without a boatload of lead flying. Being “Anti-Zionist” is about as possible in the real world as being “Anti-Manhattanite” or “Anti-Polish.” The sooner the world (and especially Arab leaders) recognize this fact and start being “Pro-Palestinian,” the region will be a lot more enjoyable for all parties. By this I mean that somebody should be out there pushing to build a Palestine, not just to tear down Israel. Pointing fingers and discarding negotiations over a dozen square kilometers of semi-arid hills doesn’t move us closer to an independent Palestine. Imposing a peace – whether by outside intervention, forceable separation, or enforced peace treaty – does. The shortest way, IMHO, is forceable separation. While I don’t like Sharon and his antics, I think a fence will accomplish that. Then the Israelis can forget about divine mandates for sitting on remote hilltops. Then the Palestinians can give up hope for getting their great grand uncle’s farm in Tiberias back. And perhaps both sides will forget about how important it is to kill the other and start worrying about water and power and infrastructure and independent judiciaries.
Just to post what I have read about Moses. There ain’t a lot of archaelogy either way about the Exodus, IIRC. But, if it did happen, the Egyptian enslavement and Exodus (with the Sinai revelation and everything) wasn’t the entire Israelite people. What is much more likely is that a group of Israelite slaves escaped Egypt, became nomadic desert wanderers, were energized by a charismatic figure named Moses to restructure their nominally monotheistic religion into a strongly monotheistic one based on Ten Commandments and some other laws, reemigrated into the bulk of Israelites in Cana’an, and began mass conversions.
I can’t believe there are still people that believe that Canaanites=Palestinians myth.
The Palestinians are Arabs, and at the time in question, the Arabs were a small tribe limited to the Arabian peninsula.
It’s a fallacy to equate cultural or linguistic descent with genetic descent. An Arab is merely someone whose mother tongue is Arabic.
Many, infact probably most of the peoples regarded as Arabs are infact peoples conquered by the Arabs and Arabicized. It’s simply not known who the Palestinians are descended from (as though there are many Palestinians who can trace there ancestry through records the earliest that these can be traced back in the area is about 900 AD), but most likely it’s a mixture of peoples including the Arabs and previous populations.
Anyway this really should be immaterial in the modern politcal landscape.
Yes, but it is often used as propaganda to usurp the Jewish claim to the land.
The Canaanites were Semetic, just like the Jews and the Arabs. Neither side can claim them with any legitimacy over the other racially. Linguistically and culturally there has never been any relation with either the Jews or the Arabs.
And your framing of the situation in the 7th century as “conquered and Arabicized” glosses over the fact that many peoples were wiped out during the expansion of Arabs throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.
I’m no rand expert on the topic, however…
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The Canaanites appear for all intensive purposes to have been pretty indistinguishable culturally from the Phoenicians and other semitic-speaking peoples in the central and southern Levant - they worshipped the same gods and spoke the same language. The seperation between the two is largely geographic ( Palestine vs. coastal Lebanon ) and temporal ( the geographic differentiation as ‘Phoenicia’ is post-1200 B.C. ). Even disregarding this, however…
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…the idea that the Jews slaughtered the Canaanites of the southern Levant to the man ( and up to a million of them ), I find very hard to credit, no matter what religious histories say on the matter. It’s not particularly easy killing a million people today, let alone in the late bronze/early iron age ( even in a gradual conquest ) and I’d like to see some solid archaeological evidence ( peer-reviewed and published in a reputable journal, not some self-published tract on a website with an ideological axe to grind ) to back such a claim. Far more likely is a gradual conquest, with the occasional perfunctory massacre, followed by cultural absorption. One possibility for how this might of progressed and how ethnic identities could have been forged in the early Jewish states, is posited here:
- It has become fashionable in certain quarters of the MENA in recent decades ( well, actually everybody has been doing it since forever, whether it is reaching back to some mythical race of demi-gods or more recently just some historical people that they think gives them some special status ) to reach back to distant putative ancestors to build some sort of prior claim to some godforsaken chunk of land or another. For example some Christian Lebanese like to make the claim that they, as opposed to their Muslim neighbors, are descended from the Phoenicians - and so they likely are in part ( along with 50 other groups ) - but then so are their Muslim neighbors. The Copts claim descent from the original Egyptians, distinct from the Muslim Egyptians - pretty true, except for that “distinct from the Muslim Egyptians” part. Some Palestinians have made similar claims for descent from the Canaanites, in an attempt to do a neat end-around to Jewish historical claims to be the original inhabitants of the area - is there some truth to this? I’d imagine. I’d also the imagine modern Jews could make much the same claim. The fact of the matter is that these sorts of arguments are taking grains of truth, stretching them all out of proportion, ignoring inconvenient realities and are at any rate pretty fucking irrelevant as far as I’m concerned.
Whole peoples, at least reasonably populous ones, rarely just disappear - instead they are simply absorbed or merge, in part of whole, into whatever cultural amoeba is atop the food-chain that century or millenia. The Jews have been rather more resistant to this than most, but hardly immune. And most groups are a lot less culturally cohesive historically than the Jews.
- This whole “the Arabs have only moved into Palestine in the last 200 years” is ahistorical nonsense. Arab demography has shifted in that period, but Arab-speakers ( which is the only defintion of “Arab” that matters in this context ) have been filtering into the region since even before the Islamic conquests ( indeed they formed an important part of the Byzantine defensive system on the Syrian border, functioning as marcher foederati of sorts ). At any rate “Arab” today is most broadly defined as speakers of Arabic and most speakers of Arabic today are NOT particularly descended from Arab immigrants from the sparsely-populated Arabian penninsula. Arabic was an imperial lingua franca, just like Latin, and spread faster than Islam did ( at least in some areas, like Egypt ). The Palestinians, just like the Lebanese and most folk, are descended from a melange of conquering and migrating folk - in which can likely be included Canaanites, Philistines, ‘Arabian Arabs’ and a dozen or two others, probably including a few Jews.
- Tamerlane
Such as?
In point of fact you are substantially ( if conceivably not totally ) wrong. Culturally, some groups were pretty much smothered out of specific existence, 'tis true ( no one talks much about the Visigoths these days - then again the dominant Latin culture was doing a pretty good job of de-Germanizing them long before the Muslims arrived ion the scene ). But widescale extermination? Nope.
- Tamerlane
More than just a few: hundreds of thousands of Jews are Arabs.
I can accept connecting Canaanites to other Semites, but that applies to Jews as well, not just Arabs.
Right. Pretty much what I said.
- Tamerlane
Ahhhh thank you Tamerlane - I knew I could count on you for a great post or two!
adher-Yes but what I am saying is it’s just as wrong to say the Palestinians were decsneded entirely from the Arabs as it is to say they were descnded from the Canaanites as the truth is it is not known, so both statements are pure speculation. Though it should be pointed out that what became of the Canaanites is unknown, AFAIK Canaanite culture disappeared over a thousand years before the Arab invasion. It’s not my strongest area of history but I think there’s a link between the Canaaites and the Phoneicans who were conquered by the Romans in about 200 AD.
There is a strong linguistic cutural relationship between Canaanite culture and ancient Jewish culture brought about by early proximity and there is even some links to Arabic culture.
You have to be careful when making bold statementts as cultural and linguistic shifts are much more common than the movement or destruction of actual populations.
Apologies to anyone if I seem a little snappy. Stupid holidays - not enough sleep :).
- Tamerlane
*200 BC
After having read Tamerlane’s posts now, I have to say I’m very cynical indeed about the earlier claim of a genocide of up to a million souls some 3 or 4 thousand years ago. There would simply be far, far too much archaelogical evidence of thousands upon thousands of skeletons and such stuff strewn throughout the region.
Nope, Tamerlan’s theories of cultural assimilation are infinitely more plausible - and in doing so - actually make any of these modern tribalistic claims of being “the true owners of the land” just seem all the more what they really are - just simple self serving bullshit which only ruins the chances of peace.
No mass exterminations? Please. They went on as recently as the 20th century! Armenians in the early part of the century, and Sudanese Christians are being systematically exterminated in the present.
Committed by Turks, not Arabs, but that’s a pretty meaningless nitpick. More important is that it is completely unrelated to the discussion at hand - that was a modern massacre having nothing to do with “the expansion of the Arabs.”
Your claim was that the “expansion of the Arabs throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe” in the 7th century wiped out many peoples. I’d like to see some backing of that argument with specifics. What whole peoples were exterminated in the Arab conquests?
Similar argument to the above, with the caveat that the Sudanese civil war is rather more complex than just Christian/Muslim animus ( indeed that is likely more a side-issue ).
- Tamerlane