Oy!  Those Jews...conquering the world, one Palestinian at a time.  As per the mainstream media, the dinky little sliver of dirt known as Israel is an aggressive expansionist empire.  History, however, offers a different perspective.

In his book Migrations and Cultures (1996), Thomas Sowell has a chapter titled “The Jews of the Diaspora.”  In it, he describes how, during the 19th century, Jews who were scattered throughout Eurasia began to move back into their ancestral homeland — known then as Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire — to escape various forms of persecution.  Other historians have described Jews as the last remaining citizens of the Roman Empire — which, during its heyday, provided the conduit for the diaspora in the first place.  

Ignorance of this series of events was most conspicuously showcased by Barack Obama’s “Cairo Speech” of 2009.  In it he parroted the standard Palestinian Liberation narrative, accusing Zionists of being foreign invaders of their ancestral homeland.  Various internet trolls contend that Ashkenazi Jews (typically eastern European) have no historical connection to Palestine whatsoever, since they were made Jewish by the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism centuries ago.  Most scholars dismiss this theory as both bogus and thinly veiled antisemitism.

The defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, because Turkey was on the losing side of World War 1, plunged the Middle East into prolonged chaos.  The British and French had a secret arrangement to impose their respective spheres of influence over this area, known as the Sykes-Picot Treaty.  Ultimately, at the end of WW2, France and Britain fought over Syria just after Germany’s surrender.

Back during the First World War, the British diplomat Mark Sykes instigated a hoax claiming that the Turks were massacring Zionist Jews in Palestine.  Although the Turks were reasonably accommodating to the Jews in Palestine, the hoax was readily believed outside the Middle East because of the real genocide the Turks imposed on the Armenians.  Sykes’s motive was to further galvanize support for the Allied cause — but he also caused Jewish Zionists in Europe and America to adopt the establishment of a sovereign Jewish nation as their goal.

Hence, we have the state of Israel, the aggrandizing imperial juggernaut that is enslaving the innocent Hamas and Hezbollah freedom-fighters...not.  Such characterization also butts up against the long established stereotype of Jewish passivity — resulting from being a small, distinct minority wherever they lived.  True, in early biblical times, the Hebrew people were fierce combatants.  The Book of Numbers is largely a roll call of the assembled warrior groups.  First the Canaanites and then the Philistines (from which the name Palestine is derived), etc., had to be fought and beaten.  That was the way the world was back then. 

Once the grotesque horror of the Holocaust was revealed, much of the world reacted by getting on board with the establishment of the nation of Israel — especially U.S. president Harry Truman.  At that time, it was the British who were mostly standing in the way, but the Zionists eventually pushed them aside.

A common fallacy is that Israeli Arabs are second-class citizens, sequestered by a form of apartheid.  There have been Arab members of the Knesset since the first day of Israeli independence.  Arab citizens of Israel have enjoyed complete legal equality since 1966.  When I first started exploring these data, I assumed that it was only Christian Arabs who were being counted.  I was wrong.  Eighty-two percent of Israeli Arabs are Muslim, and Arabs of all faiths constitute over 20% of the Israeli population.  As previously written, some of the first Christians were Arabs — since they were there when the faith was born.  Christian Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East are often fiercely persecuted and would probably very much enjoy suffering under the Zionist jackboot.

Image via Pxfuel.