Why progressives can’t simply condemn antisemitism

2 Responses

1. Why?
   Because devolution has erased the necessary brain circuits, resulting in Zombies disintegrating to Ogressives (male, female, Other, PolyMultiMorphs).

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2. Oh for Pete’s sake.

   We know that the Palestinians are the genetic descendants of ancient Canaanites [as indigenous as it gets], Philistines [invaders from the north contemporary in time to Moses, more or less], with a tiny overlay of peninsular Arab that arrived from the 7th century AD, which just happened to be spectacularly successful over time in Arabizing culture and language and Islamizing religion of a formerly Christian region.

   We know this the same way we know the Egyptians are overwhelmingly the descendants of ancient Egyptians [the Copts the most of course], the Lebanese are mostly Phoenician [also a Canaanite people], the Syrians are the descendants of the West Semitic speakers [Aramaeans and so forth] of that region, and Mesopotamians of the complex melange of West and East Semitic peoples who had been there since pre-Islamic times, by millennia- through genetics. They all got a thin layer of peninsular Arab that brought with it a powerful language, culture and religion set that overwhelmed the whole region.

   These are facts established by material means.

   The Palestinians of today thus DO have ancient claims. AS ancient claims as Israel. Insofar as they too are Canaanites, like Israel, they are the SAME claims. Insofar as they might have Philistine ancestors [likely less than some romantic Aryanists once claimed] they are descended from invaders, but then invaders who came at the same time as Israel came out of Egypt, more or less. If not before.

   We can certainly go back farther and look at proto-Israel in the time of the Patriarchs, presuming I take a thing that is attested only in the Hebrew Bible at face value. But then we must note that they left Canaan a small group of families, who had not had a state, and returned as a nation and conquering army ready and able to thrown down walls and conquer and rule. That was a change in status and aim from how Abraham’s people had entered Canaan. And we would need to ask, too, what was Abraham’s ancestry and connection to Canaan, if any? When his God spoke to him and promised him a home there, he was in Mesopotamia. Did these earliest proto-Jews have an earlier ancestry in Canaan, among the many peoples churned around by ancient empires, and he just ended up in Mesopotamia? If so, fine. That could well have happened, and so he was leading his kinsmen to a lost homeland. If not, then Abraham’s arrival as a group of peaceful shepherds living in peace, and intermarrying Canaanites, is a story of peaceful immigration to a new land in the west, but one that laid a basis for an eternal claim by his descendants in Egypt and an undisputed military conquest by Joshua.

   I’m happy to dismiss all that. But it is Israel’s own narrative of its deep history.

   If we start with reasonably understood secular history, we have Canaanite peoples of all sorts of sub-ethnicities living there from the early first millennium BC.

   Israel, of today, is unquestionably and also by genetic means known to be descended of those people. That land is their home. There were some additions [the Ashkenazim are half italic European by genetics, which is a lot better story and better proven than the silly Khazar hypothesis, and goes back centuries earlier; but I gather the Ashkenazim are no longer a majority of Israelis though a majority of Jews in the world, so leave that aside] but they are Canaanites genetically, and they have maintained the Jewish cultural and religious identities. That most returned from Europe or elsewhere in the 19th century or after does not change that.

   The Palestinians are also Canaanites. They might to some extent even be descendants of ancient Israel themselves. The Israelites, Samaritans, and various neighbouring vaguely similar if sometimes hostile peoples around the Jordan mingled all the time, as even the Bible attests, often with anger or grief. Idumeans were Judean kings, after all. And not all the tiny number of Jews who remained after Bar Kochba stayed Jews. Some became Christians and eventually Muslims, or other things. There will be Palestinians from those lineages.

   Their influx of peninsular Arab in the 6th century does not change that, any more than an influx of Italic in the same century makes the Ashkenazim not Jews [even though it was in the female line, I know that rule is far more recent]. That many immigrated from greater Syria in the late Ottoman or British periods, and thus their ancestors include Arameans and others, no more changes their majority ancestry than does the fact that most Jews immigrated back from Europe at that time.

   These are the tragedies. Also, a paramount example of how ancestry is not the whole of a story- culture, religion, language and history have separate the same people, in large part, more than a bit of different directions in intermarriage, and they neither can nor should surmount them now or be expected to. Still, tragedy.

   I think, turning to the fact that I am nevertheless fantastically sick of the Palestinians and could not care less about their cause at this point, a better line of argument remains that they repeatedly had the option of having a state, first at 3/4 [Peel], then at half [UN], then WB + Gaza + East Jerusalem [had they the balls and honesty to demand it from Egypt and Jordan and those two nations the integrity to give it to them], and turned down or didn’t ask for every one in preference to war and pan-Arab solidarity. Therefore let them find their future as Arabs in Arab nations.

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