Winners and Losers

University students, particularly the youngest ones, frequently go through a phase of swelled heads, believing that they know better than the grownups who messed up the world. Right now, there is a poisonous propaganda campaign about the innocent "Palestinians" being colonized and exploited by the evil Israelis.

Sympathy for the Palestinians has just been smashed by Hamas, which has invaded Israel, taken hostages, and even exceeds Putin in committing war crimes. This campaign is not war, it is terror, aided and funded by Iran and Putin, hoping to distract the world from their own violation of Ukraine and their own internal misrule.

Many students are ignorant of the greater history of how human beings have created nations and empires. Humans are a mobile species, on the move since their exit from Africa, to people the world. Those first generations of humans eventually settled down when they adopted agriculture, and then spent the next millennia either taking the land of their neighbors, or being taken by fiercer enemies.

This process has been universal. All people who think their lands have been inhabited by them forever have forgotten the past. China moved from its origins in North Asia to occupy (and replace) all the people of east Asia, finally occupying the south when they drained the swamps of water, mosquitoes, and malaria.

The Neanderthals of Europe were replaced by Homo Sapiens from Africa, who morphed into the White people of Europe. Then among them, they were invaded and taken over by Greeks, Romans, and Germanic populations. Today?s England has a heritage of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxon Germanics, Normans (Vikings from Norway who invaded France), and Danes, and amalgamated into the English of today.

All of these invasions and transformations were done by force, the winners dominating the losers and the strongest winners ruling over their own lower classes.

What is today?s Israel was once a land occupied by Phoenicians, a seagoing trading people called the Philistines. The Old Testament describes how the Hebrew tribes invaded and occupied this land. It soon divided into Israel and Judea (even they couldn?t get along with each other), and was conquered and occupied many times until Rome took over and after an insurrection, expelled the Hebrews (then the Jews of Judea), who became a stateless people for the next 2000 years.

In the 7th century AD, a new people, Arabs who were converted to Islam, started to move in to all the territories belonging to others, from Palestine across North Africa (once Roman) to Roman Spain, where they ruled for 700 years.

This ancient process of the strong invading and occupying the weak, finally came to a crashing end in World War I, after which a number of powerful empires disintegrated. Russia, Turkey, Austria/Hungary, and Germany/Prussia were reduced to countries, no longer empires. All of those were collapsed empires,

Turkey, had been the last to occupy what was later to become Israel. The British took it over and kept the peace for a while, but a new rebellion was brewing: Jews who left the horrors of life in Europe to return to the land they once presided over for centuries, Israel. They found some Jews and Palestinians already living there.

The two ethnicities sometimes cooperated, and then fought, until the British offered a solution: they promised each nation the same land. The UN finally weighed in: offering half the land to each, which were to be Israel and Palestine.

Palestinians refused this solution and convinced seven other Arab states to help them evict the Jews and end Israel?s existence. They lost. But these Palestinians have never given up. They fought and lost every war. The Israelis were more modern and were fighting for not against, something. The results are powerful Israelis and dysfunctional Hamas terrorists who misrule their own people and are on a murder spree.

Every time the Israelis and Palestinians came close to forging a two-state future, the Palestinians withdrew and resorted to more terror.
The world has moved on. Even Arab states are increasingly recognizing Israel, and Hamas? hideous behavior may well be their demise. They are the greatest losers in history.




686 words


Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author of "How Do You Know That? Contact her at Lfarhat102@gmail.com or www.globalthink.net.
.