an autodidact meets a dilettante…

Canto: Currently I’m reading stuff about Palestine, and wondering why it is that the Palestinian people and their plight appears to be so ignored in the west, at least by governments, and certainly by the Australian government, whether conservative or liberal. We seem to follow the USA rather religiously on this matter.

Jacinta: Yes, I believe the USA is nowadays firmly captured by the Jewish lobby, a far cry from the days when anti-semites like Henry Ford and Charles Coughlin were feted as American heroes.

Canto: Well I think you mean a certain kind of Jewish lobby – maybe better to say the Zionist lobby. But we’ll explore such terms as zionism and anti-semitism in the course of these dialogues, which given the complexity of this issue, and its rich but sad history, will probably cover several if not scores of blog posts…

Jacinta: My god.

Canto: Well I don’t know about your god but certainly the Jewish god will play his role, along with the Arabic god, but hopefully not too big a role since they’re arguably the same person, which would just confuse everyone.

Jacinta: So is Palestine considered a nation? I believe Australia is playing Palestine in the Asian Cup tonight, so doesn’t that prove that Palestine is a nation?

Canto: Maybe it proves that FIFA thinks Palestine’s a nation, so good on them for that, but certainly Israel doesn’t recognise Palestine’s nationhood. The fact is that a clear majority of UN member countries recognise Palestine as an independent state – essentially, a nation – but the situation on the ground is that this ‘state’ is broken into two unequal bits, the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean coast to the south, and the much larger West Bank region, which sort of includes the highly contested city of Jerusalem. The West Bank is more or less completely occupied by Israel, apparently against international law, and Jewish settlements are continually being built there, again illegally, but with the clear consent of the Israeli government. The Gaza Strip is under Israeli blockade, so the people there don’t seem to be regular members of any kind of independent state that’s worthy of the name.

Jacinta: Yes, and, looking at a map of the nations that recognise Palestine, Sweden and Iceland appear to be the only Western European nations that do so. Western Europe, along with other nations with a European history such as Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada, are siding with Israel in opposing Palestinian nationhood. Interesting, because those are the nations that seemed most invested in setting up Israel after WW2, the nations with sizeable Jewish populations, right?

Canto: Yes, though the case of Russia is interesting. It has, or had, a large Jewish population, but anti-semitism, or anti-Jewish sentiment, to be euphemistic, has long been a feature of Russia (now officially known as Putinland). So it’s hardly surprising that Putinland supports Palestine.

Jacinta: Of course Putinland’s official policy would simply be ‘take the opposite side from the USA in all foreign affairs issues’.

Canto: That’s true too. But we need to understand the history of the Levantine region, and something of the history of the Jews, and the history of European colonialism – the tendency of powerful and ambitious nations, some of them not so ancient themselves, to draw up the boundaries of new nations – Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel etc – for more or less self-serving reasons, in order to understand what’s at stake in this conflict.

Jacinta: So the Jews go back a long way and are traditionally associated with this region, right?

Canto: Yes, but you have to try and dissociate the story the Jewish people tell about themselves, specifically in the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, and what we know of history, objectively speaking. After all, this is all about land, and who it belongs to.

Jacinta: Well, we’re both evidence junkies, so it’ll be interesting to see where the evidence takes us. But I must say that my own possibly naive take on land questions is that land in general, constantly changing over the millions of years that tectonics have operated on it, belongs to nobody but itself. We’re nowadays obsessed with private property, and land first and foremost. But in a million years who will own the land that people spill their guts over today?

Canto: Yes, but that’s taking a rather long view of things, and we humans aren’t much into that. So let’s take a slightly shorter view and go back a few thousand years. The region currently in dispute was then known as Canaan. Now of course there were no defined boundaries to this region, and it wasn’t anything like an organised state, so the term Canaanites referred to an agglomeration of peoples with a variety of gods, beliefs and practices. Generally, though, they spoke a Semitic language…

Jacinta: Right, and this is interesting, in relation to the term ‘anti-semitism’. Hebrew is a Semitic language, but so is Arabic, which is much more widely spoken today, so to call Arabic people ‘anti-semitic’ doesn’t make much sense in the proper understanding of the term, though of course many Arabic people are anti-Jewish. But the term semitic is quite recent, first coined by German historians in the late 18th century, based on the Koine Greek pronunciation of Noah’s son Shem. It’s based on the proto-alphabetic scripts used by these languages – among the oldest written languages in the world.

Canto: So the Canaanites were polytheistic, and only a few of their gods are remembered today – Baal, Moloch and El, for example. The latter was a supreme god and might have been the model for Judaic monotheism, but I don’t want to get into that. The real point is that a diverse lot of people lived in the region of the southern Levant, or ancient Canaan. So let’s start the story some 3,400 years ago when various powerful empires or civilisations converged in terms of their interest in this region – the Egyptians of north Africa, the Hittites of Anatolia (modern Turkey), the Assyrians of Mesopotamia and the Mittani of the northern Levant and southern Anatolia. Now, we can get bogged down for ages in exploring the cultures, lifestyles and languages of these Canaanites…

Jacinta: Yes, let’s do so – I want to be thorough.

Canto: Well, however intrinsically interesting it all is, I’m not sure if it helps us to understand the current disaster in the region.

Jacinta: I’m sure it will – it’s just that understanding might not solve the situation. The people with the power today don’t much care about understanding. Anyway, you’ve started at 3400 years ago, and of course the land had been inhabited for thousands of years before that. Judaism presumably didn’t exist at that time?

Canto: No, it’s generally believed to have emerged later. The Torah, the first-written of its essential texts, was written between 2600 and 2400 years ago according to most scholars, presumably based on stories handed down about Jewish history – but many of those stories, such as that the Jews were once the captives of the Egyptians and escaped to the ‘promised land’ where they proceeded to slaughter its inhabitants, aren’t backed up by much in the way of archaeological evidence.

Jacinta: I suppose what I’m trying to get at is – when, if ever, did the region known as Canaan become something like ancient Israel, or Judaea, with a population that professed Judaism, predominantly?

Canto: Well, it’s very confusing. The land of Canaan, which we might call the Levant, was more or less the same as the region called Phoenicia by the Greeks, as far back as Homer, and we’re not sure when, or whether, Homer existed. But the Greeks also used the term ‘Palestine’, at least from the time of Herodotus 2500 years ago. These different names probably derived from different local languages. The Hebrew Bible – the Old Testament – doesn’t mention Phoenicia, which appears to be more a reference to the northern Levant – perhaps modern-day Lebanon. However, it has to be remembered that the Old Testament may be a guide but can’t be relied upon as serious history.

Jacinta: So how can we test the Zionist claim that this region is their natural homeland?

Canto: Well I’m trying to get to that, but the difficulty is that Zionism tends to be an exclusivist, nationalist movement, sometimes with religious overtones, and we’re inclusivist, transnational humanist types, so I’m struggling against my biases to give a fair rendering of the history. So let’s look at Judea, or Judah – and even that is confusing because Judea is a modern or revived term for a part of southern Palestine, and Judea is a Graeco-Roman adaptation of the term Judah, which refers to a territory of one of the Israelite tribes, later called the Kingdom of Judah, associated with such names as David and Solomon. However, insofar as the Kingdom of Judah existed, it was a small, sparsely populated mountain region of the southern Levant between Samaria in the north, the Dead Sea in the east, and the ‘Phillistine States’ in the west. I should point out that the Samaritans, a tiny ethnic group still in existence today, have their own religion distinct from Judaism, though they like to think it’s the true Judaism, as is the way with religious disputes between neighbouring tribes. The Phillistines were supposedly an Aegean people who settled in the region now more or less covered by the Gaza strip a little over 3000 years ago. According to the Hebrew Bible they were constantly doing battle with the Israelites, so you could say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just a continuation of a tradition.

Jacinta: Haha that’s not funny. I can’t wait to hear more next time…