On the subject of Israel, the big thing for the Leftist community is the One-State Solution. In case you are wondering, that was not a typo. The One-State idea starts off with the presumption that not only is Israel's existence wrong in the first place, but that Israel has not negotiated fairly with the Arabs who created their Palestinian identity long after after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.(The opposite is true- negotiating with Palestinians is like dealing with the Mafia) Until that point, these people called themselves Arabs. They just lived under Ottoman administration.The whole Palestinian identity gained ground to counter the Zionist movement. I won't treat the One-State idea today (Read the above link please). The parallel demand that the Jews just give up and admit that they are Arabs (That is not a joke), demands a quick summary of the region and currently used names of its people.
Palestine was the word that the Romans used to name the region of Judea, Later, there were two regions with the name Palestine. As this occurred under Diocletian's rule, I will avoid going into detail on that subject other than to note that the addition of Palaestina Secunda to Palaestina Prima occurred long after the Jewish revolts and included areas traditionally outside modern Israel.
The whole idea of renaming the Roman province of Judea was to remove any sense of Jewish connection, claims, or identity to that region. The Jewish revolts, to put it simply, made all the other revolts by other peoples against Roman rule look like three militia dudes in the US barricading themselves in a barn and threatening to take on the Federal government. The revolts were near catastrophes for the Roman. The amount of Legionaries (And Legions) that were lost was staggering. Although she was eventually able to viciously put down these uprisings, Rome was humiliated. Hadrian decided that the region (And Rome) would benefit from a judicious application of relabeling. Thus Judea was now to be referred to as the land of the Philistines, the old enemies of the Hebrews back in the days when they first were settled in Israel. The Philistines as an identifiable people has been long gone by that point, but Rome needed to make a point. Interestingly, there is a tremendous amount of evidence that the Philistines were largely or almost entirely composed of Achaean (Or Mycenaean if you have archaeological sympathies - my sympathies are with Homer) Greeks who had been driven out of the Balkans by the Dorian invasions after 1200BC.
Anyway, Syria Palaestina came into being due to Hadrian. Most of the Jews had been expelled, and the region remained under Roman rule (Later Eastern Roman or Byzantine) until a brief occupation by the Sassnanid Persians. After the Byzantines retook the area in the final war which had thoroughly exhausted both the Empire and the Sassanids, neither was prepared for the onslaught of Islam in the 7th century. Does the idea of fighting each other until both sides are worn out just before an full-out attack by Islam sound familiar?
From that point on, aside from another relatively brief rule by Crusader forces, that region was, until the collapse of the Ottomans and the British Mandate, always under Islamic rule after that and had no identifiable Arab population that could be considered distinct from other Arabs.
Now, back to the topic:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/the_one_state_conference_at_harvard_march_madness.html
Good ol' Hahvaard.
The One-State conference was a typical Leftist display of attacks on the sovereignty of the only Democratic nation in the Middle East. Again, for the sake of space please read the above post for details on that part.
A few quotes from the post concerning the responsibility of the Jews to drop the whole Jewish thing and just be Arabs like they are supposed to do:
"This concept was shared enthusiastically by the numerous Jews and Israelis, including rabbis, at the conference. Indeed, panelist Rabbi Brant Rosen of Evanston, Illinois, announced that he routinely preaches that Zionism is idolatry. "My Torah," he said, "is the Torah of universalism and humanism."
The protestors on the sidewalk outside, alarmed at the potential extinction of the Jewish state, had thus ironically nailed the precise outcome hailed by the participants. A "Jewish" state is the problem they came to solve. Indeed, the word "Israel" came up only in its context as conqueror, occupier and supremacist. Otherwise, it was supplanted in the conference vocabulary by "Palestine," which will be the name of the proposed single state.
One questioner, a rabbi without a congregation, asked a panel member whether "Jews, even Lefties like me, will be able to live in Palestine." After the desired approbatory chuckle, the participants were unanimous in emphasizing the absolute equality of Palestinians and Jews in the coming state. This sentiment was repeated in every panel, but the quid pro quo would of course be a "voluntary" dismantling of all the modalities of Israeli power and identity. Everyone agreed this won't be easy for the Jewish Israelis, which is why they also stated repeatedly that change must come from the bottom. The Occupy movement was suggested as a model. Incidentals such as Article 7 of the Hamas Charter ("The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight Jews and kill them") were not considered, perhaps because of time constraints.
One possibility for the newly disempowered Israeli Jews, said Leila Farsakh, associate professor in political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, would be to "reconnect with their Arabism." Indeed, the term "Arab Jew" became ubiquitous toward the end of the conference. Or, as Marc Ellis, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University, himself a Jew, said, "Becoming un-Jewish is the first step." After that would come, in his words, "revolutionary forgiveness." [All Italics were added]
So we get the idea- Jews are really just Arabs, and if they can get it through their thick skulls that a Jewish identity is the core cause of all of the problems in that region, everything would be OK.
Now a brief lesson on the Semitic peoples is appropriate:
Semitic peoples were the inhabitants of all of Arabia, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, almost from the dawn of history (Aside from the northern areas peopled by the Sumerians, Kassites, Hurrians, etc). There was no clearly defined Semitic groups at the time. After the Chacolithic age got into full swing in all of the Semitic-speaking regions, many moved North and West to populate the regions named above. These were the nascent groups from which all Semitic peoples were to develop ( Hebrews, Syrians (Who are not Arabs but Arabized), Edomites, Moabites, Canaanites, Arabs, etc.) Many of these people also had admixtures from the Arameans, also Semites who started from the Northern limits of Semitic-speaking regions such as modern-day Iraq and moved westward around the time of the arrival of the Dorian Greeks into Greece proper. (By 1200BC)
Earlier, by 1600BC, Amorite (Probably the source of Abraham's clan) tribes had moved West from the Northernmost (Not Arabia proper) reaches of Semitic speakers and inhabited Lebanon, Syria and parts of Israel. That region itself was ruled on and off by the Egyptians but not colonized by them to any appreciable extent.
As I mentioned, the Philistines, very possibly the "Sea Peoples" that also attacked Egypt came into the picture (That whole tumultuous 1200BC thing). They were likely Greeks displaced by the Dorians and may well have included Luvians and Phrygians of modern-day Turkey (Thraco-Cimmerian origin - not Turks who were a long way off) who also were affected by the turmoil of Achaean Greek movements, such as the sack of Troy and the natural push of hard-pressed Achaeans as they fled Greece.
Aside from expulsions of tribes by the conquering Assyrians and Babylonians (Not permanent for Jews expelled by Babylon), who were also Semitic but not Arabs, the ethnic and cultural situation in the Levant was fairly static for some time after that. The Macedonian Greeks (I hold the the position that Macedonians were mostly ethnically Greek) Roman, Byzantine, and Persian rulers did not push any people out of the region.
Other than the first southern Arabian cities of Sheba, Maan, Qataban, and Hadramut, the first Arab state at the Northern limits of Arab/Arabic peoples was the Nabatean kingdom, which can be positively identified after the arrival of Alexander. They inhabited the areas south and southwest of the Levant (Modern-day Israel, Lebanon, and some of Syria) and about a third of the way down the western Arabian coast. These Arabs are not the same ones that inhabited Mecca, Medina, etc.They slowly moved northward along the Roman frontier (After they arrived of course) through the years but were kept out of the region. The Nabatean Kingdom fell to the status of a province during Trajan's reign. After that, especially following the advance of Islam, Arabs sort of cease to have markedly different groups.
Again, the region's ethnic makeup is static until the arrival of the Islamized Arabs from Southern Arabia. The floodgates were then open for all sorts of movements of Arabs, both southern and northern.
I know that this post was too long, but I had to dispel the absolute falsehood that Jews are Arabs. Jews/Hebrews never were Arabs. Jews, Arabs, Syrians, Canaanites, and others were Semites/Semitic-speakers. This does not mean that all Semites are Arabs. That would be like saying that, since Italics or Germanics* were descended from the same Indo-European body/groups of peoples from which the Greeks or Iranians sprung (As noted in earlier posts, modern-day Iran is peopled by those Iranians descended from the Medes, Parthians and Persians - the Iranian/Iranic group was huge and included the Scythians, Aryans, and others), Italics, Germanics, and others of Western Europe should drop the whole identity thing and just admit that they are Iranians. Lumping ethnic/cultural groups of distant cousins into one group was exactly what Hitler did when he claimed that Germans were Aryans.
*Of course, all Indo-European Speakers who moved into any areas from their origin north of the Black Sea mixed with people who were living in the regions in which they settled, so Greeks, Celts, Slaves, Balts, Iranics, etc. do not appear to have exterminated or completely driven off those who were there before the IE groups arrived. DNA evidence seems to indicate that this was especially the case with female (Mitochondrial) DNA. The male (Y) DNA markers associated with the IE groups had more of an imprint. I will avoid theories or conclusions on that fact for now.
An outstanding source for DNA info. The article is long but is a quick read.
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