Another Fine Mess They've Got Us Into

Cartoon by BALOO

Most of the people with deep, sincere convictions about right and wrong in the Middle East, and what our policy should be, quite literally don't know what they're talking about.  Try asking one of them the difference between Sunnis and Shi'as. Some of them, of course, have religious reasons for their ignorance (See "Christian Zionists"), but the ones who don't, or think they don't, are remarkable for the huge inventory of facts they don't know about.  The pro-Zionist side is of course totally dominant in the US, so that's who I'll talk about here.

Most pro-Zionists think it all started in WWII.  Jews escaped, one way or the other, from Europe, and went to Palestine and established Israel and the Arabs went barking mad and attacked them.  Partially true.  Zionism goes back a lot further than that, and the principle of Palestine as a homeland for the world's Jews was made official by the Brits at the end of the First World War, when they and the French occupied and controlled the general area and the Arabs didn't have a thing they could do about it.  Indeed, they weren't in a position to do much until 1948, when the Brits pretty suddenly established Israel, disclaimed all responsibility for anything, and got out of Dodge before anything worse happened.  Originally, the US and the USSR were staunchly pro-Israel (do you ever hear "staunch" or "staunchly" any more in any context other than this one?), and then the Soviets saw an opening to exploit Arab resentment and switched sides, more or less. We were fairly objective about the situation through Eisenhower and Kennedy, and then LBJ poisoned the well by pretty much surrendering our whole foreign policy to the Zionist faction, and we've been in that situation ever since.

Right now we're in the midst of a terrific hissy-fit about the UN vote on whether to regard the Palestinians as a country, and emotions and illogic run high.  A rather deeper and probably more objective view on the whole rat's nest HERE from Dave Witter.