Nativier than thou...

One of the more spurious arguments one occasionally hears from the Pro-Pals is that so-called Palestinians are descended from ancient peoples who inhabited the Levant.

They may well be. But the point is spurious because almost all historical-nationalist polemics derived from DNA analyses are notoriously dodgy, and 'nativier than thou' is generally considered an essentially racist proposition in most other contexts. 

Indeed if I were to make a show for political purposes of how much longer my ancestors had spent on the island of Britain compared to newcomers of any kind, I would soon be designated a knuckle-dragger and scheduled for ostracism.

And one is also obliged to remember here that many of those who big up these statements are otherwise inclined to aggressively play down biological factors compared to cultural ones in the other situations which matter to them.

I would also suggest that the argument is being used rather blatantly in bad faith, because the peoples who have long opposed Jewish self-determination, have done so precisely because they have closely identified with the culture and geopolitical objectives of their own later colonisers, the Arabs. 

It is this adopted Islamic identity which means the very notion of going Dutch with non-Muslims is broadly antithetical to them, and this means that there is something extremely cake-and-eatey about the DNA narrative.

In 1948 roughly 120,000 non-Jewish inhabitants of the Mandate decided that they could coexist with the Jews, assuming Israeli citizenship, while as many as 600,000 chose the path of violent 'resistance', which they have followed ever since.

The numbers of the latter have swollen to millions — that great inverted genocide — suggesting that any ancestry test result is likely to have been significantly diluted. Yet the continued 'resistance' remains grounded in another highly spurious, historically-blinkered line of argument, that it is the Jews who are all newcomers to the region, occupiers or settler-colonialists no less.

If it is really anti-colonialism that you support, be careful what you wish for…

 

 

Even Yemen was a Jewish kingdom pre-colonisation.

The truth is that the modern world should not rely on any kind of regressive territorialism, based on race, religion or uncompromising irridentistism. Everyone has to come to the table with dotted lines in their heads based on actuality.

This applies to all significant actors in the current situation, yet in saying that, one must never lose sight of the fundamental dynamic of the conflict, which has always been an attempt by Islamists to eradicate the only Jewish-identifying polity from this earth. They dress up this objective in all sorts of borrowed fineries, but nobody should ever be fooled.

 

There have been immoral behaviours and attitudes all around since 1948, but until that urge to smother all alternatives to the Islamic way is put on the back-burner, there is unlikely to be any real peace in the region.