Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) called some of his colleagues’ quickness to blame Israel for the hospital blast in Gaza “disturbing” in a statement Wednesday.
“It’s truly disturbing that Members of Congress rushed to blame Israel for the hospital tragedy in Gaza,” Fetterman said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Islam wasn’t founded until 610 CE, which was almost 200 years after the fall of the Roman Empire. Definitely not the Bronze Age and at best the late Iron Age.
Also, between then and now, Europe was a far more dangerous place to be a Jew than the Middle East. Pogroms were common in the Middle Ages, while cities like Jerusalem and Baghdad were multicultural and tolerant. After the siege of Jerusalem during the first Crusade, Christians massacred the Jews living there along with the Muslims.
This conflict specifically started with the Sikes-Picot Agreement in which the western powers reneged on their deal to establish an Arab homeland. But the real conflict didn’t start until the UN’s Partition Plan, which gave most of the land to the Jewish minority.
So, no, I don’t think this goes back thousands of years. More like hundreds, with worst of the actual fighting in the last 76 years.
And, ah, who were the Palistinians before Islam?
Gaza was one of the Philistine city-states… you know. Early on, Canaanites- The people that Israelites tried genocide to “come into the promised land”… and who Solomon and David were at war.
The area has a very long, very ancient history… and that history is part of how we got to the partition plan and the Nakba and all that.
I don’t have any real answers for solving the violence. I truly wish I did.
Archaeology links the Philistines to the Mycenaean civilization due to similarities in their crafting. There’s a possibility the Philistines were of the Sea Peoples - Southern European invaders of Egypt, Canaan and Turkey - in the late Bronze Age.
oh man. thank you very much for the sikes picot link. that is super interesting.
You have to consider the Tanzimat reforms in the waning Ottoman Empire, specifically the Land Code of 1857 and the Nationality Law of 1869. The Land Code misappropriated much of the tribal land in current day Israel/Palestine to Ottoman administrators, which was later brought under the control of Britain after WWI. Particularly after the Nationality Law, which granted citizenship rights irrespective of religion, the Jewish National Fund was able to purchase and settle that land. Under British rule, the settlement accelerated. It’s worth noting that there was massive migration to the Holy Land of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. During the late Ottoman period, 1850 to 1915, the Muslim population doubled (+300k), and the Jewish & Christian populations tripled (+26k and +54k respectively). By the British Mandatory period, the majority of the population in the Holy Land were immigrants.
But anyway, you’re right. Although there was always tension between Muslims and Dhimmis, the specifics of the contemporary conflict can’t be traced back much further than the late 1800s. Perhaps if the original negotiated Arab homeland consisting of the Arabian Peninsula, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon had been honored, the entire region would be much more stable today. Hard to say what would have happened to the Jews during WWII, though.