Monday, July 5, 1915. Anarchist end, Ottoman failure, British withdrawal.

 Anarchist bomber Eric Muenter committed suicide while in New York police custody.

The Ottoman Army failed at a final attempt to recapture ground in the Battle of Gully Ravine.

British forces withdrew from Lahij, South Arabia.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 4, 1915. Sedicionistas hit Los Indios. Ottomans and Arabs tribesmen hit Lahij, South Arabia (جنوب الجزيرة العربية).

Labels: 1910s, 1915, Arabs, British Army, Holidays, Immigration, Independence Day, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Ottoman Army, Ottoman Empire, Plan of San Diego, Sedicionistas, Texas, World War One, Yemen

Sunday, July 4, 1915. Sedicionistas hit Los Indios. Ottomans and Arabs tribesmen hit Lahij, South Arabia (جنوب الجزيرة العربية).

Sedicionistas hoped to bring the territory south of the C line back into Mexico.

Sedicionistas, hoping to spark a revolution in the southern US to bring what had formerly part of Mexico back into the country, launched their first cross border raid, hitting the Los Indios Ranch in Cameron County, Texas.

Interestingly, in some parts of the US July 4, 1915 was Americanization Day.

It would  be so defined by the movement supporting it up until entry into World War One and would later become Loyalty Day.

The Ottomans and loyal Arab tribesmen attacked British held Lahij in South Arabia (جنوب الجزيرة العربية), or Greater Yemen).  The city on the Indian Ocean is now in Yemen.

Related threads:

Wednesday, January 6, 1915. The Plan of San Diego.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 3, 1915. Muenter bombs Morgan.

Labels: 1910s, 1915, Anarchy, Art, Crime, Independence Day, J. C. Leyendecker, J. P. Morgan, James Montgomery Flagg, Personalities, World War One

Thursday, December 7, 1944. The end of the USS Ward

A U.S. counterattack halted the Japanese offensive on Leyte.

USS Lamson on fire after being hit by a kamikaze at Ormac Bay.

Kamikazes damaged the USS Mahan and USS Ward beyond repair during landings at Ormoc Bay.

The Ward figures prominently in the story of the Battle of Pearl Harbor.

Today in World War II History—December 7, 1939 & 1944: At Ormoc Bay, destroyer USS Ward is damaged by a kamikaze; three years earlier to the day, USS Ward fired the first shots during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The 77th Division landed against Japanese opposition, but it was not heavy.

General Nicolae Radescu took office as Prime Minister of Romania.

The International Civil Aviation Organization was established.

The Arab Women's Congress of 1944 took place in Cairo.

An earthquake at Tokai, Japan, killed 1200 people and halted production at the Mitsubishi plant.

Last edition:

Wednesday, December 6, 1944. Japanese paratroopers on Leyte.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, Airborne, Aircraft, Battle of Leyte, boats and ships, Charles de Gaulle, Dekemvriana (Δεκεμβριανά), Greek Civil War, Imperial Japanese Army, Joseph Stalin, Royal Air Force, World War Two

Sunday, July 21, 1974. Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Israeli no, Turkish misidentification.

The day prior, July 20, 1974, the Turks invaded Cyprus in response to the July 15, 1974 move by the Greek military junta ruling the country to annex the island to Greece which had seen a coup take place on the island, replacing Archbishop Makarios III with Greek nationalist 

Greek commandos landed on the island on this day.

The USS Harwood, which later became the TCG Kocatepe.

The Turkish Air Force, in a case of mistaken identification, sank the Turkish destroyer TCG Kocatepe, and heavily damaged the Adatepe and Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak off the coast of Paphos at Cyprus.  The vessels were misidentified as Greek vessels.

The Israeli cabinet voted to turn down a proposal to begin discussions with moderate Palestinian representatives to establish an independent Palestinian nation on the West Bank in exchange for Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist.

Egypt gave exclusive oil and gas prospecting rights in the Gulf of Suez to Standard Oil and the same for the Red Sea to Mobil Oil and Union Oil.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 6, 1974. Live from Lake Wobegon.

Labels: 1970s, 1974, Comedians, Garrison Keillor, Minnesota, Music, Radio, the spoken word

A Palestinian Solution (that nobody is going to do).

In this thread, I suggested a solution to the "Palestinian" problem isn't all that hard:

An uncomfortable truth.*

In reality, I'd partially already proposed it:

The Palestinian Problem and its Wilsonian Solution.

Those threads are pretty complete, but let's just set out the basic facts of the problem.

Part One:

• The Palestinian Mandate's Levantines didn't want any sort of Jewish state or any sort of "two-state solution in 1948".  The neighboring Arab states didn't want one either.
• World War Two made it inevitable that Jews would seek refuge in the region they'd held historically and up until 70.
• The British tried and failed to create a two-state solution, and then washed their hands of the matter and left.
• The Israelis won the 1948 war.
• During the 1948 war, a lot of Levantines left out of fear, rational calculation of danger, or were expelled.
• Just would have invited them back in, but the Israeli's were not in the mood for that, and the Arabs largely weren't either.  That is, having fought for it, the Israeli's decided to keep what they had in every sense, and the Arabs were still dedicated to the proposition of pushing them out.
• That's now over 70 years ago and almost everyone involved in the original drama is dead.

Part Two:

• The Arabs have been happy to support a Palestinian diaspora, partially, but not to invite them into their own countries.
• The Palestinians have been unwilling to come up with a new, permanent plan, that doesn't feature, at a bare minimum, the territory that was at least partially in Mandatory Palestine.
• Gaza and to a lesser extent the West Bank were solutions that Israel was willing to put up with, but not the Levantines, even as they took advantage of it.
• The "Palestinians" have been , to a large extent, living on the Arab and Global dole since Gaza and the West Bank were created as entities subject to self rule. They don't have work, and they don't have much to do, other than to do, what people who have an income, but no work, do. . . . fill in the blanks here.

Okay now for the elements of the solution.

Part One

• The Palestinian Levantines need work and need to be taken off the dole.
• In order to do that, the pipe dream of an independent Palestinian state inside the borders of Mandatory Palestine needs to be given up on, unless Jordan, which is a Bedouin state, wishes to become that entity, and it doesn't.

So, what can be done.  There are two, and only two, possibilities.

Solution Number One.

The Palestinian Levantines can be taken in by the Arab states that have work, which would include the Emirates, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia.*

Yes, that's radical, but if they were taken in, taken off the dole, and got to work, within a generation or two, this problem would be over, and they would be better off.

Solution Number Two.

Create a Palestinian state in the Sinai.

That has obvious geoengineering problems, but the Israelis confronted those inside Mandatory Palestine and the states of the Arabian Peninsula have faced them as well.  It's been proven that you can geoengineer these areas productively.  It has been done.

And in that state, Gaza could remain part of it.

This, of course, would require Egypt to give up Sinai, but frankly, it's not making much use of it anyway.

Footnotes:

*And probably Jordan as well, as the West Bank was part of Transjordan and probably ought just go back to Jordan.

Related threads:

An uncomfortable truth.*

1940s, 1948, 70, 70s, Al Nakba, Arabs, British League of Nations Mandates, Hamas, Israel, Israeli Hamas War, Levant, Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Palestinian Revolution, Roman Empire, The Holocaust

The Palestinian Problem and its Wilsonian Solution.

Arabs, British League of Nations Mandates, Israel, Israeli Hamas War, It was because of World War One, It was because of World War Two, Kuwait, MIddle East, Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia

An uncomfortable truth.*

The US has been rocked in recent weeks by student protests over the war between Hamas and Israel.  The striking thing about it for me is how much this has turned, in terms of public opinion.

Even my own opinion has changed, but in the other direction. When I was young, I had quite a bit of sympathy with the Palestinian cause.  My views on it developed when I was old enough to not have any really good recollection of the Palestinian terrorist activities of the 1970s.  The problem to me seemed clear enough.  Israel had been established on British occupied territory without the clear input of all of the residents of that territory, and since then war had precluded the Arab residents from having a voice.

I don't really hold that view anymore.

Unfortunately, much of the world seems to.

"Palestine", as a political entity, has not been free, in a self-governing sense, since sometime . . . well It's hard to say if it ever was.  The word itself refers to the Roman administrative province that was imposed on the Kingdom of Israel.  Romes grip weakened in the 600s, with a Persian invasion taking Jerusalem in 614 and the Muslims invading and conquering all of the Levant in 634-638.

Note those words. . .Levant and conquering.

That's what the Islamic invaders did, they invaded and conquered.  Islam was spread by the sword.

We'll also note that this was a long time ago.

In the Levant, which is what we're dealing with, there were multiple religious groups and Christianity and Judaism remained strong.  Much of what Islam conquered were Christian lands.  Islam did not spring up there from fertile soil, it was imposed, but the other religions remained.

By the 1090s the Muslim principalities of the Levant were themselves coming under attack from other Islamic forces, the net result, without getting into all of the details, were the Crusades.  In 1260, in an odd event, the Mongols briefly conquered the entire region before they retreated due to a succession crisis at home.  The Ottoman's conquered the entire region in 1516-1517 and ruled it, in an increasingly weak manner, until the British Mandate was imposed at the end of World War One.

At the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century, the Zionist movement sought to reclaim the region that had been Israel up until AD 70.  The Ottomans both facilitated and opposed the movement.  It was gaining strength by World War One and took on a life of its own.  By World War Two (this is the 80th anniversary of the Biltmore Conference) it was becoming a mass Jewish movement of sorts, as Jews around the world reacted to the horror of the Holocaust.  

At the same time, Levantines in the region became increasingly hostile to Jewish settlers, fearing what was to become.  This turned violent on at least one major occasion before World War Two, causing the British to have to put a Palestinian Revolution that lasted from 1936 to 1939.  That movement sought independence, but it did so in part as Levantines feared that the growing strength of Jewish settlement movements meant that they'd be displaced on their own territory.

When the British ducked out in 1948 the Arabs and Israelis went right to war with each other, resulting in the fleeing of 700,000 Levantine's from the region, half of pre-1948 Mandatory Palestine's Levantine population.  That population, now enormously increased, sets up the current situation. Some fled because fleeing fighting armies is the rational thing to do. Some fled as they feared being killed by Jewish militias.  Some fled as, after Israel established themselves, they were expelled.  

The overall problem is that 70 to 80 years ago is a long time.

In the past 70+ years, those tragically expelled should have been productively resettled.  Some were, of course, but many were not.  Instead, the results of the 1948 war were rejected across the Middle East, which in turn made it worse by repeated incompetent efforts to militarily reverse the situation. The West Bank, for example, was lost in the 1968 war.  Movements supporting the Levantine cause, moreover, have been attracted not only to violence, but to extremism.

At the present time, Hamas wants to expel Jews from the borders of what had been Mandatory Palestine, a region that has existed as a politically independent area for, well, ever.  Hamas would impose radical Islam on the region to the detriment of not only the Jews, but to Christians, who remain in the region, and even to other Muslims.

There is, unfortunately, no reason to believe that there's any Levantine entity any less radical than Hamas.

A two-state solution for the problem is absurd.  Part of the ongoing problem is that the Levantines have been kept in postage stamp sized settlements not only by the Israelis, but by the non-Levantine Arabs, who don't want to take them in.  An independent Levantine state based on the West Bank would be dirt poor, radical, and a menace to the region's political stability.

And that's not what so many of them want. They want the borders of Mandatory Palestine, with its current Jewish residents expelled from the region for from life.

And that's what student protesters are actually advocating in some circumstances.  Both the Atlantic and the Guardian have interviews with a narrow selection of them who are basically comfortable advocating that murderous solution.   Levantine protesters in the US seem pretty comfortable with it as well, or at least not uncomfortable with noting that those they are supporting by implication are murderous rapists.

One of the uncomfortable truths of history is that wrongs of the past can't be righted, really.  Nobody can go back to 70 and keep the Romans from expelling the Jews.  Nobody can go to all the numerous localities where they were thereafter oppressed and murdered and keep that from happening.  Germans today seem remorseful for what they did from 1932 to 1945, but that can't keep the horror from happening.  The British today would not take Palestine as a mandate, but they did, and that's done.  And the expulsions and fleeing of the Levantines in the late 40s has already occured.

Like so many other things that humans imagine, trying to restore a status quo ante, long after that status quo has fled, only results in new horrors.  The Jewish desire for a homeland was rational.  That they'd desire a portion of what had been Israel (modern Israel is smaller than Biblical Israel) was also rational,  It's already happened.   A solution for the plight of the Palestinian Levantines needs to be found, and frankly isn't all that difficult to work, but neither a two-state solution nor setting an army of rapist and murderous lose in Israel is a solution that's either workable or tolerable.

Nor is it rational or tolerable to put up with people protesting for it.**  Students form the protesting base in any country in part, quite frankly, as a large percentage of them are essentially idle while not knowing it.  As a student, I imagined what I'd do once I was out of school, with a job, and finally "free". It turned out that what I did was worked and took on the responsibilities of adult life.  Freedom, in a certain sense, isn't what Janis Joplin claimed it to be, that being "nothing else to lose", but it is, in another sense, "nothing else to do".

In the 1930s, when Spain was in a violent crisis, a tiny number of people went there and fought in its civil war.  I don't admire the foreign volunteers to Republican Spain, who misjudged their cause and blinded themselves to what it was really for, but at least they did more than gum up classes.  Students yelling bear, ultimately, no real burden for their efforts. They're not Freedom Riders or the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

And here, ironically, should they really have an impact, it'll be to bring to power in "Palestine" a group of murderous perverts, and to help bring to power in the US somebody whom they don't agree with on anything.

Footnotes

*Because I'm not a professional blogger, nor retired, I have a lot of posts, well over 100 in fact, that are in the hopper, some of which related to this.  I note that, as there's more coming, maybe, if I ever get around to it, on the crisis in the Middle East.

**Protesting against Israeli military overreach is something else entirely.  Israeli's are doing that.

This is a common feature, oddly, of protests.  It's perfectly rational, for example, to have been against bombing Hanoi during the Vietnam War, but that doesn't mean you need to appear on an anti-aircraft gun belonging to a communist army.  Here being opposed to Israel leveling Gaza is rational, pretending that Hamas is on the side of virtue is not.

Related threads:

The Palestinian Problem and its Wilsonian Solution.

Arabs, British League of Nations Mandates, Israel, Israeli Hamas War, It was because of World War One, It was because of World War Two, Kuwait, MIddle East, Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia

Levantines

I've used the term "Coastal Arabs" here recently to describe the culture that stretches from teh Sinai to Turkey and which includes a lot of Syria.

Distribution of Levantine Arab dialect. By A455bcd9 - Own work based on: Levantine Arabic 2022.svgReferences:Brustad, Kristen; Zuniga, Emilie (2019) "Chapter 16: Levantine Arabic" in Huehnergard, John , ed. The Semitic Languages (2nd ed.), Routledge, pp. 403–432 DOI: 10.4324/9780429025563. ISBN: 978-0-415-73195-9. OCLC: 1103311755.Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D. (2022). Jordan and Syria. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. SIL International., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128220068

It turns out, the word that I should have used is Levantines.

The region has its own dialect of Arabic, its own (really good) cuisine, and those who genetic history from the region can be identified by their DNA.  

Yes, they are Arabs, but they are not Bedouin. 

Wednesday, October 21, 1943. Indian declaration.

The Provisional Government of Azad Hind ("Free India") was declared with Subhas Chandra as president.  Its territory, such as it was, were those portions of Indian occupied by Japan.

It immediately declared it was entering the war on the Japanese side, an example of really not grasping the direction things were headed in, and in fact already well advanced towards.

On the same day, Japan began drafting high school and university students.

The Germans began liquidating the Minsk Ghetto as they were retreating from Belarus.

The RAF made a highly destructive raid on Kassel.

Algerian Jews, 140,000 in number were restored French citizenship, which had been restricted, along with the same for Algerian Arabs, on March 17, 1942 by Gen. Henri Giraud.  Arabs had to apply for restoration of their French citizenship.

The Palestinian Problem and its Wilsonian Solution.

Lex Anteinternet: Wars and Rumors of War, 2023, Part X, Declarations: 

October 15, 2023

Hamas v. Israel

Egypt has completed a concrete barrier to block Palestinian entrants from Gaza.  Their border is very small, so they will be able to enforce it.

Qatar has refused to take Palestinian refugees.

Why have I linked this in, well to demonstrate part of the problem.

Bernie "I knew Lenin when he was just a baby" Sanders has called Gaza an "open air prison".

It isn't, but if it is, the guards aren't just Israeli, they're also Egyptian, and quite frankly, the Arabs in general.  

Nobody wants the Palestinians, as by this point, to put it charitably, they're acclimated to living off the dole and are inclined to violence. They're like the residents of Northern Ireland at one time, on spades.

We went into the complicated history of what is now Israel the other day, but to unfairly summarize it, the problem was created by this.

Ottoman Palestine.

Jewish immigrants legally started migrating to the region when it was an Ottoman province, and then when it was a British League of Nations Mandate.  When the Jewish population became noticeable, in a region we might note that not only had an Arab population, but an Armenian population and a Greek population, the Palestinians began to worry and demanded that it stop.  They turned to violence in the 1930s/

Prior to this time, it isn't as if it was an independent country and indeed, as the map above shows, is borders weren't really what they are now.  Israel had been an independent kingdom in ancient times, but it had been conquered by numerous ancient empires and kingdoms during its history.  Rome put an end to Israel, as we discussed the other day, until 1948.  Like much of the pre World War One Arabic Middle East, it was ruled under Ottoman rule by various tribal families.  

The period after the Great War was transformational due to the high levels of Jewish immigration, and World War Two made a push towards a restoration of Jewish Israel inevitable.  After over a millennium of being murdered for no reason whatsoever, the Jewish people wanted a homeland of their own. And, by that time, they had the population base in Palestine to demand it.

The Palestinian Arabs simply couldn't accommodate themselves to the thought, and the non-Palestinian Arabs couldn't either. They made a bad bet.  Had the Palestinians imply gone along with it, quite frankly, by now the demographic impact of their higher birth rate would mean that Israel would have a majority Palestinian population. But they didn't, and in becoming refugees they became wards of the world.

Today, inside the Palestinian Authority, they suffer high unemployment, particularly in Gaza, which is an unnatural economic unit. The Arabs, and Iran, support them, but they've largely gotten over Israel by now and they don't want the Palestinians in their country. They'd rather back them economically than let them in.

But, if there's a solution to this, they probably need to.

Following World War One, largely due to Woodrow Wilson's view of how the world should work, everything pushed towards nation states.  Due to the Great War, Germany and Russia were pushed out of Poland. Finland, the Baltics States, and the various Slavic states that hadn't been independent, became independent.  Ireland became independent.  Colonialism started to become a dirty word.

The Ottoman Empire collapsed and Middle Eastern kingdoms, imperfectly drawn, sprang up. 

And populations were somewhat moved.  

After World War Two, this was very much the case again, although mostly due to the Soviet Union seeking to redraw is territory on ethnic grounds.

None of this is pleasant, but the solution to this may be here.

Israel isn't going to go away, and is not going to let itself become an Arab dominated state.

The Palestinians aren't going away either, but their territory, and they aren't getting Palestine back, isn't viable.  They've never, moreover, really had any sort of independent state in the first place.

They are also a Mediterranean people, which means that they are largely a Sunni Muslim (some are Christians, but they're disappearing as a demographic as Islam is hostile to them and for that matter the Israelis aren't keen on them either) Arab coastal people.

Qatar is a coastal, Sunni Bedouin Arab nation.  So is Saudi Arabia. So is Kuwait.  So is Dubai.

All of these countries have a labor shortage.

A solution, and perhaps the only one, is to resettle the Palestinians in those countries.  Not in one country, which will create all kinds of problems, but across them.  

They will not mix in immediately, but they would in fairly short order.  

Jews whose ancestors emigrated from Ukraine, Poland, etc., 75 years ago do not look back and wish romantically that they could reclaim lost occupations and lands. Frankly, in 75 years, if this was done, Palestinians wouldn't either.  For that matter, in a fairly short period, they'd be fairly mixed with the local Arab population in any event, their identify less of a thing, and their futures better.

Of course, nobody is proposing this, even though many are secretly thinking about it.  Simply pushing the Palestinians out of Gaza has come up as an Israeli solution before.  The Egyptians fear a lot of Palestinians heading their way, and they cannot accommodate them.  That Qatar would reject their entry at this point shows that a lot of Arab states have this on their minds.

And the Palestinians, clinging to a pipe dream, probably wouldn't want to do it either.

Related threads:

Hamas v. Israel. Some observations, and How did we get here?

People seem shocked to learn that Egypt isn't letting Gazans in.

Saturday, September 29, 1923. Mandates and Floods.

April 25, 1920. Settlements that didn't settle.

April 8, 1920 More Strife

The Secondary Waves of the Great War.

Hamas v. Israel. Some observations, and How did we get here?

Lex Anteinternet: Some additional observations on the Hamas v. Israe...: 1.  "Was this an American intelligence failure?" Why does the press keep asking this really stupid question?  Hamas didn't att...

Some additional observations, yet again.

It was inevitable that the war in Israel would spill over to the United States in terms of internal politics.  That this makes it different from every war since the Anglo Irish War, which also did, makes it unique. North America does have a fairly large Ukrainian ex pat population, and a fairly large population of descendants of Ukrainians, but they're largely out of view, and therefore out of mind. Because of that, people like Matt Gaetz can choose to suggest that we leave Ukrainians to the tender mercies of the Russians, but he can't say the same thing about Israel.

But we now also have a large immigrant Palestinian population in the US, and a significant one in Australia as well.  Other Palestinian populations are in Europe. This has given us the shocking, to most people, example of people demonstrating either for Palestine or against Israel, depending upon how you think of it.

Which leads me to this:

I think people will not believe the reports of what happened in Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Beeri. Even though Hamas posted photos and videos on their own Telegram channel. Because these are ISIS tactics. Beheaded babies and burned corpses. Yes, I saw the photos.

I don't care if you are of Palestinian extraction or not, although I frankly feel that this adds fuel to the fire that the further away from the prevailing culture an immigrant population is, the harder it is for the "melting pot" (the antithesis of the currently popular but demonstratively false concept of "diversity is strength" ethos) to work.  It can, but it's harder.  At any rate, people had no sympathy at all with German immigrants and German Americans who were in support of the Nazis during the Second World War, and Hamas deserves no sympathy either.  It doesn't matter if you are of Palestinian extraction or not.

I'd also note that one member of Congress of Middle Eastern extraction keeps a Palestinian flag outside of her door, and as of yesterday, still was.  Frankly, no Congressman should keep any flag other than that of the U.S. or perhaps their state outside their door.  

None.

This causes me to recall my father, who never liked people using hyphens in their name to identify themselves as something other than American.  Half German and half Irish by descent, he didn't like, for example, when people called themselves "Irish Americans", a trait he shared with Theodore Roosevelt.

This also says something about preserving old fights, something many cultures and peoples do.

Palestinians are upset, in part, about something that took place running from the late 19th Century to the mid 20th Century, that being the return of Jews to what is now Israel, as well as the history that followed.  The spreading of Jews around the ancient world started as long ago as 586 BC but it got rolling in the modern era in the 60s and of course we can famously date it to 70, the year of the destruction of the Temple.  The Zionist movement began the return starting in 1897 with the creation of a modern Jewish state an expressed goal.  Palestine, part of the Arab world, but in a region that already had a Jewish and Greek population, was the old Israel, territory wise.  Its population was also not uniformly Islamic, having an Arab Christian population, which it still does, and which is hated by Hamas along with the Jewish Israeli population.  The Jewish population of the country doesn't necessarily get along that well with the Christian population either.  The Palestinian identity itself is hard to define, as the region was so mixed up to the point of Israeli independence.  The term apparently wasn't used in modern times, ironically, until 1898, although some argue that Palestinian nationalism was around as early as an 1834 rebellion against Egypt.  Like other regions of the coast Middle East during the Ottoman period, the region was inhabited by nomadic Bedouins, still not identified as Palestinians, and then more urban and agricultural people, something true of Lebanon and Syria as well.

For this reason It's occasionally suggested that the Palestinians are not a real people at all, and to some slight extent, and it would be slight, that would have been almost sort of true at one time.  Having said that, the people who inhabit Lebanon historically are a different ethnicity.  So the Palestinians are a real people, or came to be, and certainly are now.

Palestine, like the entire Middle East, east of Egypt, was an Ottoman possession prior to World War One. For that matter, things west of Palestine technically were as well, although the oddities of colonialism and international politics meant that the British controlled Egypt and the Ottomans really controlled nothing, at that point, further east.  World War One brought Palestine under British rule, as a League of Nation's mandate, and brought Syria and Lebanon under French rule the same way.  Jordan came to be administered by the British as well, through the Hashemite ruling family, as did Iraq.

Allenby entering Jerusalem.

Palestine always proved to be problematic for the British and between the wars there was increasing tension between its Jewish and Arab populations, in part brought about by the fact that the British had made promises in the Balfour Agreement which supported, more or less, the concept of Palestine becoming the home for a future Jewish state.

At the time of Balfour's declaration, the Jewish population, even with two decades if immigration, was pretty small and the declaration wasn't really very specific.  From a British prospective, they were really dealing with a sparsely populated land. At the same time, however, they made promises to Arabs through their leaders to support outright Arab independence in the Middle East.  The two sets of promises were not necessarily irrconcilable, but they weren't necessary easy to deal with on the ground.

The additional problem really was that the land was not the United Kingdom's to give and indeed, in 1917, when made, it was still an Ottoman possession.

Between World War One and World War Two the British had to live with this, which wasn't easy.

By the 1930s Palestinian populations were getting seriously agitated with the direction in which things seemed to be going.  In 1936 this lead to a revolt against the British in which the Palestinians demanded independence and an end to open ended Jewish immigration.  To an extent, because of the involvement of the local populations, this may be regarded as the first Arab Isreali War, or perhaps a proto war, a sign of things to come.  Interestingly, Bernard Law Montgomery had a signficant role in putting it down.

Perhaps because of this, during World War Two, while the British did have armed Arab formations, they were reluctant to really use them.  Also during World War Two, the Grand Mufti of Jersusalem came down on the side of the Germans.  The nature of the conflict as an ethnic one was clearly drawn.

World War Two created the drive towards an independent Jewish Israel as an unstoppable one, with refugees flooding ino the coutnry. The British saw the handwriting on the wall and looked for a way out of the region, which they succeeded in doing in 1948.  Before that, an attempt at imposing a sort of two state solution was made.

Israel delcared independence in 1948 and the Arabs opposed it. In spite of an advantage of arms on part of the Arab armies, and in spite of having established military units of some standing, and in the case of the Arab Legion, partial European leadership, Israel won the war.  The war had huge demographic consequences as 700,000 or more Palestinians became refugees and were later unable to return to the lands they'd abandoned or been forced out of. That's the root of the Palestinian discontent today.

The ultimate cause of Palestinian dispersal is mixed, some of it being due to fear, some of it being due to force, and some of it being Israel preventing their return by operation of law.  I'm not claiming it was just.  But an added factor to it was that the neighboring Arab states did not accommodate a permanent resettlement of the displaced, hoping instead to see Israel defeated in a series of subsequent wars. By the early 1960s the population was radicalizing and in 1964 the Palestinian Liberation Organization formed.  The PLO ended up going to war with one of its host nations, Jordan, in 1970 in a war which looked as if the PLO might overthrow the Hashemite kingdom and claim it for its own. Jordan prevailed in the Black September war and the PLO relocated to troubled Lebanon.  In 1982, it was driven out of that country, which had been created in the first place as a separate political entity for Christian Syrians, and it relocated to Tunis.  Ultimately the PLO came around to the political solution that's in place to day, with the Palestinian authority being a quasi independent Palestinian satellite territory, of which Gaza is part.

After the War of Independence.

What was never foreseen is that Hamas, which is more radical than the PLO and its political expression Fatah, would become the dominant political entity in the Palestinian parliament.  It is.  Backed by money brought in from the outside, and notably Iran, it thrives on the fantasy of driving the Jews out of what had been Palestine.

Israel has been independent for seventy-five years now.  Almost everyone who fought for or against its independence is now dead.  The youngest displaced Palestinians are 75 years old.  The land that they were displaced from has been in other hands for 75 years.  The legacy of this however goes on and on with both sides focusing on a narrow aspect of the history.  Israelis, and the country's supporters around the world, imagine an early Israeli history like that glamorized by Leon Uris which ignored the realities of Palestinian displacement. Palestinians remain bitter about being displaced, a bitterness which is aided by their untenable situation in some parts of the Palestinian Authority but fail to appreciate that they made a bad bargain in 1948 by insisting on taking all of the country. Part of that bad bargain is that there is no reason to believe that had the Arabs won in 1948, the result would have been murderous and certainly would have resulted in the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine, just as Europeans were expelled from Algeria (and their Berber allies murdered) and the Europeans from Libya. For much of the post 1948 period, and for Hams to this day, Arab goals have been been to expel the Jewish population rather than to live with it, although over time, Egypt and Jordan have relented. Hamas also fails to appreciate that they're as boxed in by the Arab neighbors who claim to support them as they are by Israel.

Impacting the entire matter, both sides, now 75 years into this, rely upon economic aid from the outside.  Israel, while often gaining the admiration of Americans for such things as "making the desert bloom" has consistenly relied on US aid from its independence, something that frankly does not make a great deal of sense in an era when US ecnomic fortunes have declined and there is no good reason why a capable foeign nation of this vintage is receiving US aid.  Ireland, for instance, was simply independent when it became independent.  Included in the aid is military aid, even though Israel is itself an arms manufacuturer.  The close economic link to the US makes the US a participant in the Middle East in a way that it would not otherwise be, which in turn has an impact on domestic politics.

Hamas depends entirely on aid from donors and regional states, with Iran being a signficant one.  Oddly enough, the relocation of Palestinians to the US is beginning to also have an impact on domestic U.S. politics.

Seventy-five years is not a long time in historical terms, but the reality of this is that Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization that is fighting for a fantasy against living people who are innocent of any wrongdoing, for the most part, against the Palestinians.  The murderous fantasy is helping to keep a real solution, if there is one, from occurring.  No sane people would enter into a bargain with a group whose goals are essentially genocidal. Also helping to prevent it from occurring is the fact that the Arabs are a group of people, not one people, and the other Arab nations really don't want the Palestinians on their land.  Egypt is not going to open up the border with Gaza and let them in. Jordan was happy to take the West Bank early on, but it's not clamoring for it back now.  Israel, by having the Palestinians within some sort of border, neatly keeps them from being within other Arab borders.

People have talked about a two-state solution for a long time, but no such solution can come about when one party will not think of it.  Hamas won't, and now surely Israel will not either.

So now what?

That's hard to say, but what seems certain is that Israel will go into Gaza and will be unwilling to let the enclave repeat this recent murderous history.  Hamas will cause the Palestinians to suffer for holding on to a pipe dream and allowing murder to be perpetrated in their name.  The Palestinians will be seemingly unable to grasp this and howl in rage and despair, rather than taking the example of other 20th Century displaced persons, such as the Germans and Poles, and build new lives in their new situation.  Of course, unlike the Germans and the Poles, there isn't much for them to build with, but by the same token, there was never much of a Palestine in the first place.  Other Arab nations that import labor, such as Saudi Arabia, are unlikely for their part to take in the Palestinian displaced population, even though they share, albeit more remotely than we might suppose, an ethnicity.

Thursday, July 22, 1943. Palermo falls to the Seventh Army. Greeks riot over Macedonia, US landings at Munda Point.

Patton's Seventh Army entered Palermo to an enormous celebration by the residents of the ancient city.  Two captured Italian generals, in turn, claimed to be happy about the event because "the Sicilians were not human beings but animals" ("i Siciliani non erano esseri umani ma animali").

Seventh Army staff aboard SS Monrovia, en route to Sicily, June/July 1943.

The Italian fascist government had held anti-Sicilian views due to Sicily's long peculiar history.  

The island has been inhabited since ancient times and was a destination for Italic and Phoenician colonists as far back as 1200 BC, who displaced the already existing Sicilian population.  Greek colonization commenced around 750 BC.  In antiquity, it was contested by the Greeks and Carthaginians, both of whom conquered it at different times.  The Romans conquered it and displaced the Carthaginians and declared that the island should be latinized, although its culture remained, at the time, Greek.  With the fall of the Roman Empire, it fell to invading Germanic tribes, with the Vandals taking Palermo in 440.  The Byzantine Empire then retook it, as the Eastern Roman Empire, and ruled it from the 550s to the 960s, during which time the Arabs began to attempt to take it.  From the 820s through the 960s, it slowly fell to Muslim invaders.

The Normans arrived starting in 1038, around thirty years prior to their invasion of England, and began to take it from the Arabs.  They formed a Norman kingdom that lasted until 1198, becoming part of the typical drama of European kingdoms at the time.  The Normans imported European settlers to the island, which went from being 1/3d Greek speaking and 2/3s Arabic speaking to being latinized once again.  It went back and forth to varying European households until 1860, when the Italians conquered it.  It became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

During the fascist period the island was subject to unwelcome attention in part because Italians have never really regarded Sicilians as Italians, given their multi-ethnic heritage, and part because the strong local character of the island was unwelcome. Also, unwelcome was the fairly strong local Communist Party and the Sicilian Mafia. The fascist nearly crushed the Mafia during their period in power.

A general strike was called in Athens over Bulgarian intentions to annex Macedonia, which resulted in a massive protest in the city over the same thing.

The protests were successful in that they postponed the Bulgarian plans to the point that they were never carried out.

The SS executed all of the remaining 2,500 inmates of the Tarnopol concentration camp.

US infantry during the battle.

The Battle of Munda Point began on New Georgia.  The object was the points' airfield, in what would become a hard fought campaign.

The U.S. Navy raided Kiska.