Quick Recap

Issue 020

So, the U.S. bombed Iran, which had attacked Israel, because Israel bombed Iran first—because Iran’s growing power is making everyone nervous, and it was arming militias fighting Israel. Militias designated as terrorist organizations by Israel and its Western allies, like Hamas, founded in 1987 during the First Intifada as a response to Israeli occupation (and which, weirdly, had benefited from Israeli support in its early days); and Hezbollah, formed in 1982 to resist Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, a country already knee-deep in a civil war that began in 1975 and included its own share of clashes with Palestinians. Palestinians who fled to Lebanon or were expelled during and after the 1948 Nakba, when over 700,000 people were displaced to make way for a new state, Israel, founded by Jewish immigrants—some religious, others secular nationalists—all claiming a historic right to the land. Some Jewish immigrants pointed to a biblical deed; others to centuries of persecution and a need for safety—especially after generations of antisemitism across Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, which was carried out by the Nazis during World War II. That trauma, and the guilt it left behind, helped secure near-unconditional European support for Israel and its actions in the decades that followed—partly out of remorse, partly out of strategic and economic interest. In any case, few of Israel’s founders were born there. Most came in waves from Europe and the Arab world, backed by American Jewish fundraising, Soviet-supplied weapons via Czechoslovakia, and a British Empire quietly exiting stage left after its mandate over Palestine. That mandate had followed Britain’s conquest of the land from the Ottomans during World War I—who themselves had ruled it for 400 years, after taking it from the Mamluks in 1517, who took it from the Crusaders in 1291, who took it from the Fatimids in 1099, who took it from the Abbasids in 969, who inherited it from the Umayyads, who inherited it from the Rashidun Caliphate after the Muslim conquest of 636, which took it from the Byzantines, who inherited it from the Romans, who annexed it in 63 BCE from the Hasmoneans, who won it from the Seleucids, who got it from Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, who took it from the Achaemenid Persians, who took it from the Neo-Babylonians in 539 BCE, who took it from the Neo-Assyrians, who had overrun the Israelite and Canaanite kingdoms that came before them—kingdoms built atop lands once ruled by the Pharaohs during their New Kingdom between 1550 and 1200 BCE, who had taken it from a patchwork of Amorite, Hittite, Hurrian, and Mitanni influences in the Late Bronze Age, who had emerged from the collapse of early Canaanite city-states in the Middle Bronze Age, which rose after the fall of the first urban settlements in the Early Bronze Age—places like Jericho, already standing by 3000 BCE, when someone looked at the land, built a wall, and said, “This is mine now”.