Jews reclaimed their historic homeland. Palestinians were there. It was their homeland, too.
Both plan on staying put.
The experience of Jews in Israel differs from the experience of Spanish conquistadors in what became Latin America and of British settlers in what became the USA, Canada, and Australia. Millions and Jews and Palestinians live together, but not in domestic tranquility.
College classmate Constance Hilliard earned a
Ph.D. from Harvard in African history and Semitic historiography. Her research interests moved toward historical genetics. She uses that lens to understand and comment on the long-festering conflict in Israel. Americans who grew up playing cowboys-and-Indians forget--or never knew--that it was diseases imported from Europe that so brutally won that battle. What disease didn't do, alcohol nearly finished. Israel has a different story. Hilliard suggests a genetic reason for that.
Guest Post by Constance Hilliard
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| Constance Hilliard |
Guest Post by Constance Hilliard
We Americans are optimistic people. We approach life as though everything has a solution. But the laws of nature rule over us whether we like it or not. In the political arena, we blind ourselves to painful truths with diplomacy, new initiatives, and hope, ad infinitum.I have profound sympathy for the plight of Israeli Jews and believe it or not, an equal measure of compassion for the situation in which Palestinians find themselves. As a historian, I fear that the most salient issue in this crisis will remain overlooked.
1980: Hilliard with Desmond Tutu
Let’s for just a moment, empty our minds of discursive thought (i.e. interpretations, judgments, analyses) about how to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. What we are left with is this: The virulence of European anti-Semitism led Zionists to seek refuge in their ancestral homeland. Otherwise, the notion of Israel would have been a lovely idea, but with insufficient backing from global powers. In seeking a solution they looked around the world and saw that the British had over the last several centuries gained control of North America, Australia, New Zealand, some of the richest farmland on the planet for free. The native or aboriginal populations were wiped out with contagious diseases.
1989: Hilliard with Angolan guerrilla leader Dr. Jonas Savimbi
The survivors were brought under control using alcohol. Because hunter-gatherers are not grain eaters, they lack the gene variants found in agricultural populations that smooth out the metabolism of grains, and eliminate the ethanol byproduct asymptotically. In short, alcohol was used as a drug to disempower the remaining indigenes. Let me be more specific, with an example. Most Japanese and Chinese carry the Aldehyde dehydrogenase gene variant. Alcohol makes them sick; so their rate of alcoholism is low. Most aboriginal populations carry variants on chromosomes 4p, 4q22, 17q21, 11q23, 11p15 and 22q11. Their bodies’ response to alcohol is craving and dependency. The western world has known about this biological vulnerability and used it in warfare for five centuries, even before the scientific basis was understood. And yet even today, the pretense remains that alcoholism in indigenous populations is a moral defect.
19th century European/American intellectuals mis-interpreted the reasons for the vulnerability of indigenous populations. All aboriginal groups lost their lands to conquest because as hunter-gatherers rather than farmers, they had no way to withstand early forms of biological warfare. But what if the Zionists miscalculated? We’re not talking here about morality. After all no one grumbles these days about the genocide that wiped out most and disempowered the rest of the American Indians. This “unpleasantness” did, after all, give these magnificently valuable lands to the Europeans for free, thus cementing the subsequent economic triumph of the West.
The Palestinians were poor and uneducated in the minds of the early Zionists. But alas, they were not aboriginal hunter-gatherers. In short, they were not going to die out as had occurred everywhere else on the planet, where more advanced societies gained control of aboriginal lands.I’m sure Israelis find a great deal of hypocrisy in anti-Zionist attitudes of Americans, since we are so clueless about our own history that we even have a holiday to celebrate the nice turkeys with which our first settlers were gifted by the nice natives.
The Arab-Israeli conflict does not have a solution. As repugnant as that mode of thinking may be, we may save ourselves enormous amounts of time, money and angst if we reflect on what that might mean.
8 comments:
I don’t believe that genetics necessarily dictates our destiny, but even if it did, that wouldn’t explain all the conflict in the Middle East. A new genetic study shows that many Arabs and Jews are closely related. More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years. This gives credence to the biblical story of Abraham and his two sons and raises the question, is all this animosity just an ongoing grudge match?
Whether the problem is nature, nurture or some combination, what we do know is that we can rise above it because many people have.
The solution for the Arab/Jew conflict is for both sides to rise above their religious and nationalistic identities and approach the issue as civilized humans. It seems though, that as long as their respective leaderships use the problem to advance their political agendas this is impossible.
The solution is tolerance and compassion and a recognizance of shared humanity.
Same as here.
Same as everywhere.
We have more future than history, yet we allow the past to govern the present moment rather than inform it.
Quite a few broad, sweeping generalizations in this post. That is big problem, in my book
The analogy that Constance Hilliard draws between European colonialism and the Zionist migration of Jews to Israel has a number of flaws.
There were no Europeans in the Americas before Columbus’ voyages. Even though many Jews ended up scattered across Europe and other places, Jews have nevertheless been a continuous presence in their ancestral homeland.
The British and other European colonizers were present in the Middle East for centuries before Zionism became a movement in the late 1800s. Any spread of European diseases to the Middle East would have happened well before Zionism commenced.
There is no evidence that alcohol played any particular role with the Arab population of the Middle East.
The Zionist movement never thought that the Arabs in the area that became Israel were going to “die out.“ What is true is that the area that became Israel was very sparsely populated before Zionists started arriving there. It was economic opportunities created by the arrival of the Zionists in the late 1800s that attracted an increasing Arab population to the area.
I wish the US would not get involved in the religious wars around the globe. We have enough trouble keeping religion out of government here.
I've always thought alcoholism was a form of addiction related to public health, not a moral issue. I doubt settlers knew there was a high-risk-of-dependency problem that was genetic based. I think in those days there were just not many morals or laws on the part of anyone.
All of us can judge, but I'm not sure any of us can empathize with either Palestinian or Israeli. Bring it home..... in a country the size of Lake county, Oregon there have been 7 major wars, 2 intifada uprisings, and numerous armed conflicts in the last 73 years. None of us has a clue, but each of us has an opinion, formed on a distant sideline.
As a European-American, I have no problem admitting what was done to American Indians. Overall, they were invaded and conquered. Their land was stolen from them. I will have to look up the estimated number that died as a result. The injustices continue to this day. Same deal in Israel: European invasion. I could care less what the Bible says. Invaders always have reasons for doing what they do to get what they want.
I find this piece bizarre. Aside from flaunting her knowledge of ethnic genetics, the author seems to have two points. One is that, because Western European settlers in the Americas decimated native American populations, we seem to have no standing to fault Zionists for stealing Palestinian lands. Oddly, she asserts that "no one grumbles these days about the genocide that wiped out most and disempowered the rest of the American Indians.." Far too belatedly, many of us here are acknowledging the treatment of Native Americans and some efforts at amends are being made. The other, if I understand her rightly, is that because the Palestinians can't be wiped out by diseases the Zionist settlers may have brought with them, there is no solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. She may be correct when she says at the start that "the laws of nature rule over us whether we like it or not," but what law of nature prevents humans from acting justly? Peter, I'm sure that among your Harvard classmates there are those who can reason better than Ms. Hilliard.
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