printPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is alleged to have presented Obama with Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, which documents the American satirist’s “post Civil War tour” to Palestine.
The New York Times disagrees with Bibi’s deductions, drawn from Twain’s impressions. Nevertheless, it reports the following:
“Nine years ago, in a book of his own, A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations, Mr. Netanyahu cited some of the observations in Innocents Abroad, about how sparsely populated certain parts of the land were at the time of Twain’s visit, as proof of ‘what every civilized and educated person knew at the close of the nineteenth century: that the land was indeed largely empty.’ Mr. Netanyahu quoted several passages from Twain’s book to support his argument that, even decades after the American writer visited the Holy Land, ‘this wasteland of Palestine,’ with ‘its miniscule Arab presence, making use of virtually none of the available land for the people’s own meager needs, could hardly be considered a serious counter to the claim of millions of Jews the world over to a state of their own.'”
“Twain’s description of Jerusalem under Muslim rule” … was far from flattering:
Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently—the eternal “bucksheesh.” To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.
[SNIP]
Arabs trashed Palestine and never dried one swamp. Jews dried the swamps—died in droves of malaria doing so—planted orchards, started industries, and generally built the place into what it is today.
Past is prologue: Palestinians continue to punish the land.
So, what’s new under the sun?
Change a few names and you have the South African history of around roughly the same period. With that out of the way, Israel will always have the support of the Afrikaner (even though they turned their backs on us when we became unpopular).
[Israel didn’t “turn its back on SA”; it made all the right noises about apartheid, but continued to trade and collaborate with the Nats with the same vigor. Actions speak louder, … etc.]
Nothing is new under the sun.
All we need do is consider how many billions have been given to the PA for a long time, and how many Palestinians still live in “camps” in abject squalor. The important thing to them is assigning blame to Israel, all the while their own so-called leaders are squandering money for munitions to murder and maim and plan to return Palestine to the image Twain depicted. It’s the culture and the mentality that keeps them in the 6th century, that and the mental deficients they choose the lead them.
The Middle East started two wars with Israel, lost both times. When the armies left the land of Palestine in defeat, the nations decided to use it as a giant “No Man’s Land” to continue the war unofficially. Egypt (Nassar) created the PLO, Iran created Hamas and the one that starts with an H. in order to stage a type of fighting (Nicknamed the ‘war of the flea.)ie continuous harassment. Every time it looks like peace is possible, something happens to break it. I’m sure that there are many in Gaza, the West Bank, etc. that would love to have a homeland they could call their own, but until the nations supporting the militants are forced to stop their involvement, no peace is possible.
Apologies, I was wrong.
[No problem. I found out in writing my book that Israel, Likud and Labor, outwardly complied with showing revulsion each time SA was mentioned, but they never stopped collaboration–military, trade, etc. The pressure to boycott came from the US and Europe, of course.]