Our accidental president, Donald Trump, just cannot do enough nice things for his best buddy, Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. After transferring the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, he recognizes the Golan Heights as “Israeli territory,” territory which the Israelis “liberated” from Syria during the Six Days War in 1967.
This move was immediately pointed out by a pundit that The Donald was being a wee bit hypocritical because it was American foreign policy to denounce Russia’s annexation of the Crimea (under less than martial circumstances) and to recognize it as still Ukrainian territory. Apparently, our “friends” and “allies” in Southwest Asia can do no wrong; and, because Israel has the backing of the world’s A-#1 “superpower,” no one can gainsay it, officially.
Seizing territory has been a favorite pastime for nation-states all throughout history. Each incident has had its unique motivation for acquisition, living space, spoils of war, and treaty rights being chief among the reasons, but all boil down to one great driving force. Territoriality is, and has been, and ever will be, a guy thing. It is the collective counterpoint of testosterone-driven behavior of an individual human male. To seize territory is equivalent to scoring during the sex act; failure to seize territory or losing territory is equivalent to impotence or castration (respectively). How many female heads of state do you know, dear reader, who have been conquerors? Not many, I can tell you.
The creation of the state of Israel is one such land grab in recent history. Occidental Jews, a.k.a. Ashkenazim, were scattered throughout Europe and suffered great persecution because they were perceived as an alien people. Their leaders founded the Zionist movement in the 19th Century and planted the idea that, because they were Jews, they were entitled to the ancient homeland of the Jews, i.e. Palestine. With the connivance of the Western powers, they undertook a mass migration, pushed the indigenous population aside, and created a homeland of their own. The Ashkenazim still rule the roost, and the Palestinians are second-class citizens in their own land.
The trouble here is that the Ashkenazim are only religious Jews, not ethnic Jews. Not one of them sprang from the seed of Father Abraham. That they did has been one of the Great Lies of history. In reality, the Ashkenazim descended from the ancient Khazars, who lived west of the Caspian Sea and who in the Eighth Century converted en masse to Judaism in order to save themselves from the tender mercies of Christian and Muslim so-called missionaries. Thus, their claim to be a Semitic people is a part of the Great Lie, and they use this claim to stifle any criticism of their abominable behavior. They, the once persecuted, have become the persecutors.
The greatest land grab of all time, however, involved the whole of the North American continent. For thousands of years, the indigenous population (who were descended from migrants crossing the Bering ice bridge from eastern Siberia) lived in relative peace and prosperity as a polyglot of hunter-gatherer societies. During the 16th Century (European reckoning), they encountered light-skinned visitors, mostly explorers, missionaries, and fur trappers, from faraway places. They took these visitations in stride so long as the visitors did not impose upon their hosts.
In the early 17th Century, a new breed of “palefaces” arrived. Having heard about a vast land sparsely populated, these newcomers came to create permanent settlements. For the indigenous, it was a different kettle of fish, and they became divided into two factions. One faction, which I will call the “Hello” faction, welcomed the newcomers, showed them every hospitality, and even assisted them in establishing their settlements. The other faction, which I will call the “Hell, No” faction, resented this intrusion upon their tranquility and made war on the intruders. What both factions failed to realize until it was too late, was that these few hundred “palefaces” were the vanguard of an army, hundreds of thousands strong, of land-hungry immigrants. Drabs and dribbles morphed into a cascade.
The Europeans regarded Native Americans as savages, because: (1) They weren’t farmers (a civilized occupation), (2) They had no concept of private property (trespassing was a major crime), and (3), Most importantly, they didn’t worship the Christian god (a venal sin). And so, the so-called savages were pushed aside, exposed to diseases for which they had no immunity, relegated to concentration camps, a.k.a. reservations, forced to sign away their land, stripped of their cultures and languages, and murdered if they resisted, all in the name of civilization.
You see, dear reader, that territoriality comes in many forms. But it has only one inevitable outcome: The winners boast about how the land they stole is their country (and always has been!); and the losers are relegated to the dustbin of history.
Just a thought.