Watch this 5-minute video-clip below to get a quick summary of one version of the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict … post the horrific October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas in Palestine. It is the Israeli sanitised version.
For someone who has no depth of knowledge of History, this video-clip truly serves its purpose. It makes History seem so uncomplicated, linear and so “black-and-white” .
Indeed, in the vast world of half-truths and half-deception which we know is the world of social-media, a video-clip like this one if virally shared amongst a billion people on the planet could soon become standard historic text and historical understanding. That’s the immense power of social media and equally so is the power of propaganda that is soon no doubt going to get unleashed by both adversaries in the modern-day Arab-Israeli conflict.
The video presents a very sanitised version of history as constructed by Israeli propaganda. Ask the Arabs and Palestinians and they’ll have an entirely different version of history constructed on the lines of their own propaganda. Neither side however will seek to answer the real tough or substantive questions of History. If they did so, that would be inconvenient to not only either parties but also terribly embarrassing to their respective allies, patrons, sponsors and financial underwriters.
A few of the real tough questions that remain unanswered are the following:
1. After the end of the World War I and II , who carved out a piece of land for the Jews and called it Israel ? And why ?
2. Why was the vast majority of Jewry across Europe and Russia driven out by Christian Europe and coerced into all going and herding themselves into — they were rather corralled into — a tiny ghetto-state right in the middle of Arab desert lands?
3. How did Christian European countries that were unwilling to accommodate their own respective Jewish populations within their boundaries, those that had lived for centuries inside their own societies in fact, expel them from their lands and from their midst?
4. What calculations did Christian Europe make while expecting the Arabs to accommodate the exodus of expelled Jews who — post the two great World Wars — were beginning to stream into Arab lands and settle themselves amidst Arab society ? What made Europe think that Jewish populations so unwelcome on its soil would be welcome however on Arab soil ?
The above are some of the critical questions that this propaganda video-clip conveniently skirts. It papers over them by glibly asserting that Israel did offer land to the Arabs in 4 international and good-faith Agreements in the last but all of which were repeatedly rejected by the intractable, implacable, unreasonable and cantankerous Arabs.
Little light does the video-clip anchor shed upon the fact the land into which the Jewish exodus poured into once belonged to the Arabs in the first place. The military might of Christian West it was that took large slices away of that very same land which in history had been wholly Arab — at least ever since it became pan-Islamic after Prophet Mohammed and then during the reign of the great Caliphates — and gave it the name Israel from which arose the Jewish State.
Tell me how would Mr.A react if one’s land was taken away by brute force and given to Mr. B who then offers much smaller parts, parcels and bits of it back to Mr. A in a pretentious show of left-handed neighbourliness ?! And furthermore, to add insult to the wound thereafter, Mr. B also starts clawing back slowly even those little parcels of land conceded to Mr. A , claiming them to be all rightful “Jewish settlements”!
The true history of the Arab-Israel conflict lies buried somewhere deep under the debris of a thousand bomb-attacks on each others’ cities, rocket-rains and artillery barrage, cold-blooded assassinations, political chaos and world superpowers’ intrigue and machinations. Nobody can unravel it. But even if it were possible in a hundred years from now for some dogged historian to dig through such terribly messy rubble and bloody debris of this conflict to get to the bottom of the Truth of the matter, he or she would still be unable to sift the historical grain from the propaganda chaff.
Sudarshan Madabushi