I really value your insight on things. I don't understand then, I thought Saudi Arabia said something in support of the attack. I was surprised as I thought they were working on a peace deal with Isreal.
I assure you the leadership of Saudi Arabia is both disgusted by this event and angry that it and Israel's inevitable response will set back normalization efforts for some time to come. Like here in the US or Canada, there are radical elements that view every event differently. In the Gulf region those radicals tend to be religious fanatics who will support any action against Israel.
It is worth noting that the majority of Arab countries in the region have merely asked both sides to exercise "restraint," and offered a bit of lip service to the rights of the Palestinian people. An interesting exception is Qatar which has placed blame solely on Israel. Qatar, however, is in the interesting position of having the US and Iran as its primary allies. It shares an giant gas field with Iran, hosts the largest US military headquarters in the Middle East, and has a centuries long, and mutually felt, hatred of the Arabs that are today Saudi Arabia.
The Gulf region is an interesting neighborhood.
Agree with you. You obviously have good memory and knowledge.
The Canaanites also intermarried with the Jews. The point is, there is no race known as Canaanites today that would have a claim on Israel prior to the Jews.
Phoenicians were definitely the sea peoples of the eastern Mediterranean that settled Carthage.
The Phoenicians and Philistines were both sea peoples. Were the Phoenicians and/or the Philistines the "Sea Peoples" of antiquity that caused so much destruction through Egypt and the Mediterranean islands, there is pretty good evidence that they were or were at least part of a Minoan confederation of sea people. Over time new information becomes unearthed that lead to new and improved theories.
Forty years ago it was a general consensus that the Philistines were the southern tribes of the Phoenicians. At worst the Philistines were part of a confederation of sea people that included the Phoenicians and probably included a common language and heritage.
dailyhistory.org
Perhaps the two most interesting and possibly the most historically important of the Sea Peoples tribes were the Danuna and Peleset. Most modern scholars believe that both the Danuana and the Peleset contributed heavily to the historical books of the Old Testament and the ancient Kingdom of Israel, but they were on different sides of the struggle. The Danuna probably originated in the Anatolian region of Cilicia and then settled in the Levant and became, or integrated with, the biblical tribe of Dan once the invasions had ended. [20] The Pelest tribe is now almost unanimously associated with the biblical Philistines, with their ultimate origins still being somewhat of a mystery, although they are believed to have also been in Anatolia before arriving in the Levant.
Dan is inland from Tyre in this map. Tyre was a southern Phoenician city.
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The Phoenicians represented a confederation of maritime traders rather than a defined country.
www.metmuseum.org
The ultimate collapse of Egyptian power in the region occurred about 1175 B.C. at the hands of the Sea Peoples, of whom the best known are the Philistines.
Philistine, one of a people of Aegean origin who settled on the southern coast of Palestine in the 12th century BCE, about the time of the arrival of the Israelites. According to biblical tradition, the Philistines came from Caphtor (possibly Crete, although there is no archaeological evidence...
www.britannica.com
Philistine, one of a people of Aegean origin who settled on the southern coast of Palestine ........as one of the Sea Peoples that invaded Egypt about 1190 BCE
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You may have heard of the Philistines or Sea Peoples from the Bible. Get to know more about these ancient peoples with this historical overview.
www.learnreligions.com
Egyptian records from the 12th-13th centuries B.C. mention the Philistines in connection with the Sea Peoples. Due to their similar maritime history, their association with each other is strong. The Sea Peoples were a confederacy of naval raiders who were assumed to have moved in the eastern Mediterranean areas during the Bronze Age. It has been theorized that the Sea Peoples were originally Etruscan, Italian, Mycenaen or Minoan. As a group, they primarily focused their efforts on attacking Egypt during 1200-900 BCE.
Phoenician colonies. Map includes Philistia.
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One does not have to go nearly that far back to find the cause of the current Palestinian diaspora. The Zionist movement to create a state in historic Israel began in the 1880's. Jews had been suffering from periodic pogroms across Eastern Europe for centuries, The Zionist movement gave hope for an eventual homeland.
The method was quite simple. Jews and Jewish groups bought land throughout the area that would become the state of Israel. By 1918, there were already nearly 60 settlements with surrounding agricultural land. It is worth noting the area was under Turkish control which made the grave error of siding with Imperial Germany during WWI. The region passed to British control at the end of the war. There was no Palestinian State.
Between the end of the first World War and the end of the second, Jewish land purchases and immigration gradually increased. At the same time traditional Arab authorities in the region were growing alarmed at the increasing Jewish presence. Some violence erupted, and the UK beginning in the thirties tried, largely unsuccessfully, to limit further Jewish immigration and land purchases.
The land that was purchased was often owned by wealthy absent Arab land owners. The ground was typically worked by tenant farmers, many of whom were displaced by immigrating Jewish families. Had WWII and the Holocaust not occurred, it is quite likely a different construct would have appeared as a Jewish homeland. But it did.
Before the Holocaust, a majority of Jews likely opposed a political structure like a Jewish State. After the war, the Zionist cause became an irresistible goal, and surviving European Jews, along with threatened Jewish communities in North Africa and Yemen began to flow into the region. Land sales accelerated dramatically as did opposition.
Much of the Arab resistance was fueled by the Mufti of Jerusalem who had supported Nazi Germany. He shifted the anti-Zionist movement from a political one to a religious one. Anyone who cooperated with the Jewish settlers was labeled an infidel. This religious element fueled the Arab Revolt of 1936-39. It was a revolt that also created the first real refugees leaving the areas of Jewish settlement.
Thanks largely to the guilt of the West following the WWII and the Holocaust, the hundreds of square kilometers already legally acquired, and the flood of survivors eager to leave Europe, the Zionist movement for the first time found broad support for the creation of an actual nation. The UN proposed a two-state solution - one Jewish and one Arab. It is worth remembering that Great Britain had been busy carving out new Arab "nations" throughout the Levant following the First World War. The US was the first the recognize the state of Israel on 14 May of 1948.
Simultaneously, a number of Arab States decided to eradicate the new nation. On 15 May forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq entered Israel. Nearly 700,000 Palestinians fled the fighting, abandoning farms and property assuming they would return when the Arab armies gained control of the region. Unexpectedly, the people now known as Israelis fought the Arab armies to a stand still. The end of the war resulted the existence if not acceptance of the Israeli State with boundaries similar to those proposed by the UN including about half the land the UN had proposed for a new Arab State.
The Arab states seized the remainder of the proposed Palestinian area with Gaza under Egyptian control and East Jerusalem and the West Bank under Jordanian control. That , of course would change again with ensuing Israeli Arab warfare.
The Arabs who did not flee became Israeli citizens. Today they make up approximately 20% of the population or a little over 2 million people.
The Palestinian refugee problem has no simple villain. What is clear though, is that every player had a share in what the Palestinians call the "catastrophe." Many of them were Arabs and the Palestinians themselves.
