Black Man Spy Israel/Palestine Conflict History Part II - Malcolm Nance

[Rhiannon12866]

April 21, 2024.

[Rhiannon12866]

1. Malcolm Nance Explains the History of Israeli-Hamas Conflict Part 1 - Malcolm Nance - (For those who missed Part 1)

March 24, 2024.

[wnylib]

2. Excellent background on the history and politics

of the Israel and Palestine region. Should be seen by everyone who is concerned with the current situation and war to understand what is happening today.

[Rhiannon12866]

3. I sure agree! I posted his Part 1 a month ago, so looked frequently for his followup - and wasn't disappointed!

Malcolm Nance is always excellent, wish he'd weigh in more often!

[wnylib]

4. I was already famiar with the history that Nance laid out.

He did a great job of putting it together in every day language.

I started reading about Israel and the Holocaust in my early teens. I was 11 years old when Eichmann's trial was televised. My widower grandfather's significant other for many years was a Jewish woman whose parents had left Poland for the US before the Holocaust. She had no extended family. It was from her that I learned about Hannukah and the Maccabean revolt during a family Christmas gathering. She had been raised as a Conservative Jew, but became secular as an adult.

On the other side of my family, my grandparents were immigrants as very young children from Germany. They came to the US in the late 1800s, long before Nazi Germany. I wanted to know what had turned Germans into such monsters, so different from the German relatives that I knew.

That led to curiosity about the history of the Jewish homeland throughout the millennia. When I was 18, I read James Michener's book, Source, over 1000 pages in paperback. It uses the setting of an archaeological site in modern Israel to cover the history of the land going back a few thousand years BCE to the present. I learned a lot from that book about the continuous history of Jews in the land under several different rulers, from the Persians, Greeks, and Romans to the Crusades, Muslim conquest, Ottomans, British, and independence.

In college, I took a History of Western Religions course that covered Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We had to do 3 research papers, one on each faith. For the paper on Judaism, I consulted the local synagogue for accurate information. The rabbi allowed me to use his office library. I got notes on the info that I needed but got so absorbed in the materials available that I read beyond what I needed for my paper. (I got an A.)

I don't expect everyone to have delved into that history as much as I have, but I am surprised at how little most people know considering how important the region is for 3 world religions and for international geopolitics today.

[Rhiannon12866]

5. Wow! Kudos to you for your depth of knowledge - which I certainly can't claim, but I always learn from Malcolm Nance

And when I first joined DU, I spent a lot of the I/P Forum - since I too was hoping for a two-state solution - I'm a decades-long admirer of President Carter and I know how hard he worked to achieve peace in that part of the world.

My parents were world travelers and visited Israel - as well as Egypt and Jordan, and they had numerous Jewish friends, as I did. My best friend in both high school and college were Jewish and I was brought up in the Church, but none of us were particularly religious, though my college friend had an older brother who was studying to be a rabbi and had also visited Israel with her cousin - who I also got to know - sent by their grandparents who I also met. The only time I remember religion coming up was when she lit her menorah when the power went out during exam week so we could see to study.

But what's going on there now is an unprecedented tragedy no matter what your background is. I hope that you continue to weigh in - and that Malcolm Nance records a part 3 for both of us.

[wnylib]

6. I hated history when I was in junior and senior high

because of the way it was taught, mostly about wars and memorizing dates.

I didn't go to college until a couple decades after high school. Between high school and college, I discovered that I did like history when it was approached by a more human interest and anthropological angle. Michener's book was fiction, but based on historical and archaeological facts. He was a historian before he started writing fiction.

I tend to read up on things quite a bit that catch my interest. When trying to track down a family story about how and why my German great-grandfather fled the German Empire with his wife and children as a political refugee, I read about the history of Germany from that period. But, since history is always intertwined with events even earlier than the period of interest, I ended up going back to the early times of Germanic tribes attacking Rome and then moved on up to modern times.

Same when I discovered that one side of one grandparent's family traced back to colonial Puritans, and from there to the British Plantagenets. I ended up learning more about British, colonial American, and early American history than I ever learned in high school or college.

I had a very multicultural childhood, within my family (Native and European American), in our neighborhood, and in people that I met through my father's work at a plant that employed a number of African Americans. It has always felt natural to me to have friends from various backgrounds.

When I got married, my fiance was Irish Catholic and his best friend, who was French Catholic, was dating a Jewish girl. I was Lutheran. To sidestep the religions, we went to a Justice of the Peace so that the Catholic and Jewish couple could be our witnesses. Through her, I met several of her Jewish friends.

In my early 20s, I did office work for a Muslim Indian couple who had their own business. The wife also taught comparative religion at a local college, so we often got into discussions about Islam and the cultures of India. She brought in some of her home made Indian snacks to munch on.

My college advisor was Jewish and friends with a Turkish Muslim professor. Sometimes the 3 of us had good comparative discussions on religion and culture.

Not surprisingly, I minored in anthropology.

[Rhiannon12866]

7. Wow! Sounds like you delved into more history than most people and a lot of us would be better off postponing college

I had no clue in my teens what I wanted to do, but college was expected, especially for me since I was the eldest and my Dad always pushed me. And my paternal grandmother was a teacher so she was very involved in my life, too. She was widowed at 40, but made sure that all her four children went to college. And it sounds like you used your time well.

And I grew up in a fairly diverse community, black classmates and teachers, many were Jewish and my best friend back then had a very nice mother who came from Japan. If anyone had told me in the early grades that we were black and white, I would have been confused since every single one of us looked different, it's not like we were chess pieces - and nobody brought up our "differences" at the time - Saratoga Springs.

I liked history a lot, my weak subject was math. My 9th grade Social Studies made sure we knew who our senators were and we learned quite a bit about the Civil Rights Movement. When I first saw the name Viola Liuzzo here, I knew exactly who she was. 10th grade was World History, one of my best subjects, and 11th grade was American history which was fun. The other girls and I would would do these historical "skits," in one I was John Hancock and in another I was President Garfield. I wanted to be the one who was shot, so I gave my cap gun to my friend who was the supposed "assassin," but she couldn't make it work, so after class I showed her how it worked and the poor teacher, who was expecting, almost keeled over.

And I was a psych major, senior year we worked with a psychologist and we all had two "patients," mine were an agoraphobic woman and an institutionalized (Marcy State) boy - they both did pretty well. We even met B.F. Skinner who came to speak since he was a graduate, I spent my first year out of college working with a class of young disabled kids, who I loved, but instead of going on to school, I got a job writing the television listing for the newspapers - the West Coast, then the satellite guides, and my longest job there was writing descriptions for the networks.

Compared to you, sounds like I have a lot more reading to do. I know my father's side pretty well, Irish great grandparents from his Dad's side and my grandmother's aunt commissioned a book tracing her Dutch family from the 1600s. My mother's side is tougher since her parents immigrated from Poland and I'm trying to help my cousin trace that side of the family, and since I'm the eldest she thought I'd remember more, and now I wish I'd asked more questions. *sigh*

[wnylib]

8. Having a multicultural background when growing up is an asset, isn't it?

That's how I feel.

I was weaker in math, too. I could get an A in English, in a foreign language, and in social studies with very little effort. But, with math, I had to work harder and still ended up with a B as a final grade, even when I got a few A's in it during the school year. Never went beyond pre calc once I had the required math credits. I liked sciences, like biology and chemistry, but did not consider either one as a major (or minor) because of the amount of math skill necessary. So I chose a foreign language major with an anthropology minor.

[burrowowl]

9. Good history summary