Everything you know is wrong

"Did you know that Indians can travel through time?  That they invented the wire recorder?"

Those statements may not be true outside the Firesign Theater universe (where it is possible to run for President on the platform "Not Insane"), but equally unlikely things may be.

Matt Gabriele directed me to a long article at Spiegel Online International on the Samaritans, then  and now.  The Samaritans are the heirs of the Kingdom of Israel which broke away from Judea after the death of Solomon, and which included 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel.  That kingdom was the big deal Israelite kingdom until it was defeated by the Assyrians, who deported much of the population ("the ten lost tribes of Israel").  At least, that's the commonly accepted story. This article references research that seems to indicate that up until about 150 BCE, the city of Samaria, or nearby Mount Gezirim, was still the big center of Israelite worship.

Working behind security fences, the archaeologist has been digging on the windswept summit of Mount Gerizim.

His findings, which have only been partially published, are a virtual sensation: As early as 2,500 years ago, the mountain was already crowned with a huge, dazzling shrine, surrounded by a 96 by 98-meter (315 by 321-foot) enclosure. The wall had six-chamber gates with colossal wooden doors.

At the time, the Temple of Jerusalem was, at most, but a simple structure.

Magen has discovered 400,000 bone remains from sacrificial animals. Inscriptions identify the site as the "House of the Lord." A silver ring is adorned with the tetragrammaton YHWH, which stands for Yahweh.

All of this means that a vast, rival place of worship stood only 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Jerusalem.

It is an astonishing discovery. A religious war was raging among the Israelites, and the nation was divided. The Jews had powerful cousins who were competing with them for religious leadership in the Holy Land. The dispute revolved around a central question: Which location deserved the honor of being the hearth and burnt offering site of God Almighty?

 Well, we will see.  But if it is so, it certainly qualifies as a case of "everything you know is wrong."

Then there is this:  early medieval historians have for a very long time considered the 7th century CE to be the bottom of a great post-Roman depression, a period of economic primitiveness, where among other things, coins were few and hardly qualified as money.

Well, Jonathan Jarrett reports on a paper by Michael Metcalf that reveals something quite astonishing to me (the more astonishing in that I used to keep up with this stuff:

For example: we can now identify nine hundred dies used in the striking of the surviving corpus of seventh-century thrymsas. There are various well-established means for multiplying these figures up towards an estimate of the whole coinage, which when applied here reasoned for three million plus coins total, on a multiplier of five thousand coins per total extrapolated dies, and more probably something like a million in circulation at once.⁷ Of the gold. If we use modern parishes as a guide to how many villages there were (and you see here what I meant by ‘adventurous’), we might then expect there to be 300-odd gold coins in any given village at once! Now, I am pretty dubious about this kind of arithmetic, as you will know, although even if you halve these figures and double the number of ‘villages’ (a thing that didn’t really exist in the seventh century but let’s just assume it means ‘district’ or ‘area’ and that’s fine⁸—and one point that came up in questions that I’d never considered is that one thing that must be missing from distribution maps of coin finds is settlements, at least where they have continued, because you can’t metal-detect in towns!) that is still quite a lot of gold to spread out. All the same, even if the actual numbers are rubbish, one point is still true: doing the same maths with the same multipliers for later Anglo-Saxon England nets you much much less. Unless there was something specifically weird about the way money was produced in one or other period (and there certainly was about the later period, given how widely and in what small quantities it might be minted, but that ought to exaggerate the later figures, not shrink them), England was more monetised in the seventh century than it was even in the eleventh.

And how is it that everything we knew was wrong?  Somebody invented the wire recorder, I mean, the metal detector.

Interesting times.

Image:  an early 7th century thrymsa or gold shilling.

One state in Israel/Palestine

Over at Juan Cole's Informed Comment site, the guest bloggers Yoav Peled and Horit Herman Peled argue that the two-state solution (two sovereign entities, Israel and Palestine) is now impossible.

What makes the two-state solution unachievable is the fact that since 1967 Israel has settled close to three quarters of a million Jews in the territories it captured from Jordan in 1967. About one-third of those are in the area Israel defined as Jerusalem and annexed in 1967, declaring it to be non-negotiable. Of the remaining five hundred thousand, the lowest estimate of the number that would have to be removed in order for a viable, territorially contiguous Palestinian state to be set up in the West Bank is one hundred thousand. This is a task that no Israeli government, committed as it may be to the two-state solution, would be able to carry out, politically. To this day no Israeli government has removed even one of the West Bank “outposts” that are illegal by Israeli law (all Jewish settlements in the occupied territories are illegal by international law), despite promises to the US and several decisions by Israel’s own High Court of Justice.

The declared purpose of the settlement drive in the West Bank (as in the other occupied territories) was to change demographic realities in order to make Israel’s withdrawal from those territories impossible. This purpose has been achieved. Not only are the settlers, their family members and their supporters an electoral power block that cannot be ignored, settlers and their supporters now make up a significant proportion of the command structure of Israel’s security forces, the same forces that would have to carry out a decision to remove the settlers.

To counter this argument, critics may point to the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza in 2005. That example, however, actually supports our argument. In order to remove 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza, an easily isolated region of no religious significance to Jews, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a military hero idolized by both the settlers and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had to deploy the entire man and woman power of all of Israel’s security forces. Moreover, the Gaza withdrawal was not done in agreement with the Palestinians, or in order to facilitate peace with them. It was done unilaterally, in order to make Israel’s control of Gaza more efficient. Judging by this example, removing 100,000 settlers from the West Bank, in order to enable the establishment of a Palestinian state, would be an impossible task.

Of course, dealing with the realities of a single state is not going to be exactly easy.

Israel's Security: Then and Now -- Tuesday March 1

From Dr. Robin Gendron:

This is just a reminder that on Tuesday, March 1st  the Nipissing Branch of the Canadian International Council will be holding a discussion of “Israel’s Security: Then and Now.”  Our guest, Dr. David Tal, will compare the threats to its security that Israel faced at its founding 60 years ago with the security situation that it faces in the contemporary Middle East where, unlike in the 1950s, more and more states in the region accept Israel's existence and maintain either peaceful or actual relations with it.  Militarily, the nature of the challenges facing Israel has changed too: conventional wars involving tanks and mass armies are less likely to occur than one involving missiles, air strikes, and attacks on civil population and centers.  Israel will have to find ways to deter and retaliate against non-state threats without using the kind of force it has used in the past.  

The event takes place on Tuesday March 1, starting at 7:00 pm in room F210 (the Fedeli Business Centre).     This event is free and open to the public, and everyone is welcome! Please tell your students in particular.   For more information about this event, please contact Robin Gendron at gendronrs@nipissingu.ca or 705-474-3450 ext 4395.

Man in the know?

Read this Aljazeera op-ed on The triviality of US Mideast policy, all the way to the end, and then note the author's nationality and professional background. No points for guessing he's an American. His old job, however...

A one-state solution for Israel/Palestine?

An opinion piece by Ali Abunimah on Al Jazeera's English website reports that is now Israeli settlers and right-wing parties that are considering a one state solution for Israel/Palestine. I strongly suggest you read the entire article, but I will include some excerpts:

With no progress toward a two-state solution despite decades of efforts, the only Zionist alternative on offer has been outright expulsion of the Palestinians - a programme long-championed by Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party, which has seen its support increase steadily.

Israel is at the point where it has to look in the mirror and even some cold, hard Likudniks like Arens apparently do not like what they see. Yisrael Beitenu's platform is "nonsensical," Arens told Haaretz and simply not "doable".

If Israel feels it is a pariah now, what would happen after another mass expulsion of Palestinians?

Lessons from South Africa

Given these realities, "The worst solution ... is apparently the right one: a binational state, full annexation, full citizenship" in the words of settler activist and former Netanyahu aide Uri Elitzur.

This awakening can be likened to what happened among South African whites in the 1980s. By that time it had become clear that the white minority government's effort to "solve" the problem of black disenfranchisement by creating nominally independent homelands - bantustans - had failed.

Pressure was mounting from internal resistance and the international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions. By the mid-1980s, whites overwhelmingly understood that the apartheid status quo was untenable and they began to consider "reform" proposals that fell very far short of the African National Congress' demands for a universal franchise - one-person, one-vote in a non-racial South Africa.

The reforms began with the 1984 introduction of a tricameral parliament with separate chambers for whites, coloureds and Indians (none for blacks), with whites retaining overall control.

Until almost the end of the apartheid system, polls showed the vast majority of whites rejected a universal franchise, but were prepared to concede some form of power-sharing with the black majority as long as whites retained a veto over key decisions.

The important point, as I have argued previously,is that one could not predict the final outcome of the negotiations that eventually brought about a fully democratic South Africa in 1994, based on what the white public and elites said they were prepared to accept.

Once Israeli Jews concede that Palestinians must have equal rights, they will not be able to unilaterally impose any system that maintains undue privilege.

A joint state should accommodate Israeli Jews' legitimate collective interests, but it would have to do so equally for everyone else.

...

That proposals for a single state are coming from the Israeli right should not be so surprising in light of experiences in comparable situations.

In South Africa, it was not the traditional white liberal critics of apartheid who oversaw the system's dismantling, but the National Party which had built apartheid in the first place. In Northern Ireland, it was not "moderate" unionists and nationalists like David Trimble and John Hume who finally made power-sharing under the 1998 Belfast Agreement function, but the long-time rejectionists of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, and the nationalist Sinn Fein, whose leaders had close ties the IRA.

The experiences in South Africa and Northern Ireland show that transforming the relationship between settler and native, master and slave, or "horse and rider," to one between equal citizens is a very difficult, uncertain and lengthy process.

There are many setbacks and detours along the way and success is not guaranteed. It requires much more than a new constitution; economic redistribution, restitution and restorative justice are essential and meet significant resistance.

But such a transformation is not, as many of the critics of a one-state solution in Palestine/Israel insist, "impossible." Indeed, hope now resides in the space between what is "very difficult" and what is considered "impossible".

The proposals from the Israeli right-wing, however inadequate and indeed offensive they seem in many respects, add a little bit to that hope. They suggest that even those whom Palestinians understandably consider their most implacable foes can stare into the abyss and decide there has to be a radically different way forward.

Image above: Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank as islands in the sea of Israel.

Image below: Israeli-controlled areas of the West Bank in red.

More on the high seas incident

The Israeli attack on the aid flotilla to Gaza remains the big story. The consequences of this action will roll on for a long time. The are some pieces that casts some light on the situation.

At Brian's Coffeehouse, Brian insists that the interpretation of events not get lost in irrelevant details:

In the wake of yesterday's assault on the Gaza aid flotilla, the most important tactic of Israel's defenders, including the American government, has been to focus on the details of the events which transpired aboard the Mavi Marmara in the early stages of the confrontation. The Israelis argue that their military was pursuing something like peaceful crowd control until they were attacked by activists aboard the ship, and pointing to the two seriously and eight lightly injured soldiers, insist they fired in self-defense.

The Israeli preference, in other words, is to have a discussion about rules of engagement. In attempting to focus the international discussion there, they are also implicitly asking their critics to somewhat carelessly accept the premise that the flotilla represented a force which required a military assault in international waters....

Despite half-baked claims to the contrary, this was not, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed today, "a violent force", and the Israelis have apparently found no weapons to trumpet before the cameras. Instead, they have found a bunch of humanitarian aid which they are allegedly transferring to Gaza themselves. I would love for someone to examine that situation, and determine how much of it was in violation of Israel's draconian blockade of the territory, and consequently how dangerous it can really be if Israel's now just passing it on.

For the real story here is not about a military confrontation at sea, but about an ongoing siege the consequences of which for the Gaza Strip have been well documented elsewhere. If Israel were just checking ships and convoys for weapons and then waving them on, this flotilla would not have existed. The violence yesterday was but an extension of the ongoing violence of siege which does not protect Israel, but makes Gaza into a giant internment camp in which conditions are becoming increasingly desperate. In this context, who did what to whom once the Israeli assault was in progress simply doesn't matter.

Yesterday I saw an American make the point that even Egypt is involved in the blockade of Gaza. As if he saw the same footage, Juan Cole illuminates the difficult position the Egyptian government finds itself in. This is a good introduction to the anomalous position that Palestinians hold in the Arab world:

Although Egypt is widely criticized for mainly keeping the Rafah crossing closed or open only for short periods, Cairo is forced into this arrangement by its peace treaty with Israel and its dependence on the US for $2 billion a year in various sorts of aid.

Were Egypt to defy Israel’s blockade for a long period of time or let in forbidden materials, the Israelis would almost certainly just bomb the entrance. Egypt’s government deeply dislikes having to remain silent in the face of Israeli provocations, as Khalid al-Shami pointed out in Tuesday’s al-Quds al-Arabi. But in fact Egypt could do nothing in the face of such an Israeli military action, being constrained by its treaty obligations and by its close alliance with the USA.

But keeping the border this open holds dangers for Egypt itself. Cairo fears that at some point Israeli foreign minister and leader of the far rightwing Yisrael Beitenu party Avigdor Lieberman will make good on his threats of ‘transferring’ the Palestinians. Egypt is determined that Israel will not resolve its Palestinian problem by expelling them to Egypt as refugees in the Sinai Peninsula. (Likely the Israeli shooting-fish-in-the-barrel war on Gaza in winter 2008-2009 was in part intended to provoke a panicked exodus of Palestinians into the Sinai, but Egyptian military forces prevented any such thing from occurring).

Egypt deeply dislikes the Hamas party/ militia and would not want to be in the position of allowing its influence to spread among bedouin and others in the Sinai region. Such Hamas influences are already blamed for terrorist bombings at Red Sea resorts earlier in this decade.

More to come, undoubtedly.

Image: the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, 2008?

On the high seas

The Israeli attack on the aid flotilla to Gaza has the potential to revolutionize the politics of the Middle East. This is such a big topic that I am tempted to leave it to the experts, advocates and agitators. But keeping in mind past and future students in my Islamic Civilization class, I have decided that I should reproduce here a few posts that touch on points I think are important, notably the relationship/alliance between officially secular Turkey and Israel, and the legality and consequences of the Israeli action.

Craig Murray, a former British diplomat, disagrees that the attack was piracy. The legal position, unless you strongly support the legality of the Israeli blockade of Gaza, is more complicated:

A word on the legal position, which is very plain. To attack a foreign flagged vessel in international waters is illegal. It is not piracy, as the Israeli vessels carried a military commission. It is rather an act of illegal warfare.

Because the incident took place on the high seas does not mean however that international law is the only applicable law. The Law of the Sea is quite plain that, when an incident takes place
on a ship on the high seas (outside anybody's territorial waters) the applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred. In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory.

There are therefore two clear legal possibilities.

Possibility one is that the Israeli commandos were acting on behalf of the government of Israel in killing the activists on the ships. In that case Israel is in a position of war with Turkey, and the act falls under international jurisdiction as a war crime.

Possibility two is that, if the killings were not authorised Israeli military action, they were acts of murder under Turkish jurisdiction. If Israel does not consider itself in a position of war with Turkey, then it must hand over the commandos involved for trial in Turkey under Turkish law.

In brief, if Israel and Turkey are not at war, then it is Turkish law which is applicable to what happened on the ship. It is for Turkey, not Israel, to carry out any inquiry or investigation into events and to initiate any prosecutions. Israel is obliged to hand over indicted personnel for prosecution.

Over at the US political news site Talkingpointsmemo.com is this comment on relations between Turkey and Israel:

Allies can make up after almost any coming to blows if they want to. But that's the key. This isn't the first blow up in Israel-Turkey relations. Turkish opposition to the Gaza War (Operation Cast Lead) has been at the center of the dispute going back to 2008. But even that doesn't really fully explain the decline in relations.

The Israelis, under the foreign ministry headed by the far-right Avigdor Lieberman, have on their side managed to repeatedly snub the Turks over recent months. Sometimes in response to deteriorating relations that both sides played a part in. But other cases seemed like gratuitous and self-destructive provocations by the Israelis. With the political vision of someone like Lieberman, who embodies the ugliest trends in Israeli politics, the alliance with Turkey isn't so much a bridge toward an opening to other Arab or Islamic countries but a distraction or an impediment.

On the other side of the equation though, it's not clear that the AKP government of Turkey, which is probably more accurate to call Islamic-rooted rather than 'Islamist', really wants the alliance with Israel in the first place -- quite apart from the Gaza War or the Flotilla incident. Their roots as a party and their diplomacy have all seemed directed at deepening ties with nearby Islamic countries who in most cases have either cool or downright hostile relations with Israel. And in that context the Turkey-Israel alliance, which has historically run very deep, seems like a liability.

More or less as an American VP said a while ago, this is a big deal. I'll pass on discussing the effects on US foreign and domestic politics; you will soon be able to find an infinity of commentary on those subjects.

Image: The USS Liberty, attacked on the high seas in 1967. A lot of people are bringing that incident up today. Look it up.

The (American) Middle East Peace Religion

This Foreign Policy article by Aaron David Miller is about official American priorities, policies and assumptions. These are important things to know about, but not to be mistaken for an overall analysis. Still, some readers may find this useful. I liked it for illustrating how perspective changes over time, since I can remember every event mentioned here.

An excerpt:

On October 18, 1991, against long odds and in front of an incredulous press corps, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin announced that Arabs and Israelis were being invited to attend a peace conference in Madrid.

Standing in the back of the hall at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that day, I marveled at what America had accomplished. In 18 months, roughly the time it took Henry Kissinger to negotiate three Arab-Israeli disengagement agreements and Jimmy Carter to broker an Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the United States had fought a short, successful war -- the best kind -- and pushed Iraq's Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And America was now well-positioned to bring Arabs and Israelis across the diplomatic finish line.

Or so I thought.

Baker, who lowballed everything, was characteristically cautious. "Boys," he told a few of us aides in his suite after the news conference, "if you want to get off the train, now might be a good time because it could all be downhill from here." But I wasn't listening. America had used its power to make war, and now, perhaps, it could use that power to make peace. I'd become a believer.

I'm not anymore.

Farmers on the move, 8000 BCE

This blog is called Muhlberger's Early History for a good reason: I'm often making a connection between things that happened centuries ago and things that our neighbors are doing somewhere in the world today. In the classroom I love talking about remote origins. If I were teaching ancient history now, you'd bet this would be included ( exceerpt from the UK's Daily Mail):

European farming began around 9,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent - a region extending from the eastern Mediterranean coast to the Persian Gulf and which includes modern day Iraq, Syria, Israel and southeast Turkey.

The region was the cradle of civilisation and home to the Babylonia, Sumer and Assyrian empires.

The development of farming allowed people to settle down for the first time - and to produce more food than they needed, leading to trade and the freedom to develop new skills such as metal working, building and writing.

Some archaeologists have argued that some of these early farmers travelled around the world - settling new lands and bringing farming skills with them.

But others have insisted that the skills were passed on by word of mouth, and not by mass migration.

The new study suggests the farmers routinely upped sticks and moved west when their villages became too crowded, eventually reaching Britain and Ireland.

The waves of migrants brought their new skills with them. Some settled down with local tribes and taught them how to farm, the researchers believe.

'When the expansion happened these men had a reproductive advantage because they were able to grow more food so they were more attractive to women and had more offspring,' said Prof Jobling.

'In total more than 80 per cent of European men have Y chromosomes which descend from incoming farmers.

'It seems odd to think that the majority of men in Ireland have fore fathers from the near East and that British people have forefathers from the near East.'

The findings are published in the science journal PLoS Biology.

Dr Patricia Balaresque, a co-author of the study, said: 'This means that more than 80 per cent of European Y chromosomes descend from incoming farmers.'

In contrast, other studies have shown that DNA passed down from mothers to daughters can be traced by to hunter-gatherers in Europe, she said.

'To us, this suggests a reproductive advantage for farming males over indigenous hunter-gatherer males during the switch from hunting and gathering, to farming - maybe, back then, it was just sexier to be a farmer,' she said.

I don't think anyone had a clue about this 20 years ago when I first taught Ancient Civilizations. What fun!

(And let's hear it for SE Turkey getting proper credit.)

Religious development is not just a matter of chronology

Kamal Al-Solaylee's Yemeni family is a lot more conservative now than it was in 1975, when the picture above was taken. Al-Solaylee talks about this in a Globe and Mail article.

Isn't this about the time a teenaged Osama bin Laden was touring Sweden?

Juan Cole has an interesting post on outright radicalization, namely the radicalization of Humam al-Balaw, the double agent who killed a number of CIA operatives in Afghanistan. No surprise to me that a figure with his background -- educated Jordanian-Palestinian -- would be hostile to American policy. Quotation from Cole (bold is my emphasis):

What is fascinating is the way al-Balawi's grievances tie together the Iraq War, the ongoing Gaza atrocity, and the Western military presence in the Pushtun regions-- the geography of the Bush 'war on terror' was inscribed on his tortured mind.

Morally speaking, al-Qaeda is twisted and evil, and has committed mass murder. Neither the US nor Israel is morally responsible for violent crackpots being violent crackpots. Al-Qaeda or a Taliban affiliate turned al-Balawi to the dark side. Gandhi and Martin Luther King taught us the proper response to social injustice (and it should not be forgotten that Gandhi had a significant following among the Pashtuns). But from a social science, explanatory point of view, what we have to remember is that there can be a handful of al-Balawis, or there can be thousands or hundreds of thousands. It depends on how many Abu Ghraibs, Fallujahs, Lebanons and Gazas the United States initiates or supports to the hilt. Unjust wars and occupations radicalize people. The American Right wing secretly knows this, but likes the vicious circle it produces. Wars make profits for the military-industrial complex, and the resulting terrorism terrifies the clueless US public and helps hawks win elections, allowing them to pursue further wars. And so it goes, until the Republic is bankrupted and in ruins and its unemployed have to live in tent cities.

So, yes, this al-Balawi person was going to help Jordan and the US find al-Qaeda leaders Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Sure he was. Walmart does better background checks on its store clerks than the CIA and Jordanian intelligence did on this guy.

You also may want to read the comments to that post.

Israel's 10 worst errors of the decade

Can you name them? A columnist at Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, will give you a hand.

The end of American exceptionalism

Mark LeVine says:

The awarding of the Peace Prize to Obama reads like a desperate attempt to resuscitate the discredited idea of a "Great Man" of history ushering in a new era. It is an understandable fantasy, given the magnitude of the problems the world confronts.

But it distracts from the reality that it will be movements from below, however imperfect and irrational they can be, that will create, in Obama's words, "the world that ought to be," not leaders from above, however audacious their rhetoric.

In that regard, perhaps the most historically significant aspect of Obama's speech is its irrelevance on the ground.

Around the world people who once looked to the US for inspiration or support are taking matters into their own hands. No one is waiting for the US to save or even support them anymore.

More here.

They thought Minoan art was cool!

Not an unusual feeling, but this still evokes in me a "well, wow!" reaction:

The remains of a Minoan-style wall painting, recognizable by a blue background, the first of its kind to be found in Israel, was discovered in the course of the recent excavation season at Tel Kabri. This fresco joins others of Aegean style that have been uncovered during earlier seasons at the Canaanite palace in Kabri. "It was, without doubt, a conscious decision made by the city's rulers who wished to associate with Mediterranean culture and not adopt Syrian and Mesopotamian styles of art like other cities in Canaan did. The Canaanites were living in the Levant and wanted to feel European," explains Dr. Assaf Yasur-Landau of the University of Haifa, who directed the excavations.

Thanks to David Meadows at Explorator for the heads-up.