Deception, lies and intrigue. How violence and warfare has always created more problems than it solves.
Perfidious Albion left the Palestinians in the lurch. They rose up in violence against the invader over-running their land from 1948 to the present day. They could have chosen a more honourable non-violence to still maintain their identity but be subsumed by the Jewish Israelis over these eight decades. Non-violence would have left them as part of a Greater Israel from the 'River to the Sea' but, with a much higher standard of living and more of them alive. Would they have been left as second-class citizens, though? Perhaps so, but better than the present state of affairs and they would still have been clearly identifiable as Palestinians within Greater Israel.
I am reading Jeremy Bowen's most recent book, 'The Making of the Modern Middle East' and the chapter, 'Mission Impassable', p 18 onwards.
We read, "The Middle East attracts outsiders, and the desire to control it has led to suffering and slaughter." (p 18)
"The slow fall of the Ottomans presented hungry European Christian powers with an imperial buffet in the Middle East."
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