In nations that have long been seen as allies to the state of Israel and the cause of Zionism (such as the USA, Great Britain, Australia and Germany), there is rapidly decreasing support among the people while sympathy for Palestine is dramatically increasing. The rest of the world, especially the neighbors of Israel, are far more advanced in their understanding of what is really going on than in these heavily propagandized nations with big military budgets.
Here on Project Avalon, Israel does not have very much support, although there are a few advocates left. I think all of us know at least a few people who still favor Israel and feel what they are doing in Gaza is righteous or necessary or justified, and if we are armed with the right information, we might be able to persuade them otherwise.
As I see if, if you think Israel is justified in it's war on Gaza, it's treatment of Palestinians, it's constant bombings and military actions in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, then you are misinformed about this history and about the current situation of Israel, about Zionism, about Palestine.
So here, to help you distinguish propagandistic fictions from historical facts, are some things you just might need to know ...
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Fiction: There is no such thing as Palestine
Fact: The word "Palestine" is derived from the Egyptian word "Peleset". The word can be traced back to 1150 BCE to inscription in ancient Egyptian temples and stelae. This would be associated with the Philistines, a group that settled in the area we now know as "The Gaza Strip" in the late Bronze Age. The Assyrian words would be "Palastu", "Pilišti", or "Pilistu."
Another word used to describe this area is "Canaan" and it's people would be "Canaanites". The map above is from a British dictionary and is an attempt to delineate the border of Canaan, which today would be comparable to what has been more recently "Palestine", "Israel", "Lebanon" and some parts of "Syria". Note in the map above at the bottom right "Philistim" which does correspond to where the Philistines lived before their last King was overthrown by the Babylonians in or around 603 BC.
The Bible mentions Canaan 88 times. The first instance is in Genesis 10, where "Canaan" is a grandson of Noah, the guy with the ark. But after that starting in Genesis 11, "Canaan" is a place, not a person:
and succeeding references in the Bible are also to the land and the people that inhabit it. Also note that the land of Canaan exists before Abram immigrated there. Abram/Abraham is often considered the progenitor of the Jews as an ethnic race. Abram is an immigrant from Ur of the Chaldeans, which most scholars agree is now in modern day southern Iraq, near Basra. He is originally a Chaldean, which today would be an Iraqi, and an immigrant to the land of Canaan.Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. ---Genesis 11:31
After many mentions in the Book of Genesis, the land Canaan is referred to several times in other Old Testament books: Chronicles, Deuteronomy, Exodus, Ezekiel, Joshua, Judges, Leviticus, Numbers, Psalms and Zephaniah. It is mentioned once in the New Testament Gospel of Matthew (15:12) written in the first century A.D. Canaan is also mentioned in many Egyptian texts including in a letter going back to the Pharoah Akhenaten in 1350 BC. It is clear that "Canaan" was the term used for at least 14 centuries.
The Romans made the area of Canaan a client state around 63 BC and eventually put it under control of Herod, and then later divided it amongst his sons. They referred to it generally as Filasṭīn, even though much of that land included much land that was North and West of where the Philistine kings were rulers. Thus, this much larger tract of land, "Canaan", became "Filastin" in Latin and then "Palestine" in other languages. We often call the Germans "Deutsch" and the Spanish "Castilians", but they are basically the two different names for the same area or the same people who inhabit that area. It is the same for Canaan and Palestine, just as "Canaanites" is simply another name for "Palestinians".
In an interview in 1969, Prime Minster Golda Meir famously stated:
There is overwhelming evidence of a historical Palestine and of a Palestinian people, but the case becomes even more clear and the roots of these people can be traced back even further if you consider that the Palestinians are the same thing as the Canaanites. The state of Israel has been renaming villages, towns, streams, river, springs, hills, mountains and lakes in its 77 year existence, often giving them Biblical and Hebrew names. But they never use the word "Canaan" to name anything even though this is one of the most popular place names used in the Bible. Are they trying to bring back history by renaming things, or are they trying to erase it, in the same way Golda Meir is?"There was no such thing as Palestinians."
Many of the nations and peoples we know today are the results of centuries of people living a similar lifestyle, speaking a similar language or group of languages. They have all been evolving, their official borders changing somewhat if they are not defined by geographical features like coastlines, their language changing slightly, their religions sometimes changing dramatically, or not, their lands sometimes undergoing invasion and new forms of government being introduced, and yet, their concept of being a people or a nation somehow survives those changes. Palestine/Canaan is no different, except it goes back well over three millennia, much longer than any European or American nation. The people who lived there before Zionism started, the people who still live there today as "Palestinians", are the same as the Canaanites who were there in the Bronze Age, years ago before Abram arrived from the land of Ur. They have essentially the same DNA, taking into account that there has some immigration and cross pollination of people and cultures which you will find in any other nation/culture. They are essentially the same people farming the farms and building the cities.
They have survived quite a long time, endured many invasions, but their greatest challenge has come in the last century, with Zionism, which has been showing up at doorsteps with guns, forcing people to leave the country and bar them from returning, turning off their electricity, restricting their access to water, forcing them to give up their homes for people who come from places as far away as Brooklyn, bombing their dwellings, their churches, their schools, their mosques, their hospitals and finally obliterating their cities and locking them in a confined area without shelter for their forced starvation.






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. People in the IDF are utterly exhausted and many are avoid serving, either because they are afraid or because they are morally repulsed about what they are supposed to do. And those are just some of the factors in Israel's pending doom. For more, check out the