The most disconcerting aspect for me of the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian dogfight is the sheer ignorance about Israel being espoused by usually educated progressives in the Valley and elsewhere. Instead of learning the long, complex and nuanced history of this conflict, they have fallen back on slogans, genocidal chants and misinformation, not to mention their silence in the wake of the sexual violence perpetrated against Israeli women on Oct. 7.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where people get their information from YouTube videos, TikTok and tweets instead of books.

The most common misconception about Israel’s creation is that it’s a European colonizer outpost imposed upon the Palestinians by Great Britain. Critics cite the Balfour Declaration, whereby the Brits in 1916 promised the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. They did, but at the same time were telling every party in the Middle East, Jew and Arab, what they wanted to hear as a ruse to bring down the Ottoman Empire.

Thanks to the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement of the same year, France and Great Britain took disparate warring tribes, families, sects and factions and jammed them together into the artificial nations of Lebanon and Syria (France) and Iraq and Jordan (Great Britain.) Not surprisingly, sectarian violence has wracked three of them.

But the British never acted on the Balfour Declaration, which also called for the protection of Palestinian rights. Instead, in the face of growing Jewish immigration from Nazi Germany to Palestine, they issued the 1939 White Paper that severely limited the influx. By 1947, the Jewish underground and the British military in Palestine were in a state of open warfare, which included the bombing of British headquarters in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel by Jewish terrorists.

Great Britain gave up on its mandate and threw the entire mess over to the United Nations. The U.N. passed Resolution 181 in 1947 guaranteeing both a Jewish and a Palestinian state.

A year later, Israel was invaded by the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, outnumbered 15-1 and hardly a military superpower. Initially, Israeli “tanks” were farm trucks with welded plate armor and its now-vaunted air force was a scattering of World War II cast-offs (one piloted by Pee-wee Herman’s father.)

The Jewish fatalities in the conflict proportionally equaled 2,500,000 Americans killed in a war. At its height, the Arab assault reduced Israel to a tiny microcosm of what it is now. As far as who did what to whom, like everything in the Middle East, there are competing narratives, all of which contain truth, exaggerations and lies. Both sides committed atrocities, the slaughters of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin by Israeli paramilitaries and the Hadassah Convoy Massacre perpetrated by Arab forces being the most glaring examples.

The mass exodus that caused hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes combines all narratives. The Israelis forced Arab villagers to vacate either through ethnic-cleansing bigotry or what they believed was military necessity. However, Arab and Palestinian leaders also urged their people to evacuate on the promise that they could return once the Jews were dealt with. I learned this from a Palestinian source.

The Israelis exaggerate how they begged the Palestinians to stay and create the new nation together but I stayed with a Palestinian-Israeli family who did just that. The Palestinians fudge on admitting that the sole cause of the Arab 1948 invasion of Israel was to destroy the Jewish state.

Ironically, had the Arabs abided by the U.N. resolution, an autonomous Palestinian state would exist to this day. One overlooked fact is that during the 1948 war, the West Bank, the designated home for the Palestinian nation, was indeed conquered by Jordan whose King Abdullah sent in his British-trained Arab Legion to occupy the region.

Although Israel’s founders are often misconceived as European colonists, the Israelis (as well as we Americans not cheerleading for Hamas) see it differently. They consider themselves Jews returning to their indigenous homeland after two millennia of brutal if not fatal exile. Jews aren’t ethnically European and it’s worth noting that while the Holocaust was a German Nazi invention, it was aided and abetted, at times cheerfully and savagely, by nearly every nation on the continent.

The Palestinians, however, are also regionally indigenous. I actually feel sorry for them as they’ve been screwed over by the Israelis, Hamas, their Arab “brothers,” the Palestine Authority’s corrupt leaders and by their increasingly bullying demonstrators who, once this current cycle ends, will forget they ever existed.

Daniel A. Brown lived in Franklin County for 44 years and is a frequent contributor to the Recorder. He lives outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, Lisa and dog, Cody.