More on the Middle East
In May we featured two articles about Israel and its history, one by Gaza author Mohammad Arafat about Palestinian sufferings during the December 2008-January 2009 war between Israel and Hamas, and a longer piece by Leslie Evans on the history of the Marxist Left’s negative view of Jewish identity, principally in nineteenth century Europe but affecting Western perceptions of Israel.
This month we reprise the subject with our same two authors. Mohammad Arafat returns in “A Tale of Determination” to the early days of the Israeli invasion of Gaza at the end of 2008, where he tells the story of his friend Musab, who was badly wounded by an Israeli rocket, as well as examples of civilian deaths inflicted by the Jewish forces. Leslie Evans in “Why the Middle East Is Always in Crisis” pulls the camera back to examine at length the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, and the legacy of seemingly insurmountable religious animosities built into the postwar map, particularly in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and, of course, Israel-Palestine.
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
