Stolen, you say?

It seems the misinformation campaign continues with regards to the Israel and Gaza situation and so I continue swimming against the tide in what is probably a vain effort alongside other bloggers such as Nourishing Obscurity.

It is said that history is written by the victors. As a statement it is only half true. The other truth is that some people try and rewrite and repurpose history for modern aims. Israel / Palestine is one that undergoes many a rewrite, usually by those who only want to see the Palestinian side of events and who care not that it is infinitely more complex than that.

It's begun to come to the fore again as a form of rationale for the rocket attacks from Gaza. Usually the rocket and mortar tacks are downplayed and once again mainstream media outlets have played a pretty disgraceful role in that. Their usual line to take has been to run with the narrative that it all started when Israel retaliated. Although they tried to advance that narrative around the broken ceasefire recently, on the whole it's been a little tougher to downplay the rocket attacks. The story of the attacks has got out more than previously and there's a more of a consensus that Hamas is has overplayed its hand this time. That consensus has made it a little difficult amongst the general Israel bad / Palestine good crowd to defend Hamas when the rocket attacks are brought up in the argument.

But they try.

They try and take the position that Hamas has no option but to shoot rockets from at Israel and in particular from civilian areas because the Israelis stole their land and penned them into squalid conditions. That's the logic, Israel stole the land and keep stealing it. That's the simple logic they want you to have in your head that justifies anything they do in Palestine.

Except it's not true. You don't have to take my word for - you can look it up yourself. Heck that's what I want you to do, so that when the pub bore amongst your mates starts coming off all Yasser Arafat on you and your mates you've got something to challenge him on.

What they'll try and do is try to talk about the period before the official formation of the state of Israel. Why? Well partly because they find it hard to admit that Israel was willing to accept getting shafted on the original, accepted a smaller chunk of land and still got attacked because their neighbours didn't want to give the Jews even one square metre of land.

So they talk about the bit beforehand, because they know that not too many people will know what really happened and that allows them to advance their narrative largely unopposed.

So just in case they decide to go their, take a look at this rather interesting summary of the history of the land from a time they'd hope you'd forget.

Early Palestine