We know one monolithic characteristic of Marxist academics: They lie. This is not surprising as they don’t enter the academy to guide students toward critical thinking through an honest and objective analysis of evidence; rather, they exist to indoctrinate their young and highly impressionable charges through ideologically-driven narrative interpretation of whatever subject they purport to teach. Indeed, for these radicals there is no such thing as objective truth, past or present. Rather, they view history as a blank canvas on which to depict whatever dialectic “explanation” of the past they believe most useful to the destruction of Western Civilization – the overriding goal of every Leftist since the French Revolution.
Today there are various dialectics trending among Marxist academics – primarily race, of course, which largely has replaced Marx’s own class-based narrative – but none is more prevalent than the division of the world into oppressed “indigenous” people and their “colonizers.” So, true to form, Marxist educators use this narrative to portray Palestinians as the indigenous people of Israel and Jews as loathsome colonizers who richly deserve their grotesque destruction. As a result, we now see thousands of college-age Americans joining Hamas-financed foreign provocateurs and Soros-funded domestic agitators to loudly – and sometimes violently – demand annihilation of the world’s only Jewish state while lauding the rape, torture, and murder of its citizens by sadistic Jihadist barbarians.
But this Marxist “history” of Israel is a lie. In fact, Jews had lived in the land “from the river to the sea” for nearly two thousand years before the Arabian forebearers of most modern Palestinians colonized the Holy Land. The archeological and written record proves that Jews have lived continuously in what is now Israel for at least three millennia. Moreover, only three independent states ever have existed on this tiny patch of land (about the size of New Jersey), each of which has been Jewish: (1) the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel established by King David around 1,000 BCE which (in the case of Judah) lasted for nearly five centuries until the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BCE; (2) the Hasmonean kingdom that existed from 141 to 37 BCE; and (3) the modern state of Israel established by the United Nations in 1947 and declared by Jews in 1948.
On the other hand, most Palestinians are descendants of Arabic-speaking Muslim invaders from Arabia who, in 638 CE, conquered Jerusalem and colonized all of modern-day Israel for centuries. In fact, with the exception of a few decades of European crusader rule about a thousand years ago, Jews in the Holy Land were colonized by successive Muslim caliphates continuously from 638 until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1917, when Jerusalem was captured by British forces who established the British Mandate.
Moreover, through most of the approximately 12 centuries of its Arab and other Muslim colonization, the Holy Land was desolate backwater within much larger empires. Thus, when Mark Twain visited in the late 19th century he disappointingly found a sparsely-populated, swamp-infested, mostly inhospitable relic of its former glory. In fact, many forebearers of today’s Palestinians migrated there from modern-day Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and other nearby Arab countries after Jews from Europe, the Americas, and other parts of the Middle East began arriving in larger numbers to reclaim the land starting around the beginning of the 20th century.
Then, in 1948, Jews finally overcame centuries of colonialization and declared an independent Jewish state in the Holy Land for the first time in nearly two millennia.
Contrary to Marxist gospel these are true, objective facts about Israel’s history. Therefore, unless Palestinians absurdly claim to be descendants of ancient Canaanites or Philistines – primitive societies obsessed with child sacrifice and other pre-Judeo- Christian depravities that existed centuries before Arabs or Islam – they are, in fact, far less “indigenous” to Israel than Jews who preceded their ancestors to the Holy Land by nearly two millennia. Indeed, until Yassir Arafat (mis)appropriated the term in the 1960s, the word “Palestinian” referred to Jews living in the British Mandate of Palestine. Most non-Jews living there were simply (and appropriately) called Arabs.
So the obscenity we now see playing out on our streets and campuses is neither unexpected nor inexplicable. Rather, it is the foreseeable result of the cynical and fraudulent indoctrination of our youth by vast numbers of Marxists who pollute our educational institutions with their false, vile, and intentionally destructive ideology.
Unfortunately, and despite the cringeworthy self-assuredness and bravado we invariably witness from them, the many young Americans waiving Palestinian flags and shouting “from the river to the sea” are ignoramuses. They know virtually nothing about the past or the present because they’ve never been taught history. Instead, they’ve been propagandized by malign academic actors into believing up is down and black is white.
I should know; I once was one of them, having graduated from UCLA with a degree in Latin American history in 1980. It took me more than a decade to outgrow my Marxist and vehemently anti-American indoctrination. Unless and until we rid our academy of these ideologues we should expect nothing else.