I have Mitchner-itis. That is, I must begin every story at the beginning of time. This essay (actually, this is the first of five essays) is about Israel. It begins at the beginning of monotheism. I think laying out such a broad and deep context is necessary to avoid the accusations of anti-Semitism that are inevitable in internet discussions on this topic. [On a less enlightened note, it may give you something to distract you from Super Bowl Mania this weekend. ]

IMHO, threads about Israel degenerate because most non-Jewish people simply do not have a command of the history of Judaism, while most Jews do. The history of Judaism goes back 2,500 years. Meanwhile, most Americans have trouble with history from 25 years ago. The Jewish people have conserved (and rewritten) their history like no other social group.

So I concluded that if you want to discuss Israel without starting a flamewar, you need to be very familiar with their long history, and you need to be able to point to references to back up your claims. Learning that history and creating those references are the tasks I set myself six months ago - that is, to create a Cliff Notes style summary of Jewish history as a reference to be used when discussing anything concerning Israel, Judaism, or anti-Semitism.

I am more than happy to entertain challenges to my research, so long as they are well-documented. I have added comments to many of my references to point at the Jewish sources from which they are taken - plus one Libertarian source and one Trotskyite source. I welcome, and actually solicit, comments and corrections from Jewish members of this board. I am willing to be informed and will make corrections if a cogent argument is made.

Creating these essays has taken a couple of months of research and writing, and the Cliff Notes have grown to over 13,000 words - about 40 pages! (That's why I broke it into five essays.) So, be warned. If you proceed, this is going to be way beyond TL;DR. But what else would you expect from a reference work? Ready? Here we go.

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE THREE ESSAYS

Here's my one sentence, fifty word, empire-level view of Jewish history:

Judaism begins in the ancient Middle East, spreads throughout the Mediterranean world via the Roman Empire, becomes ghettoized by the Catholic Church but accepted by Islam, finds a safe haven for centuries in Poland-Lithuania, is almost wiped out by the Nazis, and finally is manipulated into being a garrison state on behalf of the Western powers.

Obviously that is too brief and too shallow. However, it does point out that, at least since the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Eastern Europe has loomed large in any discussion of Judaism - because a substantial proportion of Judaism lived there, especially in Poland. Furthermore, from that time (actually, from 1795) the State of Poland ceased to exist for over a century; and the population was divided among the Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires. In Russia, the Jews were heavily regulated in the "Pale of Settlement", while in the German-speaking empires, they had the same freedom to move about and to be educated as the rest of the citizens of those Constitutional monarchies. Even the Pale was not homogeneous. There was a small population of educated urban Jews who created labor organizations, and a much larger population of illiterate, often fundamentalist, peasants. The imprecision in the discussion of nationalities and sub-populations of modern Jewish people has made it easy to make false generalizations about Jewish history.

False generalizations are the stock in trade of propaganda, which we have all been marinated in since WW2. There was Nazi propaganda, and Communist propaganda, and CIA/free world propaganda. Today we have "exceptional nation" propaganda and Identity Politics propaganda and anti-Semitism/Zionism/Likudnik propaganda. We scream bloody murder about "animal Assad", while we ignore the genocide in Yemen, the wedding party drone massacre of the week, and the cold-blooded sniper murders in Gaza. Most propaganda is Manichaean, with "our" side as the blameless good guy, and the "other" side as the abominable evil. It is hard to have an intelligent discussion about anything, much less the charged topic of Israel, in the face of such a gale of propaganda unless one has a command of the true history, in all its ambiguity, happenstance, and bad behavior. Or at least Cliff Notes of that true history - henceforth referred to as an "outline".

Even an outline is a huge task. As I studied the history, it seemed clearest to divide the notes into this introduction and three essays. That would give the reader meaningful organization of the material, and allow him to absorb it in chunks instead of all at once. The three essays are organized as follows:

1) Monotheism - Placing Judaism in the context of monothesim and discussing the well-known failure modes of all monotheisms.
2) The Dual Revolution and the Fundamentalist Backlash - How the French and Industrial Revolutions released Jews from the ghettos, but left them smack in the middle of the brutal, racist politics, and the rise of nationalisms and fundamentalist religions that enveloped the West after Darwin.
3) Zionism - Part 1 and Zionism - Part 2 - its supporters among the British Christian Zionists, and how that led to the creation of Israel.

(Actually, the third essay is so long that I broke it into two parts.) I decided to stop at the foundation of Israel, because that is well within the historical period. Of course, there is plenty to discuss in this period - the Suez attacks, the theft of nuclear secrets and materials, the ongoing illegal occupation, the Yinon Plan, the increasingly racist behavior and policies. But, it is the foundation of Israel that is misunderstood, mythologized, and generally unknown to the casual reader. IMHO, the details of today's fights would only obscure the deeper history that people need to know to speak cogently about Israel.

If you don't care about anything but Zionism and the founding of Israel, skip straight to the third essay.

If even that two-parter is too long, there are eleven bullet points in Section "3.8 CONCLUSION".

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I started out thinking that supplying people with this history would reduce tensions and increase rational discussions, would show that the Jews had been a punching bag for Christianity for Millenia. But, because the history of Judaism goes back before even the Catholic Church, to the beginning of recorded history, I constantly came face-to-face with the murderous religious fanaticism that held the world in thrall until at least the Enlightenment - and even after then thanks to fundamentalism of all religions. That history showed me that the problem is not this or that religion. The problem is monotheism, which is really tribalism for keeps. The problem with monotheisms is that they are always captured by the most fanatical sect. Judaism is no exception. Neither is Islam or Christianity. They are all full of zealot nutcases, all armed with nuclear weapons (Pakistan has the Islamic bomb.).

To cut to the chase, if we do not end fundamentalism, it will soon end us. The American military, especially the Air Force, is infested with fundamentalist Christian fanatics who are itching for a fight in the Middle East to "fulfill the prophecies". Israel has passed laws that make it a theocracy, with fundamentalists (one of whom assassinated Prime Minister Rabin) exempted from military service, with violent, fanatical settlers who have been normalized, and with a Yinon Plan to expand to "Biblical" borders. The Israelis are happy to manipulate the Christian fundamentalists in the US to protect them, while the Christian-ists are happy to use the Israelis as front-line troops. Saudi Arabia is a medieval theocracy that spends billions to preach (and arm) murderous, anti-intellectual, misogynistic fundamentalist Wahhabism all over the Moslem world.

It is beyond unfortunate that the Middle East, birthplace of these three murderous theocracies, contains the majority of the most important commodity of our time: oil. The pragmatic fight over oil has long since been hijacked by the religious fight over 'the Holy Land". As a result, the world keeps throwing theocratic matches into the gas tank of nuclear war. Our luck will soon run out.

In a sane world, all these fanatics should be in jail. But it has become taboo to call out murder. Calling out sectarian murder is "prejudiced". Objecting to the ongoing massacres in Gaza is anti-Semitic. Supporting murderers like ISIS is excused as realpolitik in the US and is touted as virtue in KSA. We are told that we must be tolerant of the murderous intolerance of religion. Sane people will disagree with this. But sane people are no longer in charge. That has happened in the past, with disastrous results for civilizations.

Before you flame me for the last four paragraphs, you need to read the three essays.