Personal Involvement

The tragic events at the junction of Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean have played a role in my life. As a child, I had an excellent memory. I knew many of the stories in the children's Bible about Abraham and his descendants almost by heart. I often added missing details to what the Sunday school teacher told us. Sometimes, she taught me new things, things my parents had skipped when reading to me. She also told us about the Promised Land and how Joshua led the descendants there.
Naturally, I was completely on their side. God was endlessly good and infallible. In my imagination, the empty land, filled only with milk and honey, was waiting for them. There was a city, Jericho, that first had to be conquered. That seemed logical to me. The manner in which the city walls were brought down by trumpets was yet another sign of God's power. However, God had instructed the weary desert travelers to kill everyone, men, women, and children. I thought I had caught her in a mistake: "Not the children, right, miss? They hadn't done anything wrong." The teacher was shocked. She hadn't thought of it that way. Killing children was not popular in our country in 1943. She didn't have time to respond then, but promised to revisit it the next week. It wouldn't leave my mind. I spoke about it at home. My mother thought the teacher must have made a mistake. People couldn't be so sure of God's will. I looked it up in my children's Bible, and it was there. Could Joshua have lied? Or the man who wrote the story? Had they really killed everyone? No one answered my questions.
The teacher didn't have time the following week either, and soon after, Sunday school closed due to the lack of fuel. In the hunger winter, people had other concerns. But the seed of disbelief had taken root in fertile soil. If one story wasn't true, what about all the other strange miracles? I kept wrestling with these thoughts, often discussing them with friends at school and in the street.

When the state of Israel was recognized in 1948, and the first reports of Palestinian refugees reached us, I wondered if this recognition by the entire world was right. Everyone had been wrong about those Bible stories too, after all. And this event seemed quite analogous to Joshua's conquest. (It took almost two more years for me to let go of God entirely.) At that time, I developed admiration for the way the Israelis built up their new country. And even Palestinians had seats in the Israeli parliament! During that time, we also knew more about the fate of our Jews under the Nazi regime. No one around me begrudged them a place under the sun. Those who dug deeper also learned about the perfidious stance of Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who knew long before others what the Nazis intended for the Jews. He represented, in our eyes, the "Arabs."


My 'Race Question'

Sunday school didn't just lead me to lose my faith. I took some good away from it as well. To encourage us and our parents to donate to the (protestant) mission, there were beautiful, exotic prints. One made a deep impression on me: a picture of Jesus surrounded by children. He wanted them near him, blonde, black, and brown children. A brown girl was the most beautiful child I had ever seen. After a little begging, the Joshua-teacher gave me a small version, which hung above my bed for years.
When I read the UNESCO study "The Race Question in Modern Science" in 1956, I had no trouble at all with its central theme: racial hatred is not innate. For me, it was more like love for other races. At the time, actresses Ava Gardner and Eartha Kitt were my idols.

The first time I personally experienced discrimination, it wasn't dramatic. I had a friend at school with whom I shared many laughs. He wasn't good at math, but he did well in languages and was very well-read. The third year was the last before the school divided into the A and B tracks. In A, math was not important, nor was natural science, another hurdle for my friend. He asked me to help him with those "rotten subjects." I was happy to help, and we shared plenty of laughs during those weekly tutoring sessions.
I was a welcome guest at his house, always treated to sweets with tea. His mother couldn't stop thanking me after he finally passed a physics test. But a few weeks later, she opened the door with something like, "Oh, it's you. You know the way." I thought it was odd. It got even stranger when she brought us tea in his room. There was only one cup and a cookie. Bram said, "Mom, do I get anything?" She replied, "Oh, I didn't know he was still here. Come with me and get it." That did it for me.
The next week, I had no desire to go to his house. I wanted to continue at my place. He asked why. I told him I thought his mother didn't want to see me. Bram got up. He told me not to worry. "You know about those silly Yiddish mothers, right?" Of that, I knew nothing. Later, I looked it up in "Van Dale". He explained the situation. He had an older sister who I'd met the week before. She had brought us our afternoon treats instead of their mother. That "stupid girl" had, according to him, made the "stupid mistake" of saying during dinner that Bram had a nice boy over in the afternoon. Well, the rest was self-explanatory. He added, "Yiddish mothers!"
It wasn't a drama. Bram moved on to A track. His sister and I never saw each other again; likely to both our satisfaction.


Was Israel's Recognition Wise?

I expressed my doubts about the wisdom of establishing a new state without the consent of its inhabitants for the first time during my university studies. Minister Luns of Foreign Affairs was invited by the Leiden Student Corps to give a lecture. Although I wasn't a member of that elite, I was usually welcome, and my Corps-friends urged me to be there to voice my discontent about Cold War escalation and nuclear weapons. To everyone's surprise, the speaker and the first discussants focused mainly on the New Guinea aftermath and the tensions in the Middle East. So, I let the nuclear bomb rest and focused on inaccuracies in his Southwest Asia history. "Mr. Minister, don't you know that Arnold Toynbee showed back in 1935..." The chairman interrupted me because the Minister wanted to say something. "Ah yes, Mr... Le Pair, I believe? I don't read history. I make history!" Thunderous applause. He had won the debate in style.
There were more people there who didn't read history but wanted to make it.


Lebanon

After my studies, when I had made a name for myself in the melting and freezing of helium isotopes, I wanted to help the Third World through physics. Malawi was interested in having me, though the university there still needed to be built. I would have to start by helping chop down a forest. My beloved Leiden advisor, Krijn Taconis, thought it was a bad idea and persuaded me to go to Lebanon instead, where I could work at a more suitable level at the American University of Beirut. My knowledge of the area was limited, recently refreshed by reading T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. With diligent effort, I delved into the history of my new homeland. My interest in foreign politics, piqued by the bomb, had made me well-versed in its sources. By the time I arrived in Beirut, I was no longer a blank slate.

Our Faculty of Physics and Astronomy had about ten professors. Two were originally Christian Palestinians, at least by Lebanese standards, atheists were not recognized. One was born in Jerusalem and had been expelled with his family under threat from the Haganah. The other came from Bethlehem, where his parents still lived in 1966. I visited them there. Hilda, our secretary, was also affected by the Haganah. Her father was building a university in Jerusalem in 1948 when he was told to leave or be killed. She had four brothers. Two were professors in America. One was an architect who designed several neighborhoods, and the fourth was a celebrated surgeon.
My colleagues were, like me, not strongly opinionated. We all regretted that contact with the best physicists nearby was so difficult. Correspondence with Israeli colleagues had to go through a contact point in Cyprus, rather than a simple coffee meetup. On Nasser's Pan-Arabism and the Americans in Vietnam, we all, including our American colleagues, shared the same view. We saw the Palestinian issue primarily through the eyes of refugees and the displaced. After visiting several refugee camps, I realized that my two colleagues and Hilda's family were incredibly lucky compared to countless others.

One evening, I visited Hilda's family. Her brothers and their wives were visiting from America, and the talk was lighthearted. The old man was pleased to tell a happy audience how he persuaded his eldest son to become a surgeon. The story was full of interruptions and corrections from everyone when the doorbell rang. Mom found such a late visit strange, and one of the sons went with her to open the door. We heard muffled voices that suddenly got louder, followed by shouting and crying. We all stood up to see what was happening. It was a cousin and his fiancée from... Israel. They came to get married, as it wasn't possible at home. The Allenby Bridge between Israel and Jordan had briefly reopened for personal travel, and they seized the opportunity to fulfill their long-made marriage vows. The reunion was heartbreaking. There was loud laughter and crying, most of it in a language I didn't understand, Hebrew, no less.

Feeling it wasn't appropriate to stay, I made to leave. Shock! No, no, I mustn't go. It was so fun, and so on. So I stayed, and for my sake, the conversation mostly continued in English. As the reunion's commotion subsided, Grandpa resumed his story of grooming the surgeon. He was just at the part of the garden conversation when the visiting cousin said, "Oh yes, that's what I meant to tell you all, they just repainted your house." Dead silence. He clapped a hand over his mouth. The rage that followed was indescribable. They had had to vacate that house, where their family had lived for generations, within 24 hours of being notified. It had been confiscated and assigned to new immigrants with whom Dad had spoken just days before, a municipal authority managed it. Those people had now lived there rent-free for nearly twenty years without ever reaching out. Others deciding the color of their home was unbearable to them.
For the first time, I realized just how deep the hatred ran. Even well-off, successful people, highly regarded in their new community, were beside themselves over such a small, seemingly trivial matter.

The rage, fortunately, wasn't directed at me, and my opinion wasn't sought. I said, truthfully, that only now did I fully understand the injustice they suffered in 1948. I had already concluded that the Palestinians were wronged. However, I did understand that revoking Israel's right to exist would be the exact same mistake, another decision made without regard for the people who lived there, built the land, and were born there.

Palestinian students I spoke with had different solutions. As far as they were concerned, the people there didn't need to be driven into the sea. There should be a democratic state where the Zionists did not have sole control. Or a two-state solution, but without "Greater Israel settlers," who, with military protection, took control of a neighboring state step by step. One of them said, "We are the same people; why shouldn't we just live in peace together in the same region? We've done that for centuries." Back then, I thought he was referring to the old Abraham, which seemed too distant to take seriously. So, I nodded a little, and I leaned more toward the two-state advocates' ideas.


Return to the Netherlands

Upon returning to the Netherlands, my side job as an NRC correspondent for the "Arab Middle East" earned me some recognition. After a lecture I gave at the Higher Defense College on the situation in the Persian Gulf, where the British were ending their military presence and trouble was expected. I was inundated with invitations to speak about the Middle East. Unfortunately, my audience seemed primarily interested in Israel and its neighbors. I didn't want to deliver a hard pro or anti message and reminded discussants of recent Israeli misdeeds when they were outraged about "Arab terrorists." My intention was to show the right and wrong on both sides. It didn't work. From East Groningen to Cadzand-Bad, people knew exactly what had happened just before that. Although I sometimes knew what happened even before that, such case-based discussions seemed futile to me. To me, it is a given that in any armed conflict, both sides commit crimes that they blame on the other.
It made me lose interest in these gatherings, and I declined subsequent invitations.

The advantage of giving a lecture over writing an article is that you also learn something from it yourself. Someone asked me where those Israeli Arabs came from. Were they leftover Turks or older soldiers of Muhammad? I suppressed my laughter and truthfully replied that I didn't know. Who inhabited the area in 1948 when other distant countries recognized a state there?
From my Christian and Muslim Palestinian friends, I knew their families had lived there for as long as anyone could remember. My Jewish friends in the Netherlands said the population mainly consisted of Jewish immigrants who had returned to their homeland over centuries. Immigration had accelerated due to the Holocaust and endemic anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe. The Jews had wisely bought the land for their homes and agricultural communities from the Arabs. Their ancestors had been deported by the Romans and were reclaiming their inheritance, the land of King David.
The stories contradicted each other on many points, prompting me to conduct my own research.


Diaspora Myth

The first hint of a misconception came from a historian specializing in Roman military history. "The banishment to the diaspora is a myth," he said. The Romans lacked the technical means to remove a population of nearly a million people. Moreover, their legionaries needed to be fed and housed locally. No, the Romans removed or expelled only a small rebellious elite. He suggested I read more about that history.
Through my reading, I discovered that a large part of the population at the time remained loyal to Judaism and stayed put. In the first six centuries after Christ, there were Christian conversions. It is likely that this was only a small fraction of the population. Mohammed was more effective in Southwest Asia than Christ. Populations that did not adopt his faith and stuck to the Bible or Torah were spared, provided they didn't get in his way. But they had to pay various taxes, from which Muslims were largely exempt. This was too great a temptation for many Palestinians, whether Christian or Jewish. The result was predictable. When the Turks later occupied the area, not much changed.
It was hard for me to accept that the population of all of Palestine after World War I could be descendants of King David's Jews. It would mean that the struggle there is a conflict between Jewish descendants.

Researchers of antiquity had already shed light on this. I like to cite statements by Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister. They both acknowledged it in 1929, the year of the major Palestinian uprising against the new British occupation: "Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea." At that time, they used this as justification for Jewish immigrants to resettle and live peacefully alongside those descendants.

Looking back, I think the best thing I read in the consulted documentation was the book by Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian: The Invention of the Jewish People (London - New York English edition, published by Verso in 2009). In summary: "Palestinians are the people we call 'the Jews' in the Bible." The documentation in his book is overwhelming.

The first independent confirmation of this nutshell version of history came to me in Israel. I attended a symposium where a doctor and two geneticists spoke about their population DNA research. Their shocking finding, to me, was: Palestinian Israelis, Christians and Muslims were clearly of the same lineage as the Israeli Jews whose families had lived there for generations. However, the genetic makeup of the other Israelites, though related more than, say, with true Arabs, was more diverse and mixed with West and East European genes.
I've since found a lot of literature reporting on this research. Internet knowledge is fleeting; for some articles I read before, my computer now says, "Not found." The references below are from publications I could still access as of October 5, 2024*.

1. Ariella Oppenheim, Ph.D., researcher at Hebrew University and Hadassah Medical School labs: "More than 90% of Palestinians share chromosomes with Israelis."
2. The Shared Genetic Heritage of http://www.patheos.com/blogs/epiphenom/2009/01/shared-genetic-heritage-of-jews-and.html#sthash.pbKRHy5m.dpufJews and Palestinians; Jewish Press, January 6, 2015: /
3. Science Daily, May 9, 2000: "The study, published in the May 9 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that Jewish men shared a common set of genetic signatures with non-Jews from the Middle East, including Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and these signatures diverged significantly from non-Jewish men outside of this region. Consequently, Jews and Arabs share a common ancestor and are more closely related to one another than to non-Jews from other areas of the world." (ClP: By "Arabs," he likely meant ancient Phoenicians.)
4. S. Sand: "Palestinians Are Biological Descendants of Bible's Jews."

For me, as a non-politician and non-historian, what I heard in Israel from geneticists my physicist colleagues deemed credible was enough. The Palestinian issue is as dramatic to me, now nearing the end of my life, as it was when I first heard of Joshua's massacre in Jericho at age seven or eight. Hatred blinds. Neither Jews nor Palestinians want to hear the findings of their own historians and geneticists. They are silenced by their own people. The others are to blame and must go or die. Hatred is fed and kept alive. The latest crime of one side must be avenged by a crime from the other.
The fertile land, abundantly provided by God with milk and honey, is fruitful for the global arms industry. The only winner is a financial elite. They lend money, with profitable interest, of course, to governments providing military aid to their favorite (or both) sides. Their knife cuts both ways. The profits of the arms industry also end up in their hands.

Nieuwegein, October 5, 2024.
ChaPT translate**, October 13, 2024

Notes added after 5/10/2024

• * URLs producing a "Not found" page with browser "Google Chrome" with me came out uncensored when I used Microsoft Edge.
• ** I only corected a few words, where AI thought erroneously, it knew better than I, what I meant.