A Piece of Our History

There's something about reading about a piece of history in a newspaper instead of in a book. When you read an old newspaper--I'm talking decades, not something you used to wrap up the Pesach dishes last year--it can make something that did not happen in your lifetime more real, and when it brings up facts that you were not aware of and opens up your eyes to what life was like so that it is more than just a 2-dimensional fact on paper.

Elder of Zion does this in his post Building an economy under fire - The Jews of 1939, where he combines jpg's of some articles in Jewish Palestine of the 1930's with his own commentary. He writes:

The Palestinian Arab economy is very interesting. It is wholly dependent on the one nation that it wants to destroy. According to the CIA World Factbook, when the second intifada started 100,000 Palestinian Arabs lost their jobs. Since they have no independent economy, the Palestinian Arabs went to the West begging for funds to pay for bogus "policemen" and pay them off to pretend to no longer be interested in terror.

No one seems to ask the question: why have the Palestinian Arabs, who have been there for decades, failed to build up any sort of decent independent infrastructure and economy on their own?

Many would answer that Israeli military actions have devastated any chance that Palestinian Arabs may have had to build such an infrastructure. This theory assumes that it is impossible to build something permanent in uncertain times, that one cannot expect people to think far ahead when they have to worry about today.

Let me introduce you to the Palestinian Jews of the 1930s.

If you have not been properly introduced yet, you should take the opportunity.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Palestine.