– Who started this mess? No one seems to want to fix it !!
For as long as most of us can remember the Middle East, especially Palestine and Jerusalem, has been tossed like a footfall back and forth between various Western powers. Today we once again find this area, and our attitudes toward it, along with those of the various surrounding countries greatly confused and pained. I’ll try here to provide a brief and clarifying summary of what has transpired in Palestine since the beginning in the Book of Genesis.
Back around 2000 BCE Abraham and Sarah had a son, Israel and Abraham and Hagar had a son, Ishmael. The former became the nation of Israel (Hebrews) and the latter became the people we call Arabs. Both were said to be blessed by God. As we know, the Hebrews moved around and suffered a lot at the hands of various surrounding nations. Eventually they conquered what we today call “Palestine” (then “Cannan”) while Ismael’s people, who became what we call “Arabs”, settled in the desert country South and East of the Dead Sea.
Meanwhile, various superior kingdoms took control of these areas and their peoples. Babylonian and Persian captured and moved these peoples back and forth between their own countries and Palestine. Eventually, Alexander the Great conquered these nations all and incorporated them into the Greek Empire (300s BCE). Later, along came the Romans who replaced the Greeks. The romans conquered and essentially destroyed the Jewish nation remaining in Palestine in 63CE. The Jewish people were scattered around the world, especially to Europe.
During the long Middle Ages Palestine was “shared” by many different peoples, including Jews, Christians, and Pagans. These folks frequently fought over who should govern the land called “Holy” by nearly all of them. The Christian, Pagan, and Byzantine Empires were regularly at war off and on throughout the Middle Ages. Around 640 CE the Muslim Faith was born and now the world had an additional, entirely different perspective and effort to conquer with which to deal. This new perspective was pretty much dominated by the Turkish and Arab peoples
All of these perspectives fought for the dominance of the Middle Eastern World. Eventually the countries and wars of modern Europe came to dominate all of the above nations and religions. After the First World War (1916) even though there were a great many “civil wars”, the British Government pretty much took control of the above mentioned areas, focusing on the Suez Cannel. After the end of World War Two (1945) there were a great many “civil wars” by various nations in the region in an effort to control it.
In 1948, under the auspicious of the United Nations, Jewish people were allowed to return to their “Holy Land” even though there were many different claims to the control of what came to be called “Palestine.” The primary reasoning behind this decision was an effort to “recompense” the Jewish people for their displacement, oppression, and near annelation by the Nazi regime. The Jewish people were allowed to “return home”, even though the peoples living there, mostly Arabs, were not part of the decision for them to do so.
Needless to say, this decision and mass “exodus” of Jewish people from all over Europe, that followed it open up near total chaos in the region. Everyone thought, for a wide variety of historical reasons, thought the region belonged to them. The Jewish people arrived by the thousands, displacing or imprisoning the largely Arab population behind steel fences, a people which had been living there for decades if not centuries. In 1948 the new Jewish nation of “Israel” waged a sudden and decisive six day war against the Arab peoples in the region, taking control of nearly all of Palestine. The two peoples have lived side-by-side ever since in a perpetual state of war. The latest clash between them is only the most recent, and certainly not the last, such conflict.
So that is something of how it all got started and where it stands today. The Arab peoples occasionally fight back viciously, and ultimately ineffectually, while the Jewish Nation continues to seek to control them, largely with the favor of the Western world. I must add that I was able to visit the Holy Land briefly back in 1966 and witnessed the thousands of Arab peoples living behind steel fences unable to move freely in what once was their “homeland.” Of course, many others live in cities and villages all over the Palestinian area, but not with full freedom to move from place to place as they might wish. And so it goes.

My uncle Vint was a mechanic who worked on almost any sort of engine. He was also a very wise man in other ways. Once when I was visiting him and his family we went to a roller-rink for the evening. The rink had a series of small hills built into one of its corners. It looked like fun and I made my way toward it. Vint saw me, shook both his head and his forefinger at me. After I saw what happened to those kids who tried the hill, I realized that it was just for experts. I was grateful for Uncle Vint’s warning.
Another time, when I was but 6 and had locked myself out of our apartment house while trying to collect the Sunday morning paper, I was dressed in nothing but underpants and it was 5 AM, I was in what they call “dire straits”. Lo and behold, along came Uncle Vint driving a street sweeper, and coming to my rescue. He took me into the truck and we drove to the nearest all-night café from which he called my mother and got her to meet us at the apartment building door. Once again Uncle Vint to the rescue.
But Vint was also able to take his mechanic skills abroad, spending a year in North Africa and another on the Alaska Pipeline as a mechanic specialist. I was also told that he had actually invented a special bulldozer blade for which he was well-known in the business. When my sixth-grade class visited a near-bye logging operation way up on a mountaintop, there was Uncle Vint, running the donkey engine that hauled the logs up the hill to be put on the trucks and hauled to town.
The experience when I learned the most from Uncle Vint involved fixing my own car engine. I had been told the “head gasket” was broken and it would need to be replaced at the tune of $200. When I called Vint about it he said “Bring It to my shop.” At the time he was running a boat mechanic shop on Lake Union in Seattle. When I got there, he handed me a wrench and said “Loosen those six bolts there on the top sides of the engine and call me.” After I had done that he handed me a rag and then used a hoist to lift the top half of the engine off.
“Use the rag to clean off all the excess oil and then go down to the parts shop and buy a “Head seal”. I did this straight way. The flat cork seal cost $1.50. Vint then removed the old seal, which had a split in it, placed the new one in place between the top and bottom parts of the engine, and said: “Clean it up and call me.” When I called him a few minutes later he used his hoist to lower the top half of the engine in place. “Tighten these six bolts and call me”, Vint said. When I called him, he said: “You are good to go. You have replaced your own head gasket and it cost you nothing”, accompanied with a big smile.
I was flabbergasted by the fact that I had done this entire $200 job by myself and it had cost me next to nothing.
Another time a mechanic had told me that my fuel system was leaking somewhere and it would cost several hundred dollars to find the leak. I called Vint and told him what the fellow had said. Vint asked: “How much gas does your car use?” I replied that it used about a tank a week. “What does it cost to fill it? Vint asked. I replied “About five dollars” (those were the days, 1960s). Vint said “You do the math.” And then he said “Have a great day, Jerry.”
I did the math. At five dollars a tank it would take nearly a year for me to the spend the $200 I would have spent getting the mechanic to find the leak. The car continued to leak gas at a pretty steady rate, but no worse, until I sold it several months later. Once again, my Uncle Vint had saved me a lot of trouble and money by helping me think through the problem on my own. Moreover, he had actually increased my knowledge of how cars work and what it should really cost to fix them. And at least once I had done the work myself !! I would like to think I may have learned something about how to be a teacher from my Uncle Vint.