the phoenicians/carthaginians, the ancestors of today's lebanese, were not arabs. they were basically jews; they spoke hebrew. but, unlike the jews, they followed pagan semitic religion, which is telling. the jews showed up with the persians, right after the collapse of the phoencian trading areas, and started practicing monotheism, like the persians did. judaism is much closer to zoroastrianism than any indigenous semitic religion, but the phoenicians worshiped tanit and the other semitic deities.

the thing is tough that the phoenicians, as we understand them, were really greeks. we can understand this better now due to dna testing in the region, which has clarified that the sea peoples were greeks. some time around 1500 bce, these greek raiders set up in cyprus and systematically destroyed the mediterranean coast. what emerged from the wreckage was a semitic civilization that was radically transformed by greek seafaring, and which led to the colonization of northern africa and southern spain by ancient hebrew speaking lebanese people.

the persians needed them to fight the greeks. this is actually recorded in the hebrew bible as cyrus being extremely pro-jewish, but cyrus was not merely pro-jewish, and the mythical part of it is an exaggeration of a larger policy. in fact, cyrus was philphoenician. he wanted to rebuild those cities on the coast that the assyrians destroyed, to rebuild those trade networks. the resettlement of the jews in jerusalem, as colonized irano-semites, was a part of that philphoenicianism.

you can start to narrate history from roughly that point. anything before cyrus in the bible has no real historical credibility, but everything after cyrus is relatively easy to corroborate.

the inescapable conclusion that follows is that the ancient caananites were neither arabs nor jews in any meaningful sense, but hebrew-speaking pagans worshiping semitic and hellenic gods. that only changes after the return from babylon, and it's hard to make sense of how there could have been a monotheistic religion in the area before the persians.

how am i feeling?

a lot better, but it's fairly dry down here, and that's had some effect on me. i need a long shower. i don't think they've drugged me in a while and i'm not sure yet if they've followed me.

i bought a few things yesterday to start the process of redesigning this basement off - a plastic drawer system to fit into a hole under the counter, a shoe rack, a fan, a mercury thermometer to replace the one i broke and a digital "weather station" with alarm clock and calendar that i actually suspect i'll find extremely helpful. i still have my clock radio/alarm clock from about 1991. i remember listening to smells like teen spirit on it when it came out. i haven't used it in 20 years, and it's well in need of an upgrade. i just don't use alarm clocks. i'm very good at waking myself up on time, without one.

i'm looking at putting a mini fridge and a long table in to extend the counter, with a smaller table under neath to put a stereo system on.

there's somebody coming tomorrow to look at whether he can install a fan in the bathroom or not and that's going to help dramatically, but i need to do the kitchen first, the walk-in closet second and the bathroom third. i don't know if i need a plumber or not yet. the kitchen plumbing is ok.

really, it's starting to look like trump and his advisors are coming down with a case of what edward said called orientalism, which is a mythical projection of the middle east as a mystical source of wisdom rooted in the writings of nietzsche, in biblical narratives and in the ubiquity of free masonry in the ruling classes 100 years ago, when the facts are that the region has been culturally backwards and struggling to catch up ever since the fall of sumeria 5000 years ago.

just for reference.

at 3000 bce, the area we now call israel was recovering from something called the bronze age collapse. there was a group of recent migrants to the region called philistines, who we know today were greek settlers related to the infamous sea-peoples, living roughly in the area we now call gaza. many hundreds of years later, the romans would rename the area after these greek settlers as a punishment for a jewish revolt against the romans. the indigenous canaanites, who spoke hebrew and not arabic, mostly lived in modern day lebanon. there was a population in the southern part of the levant that corresponded to what was later called judaea that appears to have been related to old mesopotamian settlers from the fertile crescent. the 'ur' in jerusalem is a place name connected to very old pre-semitic sumerian language groups, which were probably ethnically caucasian (related to modern day georgians and armenians) and not semitic at all. the assyrians had not yet moved south to conquer the area, and the movement of a heavily colonized iranic-semitic group into the region under cyrus had not yet occurred. what we call israel today was really created under the direction of the persians, who had a broadly phil-phoenecian policy, due to the phoenecians' naval supremacy, and the fact that the persians were a horse-mounted warrior group from the european steppes around ukraine, that were not good at ship building. the persians needed the phoenecian/canaanite/hebrew groups to import items like tin, which was used to make swords, via naval routes.

there were a people that the western sources called arabs living in the desert outside of the southern levant, but they appear to have spoken hebrew, and not arabic. they were not the same people that invaded the region in the 7th century, from yemen, and brought south semitic arabic languages into it. in fact, the hebrew-speaking arabs just outside of israel, in cities like petra, appeared to worship greek deities like zeus, and seem to have been heavily influenced by the philistines.

the conflict in the region at the time was a lingering ethnic conflict between the greek-speaking sea peoples and the indigenous egyptians and hebrews, as well as conflict between the trade-focused and vaguely democratic hebrew-speaking phoenician groups on the coast of the mediterrranean, who were very greek in behaviour, and the brutally authoritarian and viciously militaristic societies that developed out of the collapsing agricultural base in the fertile crescent, most importantly the assyrians. the assyrians sought to force tribute on the hebrew-speaking groups, who had a tentative level of autonomy from a longstanding egyptian hegemony, which asserted itself after the egyptians had driven the hittites (an indo-european group living in modern day turkey) out of the region, before the onset of the bronze age collapse. we can prove that the assyrians did eventually succeed in moving south and destroying the societies in the hebrew speaking areas and taking a large amount of slaves back to babylon, an area which included lebanon, syria, "palestine", jordan and israel, but they were mostly interested in the phoenician trading ports in lebanon, and there is no historical support for any of the stories around saul, david or solomon in the old testament, and they probably never existed at all, but were invented as a myth during what the hebrews call their captivity.

as such, the idea that the current conflict in israel is 3000 years old has no basis in fact or history. there were hebrews/phoenecians/canaanites, egyptians and assyrians in the region at the time, and the persians were coming in soon, but there were no arabs, by the modern association of the term with a group of south semitic speakers from yemen, in the area at the time. when these groups from yemen did eventually move into the area, the western sources distinguish them from the hebrew speaking arabs and call them saracens, instead. it took a long time for these ethnic and cultural identities to fuse in the western sources, until well after the crusades had begun. more academic (as it was defined at the time) western sources like the papacy use specific language to differentiate between the existing hebrew-speaking arabic groups and the invading muslim saracens from yemen. the assyrians sought economic control of the region, and to destroy it for refusing tribute, in acts of simple barbarism, while the egyptians maintained loose hegemonic control, and saw it as a buffer between themselves and the warlike groups in mesopotamia.

after the persians came the greeks and romans, and then the arabs in the 7th century, who were themselves overrun by turks and mongols in the 12th and 13th centuries. there was migration of south semitic speakers from yemen into the region during the islamic conquest, but the region was heavily depopulated not by the expulsions of the jews but by the brutally destructive heraclean wars between rome and persia and by devastating epidemics of the bubonic plague, coming out of the heraclean wars. it was the plague that wiped the then roman society out in the region. the archaeologists have found a destruction horizon after heracleus, and connected it to an increase in pastoralism and herd grazing. before the arabs moved into jerusalem, it had actually been abandoned by roman civilization and overrun by sheep and goat herders, as had happened earlier in britain, in germany and in the trans-danubian basin.

if you want to be very generous, you could tie the current conflict to the monophysite heresy in egypt during late antiquity, but that is a dramatic stretch.

a better number to use would have been 1000 years rather than 3000 years, as you can make a coherent case that the basis of the british palestinian mandate began during the crusades. you couldn't cogently extend that back further.  but i don't think trump was expecting a rigorous analysis of the number he pulled out of his ass.