Palestinians, in history, are Jewish

Around this time of year we mark the anniversary of the fall of Betar in 135 AD. Betar was the last major fortress of the Bar Kokhba revolt, the final large-scale Jewish uprising against Rome. The revolt erupted after Emperor Hadrian’s plans to rebuild Jerusalem as the pagan city Aelia Capitolina, complete with a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount. The day of Betar’s fall coincided with Tisha B’Av, the same fast day that already commemorated the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians and the Second Temple by the Romans sixty-five years earlier. After crushing the revolt, the Romans renamed the province of Judea “Syria Palaestina.” The name was not inventing an ancient nation; it was a deliberate administrative and symbolic act that sought to erase the Jewish character of the land.

Most people today treat “Palestine” as if it were the continuous name of an ancient sovereign people. It was not. The term itself has older roots in Greek sources for the coastal region associated with the Philistines, but the formal Roman redesignation of the Jewish province came after a Jewish rebellion was suppressed. The land remained the historic homeland of the Jews. Jews had lived there for more than a thousand years before the revolt, returned after the Babylonian exile, rebuilt their Temple, and maintained continuous presence even under successive empires. Dispersal followed Roman victory, yet the connection to the land never disappeared. The Jewish diaspora is wide precisely because Jewish history is long—three to four thousand years of recorded continuity, not a recent invention.

The modern claim that “Palestine” is the exclusive homeland of a distinct Arab people called Palestinians is recent. It does not rest on continuous ancient nationhood. It rests on a selective reading of the Balfour Declaration, the subsequent British Mandate, the 1947 UN partition proposal, and especially the aftermath of 1948 and 1967. The Balfour Declaration supported a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine while protecting the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities. The Mandate territory originally included land east of the Jordan; Transjordan was later administered separately and became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In 1948 Israel declared independence on the basis of the UN partition and surviving Jewish settlement. Neighbouring Arab states, including the newly independent Jordan, invaded. Jordan occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) until 1967; Egypt held Gaza. No independent Palestinian Arab state was established by those occupying powers.

Jordan itself was no stranger to internal political tension over the Palestinian question. In 1951 King Abdullah I was assassinated at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by a Palestinian gunman (a Jordanian subject after the annexation of the West Bank). The killing reflected deep resentment among some Palestinian nationalists toward the Hashemite monarchy’s policies, including its pragmatic dealings and the formal incorporation of the West Bank into the kingdom. The 1950s saw repeated civil unrest, demonstrations, and attempted coups, particularly on the West Bank, as Palestinian nationalists and pan-Arab radicals challenged the monarchy’s authority and its Western alignments. These tensions never fully disappeared.

After 1967 the presence of armed Palestinian fedayeen groups inside Jordan escalated into open confrontation. In 1970 King Hussein’s forces moved decisively against the PLO and other guerrilla organisations that had established a state-within-a-state and challenged royal control. The fighting, remembered as Black September, drove the bulk of the fedayeen leadership and fighters out of Jordan and into Lebanon, where their presence contributed heavily to that country’s later instability. One of the central figures who emerged from this period, Yasser Arafat, advanced the ambit claim that “his” people were Palestinians entitled to a state in the territory of Israel, including parts of Jerusalem.

For many reasons not rooted in historical continuity, the UN and much of the international system found it convenient to maintain a particular status quo after 1967. Neighbouring Islamic states largely refused permanent absorption of the original 1948 refugees and their descendants. Worse, the UN adopted a unique refugee definition and hereditary status solely for Palestinians under UNRWA—status that passes down the male line and can persist even after citizenship is acquired elsewhere—turning a mid-century displacement into a multigenerational political instrument.

Critics of Israel point to the West Bank and Gaza and insist Israel should not hold them. Israel captured those territories in a defensive war in 1967. It has repeatedly offered withdrawals and territorial compromise in exchange for recognition and an end to violence. What followed decades of concessions, including the complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, was not durable peace but sustained terrorism, culminating in the massacre of 7 October 2023, the worst single day of anti-Jewish slaughter since the Holocaust. In the intervening years, international funding and UN-endorsed education systems in the territories have coexisted with curricula, media, and official rhetoric that celebrate the killing of Jews, often packaged as “anti-Zionism” and the demand “from the river to the sea.” Senior figures in the Palestinian leadership have histories of terrorism and crimes against civilians; accountability has been selective at best.

None of this requires denying that Arabs have lived in the land for centuries or that individual Palestinians have genuine grievances and attachments. It does require rejecting the erasure of Jewish history. The Romans renamed Judea after crushing a Jewish revolt. The modern political identity of “Palestine” as an exclusive Arab national claim is a 20th-century development, sharpened after 1967 and sustained by institutions that treat Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate. The land’s deepest continuous historical identity is Jewish. Pretending otherwise does not produce peace; it produces permanent grievance.

JFK’s Legacy, Reframed: A President Constrained, Then Removed

Under the working assumption that John F. Kennedy was eliminated by a conspiracy involving Lyndon Johnson and senior military command, with Lee Harvey Oswald as the designated patsy, the standard media narrative of his presidency collapses into something sharper and more revealing. The familiar list of achievements and failures remains, but the causal weight shifts. What looks like personal weakness or half-measures becomes evidence of a man pushing against entrenched institutional power that ultimately decided he had to go.

Kennedy’s strongest moments look, in this light, like deliberate resistance rather than mere competence. The Cuban Missile Crisis was not simply calibrated brinkmanship; it was a president overriding the loudest voices in the military and intelligence apparatus that preferred immediate strikes. The secret Turkey missile trade, kept quiet at the time, bought a temporary partner in Khrushchev. The Limited Test Ban Treaty and the American University speech that preceded it signalled a genuine desire to dial back nuclear confrontation. The Peace Corps and the Moon commitment projected soft power and technological ambition rather than pure kinetic force. These were not the priorities of a military establishment already eyeing deeper involvement in Southeast Asia.

The failures and compromises take on a different colour under the same assumption. Bay of Pigs was a CIA operation Kennedy inherited and only partially controlled; withholding air support may have been the least-worst decision available once the plan’s flaws became clear. Vietnam is more damning in the official record—advisers rising toward 16,000, the green light for the Diem coup—yet the numbers and the timing can be read as a forced compromise rather than enthusiastic escalation. A president who had already been burned by the intelligence community at the Bay of Pigs was not in a position to simply refuse the entire apparatus. Direction from the Oval Office is not the same as control of the machinery. The later claim that Kennedy would have withdrawn after 1964 sits more comfortably if one believes the same machinery preferred a president who would deliver the larger war.

Civil rights fits the same pattern of constrained action. Kennedy moved when the street pressure and the optics became unavoidable, not when the moral case was first made. He allowed Southern Democratic governors room to manoeuvre because the congressional arithmetic demanded it. That is ordinary political calculation; under the conspiracy frame it also becomes another instance of a president who could not fully impose his will on the party and institutional structures around him.

The personal and medical material functions, in this reading, as useful post-assassination narrative management. Chronic illness, heavy medication, and extramarital affairs were real. Once the man was dead they became instruments for diminishing the administration while leaving the martyr’s charisma intact. A drug-addled, Mafia-tangled, Cuba-obsessed president is easier to isolate from the policy choices that threatened larger interests. The same interests that preferred a steady escalation in Vietnam under Johnson had every reason to shift retrospective blame onto the predecessor whose death cleared the path. JFK becomes the flawed operator; LBJ the practical successor who simply finished the job.

This framing requires accepting that the assassination was not the work of a lone misfit. It requires senior military figures, operational capacity for multiple shooters, a controlled narrative after the fact, the replacement of inconvenient physical evidence, and the subsequent elevation of at least one participant in the official inquiry. It is, as the premise itself notes, a conspiracy theory. Yet once the assumption is granted, the legacy coheres differently. Kennedy’s reputation was not merely enhanced by death; it was selectively curated. The Camelot myth preserved the inspirational surface while the deeper institutional conflict—over nuclear restraint, over the scale of commitment in Asia, over who ultimately directed American power—was papered over by focusing on personal failings and incomplete domestic legislation.

The result is a presidency whose direction is more interesting than its completed statutes. Kennedy’s short term left few permanent legislative monuments of his own, yet the direction he tried to set—toward arms control, toward limits on covert overreach, toward a less purely military definition of American leadership—collided with structures that preferred otherwise. If those structures removed him, the unfinished quality of his record is not simply the accident of an assassin’s bullet. It is the visible scar of a contest he did not win.

That contest continues to shape how the record is taught and remembered. The official story keeps the focus on Oswald, on personal scandal, and on the tragedy of lost potential. The alternative assumption keeps the focus on power: who held it, who resisted it, and who decided the resistance had gone far enough.

From personal difficulties in challenging times, the US Civil War became certain.

Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, successive Democratic presidents in the 1850s, governed amid rising sectional fury over slavery. Both men carried heavy personal burdens into office. Both operated inside partisan media environments that amplified their worst instincts and muted dissent. Neither proved equal to the crisis. The result was not merely policy failure but the progressive collapse of the Union’s political center.

Pierce arrived as “Young Hickory,” the handsome New Hampshire Democrat who had ridden Andrew Jackson’s coattails from private to brigadier general in the Mexican War. His private life was already marked by grief and frailty. His wife Jane, religious and committed to temperance, disliked the political world. Their three sons all died young; the last, Benjamin, was killed in a train wreck weeks before the inauguration. Pierce himself was often unwell and later died of cirrhosis. These private sorrows did not prevent him from making a decisive public error. By signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, he repealed the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition on slavery north of 36°30′ and substituted “popular sovereignty.” The predictable consequence was Bleeding Kansas—armed conflict between pro- and anti-slavery settlers—and the rapid emergence of the Republican Party. For a time the partisan press cheered the move as democratic principle and Western expansion. Only when the violence became undeniable did his own party refuse him renomination.

Buchanan, the only lifelong bachelor president, carried a different private wound: the broken engagement and sudden death of his fiancée Anne Coleman in 1819, long rumored to have been suicide. He spent decades as a skilled politician and diplomat, serving in Congress, as minister to Russia and Britain, and as Polk’s Secretary of State during the era of continental expansion. He entered the White House in 1857 intending to quiet the storm. Instead the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision—rendered by a Court shaped in large part by Democratic appointments—declared that Congress lacked power to ban slavery in the territories and that Black people had no rights the white man was bound to respect. Buchanan’s subsequent push to admit Kansas under the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution further split his party. The doctrine of states’ rights, combined with the formal denial of citizenship to people of color, rendered the Union’s constitutional order increasingly untenable for large parts of the North. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election and offered a careful, limited compromise on the extension of slavery, Southern states seceded. Buchanan denied both the right of secession and the federal power to coerce the seceding states. He left office with the country fracturing. He later supported the Union cause during the war, but the damage of the preceding four years was already irreversible.

Then, as now, partisan media functioned as an echo chamber. Democratic papers defended Pierce’s Kansas-Nebraska Act as fidelity to local self-government and later portrayed Buchanan’s acquiescence in Dred Scott as respect for judicial authority and constitutional restraint. Opposition voices were dismissed as agitators or sectional extremists. The presidents, operating inside that closed information loop, found it easier to continue along the path of least resistance than to confront the moral and political reality that slavery’s expansion was no longer compatible with a durable Union.

Would either man have governed differently if the headlines had been less forgiving? Possibly at the margins. Public pressure can force recalculation. Yet both men’s records suggest deeper limits: personal grief and temperament in Pierce’s case, a lifelong preference for legalistic compromise and Southern constitutional arguments in Buchanan’s. The more fundamental failure was institutional and cultural. A political system that could not produce leaders capable of recognizing when compromise had become capitulation, and a media culture that rewarded tribal affirmation over hard truth, left the country without the resources to negotiate its deepest division.

The Civil War was not inevitable in 1850. By the time Lincoln took the oath in 1861, after eight years of Democratic stewardship under Pierce and Buchanan, it had become nearly certain. Personal misfortune does not excuse public failure. Nor does a partisan press absolve presidents of the duty to see beyond their own side’s applause.