In 1979, I had a Palestinian problem. Worse, I wasn’t aware of it.
The problem was that I knew nothing about Palestine, or about Palestinians, or about Lebanon, or virtually anything about the wider Middle East. The slightly mitigating factor here was that I was only 20 years old.
That summer I took a job at a progressive, listener-funded radio station in Berkeley, California. Don’t let “listener-funded” mislead you. This was a storied operation dating back to the late ‘40s. Its FM signal was the most powerful in the San Francisco Bay area—reaching at night to the Oregon border.
Programming ran the full gamut from far left to very far left, providing a platform to all manner of social activists—political, sexual, racial. My job was to coordinate volunteers answering the phones during pledge drives, and this is how I met Tina, a Palestinian refugee via Lebanon.
But let’s back up a couple of years.
Think back, those of you of a certain age, to the 1970s. It was a decade packed full of Middle East news, little of it good. It was the PLO and Yasser Arafat hijacking 707s and blowing them up on airport ramps. It was the Munich Olympics massacre of Jewish athletes. It was the first oil embargo. It was the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Wars in Lebanon. Ten years of confusion and turmoil and comedians on TV saying that maybe they should just nuke the whole place and be done with it.
Then, the summer I took the job in ‘79, a second oil shock. The Shah of Iran is deposed, Islamic hardliners take over and hostages are held at the US embassy in Tehran. The Soviets invade Afghanistan.
For reasons that I’ve long forgotten, Tina and her son, who were Christian, fled Lebanon, ending up as refugees in the US. (Neither, 44 years later, can I swear that her name was Tina, though that's the recollection of a former co-worker who thinks it was short for Christiana.) Her husband was out of the picture, either because he was dead or in prison—either way the Israelis were responsible. Tina was angry, and it didn’t take much to set her off when it came to Israel and the annexation of her Palestinian family’s land going back generations.
This was my introduction to the real-life complexities of Middle East history and politics. I grew up a sheltered kid, it turned out, being taught next to nothing about the Middle East in school, and certainly getting little insight from mass media of the era, including Hollywood and TV, where dark-skinned “terrorists” were stock characters that apparently needed no further explanation.
I’ve just spent the better part of an hour sifting through the Wikipedia entry for Lebanon, hoping to jog my memory of Tina’s specific situation, and came away with only a headache. It’s not just a relatively simple matter of Christian vs. Jew vs. Muslim, but a myriad of factions, ranging from near-secular left to fanatic hard right within each religion, a bubbling, toxic stew of grievance and animosity going back hundreds, even thousands of years.
Hamas is self-evidently of the fanatic hard right, for whom no compromise is permissible and the state of Israel will forever be illegitimate. They use despicable terror tactics to further their aims. They are also clearly willing to sacrifice the lives of countless innocent Gaza residents by provoking Israel into the retaliation we have seen unfold over the last few days.
By that autumn I was back at university, and while I continued part-time at the radio station for the next few years I lost track of Tina and her son and have wondered over the decades what became of them—assuming he was around 10 at the time, the son would now be in his mid-50s.
It's useful to remember that Palestine was inhabited long before the state of Israel came into existence. It was not empty desert, a misapprehension that perhaps some in the west have been too easy to let go unchallenged. This documentary does an excellent job in a short time laying out the general history of the region.
I’m going to recommend another video as well, a lecture. I know, I know. Any time someone has recommended a video lecture lately it’s invariably been about the “Covid hoax,” or, alternatively, how to cure the hoax with a few Ivermectin tablets followed by a bleach chaser. This isn’t that.
It’s an Austin Community College professor of Government, Roy Casagranda, whose interdisciplinary approach to history combines politics, economics, psychology, and philosophy. Give him a 10-minute try and you’ll see what I mean. It’s invigorating stuff. Truly enlightening.
Last weekend’s attacks did not spontaneously erupt, and understanding their origins is essential to knowing how to stop them from happening over and over again.
Casagranda can be a bit glib and candidly this is not his best effort (more recent lectures are better delivered and recorded), but I’ll take glib over deadly dull monotones any day. See you next time.
Updated to correct the more likely accurate name of Tina, the Palestinian refugee.
