Homework, Anyone?

As much as I love Abby Martin, is it too much to expect of her, and other progressives who 'get' Palestine, to bone up on the early history of the Palestine problem? This is her riff on the subject from the same video extolled in my last post:

Martin: They should have created Israel not in the God-damn Middle East. Put it in fucking Australia. Like, what the hell were they thinking? It's insane.

[MERC: Actually, Abby, "they" shouldn't have put it anywhere, neither in Palestine, nor in Australia. The creation of ethnocratic, apartheid states are never a good idea.]

Rogan: I don't know enough about the history of that region...
Martin: I mean, Sykes-Picot, Western empires basically just drew a line through the Middle East and divided all these countries and formed all these borders back, like, 120 years ago and I don't know, like 19... when was Sykes-Picot? I dunno, somewhere around that time.

[MERC: But surely, Abby, you've heard of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, particularly in the year of its centenary?]

So anyway, fast forward to when the Ottoman Empire was colonising this area...

[MERC: Abby, you mean 'rewind'. And also, however bad their repression of the Arabs during World War I was, the Ottomans at least didn't flood Greater Syria with Turkish colons.]

... and the British were occupying what is Palestine, right, and the Zionist lobby was really strong. This is well before the Holocaust, and they were super, super strong and emboldened, and they were negotiating with the Brits about where they can form, like, a Jewish state, and there was really no support until the Holocaust where they were able to sell, like, you know, the fear more and there was even false flag attacks where Zionist organisations were going round different Arab countries and committing terrorism and they're saying, like, the Jews need to come and escape, you guys are being persecuted. Like, they'd actually carry out terrorism in, like, synagogues and stuff and it's all documented.

[MERC: Abby, you've fast-forwarded a tad too far here. The synagogues you mentioned were in early 50s Iraq, after the creation of Israel in 1948.]

But the ethnic cleansing that went on, I mean, it's horrific. There's dozens of massacres that happened in the formation of Israel because even though it was partitioned by the UN - I don't know who gave this international body the authority to partition a country on top of another country, but on top of that there are several massacres that just continued to take more and more of the land as I said, and that was called the Nakba, and so all those people were expelled violently and purged from their land, and we visited some of these refugee camps and the people were, like, literally... our houses are, like, 5 miles away and we're just stuck in these camps and we've been here for 50 years. Yeah, it sucks.