Theos-Talk Archives (August 2004 Message tt00531)

I just received this re your post from a fellow claiming to be 
Nostradamus. I have no idea whether he is for real or not: Just as 
I have no idea whether anyone else on this list is for real or not.

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Please forward this to Frank N. Stein

Dear Frank:

There are several historical precedents for the current occupation of 
Palestine from which we can extrapolate cautiously to guess the 
future. The oldest of course is the Latin Kingdom, which existed for 
148 years and was ended when the Crusaders were thrown out of the 
area. The most recent is the French conquest and occupation of 
Algeria, in which they proposed to simply expel the people who lived 
there and make the area "metropolitan France." That experiment began 
in 1830 and ended in the late 1950s and early 1960s (don't remember 
the exact year.) So this would be about 130 years, slightly less 
than the Latin Kingdom. If history repeats itself, and the Arabs 
seem determined to be certain it does, it is reasonable to expect the 
occupation of Palestine to last less than another 60 years and then 
come to an end. I am not suggesting that any of us should either 
cheer or jeer this development, merely that it seems plausible and 
even likely.

Ever since Napoleon invaded Egypt Arab armies have performed poorly 
against western aggressors. (I assume nobody cheers Napoleon these 
days.) The most recent instance of this was the poor performance of 
Saddam Hussein's armies when defending their country against the 
George W. Bush effort to seize Iraq's oil wells. What seems to 
escape notice, which strikes this observer as remarkable, is that the 
whole situation has now reversed itself. Foreign armies have been 
completely thrown out of Fallujah, which is now self governing, and 
Shi'ite armies are giving an excellent account of themselves 
throughout the southern part of the country, with explicit materiel 
support from their Sunni colleagues. Someone will say George Bush is 
a divinely appointed king who can do no wrong or something like that, 
but that has no bearing on the fact that Arab armies are now fighting 
back and doing so with increasing skill and sophistication. Anyone 
is welcome to say that the Arabs should fight on behalf of 
Halliburton and their man in the white house, Halliburton Dick 
Cheney. But that is a completely separate issue from the fact that 
Arabs are tired ot being conquered, occupied, humiliated, and 
exploited by foreign caliphs. It is not lost on Arabs that George 
Bush constantly proclaims himself a "crusader" preaching a 
modern "crusade" against the infidel. The larger historical issue is 
that the balance of power in the Mideast is changing. This would 
seem to have begun with the war against the Soviet occupation of 
Afghanistan and the boost it gave to Arab self confidence.

That said, it is plausible that there may be a new era of more 
effective Arab self assertion in the Palestine area. History may 
repeat itself, in other words, but this time it may not take 130 
years. I was listening to a member of the Palestine lobby in 
Washington DC saying the main cause of the current situation is not 
Ariel Sharon but Yasser Arafat. Arafat is more interested in 
stealing and enriching his cronies than he is in representing the 
Palestinian people. He bears an amazing resemblance to a certain 
western leader, in other words, who is the object of fawning worship 
bu unintelligent people. As the lobbyist pointed out, there are 2.5m 
people (as I recall) in the Gaza area and the whole place is run by 
7000 Jews who do not even live among the public but sequester 
themselves in "settlements." Regardless of which side you take on 
this dispute, this is clearly an untenable situation from the Israeli 
point of view. Some sort of tectonic shift is inevitable, and 
probably in the short term.

When the final shift occurs the last destination for emigrating 
former colonists would NOT be central Europe for obvious reasons. 
For reasons which are not clear Israel is a thin cover for an effort 
by the US government to conquer the Middle East. So it makes more 
sense that emigrants would move to the US than anywhere else. Once 
again we have an historical precedent in the collapse of South 
Vietnam, after which those emigrants who were well connected were 
allowed to come to the US. Those who were not well connected were 
left to be killed by pirates or slowly starve to death in refugee 
camps. All of this was misrepresented in the press as motivated 
by "humanitarian" impulses. It is reasonable to expect a repeat of 
this situation for the same reasons when the Arabs repatriate their 
territory in Palestine.

That would be my guess. The future, when it comes about, will 
undoubtedly confound every one of my guesses. Hell, none of that 
stuff I wrote in French a few hundred years ago ever came true.

Nostradamus