Mouse to the Ramparts

A local acquaintance -- and a highly educated one at that -- conservative to the core and at the mouth-end too, just recently informed the Mouse of several "facts" that had somehow slipped through the Mouse's intelligence gathering network without becoming entrapped. Foremost among the elusive knowledge imparted by this worthy is the "fact" that "there is no such thing as a Palestinian." My informant -- perhaps without realizing it -- was in effect saying that there never was a place called Palestine. Which is of course cat shit.

Hmmm. As it turns out the term "cat shit" fits nicely here, since cats -- but not bulls -- try to cover up their excrement. And that appears to have been the case with this particular "fact." Someone has made a conscious effort to cover up the fact that the area currently occupied by Israel was at one time known as Palestine. Without that cover-up, my highly educated friend would perhaps never have made such an egregious error. He is after all a conservative, and we all know that no genuine conservative would ever speak anything but the dead level truth. [Pity me, please, for the lame irony of that last sentence.]

You might imagine that the erasure of Palestine from the historical map of the world was brought about by the efforts of Limbaugh, Rove, and other recent revisionists, but to believe that would be a mistake. They have merely continued an effort that traces at least to 1974. I have in my (secret) possession several stamp albums that I acquired during a previous incarnation when I operated as a small business stamp dealer. Several of those albums were printed in the 1940s, and all of those contain spaces for the stamps of a place called Palestine. But I have one other album, copyrighted last in 1974, that contains no places for any country going by that name. Moreover, a page by page search of that album finds none of the stamps of Palestine by any other country name. Palestine was deleted as a country at least as early as 1974.

Strange, you might say, until you notice the publisher of the album: Minkus Publications, Inc. To those of us in the stamp business it was well known that the Minkus company, in addition to offering the conventional philatelic services, also was the paid representative of the Israel Post Office. Under the terms of its agreement with the IPO Minkus was to see to it that the stamps of Israel were widely collected. The economic value of that service will be appreciated once you catch on that a stamp can be printed for less than a penny. When sold at face value to collectors who will probably never use the stamps for their intended purpose -- to mail a letter -- the profit margins approach astronomical proportions. The U.S. Post Office does the same sort of thing, but they do not fool around with middlemen like Minkus; they run their own retail outlets to collectors and dealers. (I got my start in the business by purchasing "nice copies" from the L'Enfant Plaza outlet in Washington and reselling to the mail order trade.)

Okay. Minkus was well within its rights to make sure that in their album provided spaces for every stamp ever issued by Israel -- more than twice as many pages for Israel's stamps as for Russia's, even though Russia had issued roughly ten times more stamps than Israel -- but by no stretch of the reasoning mind can a justification be found for the deletion of any mention of the country called Palestine.

Well, that depends on your point-of-view. Clearly, if you are a member of the Israeli government, faced with trying to win an endless war with a bunch calling thmselves "Palestinians," it may very well make all the sense in the world to create the illusion that nothing like a "Palestinian" every existed. The war is, after all, a land war, with both sides claiming ownership to the same piece of real estate. If the claimants on one side do not even exist -- and never did -- it's easy to see how the issue ought to be settled in the minds of the world's people.

Just to make the matter sure, I looked up the word "Palestine" in a Biblical Atlas. Sure enough, the word is there, "Palestine," defined as the equivalent of "Israel" and "Canaan." The atlas goes on to say, however, that the word "Palestine" has in recent times taken on "political overtones," so anyone using the word should understand that it refers to an area of land in the near east. "Palestine," it says, is a derivative of the word "Philistine," the name once given to the people who lived there in Bible times. Now, I would not go so far as to say that the publishers of the Biblical Atlas were in on the coverup, but it has not gone unnoticed that by mentioning the derivative of the name, they have effectively identified the current Palestinians with the Philistines of Goliath fame, and we all know what shit asses those guys were. But like I say, that's probably just an unintended consequence of the truth: the derivative of the name appears to be a simple fact.

Now, the Mouse is well aware that in bringing this up he is apt to be branded an anti-semite or even a Nazi. T'ain't true, but I do not see how the Iraelis have done themselves a favor by permitting the name "Palestine" to be purged from the vocabulary. If the Palestinian people truly do exist -- and they do -- and if they think they have a claim to certain of the lands in Canaan, then there ought to be a court somewhere that would grant them standing. God knows how many lives and fortunes would have been saved if the changes that took place in Palestine in 1948 had been settled by lawful means.

But then, the same could be said for most of the lands of the world. We are, finally, all Africans who have migrated into territories that were presumably unoccupied before we got to where we are. I suppose the law, "finders keepers, losers weepers," could be applied, but more effective "laws" have usually prevailed: the laws of force. To settle disputes of the "land" sort . . . well, that's what bombs are for, and everyone knows how effective and just are the finer points of argument when munitions are properly and loudly proclained.