Fact-Checking -- clearing up a lot of ignorance part 5

So the latest ignorance on Twitter is about past issues in Holy Land history, and it comes in two parts.

First, a photo has been circulating of an official document with the word Palestine on it. People use it to claim that a Palestine existed before there was an Israel. But as you know, I wouldn't be posting about it unless it was an urban legend. Here's the photo.

This document was issued by the British mandatory authority which, under the Sykes-Picot agreement, took control of parts of the Ottoman Empire after WWI (the one that ended in 1918). The year on the document is 1935 or something like that.

The British named the mandate Palestine for whatever reason. The region was not under control of its long-time residents, not even the Jews of the Old or New Yishuv, let alone the Jews that remained in Jerusalem or the Kabbalistic settlement in Tsfat.

The other is claims about the term Zionist, similar to false claims about the term anti-Semitic.

The term anti-Semitic was invented by Edouard Drumont and his right-Orleanist political associates in France, to describe themselves. Ignorant, bigoted and weak-minded people have tried over the decades to pretend that the term relates to non-Jewish Semites like Arabs, but that is a fallacy called redefinition.

The term Zionist was coined by Herzl and his followers in the 1800s CE, while the Ottoman Empire still governed the Holy Land. The Empire divided its territories into units called, in the 20th century, vilayets. I googled an article which shows that the Ottomans never had a sub-unit called Palestine; Nablus (now on the West Bank) and Jerusalem were part of the same sub-unit.

A lot of things are swirling around in world affairs right now. They come down to two things. Evidence is piling up that the demonstrations and protests are promoted by Russian interests, including the photo of a "Polish protestor" with pro-Russian signs on his tractor. From promoting political candidates like Trump and Geert Wilders; to fostering secession movements including Catalonia and Brexit (ask me for receipts); to allying with existing far-right movements, to sponsoring the French Yellow Vests and, as we now know, Antifa; to the US "trucker's" convoys and Polish "farmers" protests; to embedding ISIS (which is wholly owned by Putin) with Hamas and Russian troops that attacked Ukraine in 2022; to promoting civil war starting with Syria in 2011 and including the civil war bloviating by MAGA; most of the unrest in the world is a result of Russian activities, not spontaneous or ideated movements. Russian criminal maneuvers were unmasked in 2015 with the Deutsche Bank Global Laundromat scandal over money laundering going back to at least 2010. Russian promotion of Palestine to the detriment of Israel goes the whole way back to 1948.

And two, a bunch of ignorant adrenaline addicts are committing reckless endangerment by closing down commerce and transport, providing screens to the violence prone and, in airports, to potential terrorists.

If all of this is news to you, don't get mad at me. Get mad at yourself for being 15 years behind the news cycle, and thousands of years behind crucial facts about the Holy Land.