7 Myths About The Arab-Israeli Conflict You Never Even Knew

1. Myth: Other countries’ support for Arab positions vis-à-vis Israel results from their dependence on Arab states’ considerable reserves of dead-dinosaur-derived petroleum.

Fact: Dinosaurs account for little, if any, of the oil deposits in the world. Petroleum comes primarily from the pressurized remains of fossilized zooplankton and algae.

 

2. Myth: The land of Palestine had always been Arab until the Zionists came.

Fact: The land of Palestine formed hundreds of millions of years before humans, even Arabs, populated any place on Earth.

 

3. Myth: Until the 1990’s, only Coca-Cola was available in Israel, because the Arabs boycotted any company that did business in Israel; Pepsi exported to the Arab states.

Fact: Coca-Cola and Pepsi are not the only manufacturers of soft drinks in the world. Coca-Cola was thus not the only manufacturer of crappy soft drinks supplying the Israeli market – they had any number of crappy homegrown soft drinks. If you come to Israel you might still see those drinks on the shelves of various stores – meaning the very drinks manufactured way back when, since no one in their right mind would actually try the stuff except perhaps recent Russian immigrants, of whom there weren’t very many until around the time that secondary boycott ended anyway.

 

4. Myth: The European Jews who settled and eventually established Israel did not descend from ancient inhabitants of the land.

Fact: The earliest example of an anatomically modern human, according to anthropological data, is actually a specimen from what is now Israel. It would thus appear that all of humanity began in Israel.

 

5. Myth: Israeli agricultural tenacity has made the dessert bloom.

Fact: ‘Desert’ has only one ‘s’. An easy way to remember the difference between ‘desert’ and ‘dessert’ is that you always want more dessert, and ‘ess’ in German means ‘eat’.

 

6. Myth: Israel’s burgeoning technology sector has made it the Silicon Valley of the Middle East.

Fact: While much of Israel’s land  is composed of silicon – a major component of most sand and rocks – little of the country’s technology industry operates in a valley. Most of the valleys in Israel are inland, whereas most or all of the population and industry lie in cities on or near the Mediterranean coast.

 

7. Myth: Ottoman rule ended when the British conquered Palestine from the Turks toward the end of the First World War.

Fact: The Ottoman Rule is that no one may sit on the ottoman when Dad is reading or watching TV unless he explicitly gives permission. That rule has never been, and never will be, revoked, no matter how many times the British or anyone else barges through the place.