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and took a great deal of colonialism classes and did a lot of research on the end of the Ottoman Empire....
I've read every word that my late lamented hero Edward Said ever wrote...
Sometimes I wish I had not, and just didn't really know what was occuring or why.
Hell, in one class I taught of 2nd half Western Civ, I had to inform very shocked college freshmen that Israel was only a state as of 1948 and that Jerusalem was part of Jordan until 1967...and then they ask why King David's heirs aren't the kings of Israel now...
For dramatic effect, I used a map that had no political boundaries drawn on it, just cities and features. I called the area I circled "Greater Syria" and then gradually put in more and more borders...the kids were shocked when I put in who drew the lines where they were and why the put them there... Best question I ever had was "Why did the Arabs get the crappy part with no sea coast?" My answer was "Evidently Europeans think that Arabs love the desert..." The second best question was "Why didn't the Allies give a big chunk of Germany to the Jews and make it Israel?" To that I had no answer.
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