Palestinian Statehood

The Palestinians submitted a request to be recognized as a nation. How can you have statehood and the boundaries for your state were never settled? From my research the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started with Zionism and European Imperialism during and after World War I, with the Balfour Declarations in 1917. This led to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922 adopted by the League of Nations, who goal was to create a Jewish Homeland for Cultural and Religious Jews. Zionism,the national movement lead by Thedor Herzl which cultivated in late 19th and early 20th century Zionist Congress that called for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. I think the land is disputed and not necessarily occupied, in that the Israelis in the original mandate, their homeland were suppose to be an area that includes not only the current state of Israel but also, what is now called Jordan. From 1922 to 1947 there were many riots and conflicts with returning Israelis and local Arabs as a result, the UN in 1947 agreed to give and Israel accepted to take the right bank of Jordan but the Arabs did not accept it. Israel declared independence and their Arab neighbors declared war. The Arabs lost the war in 1948, and lost subsequent wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973. The Palestinians fled their homes and this created refugees. The Arab and Muslim neighboring nations refused to accept the refugees who fled in the wars thus creating so-called refugees (how can you be a refugee for 63 years). I think it is all based on religion. The idea of a promise land, that is based on the myth of an Exodus from Egypt that never happened. There is no archeological evidence to support a massive exodus of over 600,000 people living in a desert for 40 years. Plus if this was true, all the Egyptians had to do was go around the Red Sea into the Sinai Peninsula and recapture their slaves. As most scholars concluded what emerged to become Israel where probably ancient Canaanites who gave up polytheism and idol worship for so-called monotheism. I must admit I admire these Canaanites who became what we culturally call Jews. Judaism is not a race, some claim they are the founders of monotheism, I think Pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV, 1364-1347 B.C.) would disagree. The reason I admire them is because they somehow kept their culture for 2600 years. They are not homogeneous as some claim. The main ethnic element of Ashkenazim (German and Eastern European Jews), Sephardim (Spanish and Portuguese Jews), Mizrakhim (Middle Eastern Jews), Juhurim (Mountain Jews of the Caucasus), Italqim (Italian Jews), and most other modern Jewish populations of the world is Israelite. The Israelite haplotypes fall into Y-DNA haplogroups J and E. Ashkenazim also descend, in a smaller way, from European peoples from the northern Mediterranean region and even less from Slavs and Khazars. The non-Israelite Y-DNA haplogroups include Q (typically Central Asian) and R1a1 (typically Eastern European). Dutch Jews from the Netherlands also descend from northwestern Europeans. Sephardim also descend, in a smaller way, from various non-Israelite peoples. Georgian Jews (Gruzinim) are a mix of Georgians and Israelites. Yemenite Jews (Temanim) are a mix of Yemenite Arabs and Israelites. Moroccan Jews, Algerian Jews, and Tunisian Jews are mainly Israelites. Libyan Jews are mainly Israelites who may have mixed somewhat with Berbers. Ethiopian Jews are almost exclusively Ethiopian, with little or no Israelite ancestry. Bene Israel Jews and Cochin Jews of India have much Indian ancestry in their mtDNA. Palestinian Arabs are probably partly Israelite or Israelis are partly Palestinian Arab. (Source: http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/abstracts.html) The last sentence is a kicker, Palestinians and Israelis share ancestry and those who are not in the Haplogroup E and J, ancestor's converted to Judaism during the Jewish Diaspora. The Bible stories of Abraham,Isaac, and Jacob being a common ancestor to the Israelites and Arabs (Ishmaelites) are not true, because the haplogroups J and E means there were two different founders, and not a common ancestor via Abraham. Think about it... John D. Socrates a.k.a. The African Socrates.

King Tut Unwrapped and need for Critical Thinking

Last week I watched the Discovery Channel King Tut Unwrapped. In the documentary, allegedly the truth about King Tut is finally revealed; however, I think it open up more questions than it answered. One important question is what is King Tut's Y-DNA and mt-DNA Haplogroups? First I think it is important to discuss what's a haplogroup, and why do geneticists concentrate on the Y-chromosome and Mitochondrial in their search for markers? For that matter, what's a marker? "Each of us carries DNA that is a combination of genes passed from both our mother and father, giving us traits that range from eye color and height to athleticism and disease susceptibility. One exception is the Y-chromosome, which is passed directly from father to son, unchanged, from generation to generation. Unchanged, that is unless a mutation-a random, naturally occurring, usually harmless change-occurs. The mutation, known as a marker, acts as a beacon; it can be mapped through generations because it will be passed down from the man in whom it occurred to his sons, their sons, and every male in his family for thousands of years. In some instances there may be more than one mutational event that defines a particular branch on the tree. What this means is that any of these markers can be used to determine your particular haplogroup, since every individual who has one of these markers also has the others. When geneticists identify such a marker, they try to figure out when it first occurred, and in which geographic region of the world. Each marker is essentially the beginning of a new lineage on the family tree of the human race. Tracking the lineages provides a picture of how small tribes of modern humans in Africa tens of thousands of years ago diversified and spread to populate the world.
A haplogroup is defined by a series of markers that are shared by other men who carry the same random mutations. The markers trace the path our ancestors took as they moved in and out of Africa. It's difficult to know how many men worldwide belong to any particular haplogroup, or even how many haplogroups there are, because scientists simply don't know.
Likewise for Mitochondrial DNA, the string of 569 letters is your mitochondrial sequence, with the letters A, C, T, and G representing the four nucleotides-the chemical building blocks of life-that make up your DNA. Here's how it works. Like I describe for the Y-DNA every once in a while a mutation-a random, natural (and usually harmless) change-occurs in the sequence of our mitochondrial DNA. Think of it as a spelling mistake: one of the "letters" in your sequence may change from a C to a T, or from an A to a G.
After one of these mutations occurs in a particular woman, she then passes it on to her daughters, and her daughters' daughters, and so on. (Mothers also pass on their mitochondrial DNA to their sons, but the sons in turn do not pass it on.)
Geneticists use these markers from people all over the world to construct one giant mitochondrial family tree. As I can imagine, the tree is very complex, but scientists can now determine both the age and geographic spread of each branch to reconstruct the prehistoric movements of our ancestors. By looking at the mutations that we carry, geneticist can trace our lineage, ancestor by ancestor, to reveal the path they traveled as they moved out of Africa." (1)
As a result, I did a search on Google "King Tut's DNA results". I found the actual results were published in the JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) that Dr. Hawass used in the Discovery Channel's documentary and King Tut's Haplogroups information is absent, perhaps because there weren't enough data to conclude this information. However, I did another Google search "King Tut's DNA results haplogroup". I found the absent of haplogroup in the published report did not stop people from trying to speculate. Consequently, we now have an unproven speculation circulating on the World Wide Web that King Tut's haplogroup is R1b. I found the source of this speculation to be someone on RootsWeb (link: http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/GENEALOGY-DNA/2010-02/1266472989) who claimed by looking at the screen shots of the video, they were able to decipher the Y-STR markers and therefore determine King Tut's Y-DNA Haplogroup. I watched the same video and no marker numbers are evident. From this now there is a great debate that King Tut and his ancestors where R1b on Rootweb and other places on the internet (some which have become racially tinged). Nowhere was the Y-STR markers published except for 2 Y-STR here's a link to the Article: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/303/7/638?home. The end result from this discussion someone published the so-called y-STR markers on Family Tree DNA's y-search.org under the ID ER7RQ. I think this should be a lesson in critical thinking; if you do not have enough data don't make it up. This led to another question; what was the motivation of the person who allegedly was able to determine King Tut's haplogroup? Quoting directly from the person who started this fiasco: "Additionally, if you look at the CODIS markers for Tutankhamen which they provide in the published study and run them in OmniPop, it indicates similarity with Europeans." In other words, did he want to know if King Tut was European? Why should King Tut's ethnicity matter? What I find fascinating is the science, that we can abstract DNA from a 3,000 year old mummy and verify his genealogy! Think about it....

Source:
Genographic project: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/index.html