Excerpt thread🧵 of Parsi's (2007) "Treacherous Alliance: Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran & the US". Book dismantles many pernicious myths, like that the Shah was ever an Israeli ally, or that the Islamic Republic is blindly driven by ideology, rather than national self-interest. Poor US understanding of past and present Iran-Israel relations, reasons for conflict is "conveniently ignored at great cost to US national interests". You don't say!
In the 80s, Israel lobbied the US *not* to take Iranian rhetoric at its word (it was then selling Iran weapons).

🧵Thread of excerpt Threads directory.
From books on Aborigines, Israel & Judaism, Indonesia, Ancient History, Poland, Nigeria, Oligarchs, South Africa, Hindutva, Russian literature etc.

https://x.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1769594424450044239

Thread on how Sparta under Agis III led Greek resistance against Alexander the Great.
Prudently, Spartan plotting only led to war once Alexander had left for Asia. Due to clever leadership, a much-weakened Sparta could still pose a serious threat for much of Alexander's life.🧵 This thread will be excerping Ernst Badian's academic paper "Agis III". Assume my followers are familiar enough with the basics of Classical Antiquity and are reading for actual new information not commonly known. I don't bother with 'history 101' wiki type summaries.

A common pattern in Muslim states worldwide: strict suppression of all political speech turned Mosques into a refuge of activism & dissent. Indonesia's secular military government reflected in the secret police chief being a devout Catholic with a deep aversion to Islamism.

https://twitter.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1980114991664492978

Giving up on open repression & hoping to avoid making more martyrs, Suharto's attempted coopt & contain political Islamic in the gov-sponsored Icmi, also backfiring. The 3 dominant figures emerged as Abdurahman Wahid (traditional syncretism), Habibie (modernist) & Rais (radical).

Thread w/excerpts from Gaza: A History (2014) by Filiu. Was curious how pre-1967 Egyptian rule compared to Jordan's West-Bank (spoiler: far worse) or how it fared under Israel before the cordon sanitaire after Hamas took over. Author clearly pro-🇵🇸 but his tone is dispassionate. Antique points of interest. Soft local soil always lent to siege tunnels. Post-Alexander Gaza was totally Hellenised, with negligible✡️, so☦️came quite late. Saint Porphyry deviously had persecution of pagans authorised by "petitioning" the tolerant Emperor Arcadius' infant son.

Thread on communal tensions & the Moulid festivals of Egypt, many of which have distant Shia origins or incorporate Coptic saints. Unsurprisingly Islamists have attempted to disrupt or shut them down. Excerpts from JR Bradley's 2012 "Inside Egypt".

Moulids are mostly celebrations of Muslim saints, though Christian & even (until 1948) Jewish ones also appeared. Surviving hidden Egyptian Sufi traditions. Given Egypt's teeming population & density, some Moulid festivals are bigger in terms of attendees than the Haj itself.

Thread on Ottoman Civilisation & the Janissary system w/excerpts by Toynbee. Citing primary sources of contemporary European visitors, who were so impressed they urged adoption of similar practices. In many ways, the institution of "slave-soldiery" was meritocracy at its purest. Opening remarks on ephemeral nature of nomad-empires, citing Al-Ghazali. Examples such as the Avars inadvertently teaching their formerly passive Slav subjects how to fight, sowing their own overthrow/assimilation. Nomad-origin Mongol & Parthian states exceptional in longevity.

Exerpt thread of "Likud's Leaders". As an originally Hebrew book, its about internal Israel conflicts. Still, interesting history on the transformation the Likud party brought after its 1977 victory, after spending decades on the extremist fringes of Israeli society. /🧵 The uniting narrative of what would become Likud.
Only months after Israel's declared independence, its 1st (Mapai, socialist) leader Ben-Gurion, tried to have his chief rival Begin killed, as he arrived by boat. This was a one-time attempt, only enabled the chaos of the 1948.

Thread w/excerpts of "Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena".
Same tone on 🇺🇸-🇦🇺 relations as former PM Malcolm Fraser's "Dangerous Allies". Found this far better on specific incidents & laws, many pathetically abject or darkly amusing, depending on your POV. Author makes clear from the start that 🇦🇺 is not some poor exploited US colony: its leaders are enthusiastic participants in the 🇺🇸 Empire.
Imperial identity instrinsic to Australia. Aus-army rejected superior 🇨🇦rifles in favour of full inter-operability with 🇬🇧guns during WW1.

Since I've read books on the Basques & Welsh already, decided to read an introduction on the only other culturo-linguistic survival from the Western Roman Empire, the Berbers. This book passes over Antiquity in a few paragraphs, focuses on post-Islamic 🇲🇦history. Exerpt🧵.

https://twitter.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1919175916472631475

Furthest Roman expedition into the Atlas. Its leader, G.Suetonius Paulinus, later defeated Boudica's revolt in Britain.
Only ancient texts concerning Berbers (Numidia, now🇩🇿) is Sallust's Jugurthine War & scraps in Livy/Polybius, but they contain almost no ethnographic info.

Thread answering whether the Ancient Macedonians were Greeks. The short answer is no. Macedonians would eventually merge with Greeks, in a process taking centuries.
But at the time of Alexander, no Greek thought of them as co-ethnics, & the average Macedonian wasn't keen either. On the question of Macedonian language vs dialect, the technical specifics remain unanswerable due to lack of evidence. However, even if that did exist, Badian points out this lense can be highly misleading: few would guess Ashkenazi Jews spoke Low-German based on other factors.

Started reading. Quite excited to get going on this. Berezovsky's unstoppable personal drive & his thoughts on the *reality* of how the American government is run.

Thread on the multinational origins & fall of the interwar 2nd Polish state.
Excerpts from Lukowski's "Brief History of 🇵🇱" - nothing specialist. but discussion of widely divergent strategies to recreate 🇵🇱, each with very different envisioned alliances were most interesting.🧵

https://twitter.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1868288699223642539

The biggest movement for 🇵🇱 independence, the National Democrats, had very different ideas from Piłsudski's faction that won out after WW1.
The ND founder, Dmowski 1st aimed at autonomy under 🇷🇺. He saw 🇩🇪as the real threat to Polish culture. He was a hard-right Social Darwinist.

Thread w/excerpts of "The Sociology of the Yoruba".
One of 3 main nations of Nigeria, with Hausa & Igbo.
Also the overwhelming original ethnicity of most USian slaves, or what @tariqnasheed dubs "Foundational Black Americans". I prefer Hakan's term "Afro-Saxon" as more precise. Pre-colonial culturo-political divisions of the Yoruba. Like the Greeks or Sumerians, they were divide into warring city-states, but acknowledged their unity in language and religion.
Author (1970) notes older people identified with their local tribe/dialect over being Yoruba.

Thread w/excerpts of How Long Will South Africa Survive (1982).
Much new info here to me; as a millennial, how apartheid SA worked as a state is a blank. Parallels with🇮🇱 are constant, though author never draws them. SA however, couldn't rely on a powerful lobby or diaspora. Author opens with the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, contends SA government very narrowly missed a violent overthrow, just as the Tsarist Russia barely dodged the abortive 1905 Revolution.
Both states had experienced breakneck economic growth alongside boiling social tension.

Thread w/excerpts of Toynbee on the lost Minoan Civilisation, which had been discovered only 33 years prior in 1900.
Most curious are speculations on possible subterranean influence on Ancient Greek religion. The Minoan culture & language (undeciphered) have no known relatives.🧵
Greek authors had acknowledged from earliest times there had been on their lands an earlier Civilisation than their own, which they had since taken over. But beyond their existence, nothing was known of these "Pelasgians" or "Trojans".
Völkerwanderung means "mass migration".

First of threads on the Hellenisation of Ancient Anatolia.
A millenium-long process that saw its transformation from an unruly province of the Persian Empire, to the main surviving bulwark of Greek culture by the early Middle-Ages.
Summarising the pre-Hellenistic period here.🧵 There are very few good sources on Anatolian between the Hittite civilisation's collapse & Persian conquest.
Known for certain is its unusual linguistic diversity (even by ancient standards) with at least 2 non-Aryan, non-Semitic language families. Because fractured geography.

Short E. Badian🧵on what first appears as the strange reluctance of the Roman Republic to expand for most of the 2nd Century BC.
After victory in the Hannibalic War, Rome stood without peer across the whole Mediterranean, yet avoided major annexations for 2-3 generations. Why? Badian outlining the problem, citing major wars in which Rome refused, ostensibly out of principle, to occupy defeated rivals whom had given it a great deal of trouble. Most prominently, Carthage, Achaea & Macedon.
Flaminius' "Freedom for the Greeks" much like America in Europe.

Thread w/excerpts of Spencer & Gillen's "Native Tribes of Central Australia" (1899). One of the latest anthropological accounts of Aboriginal societies in a relatively 'pristine' state, though early comments in the book say their isolation wouldn't last much longer.🧵 Authors state urgency of their mission, having scant remaining time to describe Aboriginal social organisation & beliefs, already rapidly going extinct at the time of writing. Book mostly focuses on the Arunda (Arendte, spellings vary) still one of the most numerous groups today.

Shahak highlighting the essential role the Achaemenids had in the evolution of Judaism. Under the Persians, it went from a bog-standard Levantine popular cult, to a religion Greeks & Romans marveled at for its extreme ethnic particularism & exclusivity.🧵

Direct attestation of the pervasive Persian influence upon leading Jewish religious & governmental figures, returning from Babylonian exile.
The "coercion" described in imposing monotheistic ideas from the top-down is everywhere in the Old Testament, if one wants to look.

Thread on the lost Greco-Roman historians.
Hopefully again relevant, with the decipherment of burnt & damaged scrolls from Herculaneum.
Naturally we can only speak of Donald Rumsfeld's "known unknowns" -histories we know only via reference or quotation by other ancient texts.🧵
Though we can only guess at the true number, roughly between 80-95% of all Greco-Roman literature has been lost.
You can get a vague sense of this from (e.g.) Plutarch, Athenaios or Polybios, attacking, praising & quoting dozens of authors, who now lack 1 line of surviving text.