In Hollywood, going against the grain and being a conservative requires intestinal fortitude and intellectual rigor.  On the other hand, going with the flow and being a leftist requires absolutely nothing from the wealthy, useless people who embrace Marxism because they think it gives them an intellectual gloss.

It's that shallow Hollywood leftism and unadulterated ignorance that lies behind Seth Rogen's recent negative remarks about Israel.  Unfortunately, despite being dangerously ill informed, Rogen's statements about Israel have buoyed up leftists, who see him as a new ally in their fight to destroy the world's only Jewish state.

Seth Rogen is not shy about his being Jewish.  However, like so many of today's young Jews, including those in Hollywood, he's a leftist.  He's embarrassed by the way Jews have prospered in America, and, because he's too ill informed to know better, he's embarrassed by Israel's very existence.

To his credit, in August 2014, Rogen, along with several other young Hollywood Jews, was one of the signatories on a statement defending Israel in its war with Hamas.  Four months later, though, Rogen joined several young Hollywood Jews at a James Franco comedy roast that spawned anti-Semitic jokes and stereotypes that one would typically hear at a Neo–Hitler Youth lodge dinner.  Talk about being conflicted.

By the end of last month, Rogen had resolved his conflict.  He now wholly embraces the leftist view that the Jews in Israel are occupiers who stole the land from indigenous people.  He was, he says, "fed a huge amount of lies about Israel."

When Isaac Herzog, head of the Jewish Agency, said that Rogen later apologized for being misunderstood on the subject, Rogen instead doubled down.  (By the way, Rogen, whose net worth is $55 million, also says his father is a socialist, which explains a lot.)

Seth Rogen is a zhlob (a gauche, tactless nothing of a person), so, theoretically, we should ignore him when it comes to Israel and its history.  Sadly, though, his prominence means that hard leftists (at Jacobin magazine, for example, to which I will not link) can use him to sell their fake history that the Zionists forcibly displaced the "true indigenous people" — i.e., the Palestinians.  This false history justifies allying with Palestinians to destroy the Jewish state.

In truth, because the biblical Philistines are no longer around, Jews are Israel's indigenous people.  The Bible says the Jews arrived in what is now Israel somewhere around the 18th through 16th centuries B.C.  From that time forward, Jews have continuously and uninterruptedly occupied the land.  (And if you don't believe the biblical version, there's good archaeological evidence of Jews in Israel by the end of the 13th century B.C.).

No matter who occupied the land (Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, Saracens, Mamluks, Ottomans, or the British), Jews have always been there.  They are the one constant.

So who are the Palestinians?  It's complicated.  During the Ottoman occupation (1516–1917), Syria-Palestine was an arid, malarial region that repelled most people.  A small community of Jews lived there as they always had, and they were joined by the Druze, a renegade Muslim sect.  There were also a handful of Christians and Muslims, drawn to their holy sites.  Also, some fellahin — Arab peasants — squatted in plots of land that wealthy Turks in faraway Istanbul owned.

Beginning in the early 19th century, disparate refugees drifted in from the Muslim world.  Thus, Algerians who left North Africa when France conquered Algeria in 1830 settled in what is now mostly modern Jordan.

In the region around Jericho, one would find Circassian immigrants from the Russian Caucasus, whom the Turks settled in Syria-Palestine in the second half of the 19th century.  The Circassian "Arab" Muslims were easy to spot because they had platinum blond hair and blue eyes.  Their descendants still do.

Lastly, there were a few Senussi Muslims from Tripoli who trickled into Syria-Palestine after WWI to escape persecution in their homeland.  (By 1934, Italian governor Rodolfo Graziani had reduced their population from around 2,500,000 to about 60,000.)

When Jews from the diaspora began to return to their homeland, they purchased tracts from the Ottoman owners — and yes, they then dispossessed the squatters.

In 1922, after the Ottomans gambled wrong by siding with Germany in WWI, thereby losing their colonies in the Middle East, the League of Nations divided the land roughly in half. W hat is now Israel was set aside for the Jews; what is now Jordan went to the Arabs.  The Jews were happy; the Arabs were not.  The British wouldn't leave anyway, so it was academic.

In 1947, when the British finally left, the Jews were willing to accept a sliver of the land they had been granted in 1922; the Arabs, getting much more, were still unhappy.  Ever since then, Arabs have attacked the Jews, and every time they've done so, they've lost land in accordance with longstanding rules of war.

If Rogen weren't so ignorant, he'd know this.  As it is, this putz has played into the hands of the far left, which has long been dedicated to Israel's destruction.

Image: YouTube screen grab.