Guest columnist: Uri Avnery. On the day of the first seder, the legendary Israeli peace campaigner Avnery mailed out a fascinating piece deconstructing some of the “Exodus” mythology, and examining its nationalist purposes. I’m glad he’s agreed to me republishing his work. Pesach is a time of asking questions, of course, and I’ve always wondered about the implausibility of some aspects of Jewish history as it had been passed down to me: Just look around you at the seder table, and ask yourself, do these people look like they could be descendants of the residents of Biblical Judea? And remember, we’re told that this is a pretty closed bloodline; it’s a heritage supposedly passed on genetically through Jewish mating. Well, just look around the table and ask yourself, did the Judeans actually look anything like this?
Obviously not, at least not at the Seders I’ve been to. So, plainly, we’ve been sold a pile of goods somewhere along the line. Clearly, there’s been conversion on a mass scale. And I’d picked up scraps of information suggesting that the Jews did, in fact, vigorously proselytize and convert members in the centuries before the Roman Empire helped create Catholicism.
I’d recently noted the provocative work of the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, whose new book When and How the Jewish People Was Invented makes the case that Ashkenazi Jews are mostly descendants of the Turkic Khazars of Central Europe, who converted en masse to Judaism around the 10th Century, while the Sephardim are rooted in Berber tribes in North Africa who did likewise. The most likely descendants of the original Judeans, he argues, are in fact the Palestinians — that’s because the “exile” and forcible dispersion by the Romans never happened, he argues; it was a myth. Most of the Judean Jews remained on the land, and later converted to Christianity and Islam.
It’s mischievous stuff, of course, and I don’t know what to make of it — I’m not entirely sure if I can buy his idea that this whole narrative of exile and wandering was created by 19th century German-Jewish nationalists — I’d be curious to know to what extent the same narrative was present among the Sephardim, who were largely immune to Zionism until it became their own <i>nakbah</i> in 1948. I don’t know the answers, of course, but I think Sand is asking some questions that need to be asked. Clearly, there are gaping holes in the version of Jewish history popularized during the Zionist moment.
So I’m glad Uri Avnery had a more developed take than I do.
The Lion and the Gazelle
By Uri Avnery
Tonight the Jews all over the world will celebrate the Seder, the unique ceremony that unites Jews everywhere in the defining Jewish myth: the Exodus from Egypt.
Every year I marvel again at the genius of this ceremony. It unites the whole family, and everyone – from the venerable grandfather to the smallest child – has a role in it. It engages all the senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. The simplistic text of the Haggadah, the book which is read aloud, the symbolic food, the four glasses of wine, the singing together, the exact repetition of every part every year – all these imprint on the consciousness of a child from the earliest age an ineradicable memory that they will carry with them to the grave, be they religious or not. They will never forget the security and warmth of the large family around the Seder table, and even in old age they will recall it with nostalgia. A cynic might see it as a perfect example of brain-washing.
Compared to the power of this myth, does it really matter that the Exodus from Egypt never took place? Thousands of Egyptian documents deciphered in recent years leave no room for doubt: the exodus of masses of people, as described in the Bible, or anything remotely like it, just never happened. These documents, which cover in the finest detail every period and every part of Canaan during this epoch prove beyond any doubt that there was no “Conquest of Canaan” and no kingdom of David and Solomon. For a hundred years, Zionist archeologists have devoted tireless efforts to finding even a single piece of evidence to support the Biblical narrative, all to no avail.
But this is quite unimportant. In the competition between “objective” history and myth, the myth that suits our needs will always win, and win big. It is not important what was, the important thing is what fires our imagination. That is what guides our steps to this day.
The Biblical narrative connects up with documented history only around the year 853 BC, when ten thousand soldiers and 2000 battle chariots of Ahab, King of Israel, took part in a grand coalition of the kingdoms of Syria and Palestine against Assyria. The battle, which was documented by the Assyrians, was fought at Qarqar in Syria. The Assyrian army was delayed, if not defeated.
(A personal note: I am not a historian, but for many years I have reflected on our history and tried to draw some logical conclusions, which are outlined here. Most of them are supported by the emerging consensus of independent scholars around the world.)
The kingdoms of Israel and Judea, which occupied a part of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, were no different from the other kingdoms of the region. Even according to the Bible itself, the people sacrificed to various pagan deities “on every high hill and under every green tree”. (1 Kings 14:23).
Jerusalem was a tiny market town, much too small and much too poor for any of the things described in the Bible to have taken place there at the time. In the books of the Bible that deal with that period, the appellation “Jew” (Yehudi in Hebrew) hardly appears at all, and where it does, it clearly refers simply to an inhabitant of Judea, the area around Jerusalem. When an Assyrian general was asked “talk not with us in the Jewish language” (2 Kings 18:26), what was meant was the local Judean dialect of Hebrew.
The “Jewish” revolution took place in the Babylonian exile (587-539 BC). After the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, members of the Judean elite were exiled to Babylon, where they came into contact with the important cultural streams of the time. The result was one of the great creations of mankind: the Jewish religion.
After some fifty years, some of the exiles returned to Palestine. They brought with them the name “Jews”, the appellation of a religious-ideological-political movement, much like the “Zionists” of our time. Therefore, one can speak of “Judaism” and “Jews” – in the sense accepted now – only from then on. During the following 500 years, the Jewish monotheistic religion gradually crystallized. Also at this time, the most outstanding literary creation of all times, the Hebrew Bible, was composed. The writers of the Bible did not intend to write “history”, in the sense understood today, but rather a religious, edifying and instructive text.
To understand the birth and development of Judaism, one must consider two important facts:
(a) Right from the beginning, when the “Jews” came back from Babylon, the Jewish community in this country was a minority among the Jews as a whole. Throughout the period of the “Second Temple”, the majority of Jews lived abroad, in the areas known today as Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Cyprus, Italy, Spain and so on.
The Jews of that period were not a “nation” – the very idea did not yet exist. The Jews of Palestine did not participate in the rebellions of the Jews in Libya and Cyprus against the Romans, and the Jews abroad took no part in the Great Revolt of the Jews in this country. The Maccabees were not national but religious fighters, rather like the Taliban in our days, and killed many more “Hellenized” Jews than enemy soldiers.
(b) This Jewish Diaspora was not a unique phenomenon. On the contrary, at that time it was the norm. Notions like “nation” belong to the modern world. During the period of the “Second Temple” and later on, the dominant social-political pattern was a religious-political community enjoying self-government and not attached to any specific territory. A Jew in Alexandria could marry a Jewess in Damascus, but not the Christian woman across the street. She, on her part, could marry a Christian man in Rome, but not her Hellenist neighbor. The Jewish Diaspora was only one of many such communities.
This social pattern was preserved in the Byzantine Empire, was later taken over by the Ottoman Empire and can still be detected in Israeli law. Today, a Muslim Israeli cannot marry a Jewish Israeli, a Druze cannot marry a Christian (at least not in Israel itself). The Druze, by the way, are a surviving example of such a Diaspora.
The Jews were unique only in one respect: after the European peoples gradually moved on to new forms of organization, and in the end turned themselves into nations, the Jews remained what they were – a communal-religious Diaspora.
The puzzle that is occupying the historians is: how did a tiny community of Babylonian exiles turn into a worldwide Diaspora of millions? There is only one convincing answer to that: conversion.
The modern Jewish myth has it that almost all the Jews are descendents of the Jewish community that lived in Palestine 2000 years ago and was driven out by the Romans in the year 70 AD. That is, of course, baseless. The “Expulsion from the Country” is a religious myth: God was angry with the Jews because of their sins and exiled them from His country. But the Romans were not in the habit of moving populations, and there is clear evidence that a great part of the Jewish population in the country remained here after the Zealots’ Revolt and after the Bar-Kochba uprising, and that most Jews lived outside the country long before that.
At the time of the Second Temple and later, Judaism was a proselytizing religion par excellence. During the first centuries AD it fiercely competed with Christianity. While the slaves and other downtrodden people in the Roman Empire were more attracted to the Christian religion, with its moving human story, the upper classes tended towards Judaism. Throughout the Empire, large numbers adopted the Jewish religion.
Especially puzzling is the origin of “Ashkenazi” Jewry. At the end of the first millennium there appeared in Europe – apparently out of nowhere – a very large Jewish population, the existence of which was not documented before. Where did they come from?
There are several theories about that. The conventional one holds that the Jews wandered from the Mediterranean area to the North, settled in the Rhein valley and fled from the pogroms there to Poland, at the time the most liberal country in Europe. From there they dispersed into Russia and Ukraine, taking with them a German dialect that became Yiddish. The Tel Aviv University scholar Paul Wexler asserts, on the other hand, that Yiddish was originally not a German but a Slavic language. A large part of Ashkenazi Jewry, according to this theory, are descendents of the Sorbs, a Slavic people that lived in Eastern Germany and was forced to abandon its ancient pagan creed. Many of them preferred to become Jews, rather than Christians.
In a recent book with the provocative title “When and How the Jewish People was Invented”, the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues – like Arthur Koestler and others before him – that most of the Ashkenazi Jews are really descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people that created a large kingdom in what is now South Russia more than a thousand years ago. The Khazar king converted to Judaism, and according to this theory the Jews of Eastern Europe are mostly the descendants of Khazar converts. Sand also believes that most Sephardi Jews are descendents of Arab and Berber tribes in North Africa that had converted to Judaism instead of becoming Muslims, and had joined in the Muslim conquest of Spain.
When Jewry stopped proselytizing, the Jews became a closed, ethnic-religious community (as the Talmud says: “Converts are hard for Israel like a skin disease”).
But the historical truth, whatever it is, is not so important. Myth is stronger than truth, and it says that the Jews were expelled from this land. This is an essential layer in modern Jewish consciousness, and no academic research can shake it.
In the last 300 years, Europe turned “national”. The modern nation replaced earlier social patterns, such as the city state, feudal society and the dynastic empire. The national idea carried all before it, including history. Each of these new nations shaped an “imagined history” for itself. In other words, every nation rearranged ancient myths and historical facts in order to shape a “national history” which proclaims its importance and serves as a unifying glue.
The Jewish Diaspora, which – as mentioned before – was “normal” 2000 years ago, became “abnormal” and exceptional. This intensified the Jew-hatred that was anyhow rampant in Christian Europe. Since all the national movements in Europe were – more or less – anti-Semitic, many Jews felt that they were left “outside”, that they had no place in the new Europe. Some of them decided that the Jews must conform to the new Zeitgeist and turn the Jewish community into a Jewish “nation”.
For that purpose, it was necessary to reshape and reinvent Jewish history and turn it from the annals of a religious-ethnic Diaspora into the epic story of a “nation”. The job was undertaken by a man who can be considered the godfather of the Zionist idea: Heinrich Graetz, a German Jew who was influenced by German nationalism and created a “national” Jewish history. His ideas have shaped Jewish consciousness to this day.
Graetz accepted the Bible as if it were a history book, collected all the myths and created a complete and continuous historical narrative: the period of the Fathers, the Exodus from Egypt, the Conquest of Canaan, the “First Temple”, the Babylonian Exile, the “Second Temple”, the Destruction of the Temple and the Exile. That is the history that all of us learned in school, the foundation upon which Zionism was built.
Zionism represented a revolution in many fields, but its mental revolution was incomplete. Its ideology turned the Jewish community into a Jewish people, and the Jewish people into a Jewish nation – but never clearly defined the differences. In order to win over the religiously inclined Jewish masses in Eastern Europe, it made a compromise with religion and mixed all terms into a one big cocktail – the religion is also a nation, the nation is also a religion, and later asserted that Israel is a “Jewish state” that belongs to its (Jewish?) citizens but also to the “Jewish people” throughout the world. Official Israeli doctrine has it that Israel is the “Jewish nation state”, but Israeli law narrowly defines a “Jew” as only a person who belongs to the Jewish religion.
Herzl and his successors were not courageous enough to do what Mustafa Kemal Ataturk did when he founded modern Turkey: he fixed a clear and sharp border between the Turkish nation and Islamic religion and imposed a complete separation between the two. With us, everything remained one big salad. This has many implications in real life.
For example: if Israel is the state of the “Jewish people”, as one of our laws says – what is there to stop an Israeli Jew from joining the Jewish community in California or Australia? Small wonder that there is almost no leader in Israel whose children have not emigrated.
Why is it so important to differentiate between the Israeli nation and the Jewish Diaspora? One of the reasons is that a nation has a different attitude to itself and towards others than a religious-ethnic Diaspora.
Similarly: different animals have different ways of reacting to danger. A gazelle flees when it senses danger, and nature has equipped it with the necessary instincts and physical capabilities. A lion, on the other side, sticks to its territory and defends it against intruders. Both methods are successful, otherwise there would be no gazelles or no lions in the world.
The Jewish Diaspora developed an efficient response that was well suited to its situation: when Jews sensed danger, they fled and dispersed. That’s why the Jewish Diaspora managed to survive innumerable persecutions, and even the Holocaust itself. When the Zionists decided to become a nation – and indeed did create a real nation in this country – they adopted the national response: to defend themselves and attack the sources of danger. One cannot, therefore, be a Diaspora and a nation, a gazelle and a lion, at the same time.
If we, the Israelis, want to consolidate our nation, we have to free ourselves from the myths that belong to another form of existence and re-define our national history. The story about the exodus from Egypt is good as a myth and an allegory – it celebrates the value of freedom – but we must recognize the difference between myth and history, between religion and nation, between a Diaspora and a state, in order to find our place in the region in which we live and develop a normal relationship with the neighboring peoples.
“That claim about 4000 years continuous occupation is largely bogus. And so is the idea of a common descent.”
First of all, I don’t read Avnery’s article as disputing either of these claims. He disputes the claim that ALL Jews lived in “Israel” and were then dispersed. I don’t think he disputes a Jewish presence going back centuries. He or Karon repeats the Khazar theory; but that’s an old theory and has been largely debunked. DNA does show remarkable commonality despite centuries of dispersion, during which time one would expect a good bit of co-mingling.
And who’s to say that what Avnery says is gospel? Uri speaks and the world must listen?
In any event, the PRIMARY rationale for Zionism is not that Jews once lived in “Israel.” It wasn’t as if the Zionists woke up one day like Andy Hardy and said, “Hey, let’s put on a country where our ancestors once lived.” No; they were fleeing persecution. The fact that the Roma didn’t say, “Hey, let’s go back to India,” and chose to stay and roam where they’ve been persecuted–in short, the fact that they decided to remain “wandering gypsies,” while the Jews decided not to remain “wandering Jews,” is immaterial to the moral case.
There are always people who make different decisions. Who respond to their situation in different ways. So what? I find it enough that some Jews decided to escape their oppression in a way that, frankly on the scale these things normally happen, wasn’t so awful.
A Jewish presence ‘going back centuries’ is a far cry from ‘4000 years’. And that Jewish presence was minimal. Even in 1914 when Zionist migration had been going on for more than a few decades the Jews only constituted just over 7 % of the total population.
About the Khazars: to say that a theory is ‘old’ and has been largely’debunked’ doesn’t make it so. The ‘debunkers’ had too much of a vested interest in different views.
And,oh ja, the Roma just didn’t make it back to India because they forgot to say ‘let us return’. Of course, if they had said so the world would have immediately fallen into step and accommodated them.
I evaluate the evidence for and against large-scale conversions to Judaism throughout history, and the evidence for and against Khazars converting en-masse to Judaism, in my book “The Jews of Khazaria”. The second edition was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2006 and has all the genetic data published up to that point. Shlomo Sand casually dismisses the genetic evidence and does not do historical analysis in a proper fashion. It is true that many converts joined Jewish groups over the millennia, but by and large there remains a strand of core Israelite DNA in almost every Jewish group, including Ashkenazic Jews. Let’s leave politics out of these questions and simply look at what the facts reveal.
I am not a professional geneticist Mr.Brook but are you? If not I wonder how you can properly evaluate the many studies in this field and suggest that they point, uncontroversially, to “a strand of core Israelite DNA in almost every Jewish group” (incidentally what is ‘a strand of core Israelite DNA’- 5 %, 10%,30%?).
Of course your wording (“a strand of core”) is sufficiently vague and compatible with almost any view concerning the part-origin of Ashkenazi Jews from a proselytized non-Semitic population.
If you would want to convince us of the genetic homogeneity of Jews around the world, however, I wonder how you would deal with the criticisms contained in the following paragraphs. They refer to Michael Hammer et al’s study regarding an alleged “common pool of Y-chromosome Biallollic haplotypes” among Jewish and non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations:
“This study alleges that Jews around the world, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic, are more closely related to one another than to non-Jews tested in the study, and that converts and intermarriages played little role in Jewish population history. But the study does not test peoples who are at all related to the Khazars, so the genetic distance between European Jews and Khazars was left untested, and the focus is on paternal rather than on maternal lines.
According to Mark Jobling, “Jews are the genetic brothers of Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians”.
Some revealing comments from the study’s geneticists: Dina Kraft’s May 9, 2000 article in the Associated Press quotes Hebrew University geneticist Howard Cedar who “said even though Y chromosomes are considered the best tool for tracing genetic heritage, researchers still don’t know what the history is behind the variations. As a result, it is difficult to draw conclusions about genetic affinity..” The article also quotes Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, a Tel Aviv University geneticist, who “cautioned that the techniques were new and that until the human genome is mapped, it will be difficult to be certain about the conclusions.”
“To say that Jews are somehow homogeneous across the entire diaspora is completely fallacious,” says Ken Jacobs of the University of Montreal. “There is so much incredible genetic heterogeneity within the Jewish community — any Jewish community.” Jewish people simply don’t exhibit the genetic homogeneity that [Kevin] MacDonald ascribes to them, Jacobs says. According to Ken Jacobs’ views as summarized in an article in the New Times Los Angeles Online (April 20-26, 2000), “Witness For The Persecution” by Tony Ortega: “The only Jewish subgroup that does show some homogeneity — descendants of the Cohanim, or priestly class — makes up only about 2 percent of the Jewish population. Even within the Cohanim, and certainly within the rest of the Jewish people, there’s a vast amount of genetic variation that simply contradicts MacDonald’s most basic assertion that Jewish genetic sameness is a sign that Judaism is an evolutionary group strategy.” In H-ANTISEMITISM, Ken Jacobs added: “Hammer’s Jewish samples are heavily skewed towards the Kohanim… This is bound to reduce within-population variance in the Jewish sample… I pointed out solely that the data reported for the Jewish samples in the recent PNAS were remarkably similar to those published previously in studies of which Hammer was a co-author, the focus of which was the Kohanim… There is an ahistorical aspect to this work, as well as a serious conflation of genes, ethnicity, and religious belief. For example, as used in Hammer’s study, the distinction between ‘Syrian’ and ‘Palestinian’ is based on fairly recent geo-political constructs that have little or no bearing on the patterns of gene flow in the region prior to 1000 CE…. In the original Lemba study, the complex of Y-chromosome genes was found in 45% of Kohanim among Ashkenazim, the percentage was 56% of Kohanim among the Sepharad, and 53% among the Buba clan of the Lemba. Among non-Kohanim the average Jewish % for this gene complex is less than 5%. One does not have to understand the lingo to see that there was inbreeding in one part of the dispersed Jewish communities and a certain level of outbreeding in the rest.”
John Tooby, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is quoted in an article for Slate’s “Culturebox” by Judith Shulevitz as saying: “The notion that Jews are a genetically distinct group doesn’t make it on the basis of modern population genetics.” ”
Your suggestion “to leave politics out of this question and simply look at what the facts reveal” seems to ignore the fact that politics seems to have provided a lot of the impulse for these studies and that their ‘revelations’ are not all that clear cut.
I will at any case endeavour to forward your comment to Professor Sand and Mr.Avnery in the hope that they will respond.
Uri Avnery wrote (and gave me permission to publish it here):
“I don’t believe any genetic data at the present stage. They
have been collected by obviously interested people to make
a desired point.
To make it scientific, experiments on a by far larger
sample by a much larger group of objective researchers are
needed.”
Amen to that.
“A Jewish presence ‘going back centuries’ is a far cry from ‘4000 years’. And that Jewish presence was minimal. Even in 1914 when Zionist migration had been going on for more than a few decades the Jews only constituted just over 7 % of the total population.”
Arie, I find your arguments to be a mish-mash. What difference does it make whether Jewish presence is 4000 years old or 2000? Isn’t that like arguing whether 6 million died or some lesser amount? The point is there has been a long-standing presence. The return to Palestine was NOT like the Puritans colonizing America. Or the British colonizing India, the ME, and much of Africa. And not like the Spanish colonising SA. These folks had NO connection to the land.
As to the small number of Jews in 1917, well there is only ever a small number of Jews anywhere. Even in Israel, there are only 7 million. In the US, we are only 3%. Jews are a small people. Is that a revelation?
As to the genetics, yes I believe the Khazar thesis has been debunked (though my saying so doesn’t make it so…just as you’re repeating the thesis doesn’t make it the truth, either). But the larger point is, so what?
While it’s true that someone with a Jewish mother is said to be Jewish, Judaism is not some cult of genetic purity. Converts are allowed though, in recent times, not sought out and even discouraged. So even if genetic studies show Jews with a rich genetic background, I say so what? It is interesting that many or most Jews show some genetic commonality with “Israelites” or “Palestinians.” That does seem to suggest that they came from there millenia ago. But this thesis doesn’t require one to assert some sort of genetic purity (though some extreme Jews and anti-Semites like MacDonald may do so, incorrectly in my view).
If some Jews left Palestine and moved through Russia converting many Khazars to Judaism, what does that prove? That Jews didn’t come from Palestine? No. That Khazarian Jews can’t claim any connection to the land? No. How could you even disentangle the two at this point?
Is the right to certain land to be determined by genetic tests? I don’t think so. For one thing, a people that has been dispersed will almost always lack genetic purity, especially if they engage with the world, as Jews did, and don’t keep themselves separate.
Genetic studies are undertaken defensively, to debunk attacks, as much as they are undertaken “offensively,” to prove a point.
As to your point about the Roma, I have no idea what you’re trying to say.
” What difference does it make whether Jewish presence is 4000 years old or 2000?”
Well apparently it made a difference to your friend Ben David. Otherwise why would he have been so eager to stress that point?
“Genetic studies are undertaken defensively, to debunk attacks, as much as they are undertaken “offensively,” to prove a point.”
Well I am glad you have learned something from my post and that of Mr. Avinery.
“Is the right to certain land to be determined by genetic tests? I don’t think so.”
So we will have no more talk then of “DNA (that) does show remarkable commonality despite centuries of dispersion” (your words) in this context?
“I find it enough that some Jews decided to escape their oppression in a way that, frankly on the scale these things normally happen, wasn’t so awful.”
So that decision created somehow a right? And you talk about a ‘moral case’? You have curious notions of law and morality.
” What difference does it make whether Jewish presence is 4000 years old or 2000?”
Well apparently it made a difference to your friend Ben David. Otherwise why would he have been so eager to stress that point?
Sweetness: I don’t know Ben. If it makes a difference to him, so what? The central is, is there a long-standing connection. I think it’s pretty clear there is. Generally, anti-Zionist are trying to show there is none. Wrong.
“Genetic studies are undertaken defensively, to debunk attacks, as much as they are undertaken “offensively,” to prove a point.”
Well I am glad you have learned something from my post and that of Mr. Avinery.
Sweetness: Ah no, sorry. As far as I can tell, the genetic studies appear to show some clear connection, though nothing like the racial purity you seem fixated on. Again, anti-Zionists seem to want to say there is no connection; the genetic studies show there is. This is not the same thing as saying that Jews are a “pure race” or haven’t comingled with other peoples over time.
“Is the right to certain land to be determined by genetic tests? I don’t think so.”
So we will have no more talk then of “DNA (that) does show remarkable commonality despite centuries of dispersion” (your words) in this context?
Sweetness: Again, the genetic tests show a connection. I would have to say that the “right” comes from a continuous presence in the land. After all, what is the Palestinian right to the land? Presence.
“I find it enough that some Jews decided to escape their oppression in a way that, frankly on the scale these things normally happen, wasn’t so awful.”
So that decision created somehow a right? And you talk about a ‘moral case’? You have curious notions of law and morality.
Sweetness: I don’t know where you live, Ari, but if it is the Western Hemisphere, you live on land that was simply stolen from others who were killed. Much the same went on elsewhere. There is a reason Arabic is spoken from the peninsula to the Atlantic, and it wasn’t all because of hugs and kisses. By comparison, Israel’s founding was a model of morality, particularly with regard to the land’s other inhabitants.
All that said, I do believe that self-defense creates certain rights, yes.
Brand: “I am not a professional geneticist Mr.Brook but are you? If not I wonder how you can properly evaluate the many studies in this field and suggest that they point, uncontroversially, to “a strand of core Israelite DNA in almost every Jewish group” (incidentally what is ‘a strand of core Israelite DNA’- 5 %, 10%,30%?).
Sweetness: If you’re not a geneticist, how do you evaluate these assertions? And why are you so intent on disproving them? Were they true would this give the Jews a “right” to the land in your view? What’s your axe and why are you grinding it?
Brand: Of course your wording (”a strand of core”) is sufficiently vague and compatible with almost any view concerning the part-origin of Ashkenazi Jews from a proselytized non-Semitic population.
Sweetness: Are you looking for a percentage? Is 100% the only percentage you’ll accept? I would imagine the percentage from individual to individual–what does this add up to in your book?
Brand: If you would want to convince us of the genetic homogeneity of Jews around the world,
Sweetness: But this is not at all what Brooks is asserting in his post or in his book I imagine. He specifically allows for Jews inter-marrying and thus Jews are not a homogenous group. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a core connection.
You seem to be pushing the “pure Jew” strawman as if disproving this thesis somehow gets you somewhere–I don’t think it does.
Sweetness none of the arguments with which you attempt to justify Zionist settlement in Palestine seem to me any good.
Though you keep seesawing on the topic (that straw man you complain about stays up because you keep stuffing it)we can dispose of the genetics argument by sticking to your own words with which I happen to agree: “Is the right to certain land to be determined by genetic tests? I don’t think so.” The reason why I harped on this topic is that many of your fellow-Zionists seem to disagree with you here (even though they have only dubious research to go on).
So what remains? As far as I can see there are only three: the argument about a ‘long standing presence’, the argument from historical analogy and the argument re ‘self defence’.
I will take each of these in turn.
1. The argument re a “long standing presence”.
The presence of what?
Since we have disposed of the genetics argument one can only say: the presence of a tiny minority of co-religionists who did then not even have a language in common. Strange. On that basis quite a few claims could arise all around the world. I have already mentioned the case of the Huguenots whose diaspora started in 1685 with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Descendants of them, who have stuck to the faith, still have a sizable minority of co-religionists in France. I don’t think that any one of them ever dreamt that that would give them a claim to France.
Oh, their presence (from about 1550 onwards) was not ‘long standing’ enough? Wasn’t it you who with lordly indifference claimed: “What difference does it make whether Jewish presence is 4000 years old or 2000? Isn’t that like arguing whether 6 million died or some lesser amount?”
I have however a stronger objection to this argument. It amounts to a gigantic chutzpah. The whole Zionist enterprise was, right from the start, based on the denial of the validity of this argument for the great majority of Palestine’s inhabitants then, its Arabic population. The sauce for the goose was here emphatically denied to the gander. Herzl
wrote in 1895 in his diary “We should endeavor to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed, procuring employment for it in the transit countries, but denying it employment in our own country.”
2. The argument from historical analogy. Here it is in your phrasing:
“I don’t know where you live, Ari, but if it is the Western Hemisphere, you live on land that was simply stolen from others who were killed.”
I am glad that in this roundabout way you acknowledge the Zionist land theft. But to answer your question: though I live presently in an ex-colony that shook off its invaders my main abode is in Australia. Aha, you will say: Australia, that example confirms my case. Not so fast.
The eighteenth century settlement of Australia took place in accordance with a then prevailing notion of international law, viz, the legitimacy of the settlement of ‘terra nullius'”
“Modern applications of the term terra nullius stem from 16th and 17th century doctrines describing land that was unclaimed by a sovereign state recognized by European powers. This modern term refers to a specific application of the concept of res nullius.
During the era of European colonialism the doctrine gave legal force to the claiming and settlement of lands occupied by “backward” people, where no system of laws or ownership of property was held to exist.” (Wikipedia)
Those early British settlers who dealt with a nomadic population of approximately three hundred thousand people lost in a vast space more than 350 times the size of modern Israel genuinely believed that they were dealing with such a country.
It is only in quite recent times that the High Court of Australia has decided that these early settlers were in error because there was a form of native title (though no ‘cultivation’) (Mabo Decision, 1992)
The Zionist settlement of Palestine, by contrast, satisfied none of these criteria (there was a system of laws and there was ownership of property and there was cultivation)- and what is more, Zionist leaders knew it though outsiders (including Jewish outsiders) were fobbed off with the lie about a “land without people for a people without land”. “Ha’am wrote in 1891, after his return from Palestine, in the article ‘Truth from Palestine’, that the country was not empty and that one hardly saw any uncultivated land.” “When Max Nordau learned that Arabs live in Palestine, he reportedly said to Herzl, “There are Arabs in Palestine! I didn’t know that! We are going to commit an injustice.” ”
“When the Zionists decided in 1897 to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, the Jews of Vienna despatched a delegation to examine the country for its suitability. The delegation reported back as follows: “the bride is beautiful but she is married to another man”. ” (Ghada Karmi, Counterpunch, July 17/18, 2004).
Israel was from the start not a matter of western powers dealing with supposed ‘terra nullius’ but a colonial enterprise as for instance French Algeria was.
The eternal Israeli complaint that Israel is the only country that is asked to legitimate its existence is therefore quite unfounded. Virtually all colonial states were in recent times not even asked that question but simply denied legitimacy and demolished.
3. The argument re self defence: this is the weirdest of your arguments. In order to deal with your enemies in Europe you had to go and harrass some other people that had nothing to do with these enemies and in the process create countless new ones.
Arie, I never expect to change anyone’s mind on this topic, because most people’s minds are made up…and that’s about all one can say.
But I’ll try to respond anyway…
The Huguenot example I think is a poor one unless “France” was co-terminous with the Huguenots in the way that Israel, the country, was the country of the Jews. It would be appear that not all Jews lived in Israel, but that doesn’t remove the fact that Israel was a Jewish country.
Moreover, Judaism is associated with a people in a way that Christianity is not. And there is and has always been a language in common: Hebrew and a historical connection to Israel/Jerusalem. YIddish, Ladino, Aramaic have all used the Hebrew alphabet. Muslims, the world over, who speak many different languages in their daily lives, have a similar relationship to Mecca.
The presence in Israel and the relationship have been woven into Jewish culture for centuries. If you choose not to appreciate this fact, then so be it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And most certainly the Jews who lived in Palestine shared a language: How do you think they spoke to each other?
Your “stronger argument” falls somewhat flat because, in the final analysis, the people who actually founded Israel agreed to the “sauce” for the land’s Arabic people. It was the Arabic people who refused the sauce to the Jewish people.
Your Australian example is a sad joke because it is hard to imagine the British turning around had they known the land was occupied. Certainly those who came to the Americas knew the land was occupied…and knew it and knew it until the last Indian was killed and they had reached the Pacific. Does your argument hinge on the fact that there were relatively few aborigines and much land to share?
And has the High Court decided that all the white folk needs get themselves back whence they came? I think not. The error–or crime–is allowed to stand; people wring their hands about the terrible past; land or money is given to the descendants…but they remain a beleaguered minority in their own land…and Australia is considered a fine, upstanding member of the world community.
As is America, Canada, and all the South American countries. Are they called “colonialists?” Ah no. They are not. Does the UN berate them for having stolen all their land and killed all, or most of the original inhabitants? No. It does not. Has America or Canada or Mexico or any of the South American countries had to legitimize their existence or done so except by exterminating their enemies?
From the Zionist perspective, Israel was hardly a “colonialist” enterprise in anything like the normal sense of the term. The Western powers may have seen it in that regard, but the Jews saw it as self-defense. Clearly. As much as any oppressed minority, the Jews tried to stick it out in Europe and be “Europeans.” Herzl was totally assimilated and non-religious. He would never have become a Zionist, let alone worked for the cause, had he thought the Jews had any future in Europe. Or anywhere else where they were a minority. Apparently, you think this journalist was hopped up on the idea of becoming a colonialist, oppressing another people, or, even starting a new country. He saw no other way.
And frankly, given the situation he was confronting, and given the ensuing events, it was a pretty reasonable conclusion, if not the only one a rational person could have made.
It appears that the migration of large numbers of people always entails some violence, sad to say. The migration of Jews to Palestine entailed a lot less than most others. And good bit of the violence was caused by Arab countries who, themselves, had no sovereignty over the land.
I don’t think we’ve disposed of the genetic argument in the broad sense. It is constantly proposed that Jews are not a people (have nothing in common, as you put it above) and had no connection to the land. The genetics show otherwise. It’s just that they don’t show that Jews are a “pure race.”
The same point applies to the question of how long the long-standing presence has been. Or how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Those who argue that 6 million weren’t killed, but some lesser amount, aren’t interested in historical accuracy, I think you’d agree. They don’t really care if it was 3.5 million or 1 million or any other number. It’s the larger point they’re after: Jews made it all up. Jews manipulate the world to control the world. Jews used the Holocaust as an excuse for invading Palestine, something they would have done anyway.
And the same thing applies to the long-standing presence in Palestine. Do this thought experiment: Suppose I could show you incontrovertible proof that there had been a Jewish presence in Palestine going back 4,000 years. Would you suddenly fold your hand and say, okay Sweetness, I see your point, the Jews DO have a right to be there?
Of course not. You actually don’t care whether Jews have been in that area for 1 year or 5,000 years. You don’t care whether the genetics point to the Middle Eastern origins of the Jews. Losing the genetic argument–were you to accept the evidence–would not change your views on Israel’s legitimacy.
You also don’t care that the Zionist theorists felt that Jewish self-determination was the only solution to the millennia-old “Jewish question.” And you don’t seem to care that the Jews who poured into Palestine did so because they felt they had no other choice and were hardly colonizers in any meaningful sense of the term.
To you, they were simply colonizers…and still are. They should simply have “dealt with their enemies” in a different way…
This is why I say, Arie, that we aren’t going to come to agreement on this.
Sweetness, one is, as Senator Moynihan once famously said, entitled to one’s own opinions but not to one’s own facts. I will limit myself to pointing out where you stray from opinion to “personal fact”.
1. “The Huguenot example I think is a poor one unless “France” was co-terminous with the Huguenots in the way that Israel, the country, was the country of the Jews. It would be appear that not all Jews lived in Israel, but that doesn’t remove the fact that Israel was a Jewish country.”
This is appropriating a right by definition. You force me to become somewhat pedantic here and to come up with facts you could have easily checked on yourself.
The “Israel that was a Jewish country”, that was “co-terminous with …the country of the Jews” became, after 922 BC, the home of the legendary ten “lost tribes” and was completely destroyed by Assyria in 722 BC. If Assyria hadn’t done the job Judah might have done it because historical Israel was on more than one occasion at war with that state.
That historical Israel (as well as modern Israel) was included in the region that the Greeks called “Philistia”. Herodotus, who traveled in the region in the fifth century BC, referred to it as Palaistine Syria. The Romans called it originally Provincia Judaea but switched to the appellation Provincia Syria Palaestina after the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 AD. The Christian crusaders also referred to it as Palestine and so did the British when they took the region on as a mandate. To the rest of the world, that is more than 99 % of mankind, it was of no concern what the Jews called it. The idea that the Jews could derive any rights from their terminology, or indeed from mythical tales about a divine bequest, strikes me as preposterous.
2. When I said that the Jews didn’t even have a language in common I was of course speaking of world Jewry not of the small group in Jerusalem. To refer to Hebrew in this context is again pretty thin. After the third century BC it was supplanted in the region of its origin by Aramaic and only survived as a liturgical and literary language until the 19th century when attempts were made to revive it as a spoken language.
3.I will no longer buy into your on again off again argument about genetics. When you are confronted by statements such as that by the Canadian scholar Ken Jacobs that “there is so much incredible, genetic heterogeneity within the Jewish community” or that by the American anthropologist John Tooby that the notion “that Jews are a genetically distinct group doesn’t make it on the basis of modern population genetics” you withdraw to the position that the right to certain land is not determined by genetic tests anyway. But yet, when not immediately confronted by such propositions, you can’t stop talking about it as a supposed basis of rights, presumably because you have so little else to go on.
4. “Your stronger argument” falls somewhat flat because, in the final analysis, the people who actually founded Israel agreed to the “sauce” for the land’s Arabic people. It was the Arabic people who refused the sauce to the Jewish people.”
– this you say a propos of my reaction to your ‘argument’ that it was continuous presence that formed the basis for the right of the Jews and my remark that this was a monumental chutzpah because of the denial of that right to the Palestinians – what was sauce for the gander, I said, was here emphatically denied to the goose –
And this one takes the cake. Sweetness, it is time that you get out of your self protective cocoon, spun from Zionist propaganda, and face some facts. There is abundant evidence that the Zionists, right from the start, tried to do the Arabs out of their land and take over the place, only, as Weizmann stressed, it had to be done discreetly and stealthily.
Herzl wrote in his diary: ” Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.”
Ben Gurion was a complete transferrist as is also evident from his correspondence to his son Amos when he wrote, inter alia : , “A partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning….” or, in 1937, to this same son : “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war…”
Benny Morris wrote:
“Ben-Gurion left a paper trail a mile long as to his actual thinking, and no amount of ignoring, twisting and turning, manipulation, contortion, and distortion can blow it away.” and “Karsh can shout until he is blue in the face that the Zionist leaders in the 1930s and 1940s rejected all thought of transfer: Mountains of evidence speak to the contrary.”
Ilan Pappe looked at this evidence for his recent book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” and came to the conclusion that the preparations for the execution of Plan D in 1948, the plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, had begun long beforehand.
Neither were the Zionists in good faith about the UN partition of Palestine because, in spite of their current protestations that they were the good boys there, they were planning to circumvent it. The 1947 delegation from Ben Gurion, in which Golda Meir was the most prominent person, to King Abdullah of Transjordan, in which they gave their assent to that monarch occupying the West Bank (everything but letting the Palestinians having a state) provides evidence for this (see Avi Shlaim “Collusion across the Jordan”).
You remark, somewhat sourly, that Australia is regarded as a “fine, upstanding member of the world community” in spite of its history regarding the aborigines. No doubt you ascribe the fact that, outside the USA, that is not exactly the impression many people have of Israel, to anti-semitism – that perpetual palliative for Zionist consciences.
I see it somewhat differently. Australia is making an effort to rectify the wrongs of the past by acknowledging these and trying to make amends, among other things by returning vast tracts of land to native title, though many people think that it could do more. Israel is not recognizing any wrongs, let alone trying to rectify them. Even now it is still lying through its teeth about what happened in 1948 and instead of making amends for the wrongs of the past it is committing everyday new ones.
Your references to the South American states are totally devoid of historical sense. Once breaking on the wheel, disemboweling and drawing and quartering were regarded as legitimate forms of execution. Today these practices are beyond the pale.
This also holds for the creation of states at the expense of native populations; once this could be done under international law and with a good conscience. But Zionist settlement started a few hundred years later. Also, the early Zionist settlers didn’t come to a sparsely populated continent but to a long settled, comparatively crowded region. They came too late on the scene, as early Zionist leaders seemed to be aware, hence their stealth and the lies about “a land without people for a people without land”. Ethnic cleansing, still going on in Israel today by making life next to impossible for the Palestinians, is now even a crime under international law. Rather than whining about Israel always being picked on in the matter of legitimacy you should marvel at the fact that some of its main leaders have not been summoned to The Hague yet.
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Wow. I can’t understand how Algeria lost. That was a quick exit. I guess I just expected that they had a great chance to do well in this years world cup. Maybe in 4 years. Maybe its time to jump on the Argentina bandwagon. Looks like Demichelis has already scored. Go Argentina. To make me feel better from that devistating loss by Algeria, I have been watching some funny jokes.. This was kinda funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3j7uSbccSc
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