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.
“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.”
The notorious lack of Egiptian documents on the Exodus can make perfect sense if the event took place during the kingdom of Pharaoh Ramesses II (rule 1279 – 1213 BC).
First, Ancient Egypt oscillated between periods of centralization and anarchy, with the kingdom of R II being possibly that of maximally centralized power ever. At that time, scribes wrote strictly what the Pharaoh wanted them to. No free press there.
Second, R II was perhaps the most megalomaniac and egolatric ruler ever, as evidenced e.g. by his self-deification at Abu-Simbel. He is known for having erased the reliefs made by his predecessors so as to attribute to himself the building of monuments. He is known for having claimed victory at Kadesh when all he did was to save his army from destruction.
It just makes sense that if such a pathological character was deeply humiliated in the way narrated by the book of Exodus, he would have taken care that no mention whatsoever of those events got recorded.
Rewriting (or erasing) history ala 1984 was not invented in the XX century.
Vox: Nice try, but I suggest you look up Occam’s Razor. The Absence of Evidence really is Evidence of Absence.
Matthew:
Egyptian textbooks completely ignore the defeat of the Egyptian Army in the 1973 War. They say that the Egpytian Army attacked the Israelis in the Sinai, forcing their retreat and thus “liberating” the Sinai, which, of course is a lie. What are future historians supposed to make of this?
YBD: Israeli textbooks used to teach Jewish Children that Palestine was unihabited before Zionist arrived. So your point is…..?
Exodus is as much a real event as Hercules Labors. Of course, if you have any evidence….
The wikipedia entry on the Exodus gives what I take to be a reasonably balanced view of the varying opinions–
<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus”<Exodus
Hmm, that didn’t work. You can cut and paste, or else just google.
Thank you, Donald. As much as I love Wiki, you know it is dangerous to quote on contested issues because it’s open format allows interested groups, i.e., CAMERA operatives, to fashion slanted entries.
I recommend the documentary on PBS called the “The Kingdom of David.” As Uri Avnery notes, it’s not like Zionist historians haven’t been trying to find archeological support for Exodus.
A fascinating piece – which highlights the folly of confusing mythology with history. Having been raised with the idea that the books of both the Jewish and Christian Bibles reflected historical reality, I gradually began to discover, through wider reading, the depth of this fallacy – for instance, that he chronology and dating of the Old Testament bore little relation to reality (for example the exodus from Egypt was at most, a gradual event, taking 100 years, and might not have taken place at all). I also discovered there was no non-scriptural evidence for the existence of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or Joseph, nor even of Moses (most non-religious archaeologists believe he was a mythical character, since no physical indication of his existence like pottery shards or stone tablets has been found). Even King David is restricted to one, much-disputed non-Biblical inscription (the Biblical account of his life appears to have been boosted and changed over time, most notably by the priests under Judean King Josiah two hundred years after his supposed death) and there is also scant archaeological or historical evidence for the existence of Solomon. It also emerged that the five Mosaic books were written by at least four authors between the seventh and fifth centuries BC (hundreds of years after the life of the Biblical Moses). More generally, there was clearly a great deal of chopping and changing in the books of the Tanakh over a 2000-year spell, with new bits added in, reflecting shifts in power, before the version we know today was settled.
But as Avnery implies, this process is not restricted to one religion or culture. I’d been raised with the idea that the Gospels were written by Jesus’ disciples shortly after his death but it turned out none were written by men who knew Jesus. The first (attributed to ‘Mark’ in the second century) was written 40 years after his death and the others drew heavily from it – John’s may have been completed as late as 160 AD. And it was only in the fourth century, when the church was already deeply Romanised, that the books of the New Testament were more or less settled. Until then, there had been several competing Gospels (including the Gnostic Gospels of Mary – written early in the second century and proposing Mary rather than Peter as Jesus’ favourite disciple – Thomas, Philip, Judas and others) and also competing views of the life of Jesus among different Christian groups, not all regarding him as divine. It was only after the assembly of bishops in the Nicene Council in 325 ad, under the Emperor Constantine, that consensus was imposed. From then-on competing versions were suppressed, as were competing religions (including Pantheism, aspects of which were absorbed into Christian practice – not least in the veneration of the Virgin Mary as a kind of female deity and the promotion of Saints as demi-gods). And to top all this, the survival of Christianity was secured by the patronage of a Roman emperor whose conversion was probably one of political convenience rather than faith, who accepted the Arian Christian view that Jesus was a man and not part of God and who by today’s standards was a mass murderer (a year after the Nicene Council he had his son and second wife executed). I was also interested to find interpretations of Biblical books completely at odds with those I’d previously received – not least on the Book of Revelation. I was raised on the idea that the writer’s apocalyptic visions referred to the imminent End of Times. In those days (the 1970s) the Soviet Union figured strongly (as the land of Magog from where the anti-Christ, Gog would emerge), although with its decline subsequent candidates emerged, including Europe and the United Nations. Anyway, revisiting this book, I found competing versions including those linking the prophesies to events in the first century, with the Emperor Nero as the anti-Christ. I also found a great deal of debate among early Christians as to whether Revelation was part of the Biblical canon. Even Martin Luther initially considered it to be “neither apostolic nor prophetic”. He also had his doubts about the books of Jude, James and Hebrews, placing them, along with Revelation, in a secondary position to the others.
Moving on to the most recent Abrahamic religion, I ‘d always been happy to accept the Islamic view that the Qur’an was the work of Muhammad but recent scholarship has thrown this into doubt. It emerges that we can reliably know very little about the life of Muhammad – everything in the Hadith (his utterances on Islamic behaviour) is based on hearsay, written down 150 years later. It also appears that the Qu’ran was compiled, and probably written, after Muhammad’s death in 632 AD, and that much was drawn from pre-existing religious texts and fables (heathen myths, apocryphal and Syriac Christian writings, the Talmud and apocryphal Jewish writings, and from Zoroastrianism). The strong Talmudic influence is hardly surprising because Islam emerged at a time of an anti-Christian alliance between Jews and Arabs. Additional evidence emerged from the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana’a in Yemen where early fragments of the Qu’ran were discovered, diverging significantly from the current version. You might think this evidence of scriptural fallibility would be disturbing to those believing it was dictated to Muhammad by the Archangel Gabriel in God’s language, Arabic, in a cave, but fundamentalists do not deal in debate. It is enough to point out that such ideas have been hijacked by Christians – proof enough of a Crusader agenda.
Point is that all three Abrahamic religions are based on a series of myths that bear little relation to history. I guess what is really surprising is that anyone with any respect for or understanding of history, or culture or archaeology, or life more generally, should think otherwise. See http://www.gavinevans.net/?page_id=403
Gavin: People think otherwise because people derive legitimacy from their national & religious myths. Without the Exodus Myth, Jews are like Angles, Saxons, Norse, and every other invader in history who conquered territory. Not quite as imspiring as saying God gave it to you, no?
It was a 14th C scribe in the Vatican who created the Christmas and Easter myths. A lowly scribe illustrating a Bible made it all up!
I saw slides of the work, including all the rough drafts, taken by a famous art history professor who was granted access to these papers during her summer research at the Vatican Library: provided she didn’t publish or publicize any of it. Since it was not her specialty, she agreed. She bought the slides back to show the four of us in her graduate class. I was dumbfounded. The Three Wise Men/Magi? Made up. Jesus in the manger? Made up. The rolling back of the rock from Jesus’s grave/cave? Made up. I have to find the notes I made about this later that day. I’m wracking my brain to remember what she said about the cross, because part of that story is untrue or all of it’s untrue. Can’t remember. Definitely the thing about the three guys on crosses on a hill is made up. [It was the art history professor’s stature with the Vatican Head Librarian that performed the open sesame with respect to this Vatican secret. They are kept in a long flat drawer, which she photographed as well, and are stored in a section of the Vatican Library that no one but the librarians have access to.]
The scribe used pagan myths that the people were familiar with to bootleg them into Christian myths. This happened shortly before Gutenberg invented his press in 1451 and printed the first Bible.
Matthew: I agree with the essence of your point, and, quite obviously, if Avnery is correct, this creates profound problems for Zionism as a political, let alone a religiously-linked, project. However, I would hesitate before putting Jews in Israel in the same category as the invaders of the British Isles in the first millenium. For one thing, no-one disputes that there are at least some Jews in Israel whose familial roots could be traced back thousands of years (and, from what I’ve read, the links found in DNA-based research between Jews and Palestinians tends to bear this out). Second, whether their forebears were converted during Judaisms prosletising phase, or whether they are descendants of the prosceletisers, they clearly have a deep religiously-based link to the territory – and here it is worth stressing that, notwithstanding major differences, there is probably greater cohesian in Judaism than in either Christianity or in Islam. But, for me, the more important point is that whatever the reasons for ‘returning’ to Israel, those who are born there have a right to live there (as do those whose parents or grandparents were forcibly removed from the territory in 1948). Finally, a different point: my father was an Ashkenazi Jew and undoubtedly carried within him a deep seam of mythology of the kind discussed. But the bits and pieces of this mythology he passed onto me, along with traditions that seemed to have a momentum of their own, always struck me as being wonderfully rich and lovely in so many ways, and it matters not a jot to me whether this is ultimately rooted in some conversion experience in the first few centuries AD or goes back further in antiquity.
Of course, whether or not Jews were ever in Egypt and whether or not at any substantial time before the Old Testament was written they believed that God promised Palestine to them …
They were basically given title to most of modern Israel by the United Nations. Then they signed the Geneva Convention in 1948-49. Then they conquered the West Bank in 1967.
Under the Geneva Convention they were allowed to occupy the West Bank, but were not allowed to settle their citizens on that property.
So the archeology is irrelevant. They must evacuate the settlements eventually.
“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.”
Just a little history about this:
Hillel Halkin wrote in The New York Sun on July 24, 2007 after Ataturk’s regime gave way to whatever they have now, the following:
“Some 12 or 13 years ago, when I was reporting from Israel for the New York weekly, the Forward, I wrote a piece on Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern secular Turkey, that I submitted to the newspaper with some trepidation.
In it, I presented evidence for the likelihood of Ataturk’s having had a Jewish — or more precisely, a Doenmeh — father.
The Doenmeh were a heretical Jewish sect formed, after the conversion to Islam in the 17th century of the Turkish-Jewish messianic pretender Sabbetai Zevi, by those of his followers who continued to believe in him.
Conducting themselves outwardly as Muslims in imitation of him, they lived secretly as Jews and continued to exist as a distinct, if shadowy, group well into the 20th century.
In the many biographies of Ataturk there were three or four different versions of his father’s background, and although none identified him as a Jew, their very multiplicity suggested that he had been covering up his family origins.”
Read the rest here: http://www2.nysun.com/article/58997
Alexandria, your 14th century theory makes no sense whatsoever–it’s like saying that the legends of dragons hoarding gold were invented by Tolkien when he wrote The Hobbit in the 1930’s.
There is a huge scholarly debate over the historical accuracy of much of the BIble, but let’s not go crazy here.
Donald,
I am not advancing theory. I am telling you that I saw the slides taken by an art history professor inside the Vatican Library showing the 14th C drawings for a hand-drawn version of the Bible.
The Vatican Librarian told this art historian that the young scribe, a lowly priest, made the Christmas and Easter stories up. He wasn’t told, ‘hey, draw pictures of a baby in a manger’. He created images from common stories known to the common people in Italy, and the parchments the Vatican preserved showed the genesis of the ideas.
I dont care how much scholarly debate there is. The original Bible was written in Greek, ancient Greek. How many people do you know who read classical ancient Greek? There are only one or two of those BIbles available. One is in the Univ. of Leipzig library. John Boswell (Yale University) did a book in the 1980s about homosexuality and christian tolerance based on the original Univ of Leipzig biblical document, and he was one of a handful in the world who could actually read the damn thing. Unfortunately, Boswell is dead; his book was a wonder, and heavily footnoted. The story he told was unlike anything you ever heard before.
Cyrus Scofield rewrote the bible that US Pentacostals use in the first part of the 20th C. So all these biblical references are to editions that no one really has a clear idea about, or catalogued adequately. It’s a hodgepodge and a mess, particularly when scholars want to advance their own religious theory.
The theory of the Khazars as Jewish converts being the Ashkenazi was invented by, I think, Arthur Koestler. I recently read that it had been pretty thoroughly debunked by modern scientific analysis. I seem to remeber a DNA comparison between the Khazars and the Ashkenazi.
I don’t bother to look it up in more detail because the analysis that Tony presents is basically racial. Judaism is a religion that accepts, has he notes, converts. Today’s Jews are the spiritual heirs of the Patriarchs and Moses. Some of the biological heirs, by marriage of a gentile woman to a Jewish man, are, of course, not Jews anyway.
Judaism is not and was never supposed to be a race. Intermarriage requires conversion but is not forbidden. It has always happened a lot. Moses himself married a non-Jew who we presume converted.
The skin color argument would make the Eastern and Sephardic Jews a different religion than the European (Ashkenazim). Nonsense.
For all we know the ancient Judeans might have been all blondes with fair skin. You can’t do anthropology by looking around at the dinner table.
Would Tony have us declare the black Ethiopian Jews non-Jewish because of their skin color?
There is archeological evidence of the Second Temple, which wasn’t all that long after the First. And there is supporting evidence that Jericho is the ancient Jericho.
The recent rediscovery of the blue dye from snails on the shore of the Mediterranean also supports the ancient origin of the Jews.
And there are the discoveries of what is probably King David’s palace in the Old City in Jerusalem.
The Jewish Menorah carved into the gate in Rome also supports the history of the Roman conquest.
The overall pattern is that the older the history, the harder it is to find physical remains. Exactly what you would expect if things were wearing away and being built over.
We don’t have video or anything from the ancient world, or enough to stand up in court as solid proof. But the casual dismissal handed us in the article is totally unsupportable. In other words, the evidence, taken as a whole, doesn’t lean his way; You’d have to be hostile to Judaism to swallow it.
Especially this slander:
Jews, uniquely in the world, are required to change their religion in order have peace. This is not only self-evidently false but objectively anti-Semitic.
I just want to respond to one point by FredJ. He says: ‘Some of the biological heirs, by marriage of a gentile woman to a Jewish man, are, of course, not Jews anyway.’ He may be surprised to know that this is a relatively recent tradition within Judaism. What is not in serious dispute is that Jewish identity was patrilineal for a very l ong time. The debate concerns when this began to change and what prompted the spread of the matrilineal tradition. Certainly there are many examples in the Bible where Jewish men marry non-Jewish women, without any reference to conversions (including the Israelite kings marrying foreign princesses). Some sources say it began to emerge, with respect to mixed marriages, at the time of Ezra but others say it began much later. There is a strong case that the change began to occur during the Mishnaic times, when the Romans ruled Palestine. But the writings of Josephus, in the first century AD, give no indication of any custom of exclusively matrilinear descent, suggesting that by then it was still a minority practice, and there is no doubt that some Jewish groups in Europe and Asia continued to recognise only patrilineal descent many centuries later, possibly until about the eighth or ninth centuries ACE, when the violent aggression of Catholic proselytising, prompted or reinforced a retreat in this respect on the part of Judaism. After that the matrileal tradition was reinforced. So it would seem that the process was more gradual than is sometimes suggested and that the need to preserve Jewish identity over the past 2000 years was part of it. For more on this debate, see: http://www.gavinevans.net/?page_id=365
Tony, how does one get on Avnery’s email list? I visit Gush Shalom regularly, mainly for his column, but I’ve never seen any place to sign up to be alerted to his latest writing.
Discovering him, somewhere back in 2001, changed my world, and not just in regards to my views on Israel. I’d figured out on my own that the “Arabs” of which so many of my Jewish-American family members spoke when they talked of those Muslim residents of Palestine who had left in 1948, were, in fact Palestinians, and that I had been told many lies about who these people were. And I come from an extremely liberal family.
Reading Avnery has also changed my attitudes about American politics, and the role of radical analysis.
I understand the list might only be for professional journalists, but if not, I’d love to sign up.
Alexandria, the scholarly debate regarding the New Testament books is about whether this one or that one was written 30 years after the events it describes, or 60 years, or maybe even in the early 2nd century, but nobody thinks they were written over 1000 years later. . And then there’s the debate over the competing gospels and when they were written and why they weren’t accepted into the canon. There are legendary additions to the birth story that have made it into the popular understanding of the event, like the names of the wise men, or the notion that there were three of them, for instance. I don’t know when those parts of the story were added.
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I think it’s clear that the Exodus story is fiction. The Jews were never slaves in Egypt. It is almost as clear that the story of a united kingdom of Israel and Judea before the Assyrian conquest is also fiction. But it also seems clear that Koestler’s and Sand’s theory is at best an exaggeration. As I understand it, DNA comparisons consistently show that European Jews are closely related to the Palestinians and only distantly related to the Khazars. But I admit, there is so much fake science and other deliberate propaganda concerning the Middle East, it’s never easy to know who is lying.
Gary: How can science solve this problem? It is beyond doubt that Jews lived all over, including throughout the Middle East during the last 2000 years. Intermarriage was inevitable. Hence, there is obviously some DNA similarities between some Jews and other Semites. But, of course, there is lots of DNA similarity between Jews and other Russians, Poles, Frenchmen, etc…How can science unwind two millenia of comingling….which, I think, is Tony’s point.
Per Matthew and Gary, Tony’s point seems to be about some sort of racial or ethnic purity. But frankly, normative Judaism never really claims that Jews are a “pure” race, religion, or ethnic group. Some Jews may make that claim or hold on to it– but that claim has nothing to do with Judaism.
For example, one of the central stories concerns “Ruth,” who becomes a Jew. Even today, Jews who are against intermarriage aren’t against it when the gentile converts to Judaism. And, of course, as someone says above, the Falasha of Ethiopia are generally accepted as Jews.
Notions of racial purity are generally used AGAINST Jews, not by Jews, by anti-Semites.
That said, rejecting “purity” as a standard doesn’t mean that any notion of Jewish nationhood or peoplehood is out the window.
Don’t we all come from mitochondrial Eve, after all?
The reason science can help with Khazar question is that it is often claimed that Jews aren’t from the Middle East, but are actually Khazars who converted. But if that were true, they’d have a strong genetic relationship to Khazars and not to, say, Palestinians. The ultimate point of the Khazar theory is that Jews have no claim to the region now known as Israel because, ah, they didn’t come from there ever. They came from the land of the Khazars. So science can help us clear this up.
But still, this argument has nothing to do with “purity” of any sort. That’s a straw man. You know, some good number of Jews sitting around the Passover table DO look like Palestinians. And some Palestinians look like Khazars. So?
Matthew writes: “People think otherwise because people derive legitimacy from their national & religious myths. Without the Exodus Myth, Jews are like Angles, Saxons, Norse, and every other invader in history who conquered territory. Not quite as imspiring as saying God gave it to you, no?”
First, Jews or Zionists are hardly the only ones who have claimed that God deeded them the land. So the preoccupation with the Zionist project, given that “God” helped Europeans conquer and subdue the entire Western Hemisphere seems a wee bit misplaced. Especially as the Zionist project was a reaction to severe oppression (not the case with Spanish, French or English) and, as it turned out, impending extermination. It was quite different from British, French or Portuguese colonialism, even though the unthinking anti-Zionist lumps them together, presumably to de-legitimize Zionsim.
The only nation that ever is asked to legitimate itself is Israel for, presumably, unspeakable crimes against humanity.
“The Absence of Evidence really is Evidence of Absence.”
Really? Does that mean that the lack of a fossil record here and there is “evidence” of the “absence” of evolutionary activity? Or should we keep on looking for fossils to fill in the gaps?
Sweetness,
I’m sure the fact that the people oppressing them were fleeing oppression themselves, and aren’t nasty old standard-issue European imperialists, is a great comfort to the Palestinians.
Nice try, Sweetness, but the “gap” argument in Evolution is actually a logical fallacy because the “gap” can never be filled, i.e., between any two points a third can be found.( Please refer to the works of Stephen Jay Gould, among others, for a fuller explanation.)
My point is that the proponents of the Exodus Myth have the burden of production and persuasion, not the skeptical. Therefore, the absense of evidence does nothing to advance the proof of the myth. Asserting that something is true without evidence is merely that: an assertion. Bertrand Russell used to joke that tiny teacups (or kettles) might be orbiting distant planets too…..if they are small enough, how can we disprove their existence?
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WB: It’s not a comfort to the Palestinians, but I do think it changes the moral status of the event. And makes the Zionists and those who moved to Palestine quite a bit different from the Norse invaders, the English who colonized North America, and the Spanish and Portuguese who conquered South America. Not to mention the British and French and their doings in Africa and Asia. Probably makes them a bit different from the Russians who moved east and the Arabs who moved west out of the peninsula.
Not to make this distinction is to fly in the face of history. In my view, there simply would not have been a state had there not been oppression and rising anti-Semitism. Even with 10,000 Herzl’s. That’s why it’s so important for many anti-Zionists to deny the Holocaust or why it’s important to prove that 6 million didn’t die; it was only 4.5 million.
In the annals of colonial conquests, Zionism is the smallest of bit players and yet, somehow, it’s accused (literally and not infrequently) of seeking to conquer and control the world. I’m sure you’ve heard those claims. “Expanionist Israel!” Ooh! So now she’s the size of Delaware of instead of Rhode Island.
As to Matthew: I agree: They have the burden of proof. But, if some pieces of the Bible have been shown to have demonstrable, historical antecedents, it’s not unreasonable to look for others. Having the story doesn’t mean they exist, but having some corroboration for some of the story makes it reasonable to try to find additional corroboration for other parts of the story (if that’s your thing). The teacups are PURELY speculative, which isn’t the same thing at all. So this doesn’t have much to do with logical fallacies or proving the negative. This is done with all kinds of stories about ancient “events” where the material evidence is scarce. Scientists and archeologists engage in this all the time.
As to Gould, I’m with him, but not sure what you say here addresses the concerns. I guess it depends on how big, time-wise and qualitatively, the gap is. Sure, there’s always a gap unless you have the remains of every single creature that ever lived. But I don’t think that’s what the critics are asserting. The gaps, apparently, are particularly troublesome to the theory in some ways. All that said, I adhere to the theory of evolution and don’t find the gaps, as I understand them, to be troublesome necessarily. That actually was my point. Even if the gaps are huge, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the evolutionary trail died out or never existed. We just haven’t found the missing parts. So absence of evidence doesn’t equal evidence of absence.
In any, any event, one doesn’t have to believe that the Exodus story occurred as it’s described or in any way, to assert that Jews inhabited the land known as Israel, had a Temple there a couple of times, etc. Nor does one have to believe in the story to justify the state of Israel, even though some clearly do. The Zionist movement was largely a secular movement, and its raison d’etre was the millenia-old phenomenon of anti-Semitism that became particularly virulent in the 19th and 20th centuries and continues to do this day, in different parts of the world.
Sweetness,
I think the double standard goes in the opposite direction, at least in America. Israeli imperialism is defended and even praised by people who don’t defend other imperialisms (in fact, what Israel is doing in the territories is almost never referred to as “imperialism” or “colonialism”). And there is less sympathy expressed for Palestinians in the American media than just about any other oppressed group I can think of.
WB,
I would not say it’s defended and praised. What’s defended and praised is Jewish self-determination effectuated under the most dire circumstances.
(Of course, it depends on the individual speaking. I hardly agree with every and anyone who “defends Israel” and all of her actions.”)
Barnett Rubin’s post in Informed Comment, April 27 is a view of the situation I can largely concur with. Labeling Israel as “imperialist” and “colonialist” just doesn’t fit the facts.
Though, as you point, it probably does for the Palestinians. But that doesn’t make it so.
If I were to take a purely Jewish point of view, or a Jewishly partisan point of view, I could say a lot of things about European, American, and Muslim culture and countries that would ring true for me–but maybe not for you.
I think the opinions of the people who are victims of colonialism (and I’m genuinely puzzled as to why Israel’s settlement policy would not be considered “colonialist”) should be given great weight in determining whether an enterprise is imperialist or colonialist.
I don’t know where you live, Sweetness, but in America, Israel’s enterprise in the territories is very often defended and praised–and not just Jewish self-determination but its exercise of rule over others.
Even if I were to agree with you that Israel’s founding was an act of imperialism, I would say it was excusable and justifiable imperialism in that it was perpetrated in self-defense.
You might say, “But did the Palestinians ever do warrant this?” I would say, “But where were the Jews going to found a state? All land is occupied or part of a sovereign nation. There isn’t any spare acreage folks are just willing to give up.”
You might say, “But what about Germany or somewhere else in Eastern Europe?” I would say that many of the Jews who tried to return to their previous homes were massacred. Beyond that, you’re not going to go back to a place where your neighbors collaborated in your destruction.
Besides which, the Jews really did have a long connection to Palestine.
But mostly I would say there are two sets of victims here. To be sure, Palestinians are victims in the course of the founding and development of Israel. Though actually, all things considered, they were offered a pretty good deal with partition–at least in retrospect.
On the other hand, the Jews were victims, whose plight led them–some say, forced them–to find a solution to their permanent oppression in the form of a state.
These two peoples clashed over the same land.
I disagree with those who say the Jews had no right to any of the land. Jews had a millenia-long presence in “Israel” and thus, I think, had some claim to some of the land.
(This is another reason I reject the simple colonialist and imperialist label. True imperialists and colonialists tend to be complete outsiders.)
The Arab position seems to have been that the Jews had no right to any of the land, except perhaps as citizens of a bi-national state.
But at the time of the founding, the idea of being a minority in another person’s state or homeland was not really an option. The Jews had tried that and it hadn’t work out very well. That’s the whole point of Zionism.
But of course one hears all of this stuff about colonialism, imperialism, taking over the world, and even foisting communism on the rest of the world on the part of the Zionists. To me The Greater Israel movement was imperialist in flavor. But one shouldn’t equate this, what I would call a perversion of Zionism’s original aims, with Zionism. I don’t think bin Laden represents Islam for the same sorts of reasons.
All of this said, however, I’m a strong two-state supporter, and put my money and votes where my mouth is. Israel has to give the Palestinians a fair deal; stop the settlement expansion; and remove the roadblocks, or most of them. In my book, the Palestinians are going to have to give up the dream of getting Haifa back.
But William, I don’t think we’re going to agree on any of this. This is one of those conversations that’s like a Rohrshach test: You see a butterfly; I seem a woman’s genitals.
Sweetness,
Actually, I think for a lot of our exchange you’ve been talking about the Zionist project in general, and I’ve been talking about the Occupied Territories.
Mr Burns,
There is no moral difference between what you call “the occupied territories” and pre-67 Israeli territory. Jews have lived in both, more or less continuously for up to 4000 years.
Y.,
So the fact that Arabs who live in one territory are Israeli citizens and Arabs who live in another have no rights Israelis respect constitutes no moral difference to you?
William,
I see your point. But often the two blend in these dicussions.
For example, one has to ask, “If the occupied territories are ‘Palestinian’ land, why didn’t they press the Jordanians and Egyptians for a state on their own land? Why weren’t Jordan and Egypt considered occupiers?” At that point in the struggle, the focus was on pre-1967 Israel borders, such as they were. They wanted pre-1967 Israel back and claimed that it was the proper site of a Palestinian state.
Now, maybe the Palestinians DID press Egypt and Jordan; I don’t know. But if it is Palestinian land now, it was Palestinian land then.
But of course time moves on; the lines of the debate change.
For example, it is my understanding that early early Zionist land claims were for a much smaller parcel of land than even the UN division. But apparently that wasn’t acceptable–perhaps because the Arabs suspected that the Zionists were going to go for the whole thing. I don’t know.
Well, in fact, that’s the Israeli suspicion, too. That the West Bank and Gaza are simply a prelude to the final struggle for all of Israel proper. That’s what we’re dealing with, in the end, suspicions on both sides that are partly justified by the other side’s words, deeds, and writings–and partly not justified.
In the end, I come down on the side of a two state solution because it seems like the only solution with some semblance of fairness and a chance of working, however remote that chance might be. Both sides would have to give up something. Both sides would be unhappy to that degree, but happy because they could finally get on with their lives in peace.
Regardless, the two people’s are going to be joined at the hip economically forever. Eventually, they will find this conjoining useful and beneficial. If they can ever find a way to work together, Israel and Palestine will become Middle East “tigers.” My prediction. My hope.
Since it is becoming apparent to all that the Palestinians are incapable of setting up and running a state, the inevitable outcome for Judea/Samaria (the so-called “West Bank”) will be some sort of condominium between Israel and what is currently called “Jordan” (regardless of whether the Hashemites or Palestinians control it). Jews living there will be Israeli citizens, the Arabs will be citizens of the Arab state. This, in practice, is what is being implemented, slowly but surely. The sooner this farce of a “Palestinian state” is disposed of, the sooner peace will come to the region.
Ah, the Jordanian option—a favorite Zionist fantasy. In the first place, is there a precedent for this kind of ethnic condominium actually working? Whose law takes precedence when there is a conflict between Arab and Jew? In the second place, there’s no indication that the Jordanians are stupid enough to be dragged into Israel’s mess on the West Bank. In the third place, what happens to Gaza under this scenario?
The condominium idea I mentioned will be de facto and not de jure. It will not be based on an “official agreement” for the reason that the Palestinians can not agree to such a thing. This will evolve into some sort of modus vivendi. Israel will still maintain military control as long as there is a security threat. As the threat diminishes, the Israeli military presence would be drawn down, hopefully to the levels that existed before the Oslo fiasco of 1993. During that earlier period, Judea/Samaria (the so-called “West Bank”) had almost no roadblocks, all roads were open, and there was easy access between the Gaza Strip and Judea/Samaria. It was the outbreak of “peace” and the subsequent explosion of terrorist activity that caused the roadblocks and restrictions on movement to be put into place. The Oslo agreement was really great for the leaders Arafat, Peres and Rabin…they won the Nobel “Peace” Prizes and other prizes putting lots of cash in their pockets and giving them lots of honors, but the big losers were the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.
The threat is diminishing now–how many terrorist attacks have recently come from the West Bank? And you know what–Israel isn’t drawing down its military presence. The only time Israel has diminished its military presence on Palestinian land is when it withdrew from Gaza, which would indicate that Israel withdraws when it’s confronted by violence, not when security threats diminish.
And you seem to have wisely given up on the idea that the Jordanians are crazy enough to involve themselves in a situation where they would have responsibility and no power.
The reason for the big decline in terror activity in Judea/Samaria is BECAUSE of the Israeli military presence. It is not because there aren’t terrorists trying to attack. The fact of the matter, since Oslo, is that any territory Israel gives up or removes is security control from has become a base for attacks on Israel. That is the current reality. The Palestinian Authority does nothing to prevent it. When will this situation end? Hard to say… as long as extremist Islam seems to be in the ascendency, it looks like this terror activity will continue. Israeli concessions merely strengthen this extremist movement. If the Arabs ever realize that this Islamic extremist movement is leading them to a dead-end (which is not perceived to be the case today), then we can hope that their societies will turn away from extremism and violence, and Israel can draw down its military presence in Judea/Samaria. Until then, it doesn’t look realistic.
Let’s be honest, if Arab countries like Egypt were ever to really have free, open, multi-party elections, parties like the Muslim Brotherhood would win, which would just fuel more extremist movements in other Arab countries. It is this situation that has to change for there to be any meaningful chance for real peace.
Y.Ben David wrote
“There is no moral difference between what you call “the occupied territories” and pre-67 Israeli territory. Jews have lived in both, more or less continuously for up to 4000 years.”
I would have thought that Avnery’s article above would have taught some discretion regarding these historical claims.
That claim about 4000 years continuous occupation is largely bogus. And so is the idea of a common descent.
But if these claims were true, so what?
There have been, in the course of history, so many diaspora populations. Can you imagine the chaos that would result if a sizable number of them would start to lay claim to the area their ancestors left (whether voluntary or not) thousands or hundreds of years ago?
The descendants of the Huguenots could claim part of France (where their brethren in the faith are still living). The Anglo Saxons to the region north of Frisia where the population is of (genuine) common descent. Etc.etc.
Yes but the Jews are a ‘special case’. They were a persecuted minority – and then the holocaust.
What about that other persecuted minority virtually none of whom obtained riches and influence, as diaspora Jews often did. A minority on whom the Nazis also attempted genocide but who have never received any compensation for their sufferings, let alone that these have been commemorated in books, movies and holocaust musea. I am speaking of the gypsies.
They hail from India where presently there still are more than two million of them. Yet, if on the basis of these facts the diaspora gypsies would claim a part of India they would be laughed (or kicked) out of court.
What makes the Jews so special?
Y Ben David wrote:
“Since it is becoming apparent to all that the Palestinians are incapable of setting up and running a state,”
It is of course a common phenomenon among colonisers to blame the colonized for the effect of obstacles that the coloniser has put in their way in the first place.
Ben David continues:”the inevitable outcome for Judea/Samaria (the so-called “West Bank”) will be some sort of condominium between Israel and what is currently called “Jordan””
I can foresee quite a different outcome. With the waning of US influence in the world and the loss of its financial clout Israel will ultimately be forced to withdrawal from the West Bank. The ‘settlers’ then have the choice to live under Palestinian sovereignty or to return to West of the ‘Green Line’.
Is this likely? Well a wee bit more so than the pipe dream of Ben David.
Y. Ben-David,
So if violence is continuing or increasing, Israel needs to stay, and if violence is decreasing Israel needs to stay. In other words, you’re for a perpetual occupation until the Palestinians all become pacifists, which isn’t very likely to happen while the IDF is brutalizing them.
I didn’t say that. I said, once a modus vivendi is reached, the Israeli military presence would be downgraded as much as possible. Arab police would take up the job in the Arab areas. But this required breaking the armed terrorist groups, which as of today, are encouraged by the Palestian Authority, either directly (Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade), or indirectly (HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, etc). From the very beginning of Arafat’s rule in the Palestinian territories, he allowed these groups to operate freely. It was he who saw to it that no proper governmental authority committed to the peace agreements would arise.
As long as Israel continued to steal Palestinian land, kill Palestinian civilians, and dump shit on Palestinian farms, violent resistance groups cannot be “broken.” At best they can be temporarily managed, as they are now on the west bank. Your “modus vivendi” seems to be Palestinian Arabs accepting that they have no right to a state and their permanent subjugation to Israel. Do you really think that’s going to work? Would it have worked for the British dealing with the Irgun and the Stern Gang?
re fredJ’s statement that ‘You’d have to be hostile to Judaism to swallow it”. No, FredJ, you’d just have to be hostile to superstition and Iron Age spin.
The archaeological evidence against the Pentateuch stacks up convincingly. Archaeologists have yet to find any trace of the half million or so people claimed to have been wandering in the desert for 40 years. Did none of them die and get buried, or break a pot, or leave a rubbish pit containing animal bones? (and if apologists try to argue that there weren’t 500k of them, then the OT has an error, and if it’s fallible on one issue, how can even the faithful be sure it’s not fallible elsewhere?)
Excavation has shown that many of the sites connected with the Exodus story weren’t inhabited when the action was supposed to have happened- but they WERE occupied during the 6th-7th century BC, so would have been familiar to the population when the books were being written. Just as evolutionary theory, geology and cosmology have destroyed the scientific claims of the Pentateuch, so modern archaeology has methodically exposed the origins of these writings as Iron Age spin and propaganda, collected around the 7th century BCE to bolster the territorial ambitions of Jerusalem-based kings. No Exodus, no Golden Age of David and Solomon. For an introduction to this debate, try ‘the Bible Unearthed” by Finkelstein and Silberman. And if claims of distant connection with the land are to be taken into account, then surely the descendants of the Philistines etc have as strong a claim as the descendants of ancient Hebrews.
Unfortunately, there are some elements within Judiasm that still want to take it all literally, and push for an Israel encompassing the original scope of the Covenant (Genesis 15:18) “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates”. And then you’ve got the Rapture crowd in the USA …
So, what would become of a Judaism that is forced to recognise that its foundation text is as historically accurate as a Dan Brown novel? to have the supernatural rug pulled out from underneath it? Perhaps they could find some consolation in the fact that that the believers of Islam, with their common ‘history’ would be in equal difficulty.
But seriously, Mr Avnery raises some fundamental issues that need to be openly discussed. Those who try to suppress such discussion by calling it anti-Semitic are only calling attention to the shortcomings of their own position.
Ben David wrote:
“But this required breaking the armed terrorist groups, which as of today, are encouraged by the Palestian Authority, either directly (Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade), or indirectly (HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, etc). From the very beginning of Arafat’s rule in the Palestinian territories, he allowed these groups to operate freely.”
Let us compare that with a statement by Avnery:
“Israel did not “create” Hamas, but it certainly helped it along in its initial stages.
During the first 20 years of the occupation, the Israeli leadership saw the PLO as its chief enemy. That’s why it favored Palestinian organizations that, it was thought, could undermine the PLO.”
So who exactly was so lenient to Hamas?