Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the
Israeli State
What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under
the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the
very same "children of Israel" described in the Old Testament?
And what if
most modern Israelis aren't descended from the ancient Israelites
at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and
others who didn't "return" to the scrap of land we
now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to
exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully
displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for
millennia?
What if the
entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora -- the story recounted at
Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the
ancient Jews' exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through
the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh's clutches -- is all
wrong?
That's the explosive thesis of When and How Was the
Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv
University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves
across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19
weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated
into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States
this year by Verso.
Its thesis has ramifications that go far beyond some
antediluvian academic debate. Few modern conflicts are as attached
to ancient history as that decades-long cycle of bloodletting
between Israelis and Palestinians. Each group lays claim to the
same scrap of land -- holy in all three of the world's major
Abrahamic religions -- based on long-standing ties to that chunk of
earth and national identities formed over long periods of time.
There's probably no other place on Earth where the present is as
intimately tied to the ancient.
Central to the ideology of Zionism is the tale -- familiar to
all Jewish families -- of exile, oppression, redemption and return.
Booted from their kingdom, the "Jewish people" -- sons and
daughters of ancient Judea -- wandered the earth, rootless, where
they faced cruel suppression from all corners -- from being forced
to toil in slavery under the Egyptians, to the Spanish massacres of
the 14th century and Russian pogroms of the 19th, through to the
horrors of the Third Reich.
This view of history animates all Zionists, but none more so
than the influential but reactionary minority -- in the United
States as well as Israel -- who believe that God bestowed a
"Greater Israel" -- one that encompasses the modern state as well
as the Occupied Territories -- on the Jewish people, and who resist
any effort to create a Palestinian state on biblical grounds.
Inventing a People?
Zand's central argument is that the Romans didn't expel whole
nations from their territories. Zand estimates that perhaps 10,000
ancient Judeans were vanquished during the Roman wars, and the
remaining inhabitants of ancient Judea remained, converting to
Islam and assimilating with their conquerors when Arabs subjugated
the area. They became the progenitors of today's Palestinian Arabs,
many of whom now live as refugees who were exiled from their
homeland during the 20th century.
As Israeli journalist Tom Segev summarized, in a review of the
book in Ha'aretz:
There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the
exile also never happened -- hence there was no return. Zand
rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the
Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily,
the horrors of the conquest under Joshua.
But this begs the question: if the ancient people of Judea
weren't expelled en masse, then how did it come to pass that Jewish
people are scattered across the world? According to Zand, who
offers detailed histories of several groups within what is
conventionally known as the Jewish Diaspora, some were Jews who
emigrated of their own volition, and many more were later converts
to Judaism. Contrary to popular belief, Zand argues that Judaism
was an evangelical religion that actively sought out new adherents
during its formative period.
This narrative has huge significance in terms of Israel's
national identity. If Judaism is a religion, rather than "a people"
descended from a dispersed nation, then it brings into question the
central justification for the state of Israel remaining a "Jewish
state."
And that brings us to Zand's second assertion. He argues that
the story of the Jewish nation -- the transformation of the Jewish
people from a group with a shared cultural identity and religious
faith into a vanquished "people" -- was a relatively recent
invention, hatched in the 19th century by Zionist scholars and
advanced by the Israeli academic establishment. It was, argues
Zand, an intellectual conspiracy of sorts. Segev says, "It's all
fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of
the State of Israel."
Zand Gets Slammed; Do His Arguments Stand
Up?
The ramifications of Zand's argument are far-reaching; "the
chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic
people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its
descendants," he told Ha'aretz. Zand argues that Israel
should be a state in which all of the inhabitants of what was once
"British Palestine" share the full rights and responsibilities of
citizenship, rather than maintaining it as a "Jewish and
democratic" state, as it's now identified.
Predictably, Zand was pilloried according to the time-tested
formula. Ami Isseroff, writing on ZioNation, the Zionism-Israel blog,
invoked the customary Holocaust imagery, accusing Zand of offering
a "final solution to the Jewish problem," one in which "No auto
da fe is required, no charging Cossacks are needed, no gas
chambers, no smelly crematoria." Another feverish
ideologue called Zand's work "another manifestation of mental
disorder in the extreme academic Left in Israel."
That kind of overheated rhetoric is a standard straw man in the
endless roil of discourse over Israel and the Palestinians, and is
easily dismissed. But more serious criticism also greeted Zand's
work. In a widely read critical review of Zand's work, Israel
Bartal, dean of humanities at the Hebrew University, slammed the
author's second assertion -- that Zionist academics had suppressed
the true history of Judaism's spread through emigration and
conversion in favor of a history that would give legitimacy to the
quest for a Jewish state.
Bartal raised important questions about Zand's methodology and
pointed out what appears to be some sloppy details in the book.
But, interestingly, in defending Israel's academic community,
Bartal supported Zand's more consequential thesis, writing,
"Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine)
does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious
Jewish historical discussions." Bartal added: "no historian of the
Jewish national movement has ever really believed that the origins
of the Jews are ethnically and biologically 'pure.' " He noted that
"[i]mportant groups in the [Zionist] movement expressed
reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely."
"As far as I can discern," Bartal wrote, "the book contains not
even one idea that has not been presented" in previous historical
studies. Segev added that "Zand did not invent [his] thesis; 30
years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by
David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others."
One can reasonably argue that this ancient myth of a Jewish
nation exiled until its 20th century return is of little
consequence; whether the Jewish people share a common genetic
ancestry or are a far-flung collection of people who share the same
faith, a common national identity has in fact developed over the
centuries. But Zand's central contention stands, and has some
significant implications for the current conflict between Israel
and the Palestinians.
Changing the Conversation?
The primary reason it's so difficult to discuss the conflict
between Israelis and Palestinians is the remarkably effective job
supporters of Israel's control of the Occupied Territories --
including Gaza, still under de facto occupation -- have
done equating support for Palestinian self-determination with a
desire to see the destruction of Israel. It effectively conflates
any advocacy of Palestinian rights with the specter of Jewish
extermination.
That's certainly been the case with arguments for a single-state
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Until recent years,
advocating a "single-state" solution -- a binational state where
all residents of what are today Israel and the Occupied Territories
share the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship -- was a
relatively mainstream position to take. In fact, it was one of
several competing plans considered by the United Nations when it
created the state of Israel in the 1940s.
But the idea of a single, binational state has more recently
been marginalized -- dismissed as an attempt to destroy Israel
literally and physically, rather than as an ethnic and
religious-based political entity with a population of second-class
Arab citizens and the legacy of responsibility for world's
longest-standing refugee population.
A logical conclusion of Zand's work exposing Israel's founding
mythology may be the restoration of the idea of a one-state
solution to a legitimate place in the debate over this contentious
region. After all, while it muddies the waters in one sense --
raising ancient, biblical questions about just who the "children of
Israel" really are -- in another sense, it hints at the
commonalities that exist between Israeli Jews and Palestinian
Arabs. Both groups lay claim to the same crust of earth, both have
faced historic repression and displacement and both hold dear the
idea that they should have a "right of return."
And if both groups in fact share common biblical ties, then it
begs the question of why the entirety of what was Palestine under
the British mandate should remain a refuge for people of one
religion instead of being a country in which Jews and Arabs are
guaranteed equal protection -- equal protection under the laws of a
state whose legitimacy would never again be open to question.
http://www.alternet.org/story/122810/
Israeli bestseller breaks national taboo
http://aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/I
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081006