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Thread: The Twisted Logic of the Jewish ‘Historic Right’ to Israel

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    Default The Twisted Logic of the Jewish ‘Historic Right’ to Israel

    The Twisted Logic of the Jewish ‘Historic Right’ to Israel

    Our political culture insists on seeing the Jews as the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews. But the Jews never existed as a ‘people’ – still less as a nation.

    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...mpaign=General

    I enjoy the vacillations of Chaim Gans, even if I don’t always understand them. I have the highest esteem for his intellectual honesty – even if at times, perhaps like everyone, he tries to resolve contradictions with lame arguments.

    However, before going into the heart of the matter, I must pause over an annoying mistake – I’m certain that at bottom it’s not deliberately misleading but a folly – concerning my writings. In the article, “From rabid Zionism to egalitarian Zionism” (November 9), Gans writes, “because, according to [Sand], there is purportedly no genetic continuity between ancient and modern Jewry, it follows that the Jewish nationhood engendered by Zionism is a total fabrication, a nationhood created out of thin air.”

    If my assumption that Gans has perused my books is correct, he appears to have read them both too quickly and at a diagonal. Since the publication of my first book "The invention of the Jewish people" a decade ago, I have made a point of emphasizing that it’s not only Jews who don’t possess a common DNA – neither do all other human groups that claim to be peoples or nations – besides which I have never thought that genetics can confer national rights.

    For example, the French are not the direct descendants of the Gauls, just as the Germans are not the offspring of the Teutons or of the ancient Aryans, even if until a little more than half a century ago many idiots believed just that.

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    One trait that all peoples have in common is that they are retroactive inventions with no distinctive genetic "traits." The acute problem that genuinely disturbs me is that I live in a singular political and pedagogical culture that continues persistently to see the Jews as the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews.

    The founding myth of Zionism – which proceeds in an unbroken line from Max Nordau and Arthur Ruppin, to worrisome geneticists in several Israeli universities and at Yeshiva University in New York – acts as the principal ideological glue for the nation’s everlasting unity, and today more than ever. The justification for Zionist settlement/colonization (choose your preferred term – they mean the same thing) is the meta-paradigm that is expressed in the declaration of the establishment of the state, namely: “We were here, we were uprooted, we came back.”

    Full disclosure: Even when I believed, mistakenly, that the “Jewish people” was exiled by the Romans in 70 C.E. or 132 C.E., I didn’t think that this conferred on the Jews some sort of imagined “historic right” to the Holy Land. If we seek to organize the world as it was 2,000 years ago, we will turn it into one big madhouse.

    Why not bring Native Americans back to Manhattan, for example, or restore the Arabs to Spain and the Serbs to Kosovo? Of course, such twisted logic of “historic right” will also commit us to supporting the continued settlement/colonization of Hebron, Jericho and Bethlehem.


    As I pursued my research, my realization that the Exodus from Egypt never happened and that the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah were not exiled by the Romans, left me nonplussed. There is not one study by a historian who specializes in antiquity that recounts that “exile” or any serious historiographic study that reconstructs a mass migration from the place. The “exile” is a formative event that never took place, otherwise it would be the subject of dozens of research studies.

    Judahite farmers, who constituted an absolute majority of the population at the first century C.E., were not seafarers like the Greeks or the Phoenicians, and did not spread across the world. It was Jahwist monotheism, which since the Hasmonean era had become a dynamic religion engaged in conversion, which laid the foundations for the Jews’ age-old existence around the globe.

    Here’s where we get to the heart of Gans’ arguments. This distinguished jurist and political theorist is not prepared to accept the standard justifications for settlement and for Zionism’s conception of land ownership since the end of the 19th century.

    He is well aware that such popular propositions would oblige him to justify continuation of the present-day settlement project, and perhaps also to deny the rights of the natives who still remain in "the land of Israel.”

    Gans even knows that there never actually was a Jewish nation, which is why he resorts to the literal image of a “profile” – a surprising and original term in the national context – wholly based on ignorance.

    For him to understand what Clermont-Tonnerre meant in his famous speech (a subject I addressed in an article in the Haaretz Hebrew edition last August), a perusal of Wikipedia would have sufficed. He’d have learned immediately that by “nation,” the French liberal was referring to a closed, insular religious community. Did the Jews, in contrast, not see themselves as a people or a nation according to the modern usage of these terms?

    continued

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    Until the modern era, the terms “people” or “nations” were used in a variety of senses.

    In the Bible, Moses goes down to the people and speaks with them directly (without a loudspeaker, newspapers, television or Twitter). The people also gathers to welcome Joshua and to congratulate him on his victories.

    In the Middle Ages the Christians viewed themselves as “people of God,” a term in wide use for hundreds of years. In our time, the terms “people” or “nations” are applied in a different way, albeit not always accurately.

    A “people” is, generally, a human community living within a defined territory, whose members speak a common language and maintain a secular culture with the same, or similar, foundations. “Nation,” on the other hand, is a term that is today generally applied to a people that claims sovereignty over itself or has already achieved it.

    I don’t think peoples existed before the modern era – that possibility would have been ruled out by the level of communication they had.

    There were large clans, tribes, powerful kingdoms, large principalities, religious communities and other groups with various forms of political and social bonds – usually loose ones. In an age when few people could read and write, when each village had a different dialect and the lexicon was appallingly meager, it’s hard to talk about a people with a shared consciousness. Minorities of educated literates do not yet constitute nations, even if they have sometimes created that impression.

    I don’t understand why all cats have to be called cats and all the dogs, dogs – and only one cat has to be called a dog. The Jews, like the Christians, Muslims or the followers of the Bahá'í Faith, had in common a strong belief in God alongside diverse and closely linked religious practices.

    However, a Jew from Kiev could not converse with a Jew from Marrakesh, didn’t sing the songs of the Yemeni Jew and didn’t eat the same foods as the Falash Mura, or Beta Israel, community of Ethiopia. The whole fabric of day-to-day secular life was completely different in each community. Accordingly, to this day – and rightly so – the only way to join the “Jewish people” is through an act of religious conversion.

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    God said it was theirs. That's good enough for me. You can rant and rave all you like. It won't change anything.

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    What about the Canaanites? Aren't they the rightful owners of the Land? (I'm guessing the Palestinians are the Canaanites)
    Aren't they all just Semitic People and the only difference is their religious preference?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Grugore View Post
    God said it was theirs. That's good enough for me. You can rant and rave all you like. It won't change anything.
    ISIS? You sound like one of the Soldiers of ISIS. Wasn't Moses the Leader of some kind of ISIS movement? Claiming Territory and killing everybody in their way?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jack View Post
    What about the Canaanites? Aren't they the rightful owners of the Land? (I'm guessing the Palestinians are the Canaanites)
    Aren't they all just Semitic People and the only difference is their religious preference?
    The rightful owner is YHWH,and he gave the Holy Land to his chosen people he chose to reveal his story thru the Jews!
    AM I, I AM's,AM I.
    What day is Michaelmas on?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Trigger Happy View Post
    The rightful owner is YHWH,and he gave the Holy Land to his chosen people he chose to reveal his story thru the Jews!
    WOW!

    I think that's what the Leader of ISIS said. Well, except YHWH said "The Muslims".

    "Why was it right for God to slaughter women and children in the Old Testament? How can that ever be right?
    It's right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die."
    https://www.desiringgod.org/intervie...-old-testament

    See, it's all good.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jack View Post
    What about the Canaanites? Aren't they the rightful owners of the Land? (I'm guessing the Palestinians are the Canaanites)
    Aren't they all just Semitic People and the only difference is their religious preference?
    The Hebrews borrowed alot of their religion from the North Coast Canaanites.. (the Ugarit) namely Psalms and several of the Canaanite Pantheon of gods.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Trigger Happy View Post
    The rightful owner is YHWH,and he gave the Holy Land to his chosen people he chose to reveal his story thru the Jews!
    Probably not because the Hebrews borrowed all the aspects of their religion from Babylon, Egypt and the North Coast Canaanites.

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    Quote Originally Posted by kudzu View Post
    The Hebrews borrowed alot of their religion from the North Coast Canaanites.. (the Ugarit) namely Psalms and several of the Canaanite Pantheon of gods.
    Probably from the Babylonians too.

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    Quote Originally Posted by kudzu View Post
    Probably not because the Hebrews borrowed all the aspects of their religion from Babylon, Egypt and the North Coast Canaanites.
    uh-oh. I guess I should have read the next post before I replied.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jack View Post
    uh-oh. I guess I should have read the next post before I replied.
    The sources of Jewish beliefs is very interesting..

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    Quote Originally Posted by kudzu View Post
    The sources of Jewish beliefs is very interesting..
    Each Cult has an interesting History. I always liked Zeus and the many stories of the Gods of Olympus. Course, I like the Sun Gods. I think the Sun God was the most popular, from a world-wide basis.
    "Sun-Day" ... I always like that.

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    Israel just needs to know to stay in their lane and stop encroaching on the West Bank and Jerusalem and other territories that are not theirs.

    But, No! They can't seen to control themselves.

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