Olmert: "Israel must return land"

Just makes you wanna slam your head onto your desk, doesn't it?

Maybe the Zionists should return all of Palestine and return to the site of the ancient Jewish kingdom on the shores of the [url=http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/cook091008.html]Caspian Sea[/url].

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"But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends.

"Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can't explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldn't find any. Not one.

"That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelmingly peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands."

Instead, he believes an alternative theory is more plausible: the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. "Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God."

So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up scattered around the globe before the modern state of Israel began encouraging them to "return"?

Dr. Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytizing religion, desperate for converts. "This is mentioned in the Roman literature of the time."

Jews traveled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen and among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the people of the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia would convert en masse to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe.

Dr. Sand pointed to the strange state of denial in which most Israelis live, noting that papers offered extensive coverage recently to the discovery of the capital of the Khazar kingdom next to the Caspian Sea.

Ynet, the website of Israel's most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, headlined the story: "Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital." And yet none of the papers, he added, had considered the significance of this find to standard accounts of Jewish history.

One further question is prompted by Dr. Sand's account, as he himself notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?

"It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel's first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area's original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam."

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While there were Jews living in parts of Europe, North Africa and as far east as India even before the Roman Empire, they were there primarily as traders and merchants. While there may have been a conversion of Khazar royalty and nobility at least, genetic evidence shows that the Khazars are not the origin of Ashkenazi Jews, who probably developed from small colonies in central Europe in the early middle ages.

Jews continued to live in Palestine through the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and afterwards. Doubtless some converted to Christianity and Islam. Many were massacred along with Muslims during the Crusades, particularly when Jerusalem was captured in 1099 by the first Crusade. Considering the conflict and migration across the region over the centuries it is no wonder that Jews were in a minority until the Zionist movement of the early 20th century.

Yes, there really isn't a good reason to bring in the Khazar thing. It's a well-known antisemitic slur.

Supporters of Palestinian self-determination don't need to argue that Jews have no connection at all with Palestine. And using the Khazar slur simply gives right-wing Israeli apologists something to tar the Palestinian support community with.

You hurt your cause by going there, Al.

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:
[b]Yes, there really isn't a good reason to bring in the Khazar thing. It's a well-known antisemitic slur.[/b]

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The Soviets, for a while, wanted to promote [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birobidzhan]Birobidzhan[/url] as a "new socialist Jewish Homeland", or some variant thereof.

[ 18 October 2008: Message edited by: DrConway ]

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Originally posted by just one of the concerned:
[b]Ahh...the Khazar myth, another staple of revisionist historians, holocaust skeptics and other characters....

Tell me al Q', is it possible for you to discuss Israel's rejection and dehumanization of the Palestinian people without this extra crap?[/b]

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This is the first I've heard of any "Khazar myth."

I assumed that an Israeli historian named Shlomo Sand would be above accusations of antisemitism, but go figure.

What I found most interesting about this article is the hypothesis that today's Palestinians may be descended from Hebrews who once lived in the area.

[ 18 October 2008: Message edited by: al-Qa'bong ]

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Originally posted by Cueball:
[b]

I don't think the actual origin of the Ashkenazi Jews is really relevant to the present day conflict.

[ 18 October 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ][/b]

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That's my main point.

The military aparatus of the Israeli state is no longer in the hands of the civilian government.