Zionist apologetics is based on two sets of claims which are each problematic. One is nationalist and the other religious. The religious claim consists of a number of arguments. First, there is the Biblical text itself, which exhorts the Children of Israel to settle the land and conveys a divine “land grant” to them. S/He tells Abraham after he departs from his ancestral home, that S/He will bestow the land of Canaan to him:
“Unto thy seed will I give this land…Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it: for unto thee will I give it””
The Jewish liturgy also repeatedly obliges worshippers to return and “rebuild” Zion, which was destroyed following the Roman conquest. This rebuilding alludes to a restoration of the Temple, an obligation Kahanist settlers have taken literally; though the majority of Orthodox Jews see this as spiritual, rather than actual physical command.
For those who assert a Biblical claim, it’s worth noting that the land promised to the Israelites included virtually all of Israel’s current territory plus almost all of Lebanon and portions of Jordan. The Revisionists and Israel’s leaders early in the country’s history envisioned similar expansionist boundaries. But most Israelis now concede this is unattainable. Thus, even believers have conceded that the Biblical vision cannot be realized and that divine promises are not absolute and inviolable. But rather subject to pragmatic realities.
Israeli archaeology offered another means of establishing the legitimacy to the Zionist claims to Israel. Excavations in Jerusalem and throughout the country (even including Palestine!) documented an ancient Israelite presence. Thus archaeology became a discipline in service to a nationalist ideology. But ironically they also documented the presence of other cultures and tribes. But this doesn’t seem to trouble the Zionist narrative.
As for the authenticity of any “divine promise” to the ancient Hebrews, Bible scholars universally agree that there was no divine author, and that Moses did not carry down from Mt. Sinai tablets engraved by God on stone. Rather the sacred book was authored by men at various different periods. This is not history, but myth. So the notion that it is God’s will that bestows this land is unfounded.
Along with the Bible’s divine, exclusivist promise to the Children of Israel, there are prohibitions on pagan worship and consorting with non-Israelite women, among others. These taboos existed precisely because they violated them. They intermingled with surrounding tribes. They absorbed language, culture and customs from their environment.
The Book of Ruth offers such an example of an Israelite man who migrates to Moab, where he marries Ruth, a Moabite woman. When he dies, Ruth’s Judean mother-in-law, Naomi, tells the former to return to her tribe, while she returns to her Judean home in Bethlehem. Instead of doing so, Ruth declares her devotion to Naomi and that she will follow her to the land of Judah. There she remarries another Judean, Boaz. The story affirms that ancient Hebrews intermingled with their neighbors. They did just the opposite of the prohibitions above. Practical realities and human behavior dictated otherwise.
Zionism vs. Biblical ethics
One of the chief characteristics of the human species is migration, a movement of populations from birthplace to new homes in new places. During such mass movement, human tribes absorbed the culture, foods and traditions of others whom they met. Jews are no different. In fact, we are known as a wandering people. From Abraham settling in Canaan, to Jacob uprooting his family to settle in Egypt. to Moses and 40 years of wandering, to the Babylonian exile, and the disperson following the Roman conquest, to the Spanish Inquisition, to the Holocaust.
All these expulsions and migrations built what has become the Diaspora. Through that movement, we became a diverse people that survived during the millennia when there was no temple nor Jewish sovereignty in the land. We dwelled among other peoples and they influenced and changed us, as we did them. In fact, it is one of the great treasures of the Jewish people and a gift to humanity.
Despite a misguided belief that forms one of the bases of Zionism–that Jews have remained racially and genetically pure from the era of Abraham till today and must remain so–we are no different than the rest of humanity. Despite what many may believe, we intermarried with non-Jews. Despite culinary prohibitions, we developed a taste for the foods of those among whom we dwelled.
The Biblical bestowal of the land to the Israelites was neither permanent nor irrevocable. Their claim was dependent on establishing a just society:
The Land of Israel is perceived as the promised land, which involves a moral and religious problem…[Its]…possession [depends on fulfillment of] a moral condition…The Israelite tribes will continue to reside in the Land only if they will be just.
5 Is this the fast I have chosen: a day for a man to deny himself…Will you call this a fast and a day acceptable to the LORD?
6Isn’t this the fast that I have chosen: to break the chains of wickedness, to untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and tear off every yoke?
7Isn’t it to share your bread with the hungry, to bring the poor and homeless into your home, to clothe the naked when you see him,
Israel today is not a just society. It is based on accumulating massive wealth and power. And using that power to oppress, steal and kill another people that lives on the same land. The nation doesn’t even provide for the poor or working-class Jews who go hungry and homeless, reminding us of Isaiah’s warning. It is a dog-eat-dog society in which the rich live in greed and smug satisfaction, while the poor are left to fend for themselves.
Zionism and the territorial claim
The Zionist territorial claim is based on the ancient Israelite possession of the land and a purported direct link to Jews today. However, possession is not nine-tenths of the law. Even if it is, Palestinians maintain equal or greater rights, because they are indigenous and have lived there for centuries. Some Jews have as well, but in smaller numbers. The latter’s presence does not automatically convey rights to those who came after them (the Zionist aliyah). Though those currently who are born there are indigenous, their status does not subordinate the Palestinian claim. The claims are equal, and dishonoring them is a grave violation of justice and fairness.
Nor do I accept an exclusivist Jewish claim to the land with all that entails. God does not grant Jews the right to oppress, steal and kill non-Jews in this land. He does not countenance forced expulsion and destruction of homes and livelihoods for the sake of Israeli interests. God is not the God of Jews alone. He is the God of all, in whatever form the divine may take in different religions.
Zionism and the genetic claim
Zionist apologetics sometimes offers a genetic claim: that the DNA of current Jews shows a direct link back to the ancient Hebrews. This claim too is attenuated by scientific evidence:
A paper published in 2000 by geneticists Harry Ostrer, a professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer showed that most Ashkenazis, Italians, North Africans, Iraqi, Iranian, Kurdish and Yemenite Jews share common Y-DNA haplotypes that are also found among many Arabs from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.
Such a link offers Jews no more legitimate claim than any other tribe that dwelled in the land before the Israelites did.
The intent to divide Israel from Palestinians via physical walls and Judeo-supremacist laws; to separate from surrounding nations due to perceived hostility; and from the world due to historical trauma or persecution, are all doomed to fail. As John Donne wrote:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
An exclusivist, supremacist Zionist conception of Israel contradicts human history and morality. Rather, we will live together, or die apart.
Finally, none of what I’ve written above should be read to deny the legitimacy of Jewish presence in Israel-Palestine.
It was not God, but the League of Nations that granted Jews the right to emigrate to a homeland in Palestine, which homeland would become a State when demographics allowed for a Jewish majority.
” a genetic claim: that the DNA of current Jews shows a direct link back to the ancient Hebrews. This claim too is attenuated by scientific evidence: ”
Well, according to your quote of Harry Ostrer, a professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer showed that most Ashkenazis, Italians, North Africans, Iraqi, Iranian, Kurdish and Yemenite Jews share common Y-DNA haplotypes that are also found among many Arabs from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Only a small percentage of the Y-DNA of Jews originated outside of the Middle East—some in the Caucusus.
Right, Jews originated in the Middle East and migrated, and some Arabs are crypto Jewish, having converted to Islam.
@ JohnCR: No. The League of Nations has not existed for nearly a century. We can argue what the original ruling meant, but it’s irrelevant. The successor to the League was the UN and while it recognized Israel as a state, it offered no comment on, and did not grant any special right to Jews regarding that state. In fact, it proposed a partition giving Palestinians and Jews their own separate states which was never realized.
“The Jews” of today did not physically originate anywhere except where they were born. Genetics is not ownership. It has no historical or practical validity.
You may post one comment in each thread. You have published your one comment in this thread.
Why was Partition “never realize” I wonder?
@ Zionistist: Because Ben Gurion knowingly destroyed Partition by declaring statehood. Not to mention that he explicitly said that accepting Partition was a ploy. A first step to eventually gaining sovereignty over all of the area partitioned.
Richard said:
” The successor to the League was the UN and while it recognized Israel as a state, it offered no comment on, and did not grant any special right to Jews regarding that state. ”
The UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (Partition Plan) November 29, 1947, does not recognize the State of Israel, but rather, it recognizes an independent, ‘Jewish State’, and does so forty times in the body of the document.
Why you even introduced Eran Elhaik into this conversation is beyond me.
The UN, by it’s words and deeds, recognized the new State as belonging to the Jewish people, and having a singular, Jewish character.
https://www.inss.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/All-UN-Resolutions.pdf
Richard also said:
“The Jews” of today did not physically originate anywhere except where they were born. Genetics is not ownership. It has no historical or practical validity.”
Leaving aside that most of the Jews of today live in Israel, its axiomatic that genetics are not ownership, but nonetheless, the genetics, collectively, of today’s Jews shows that today’s Jews have an origin story and originated in Eretz Yisroel many thousands of years ago.
@ Chad: It doesn’t matter what the Partition agreement said because Ben Gurion rejected it. Not only did he reject it, he did not accept a the Arab/Palestinian territorial claim. You don’t get to use the UN to legitimate your claim when Israel rejected the UN plan.
I didn’t mention Elhak. In fact I quoted Harry Ostrer, who criticizes Elhaik. Don’t criticize me for things I didn’t say.
I have no interest in genetic claims. They prove nothing. Origin stories are a literary device. Not a historical claim. Because someone lived somewhere 2000 years ago doesn’t give you, me or anyone else a rightful claim to anything; whether we’re related to them or not. And just because you believe in fairy tales and myths doesn’t mean anyone else needs to believe it.
Greco-Roman Judeans are ancestors of modern Palestinians and not of Rabbinic Jews.
Bar Kochba and Tannaim like Rabbi Akiba completely discredited Biblical and Tannaitic Judaism for the peasantry because Bar Kochba persecuted the peasantry and the Tannaim supported him. The Palestinian population, which had practiced Biblical Judaism, converted entirely to Christianity and subsequently mostly to Islam, which is a slight variant of Judean (Jamesian) Christianity in which Jesus is the messiah but not divine. By the beginning of the 3rd century CE most of the Judean peasantry (90% of the population) practiced some form of Judean Christianity.
The Roman Exile is a metaphor for the transformation of Judaism from the religion of Judea into a religion that only descendants of non-Judean converts practice.
A Zionist propagandist tries to use the fairy tale of the Roman Exile in an active defense to the accusation of genocide. Even if the Roman Exile were something historical, this defense would not be cognizable.
The best most recent study (High-resolution inference of genetic relationships among Jewish populations) shows that Rabbinic Jews and their descendants have no genetic connection to Greco Roman Judeans and have only limited connection from one major community to another major community.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7253422/
@ Jonathan: Please make your comments directly related to the post topic. Do not wander far afield as you have here. As interesting as this may be to you, it may bore others silly; or leave some mystified by your comment. The subject of this blog and the post is not Tanaitic Judaism Judean Christianity or almost all of what you published here.
Sorry, I was replying to Chad’s reference to obsolete genetic anthropological claims. You replied to this reference, too. I also don’t have much interest in such a reference except to bury bad science. I only pay attention to such a reference when it seems to be used in a bizarre active defense to a charge of genocide.
Correction: UNGA 182 is a nullity. It was a proposal for Security Council action and did not partition Palestine as the Israeli founding myth proclaims. See the resolution: “The General Assembly … [t]he Security Council take the necessary measures as provided for in the plan for its
implementation[.]”
The Security Council never did so, stopped by strenuous objections by the Arab States that the partition would violate the procedures established by the U.N. Charter for mandate territories to become independent nations (the goal of self-determination). See Charter, Chapter XI, “Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories,” https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text (.)
Under that argument, the Security Council was powerless to impose its will on the people of Palestine. Under the Chapter 11 procedures, only a vote of all Palestinian residents (including Jews) could establish a new government or partition Palestine. See Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965, International Court of Justice (25 February 2019), pg. 38, https://www.icj-cij.org/files/case-related/169/169-20190225-01-00-EN.pdf (“States have consistently emphasized that respect for the territorial integrity of a non-self-governing territory is a key element of the exercise of the right to self-determination under international law. The Court considers that the peoples of non-self-governing territories are entitled to exercise their right to self-determination in relation to their territory as a whole, the integrity of which must be respected by the administering Power. It follows that any detachment by the administering Power of part of a non-self-governing territory, unless based on the freely expressed and genuine will of the people of the territory concerned, is contrary to the right to self-determination.”)
A remark and a question.
“The promised land’” – according to the explanation of the late Henri Veldhuis, a prominent Dutch theologian- is not any given physical entity. It’s everywhere where people live up to the Thora. The promised land can be the street around the corner of your house, or even your house itself .
Pushing aside others because your religion or mythology or your leaders tell you, you have special prerogatives, is nothing short of hubris and fundamentalism. Others do not have to subordinate to your selfperception and give up any rights because of that. Why should they give in? You’re not any type of Übermensch. Jews don’t have any divine prerogative over non-Jews. They’re not better human beings deserving a special place of their own in the universe, at the cost of others, whatever selfperception might lead them conclude just that. A G’d prioritizing jews over others is not even a despicable G’d , it’s a self-serving phantasy., Not a thousand Biblebooks can change that simple human reality. At the end of the day, there’s nothing but reality of a human origin.
Joe has given Israel a free hand … attack Iran at your own peril …
You ain’t seen nothing yet from the fascist members in Israeli cabinet …
Itamar Ben Gvir a free hand in administrative detention of Israeli Arabs, housing evictions and police matters. Urgently needed judicial reform …
Cabinet okays measure shortening approval process to build in West Bank settlements
Madness continues at an elevated pace …
Richard said:
“Chad: It doesn’t matter what the Partition agreement said because Ben Gurion rejected it. ”
No, Richard..
David Ben Gurion did accept the November 1947 partition plan.
https://israeled.org/jewish-agency-accepts-partition-plan/
@ Chad: Nope. He claimed to have accepted the Plan, but rejected the Plan’s borders. That means he rejected the territory alloted to Palestinians for their own state. Hence, he rejected it. You can’t have a plan for two states and say I only recognize my state but not the other guy’s. The Plan isn’t a la carte. You either accept it in its entirety or you reject it. You can’t be half pregnant.
Ben Gurion accepted the partition plan, but did so using the term ‘frontiers’ in favor of the term ‘borders’.
Ben Gurion did this because he knew with certainty that the Arab rejection of the partition plan would take the form of armed attacks on Jewish settlements, towns and cities by armed Arab bands.
Those armed attacks began in earnest only days after the Resolution passed.
@Chad: As I think you know, there is no such thing as a “frontier” that is a “border.” So he in effect recognized nothing.
In fact, the only reason the attacks began was because BG declared independence. The Arab states and Ralph Bunche warned that this would mean war. And he proceeded because he knew the Haganah was stronger than any Arab force at that time. If he waited, he anticipated the Arab forces would strenthen & increase in size and skill. He knew an immediate war would result in Israel gaining much more territory than partition promised. Which is why he would never accept any territorial limits. And as he was a Greater Land of Israel guy, he wanted maximal borders. It was cynincal and unprincipled. But that’s BG (and Israel) all over.
I’m glad you at least tactitly concede BG rejected Partition.
The LoN Mandate for Palestine defined a hostile occupation whose purpose was replacement genocide of Palestinians.
When the international community banned genocide on Dec 11, 1946 and made this ban jus cogens, any international instruments’s clause that violated the ban on genocide was voided. This ban explains why the Nov 1947 Partition Plan was optional and non-binding. The Palestinians had to agree to any international agreement on sovereignty that might result in a population transfer or exchange. Otherwise the international agreement would give legal status to replacement genocide.
What is replacement genocide? It is defined in Count Three (the Genocide Count) of the Indictment of the 1945-1946 Nuremberg International Tribunal but is unfortunately called Germanization. Germanization becomes no less an international crime and no less an act of genocide by renaming it Judaization.
(J) GERMANIZATION OF OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
In certain occupied territories purportedly annexed to Germany the defendants methodically and pursuant to plan endeavored to assimilate those territories politically, culturally, socially, and economically into the German Reich. The defendants endeavored to obliterate the former national character of these territories. In pursuance of these plans and endeavors, the defendants forcibly deported inhabitants who were predominantly non-German and introduced thousands of German colonists.