Posted: 10 Oct 2008 04:47 AM CDT
Israeli Bestseller Breaks National Taboo
by Jonathan Cook
No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel’s bestseller list – and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel’s biggest taboo.
Dr. Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation – whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel – is a myth invented little more than a century ago.
An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Sand drew on extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this claim but several more – all equally controversial.
In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today’s Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel and that the only political solution to the country’s conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.
The success of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? looks likely to be repeated around the world. A French edition, launched last month, is selling so fast that it has already had three print runs.
Translations are under way into a dozen languages, including Arabic and English. But he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched by his English publisher, Verso, in the United States next year.
In contrast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly supportive, at least curious about his argument. Tom Segev, one of the country’s leading journalists, has called the book “fascinating and challenging.”
Surprisingly, Dr. Sand said, most of his academic colleagues in Israel have shied away from tackling his arguments. One exception is Israel Bartal, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Writing in Haaretz, the Israeli daily newspaper, Dr. Bartal made little effort to rebut Dr. Sand’s claims. He dedicated much of his article instead to defending his profession, suggesting that Israeli historians were not as ignorant about the invented nature of Jewish history as Dr. Sand contends.
The idea for the book came to him many years ago, Dr. Sand said, but he waited until recently to start working on it. “I cannot claim to be particularly courageous in publishing the book now,” he said. “I waited until I was a full professor. There is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort.”
Dr. Sand’s main argument is that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion.
Equally, the modern Zionist idea of Jews being obligated to return from exile to the Promised Land was entirely alien to Judaism, he added.
“Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem. Before, the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be lived in. For 2,000 years Jews stayed away from Jerusalem not because they could not return but because their religion forbade them from returning until the messiah came.”
The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking at the archaeological evidence from the biblical era.
“I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD.
“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 overwhelming 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.”
Dr. Sand attributed his colleagues’ reticence to engage with him to an implicit acknowledgement by many that the whole edifice of “Jewish history” taught at Israeli universities is built like a house of cards.
The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Dr. Sand said, dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two disciplines: general history and Jewish history. Jewish history was assumed to need its own field of study because Jewish experience was considered unique.
“There’s no Jewish department of politics or sociology at the universities. Only history is taught in this way, and it has allowed specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative world where they are not touched by modern developments in historical research.
“I’ve been criticized in Israel for writing about Jewish history when European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world.”
This article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
When will America wake up
When Will America wake up from her slumber?
When future Historians look into the factors that ultimately brought down the American empire, one of the main factors they will feature prominently is the “Israeli factor.”
It is well known that Israel, through the numerous Zionist lobbies and pressure groups, more or less controls America’s politics, media and financial institutions.
I am not going to provide statistical data showing the extent to which nearly every aspect of American life is infiltrated and penetrated by Zionism. Such data are readily available for those seeking the truth about Zionist dominance in America.
Instead, I suggest that skeptics speak to some of those senators or congressmen and women who dare to “tell it like it is,” or privately ask some people in the media and show-business about their respective experiences with regard to the “Lobby.”
Undoubtedly they will hear hair-raising stories they have never thought they will ever hear.
In the late 1970s, the American Jewish intellectual Alfred Lilienthal wrote an extremely important book on the Jewish lobby that controls contemporary America. The book is titled “The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace,” and is in my opinion one of the greatest books written in the twentieth century.
The reason I mentioned Lilienthal’s book is because the Zionist control of American political life and institutions is today deeper, tighter and more encompassing than ever before. And there is no doubt under the sun that America’s steady downfall is imputed first and foremost to this impenetrable Israel-worshiping lobby which utilizes America’s power and resources for the sake of serving and promoting Zionist goals both in the Middle East and at the global level.
Didn’t Israeli emissaries in the 1990s, following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, tell the rulers of Central Asia and Eastern Europe that “we control the US government, and the way to America’s mind and heart goes through Jerusalem?”!!!
Sounds anti-Semitic? Well, don’t be too sure, just listen to what Zionist leaders and rabbis in Israel are saying! Maybe you will change your views.
Some of the most strident and audacious acts Israel and her agents in America have taken to destroy America from within has been the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. That unnecessary and manifestly disastrous war was conceived in and planned by Israel through the mostly Jewish neocons in Washington, D.C.
Interestingly, not only has this criminal war killed more than a million Iraqis and several thousand American soldiers, but it has also ruined the United States financially and dealt the American currency, the US dollar, what seems to be an irreversible crushing blow.
Needless to say, the current mega crisis in America, on the one hand, and the ongoing Israeli-conceived wars America is fighting in many parts of the world, on the other, are inextricably entwined. American leaders and politicians won’t say that openly. But America doesn’t lack the brain power to know the facts and find out the truth about the umbilical connection between the Israeli factor and the ravaging financial crisis now facing the US.
Again, if you are in doubt, ask those who dare to speak in Washington and they will tell you what you can’t count on the Zionist-controlled media to tell. After all, Fox News, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek, to mention a few of the so-called “agenda setters,” are not really answerable to the American people. They are answerable to the lobby, because if and when officials at these outlets don’t go with the flow, they get fired immediately. Have you ever thought why it is easier to criticize Israel in Tel Aviv than in New York? Have you every figured out why it is easier for an Israeli politician to lambaste his own government for its misdeeds than it is for an American official to do so? There are Israeli academics and intellectuals who have called Israel “a Nazi state.” Can an American professor or intellectual call Israel a Nazi state and retain his job?
Now Israel has got America deeply sinking in the futile war on terror, which is actually another meaningless war on Israel’s enemies, namely the Muslims, for supporting the just Palestinian cause and demanding Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab land.
Like the Iraq war and the Afghan war, the apparently nihilistic war on terror is being waged on Israel’s behalf because, in the final analysis, there is really no conflict between Muslims and America.
Yes, “9/11″, we are told, was carried out by a few terrorists who held Muslim names and who wrongly thought that they were serving the Palestinian cause and the cause of Islam by killing innocent people.
But these misguided individuals, if indeed they were the real villains (because there is a growing mass of evidence prompting honest people to doubt and question the authenticity of the official American narrative in this regard) only represent a tiny part of the Muslim world. Muslims generally don’t hate America and the American people. Most people don’t hate other people, regardless of religion and culture. It is only due to deep and grievances that oppressed people harbor ill feelings toward their oppressors.
Otherwise, I am sure a hundred per cent that Palestinians and Muslims in general have no inherent ill-feelings toward the American people.
Of course, Zionist Jews, some of who are now distributing anti-Islamic DVDs in America to instill hatred and fear of Islam and Muslims in the hearts of Americans in order to serve Israeli interests, dread the day Americans will know the truth about Israel, e.g. that Israel is nothing less than a crime against humanity and that it represents the ultimate antithesis of everything the American people hold dear and stand for.
Yesterday, America had to allocate 700 billion dollars to bail out another ramshackle American financial institution.
I am afraid there will be more bad news in this regard if America doesn’t reclaim its liberty from the Zionist Rober Barons who have come to tightly control the American financial establishment.
Moreover, should the US decide to act on Israel’s instructions (or orders) and go to war against another Muslim country, this time Iran, one could imagine the magnitude of the financial and therefore economic disaster that would befall America and the world.
A few years ago, it was rumored that former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, that certified war criminal, told Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, during an acrimonious cabinet meeting “that we control America from California to New York and the stupid Americans know it.”
And while I am not completely sure about the authenticity of the statement, it is amply clear that the disgraceful pandering to Zionism by American politicians, including Presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain and their running mates, vindicates the veracity of that statement, uttered or unuttered.
Today, Israel is trying to consummate its hateful enterprise of ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, using American money and American power. Israel will fight the Muslim world to the last American dollar and the last American soldier.
Hence, it is time ordinary Americans wake up from their slumber to reclaim their country from rapacious Zionism. Because their very future is at stake.
When future Historians look into the factors that ultimately brought down the American empire, one of the main factors they will feature prominently is the “Israeli factor.”
It is well known that Israel, through the numerous Zionist lobbies and pressure groups, more or less controls America’s politics, media and financial institutions.
I am not going to provide statistical data showing the extent to which nearly every aspect of American life is infiltrated and penetrated by Zionism. Such data are readily available for those seeking the truth about Zionist dominance in America.
Instead, I suggest that skeptics speak to some of those senators or congressmen and women who dare to “tell it like it is,” or privately ask some people in the media and show-business about their respective experiences with regard to the “Lobby.”
Undoubtedly they will hear hair-raising stories they have never thought they will ever hear.
In the late 1970s, the American Jewish intellectual Alfred Lilienthal wrote an extremely important book on the Jewish lobby that controls contemporary America. The book is titled “The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace,” and is in my opinion one of the greatest books written in the twentieth century.
The reason I mentioned Lilienthal’s book is because the Zionist control of American political life and institutions is today deeper, tighter and more encompassing than ever before. And there is no doubt under the sun that America’s steady downfall is imputed first and foremost to this impenetrable Israel-worshiping lobby which utilizes America’s power and resources for the sake of serving and promoting Zionist goals both in the Middle East and at the global level.
Didn’t Israeli emissaries in the 1990s, following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, tell the rulers of Central Asia and Eastern Europe that “we control the US government, and the way to America’s mind and heart goes through Jerusalem?”!!!
Sounds anti-Semitic? Well, don’t be too sure, just listen to what Zionist leaders and rabbis in Israel are saying! Maybe you will change your views.
Some of the most strident and audacious acts Israel and her agents in America have taken to destroy America from within has been the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. That unnecessary and manifestly disastrous war was conceived in and planned by Israel through the mostly Jewish neocons in Washington, D.C.
Interestingly, not only has this criminal war killed more than a million Iraqis and several thousand American soldiers, but it has also ruined the United States financially and dealt the American currency, the US dollar, what seems to be an irreversible crushing blow.
Needless to say, the current mega crisis in America, on the one hand, and the ongoing Israeli-conceived wars America is fighting in many parts of the world, on the other, are inextricably entwined. American leaders and politicians won’t say that openly. But America doesn’t lack the brain power to know the facts and find out the truth about the umbilical connection between the Israeli factor and the ravaging financial crisis now facing the US.
Again, if you are in doubt, ask those who dare to speak in Washington and they will tell you what you can’t count on the Zionist-controlled media to tell. After all, Fox News, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek, to mention a few of the so-called “agenda setters,” are not really answerable to the American people. They are answerable to the lobby, because if and when officials at these outlets don’t go with the flow, they get fired immediately. Have you ever thought why it is easier to criticize Israel in Tel Aviv than in New York? Have you every figured out why it is easier for an Israeli politician to lambaste his own government for its misdeeds than it is for an American official to do so? There are Israeli academics and intellectuals who have called Israel “a Nazi state.” Can an American professor or intellectual call Israel a Nazi state and retain his job?
Now Israel has got America deeply sinking in the futile war on terror, which is actually another meaningless war on Israel’s enemies, namely the Muslims, for supporting the just Palestinian cause and demanding Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab land.
Like the Iraq war and the Afghan war, the apparently nihilistic war on terror is being waged on Israel’s behalf because, in the final analysis, there is really no conflict between Muslims and America.
Yes, “9/11″, we are told, was carried out by a few terrorists who held Muslim names and who wrongly thought that they were serving the Palestinian cause and the cause of Islam by killing innocent people.
But these misguided individuals, if indeed they were the real villains (because there is a growing mass of evidence prompting honest people to doubt and question the authenticity of the official American narrative in this regard) only represent a tiny part of the Muslim world. Muslims generally don’t hate America and the American people. Most people don’t hate other people, regardless of religion and culture. It is only due to deep and grievances that oppressed people harbor ill feelings toward their oppressors.
Otherwise, I am sure a hundred per cent that Palestinians and Muslims in general have no inherent ill-feelings toward the American people.
Of course, Zionist Jews, some of who are now distributing anti-Islamic DVDs in America to instill hatred and fear of Islam and Muslims in the hearts of Americans in order to serve Israeli interests, dread the day Americans will know the truth about Israel, e.g. that Israel is nothing less than a crime against humanity and that it represents the ultimate antithesis of everything the American people hold dear and stand for.
Yesterday, America had to allocate 700 billion dollars to bail out another ramshackle American financial institution.
I am afraid there will be more bad news in this regard if America doesn’t reclaim its liberty from the Zionist Rober Barons who have come to tightly control the American financial establishment.
Moreover, should the US decide to act on Israel’s instructions (or orders) and go to war against another Muslim country, this time Iran, one could imagine the magnitude of the financial and therefore economic disaster that would befall America and the world.
A few years ago, it was rumored that former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, that certified war criminal, told Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, during an acrimonious cabinet meeting “that we control America from California to New York and the stupid Americans know it.”
And while I am not completely sure about the authenticity of the statement, it is amply clear that the disgraceful pandering to Zionism by American politicians, including Presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and John McCain and their running mates, vindicates the veracity of that statement, uttered or unuttered.
Today, Israel is trying to consummate its hateful enterprise of ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, using American money and American power. Israel will fight the Muslim world to the last American dollar and the last American soldier.
Hence, it is time ordinary Americans wake up from their slumber to reclaim their country from rapacious Zionism. Because their very future is at stake.
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