Israel deliberately forgets its history is the title of this article which appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique this month. It is unlikely that such an article would appear in the United States, given the censorship and propaganda about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that prevails. That the subtitle reads, Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile, is likewise not one that Americans would ever see in the mainstream media.
Enforced exile and return after 2,000 years is a common understanding that fortifies Israel’s raison de etre today.
It is an important article as well because it discusses the rationale being used by right wing Zionists in Israel to defend its ethnic cleansing and persecution of the Palestinians, who lived in the land that is now Israel for over a thousand years before they were forcibly exiled themselves, most in 1948, but many others through the ethnic cleansing that continues to this day.
Schlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv University. In this article, he suggests that the Jewish diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of a proselytizing fervor across north Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East. In the process, he destroys several Zionist propagated myths. According to Professor Sand,
Every Israeli knows that he or she is the direct and exclusive descendant of a Jewish people, which has existed since it received the Torah in Sinai. According to this myth, the Jews escaped from Egypt and settled in the Promised Land, where they built the glorious kingdom of David and Solomon, which subsequently split into the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. They experienced two exiles: after the destruction of the first temple, in the 6th century BC, and of the second temple, in 70 AD.
Two thousand years of wandering brought the Jews to Yemen, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Poland and deep into Russia. But, the story goes, they always managed to preserve blood links between their scattered communities. Their uniqueness was never compromised.
At the end of the 19th century conditions began to favour their return to their ancient homeland. If it had not been for the Nazi genocide, millions of Jews would have fulfilled the dream of 20 centuries and repopulated Eretz Israel, the biblical land of Israel. Palestine, a virgin land, had been waiting for its original inhabitants to return and awaken it. It belonged to the Jews, rather than to an Arab minority that had no history and had arrived there by chance. The wars in which the wandering people reconquered their land were just; the violent opposition of the local population was criminal.
So go the myths. Unfortunately, copyright restriction prevents me from reprinting the entire article, which is available through the link provided above. It is a worthwhile read.
But what is the truth, according to Professor Sand?
The myths, he says, arose when Zionist historians turned Biblical “truths” into the basis of a national education. These historians, using surviving fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memory, constructed a continuous genealogy for the Jewish people, while ignoring discoveries that threatened the picture of a continuous linear past. They rejected contradictions to the “biblical” story for a “selective vision” about what constituted Jewishness. They developed a “national” vision of the Bible, transformed Abraham’s journey to Canaan, the flight from Egypt, and the united kingdom of David and Solomon into an authentic national past.
According to Sand, for sake a better word, it is all rubbish.
These founding myths were shaken in the 1980s. Excerpts:
The “new archaeology” discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time.
There is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.
Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon. That is indeed very strange.
Recent discoveries point to the existence of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon.
The encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism. Freud said it came from the Egyptians, but what did he know?
Then there is the more important question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.
The Roman exile and the notion of a wandering Jew are therefore myths.
Proselytising zeal led Jews from Palestinia
Professor Sand asks: if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The preferred Zionist national historiography actually hides a different reality.
From the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising religion. The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted the Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of Galilee and incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism spread across the Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century AD saw the emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just one of many that converted.
According to Sand, the writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the proselytising zeal of the Jews: Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud authorized conversion, even though some expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure from Christianity.
Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark the end of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the margins of the Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose descendants preserved their faith through the Islamic conquest and down to the present day. Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that characterised “Hispano-Arabic” culture.
A significant mass conversion is also reported to have occurred in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. Judaism expanded from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine and created a multiplicity of communities, but many of these retreated in face of the 13th century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe. There, along with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south, and from what is now modern Germany, they formed the basis of Yiddish culture.
In short, many Jews just do not have their origins in a blood line from original Palestinia Jews, what is modern day Israel, but were converted into Judaism long after the Roman period.
Prism of Zionism
Until about 1960, the murky origins of the Jewish people were more or less reluctantly acknowledged by the Zionists. But they were marginalized and then erased from Israeli public memory. According to Sand, “the Israeli forces who seized Jerusalem in 1967 believed themselves to be the direct descendents of the mythic kingdom of David rather than – God forbid – of Berber warriors or Khazar horsemen.” That is to say, not Jews whose ancestors could ever have originated from Palestinia, let alone King David’s kingdom.
The big Zionist myth: Jews constitute a specific ethnic group that had returned to its capital, Jerusalem, from 2,000 years of exile and wandering.
The problem, according to Sand, is that “this historical fantasy has come to underpin the politics of identity of the state of Israel. By validating an essentialist, ethnocentric definition of Judaism it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews – whether Arabs, Russian immigrants or foreign workers.” On the basis of the prevalent historical fantasy, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of all of its citizens like other democracies. For those who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the citizens of other countries. The ethnocracy that Israel has become now it justifies internal discrimination against its own citizens, the quarter of who are not Jewish.
The myths covered by Professor Sand have implications for ethnocentrism, the evil force that gave rise to anti-Semitism and other forms of ethnic and racial prejudice, the one that today justifies ethnic prejudice within Israel, the continued military occupation and colonization of more and more Palestinian land, and even the actions of Israeli soldiers who aim and shoot at the heads of Palestinian children.
