[News] Israel's surprising best seller contradicts founding ideology

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Israel's surprising best seller contradicts founding ideology
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9884.shtml

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 8 October 2008

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.

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, 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, 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, Bartal 
made little effort to rebut 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 Sand contends.

The idea for the book came to him many years ago, 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."

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 70 AD.

"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"?

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.

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 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."

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, 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."

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. 
His latest books are 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745327540/theelectronic-20>Israel 
and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the 
Middle East (Pluto Press) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1848130317/theelectronic-20>Disappearing 
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His 
website is <http://www.jkcook.net/>www.jkcook.net.

This article originally appeared in <http://www.thenational.ae>The 
National published in Abu Dhabi and is republished with permission.



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