<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[The Fiction of the Jewish History in&nbsp;Palestine]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p><strong>By Hasan Afif El-Hasan</strong></p>
<p>Prime  Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told NNC Pierce Morgan on March 18, 2011  that he might agree to a Palestinian state through negotiations. And he  added, &#8220;We will make territorial concessions although it is very painful  to do that in our ancestral land.&#8221; Netanyahu was not talking about  Poland where his ancestors lived. He was talking about Palestine where  generations of its indigenous population ancestors lived, cultivated the  land and are buried.</p>
<p>By the end of the nineteenth century,  Zionism created a new Jewish identity of blood and soil. To mobilize  their followers and supporters and appeal to their emotions, the  Zionists created myths. Zionism started as a tribal religion without  god, but in order to fulfill its function as a unifying force, Zionism  required external religious and race symbols, not inner content. Its  leaders regarded metaphysical religious belief and purity of race as  having value in itself. They created a divine paradisiacal state of  merger with the gods. Despite his non-religious ideology, Herzl writings  were replete with religious references. The Jews should settle in  Palestine because, in his words, “the Temple will be visible from long  distance, for it is only our ancient faith that has kept us together”.</p>
<p>The  Zionists and their supporters have invested tremendous financial and  scholarly resources to work within the Hebrew Bible historical  narratives to affirm the links between the intrusive Zionist population  and the ancient Israelite past, and by doing so assert the right of that  population to the land. The political end-game shaped the investigation  and the outcome. Tracing the roots of Israel’s ethnic state in biblical  antiquity is effectively to silence the indigenous Palestinians claim  to the past and therefore to the land. The Biblical scholarship employs a  bewildering array of terms for the region: “the Holy Land”, “the Land  of the Bible”, “Eretz Israel”, “the Land of Israel”, or “Judah and  Samaria.” To the casual reader these names appear interchangeable, but  they all imply connection to ancient Israel.</p>
<p>Biblical narratives  or poems that cannot be supported by archeology and common sense are  treated by the Zionists and their supporters as historical language.  Historians have to differentiate between biblical myths and the history  of real people living in real places and real time. They should have the  intellectual courage to challenge any source including the “revealed  truth” of higher order as presented in Biblical text if it is used to  justify injustice and cruelty by one people against another. Gamla, an  ethnic cleansing advocacy group founded by former Israeli military  officers, Knesset members and settler activists publishes detailed plans  for how to carry out the “complete elimination of the Arab demographic  threat to Israel” by forcibly expelling all Palestinians and demolishing  their towns and villages. This, the plan argued is “the only possible  solution” to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and it is “substantiated  by the Torah.” Biblical studies have focused on inventing “Ancient  Israel” while ignoring the reality of Palestinian history over thousands  of years. Many historic experiences related to the ancient Israelite  conquest and settlement of Palestine were described in terms of divine  acts with religious zeal.</p>
<p>Many scholars, mostly moderate Jewish,  who give primacy to archaeology, relegate the biblical text to a  secondary place as a historical source. On 2001 Passover, Rabbi David  Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Westwood, Los Angeles told his congregation:  “The truth is that virtually every archaeologist who has investigated  the story of the Exodus [from Egypt], with very few exceptions, agrees  that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened,  if it happened at all.” He based his conclusions on the fact that no  archeological findings have produced evidence of the Jews wandering the  Sinai Desert for forty years, and the excavations in Palestine show  settlement patterns different from the Biblical account of a sudden  influx of Jews from Egypt.</p>
<p>Nadva Na’aman of Tel Aviv University  wrote, “The comprehensive conquest saga in the book of Jashua is a  fictive literary composition aimed at presenting the occupation of the  entire Land of Israel, initiated and guided by the Lord and carried out  by the twelve tribes under Jashua.”  Jashua, the man, was according to  the Bible the right-hand man of Moses. After Moses death and the ancient  Israelites camping near Jericho, Jashua commenced the military  campaigns that, according to the biblical account, culminate in the  conquest of the heartland of Palestine where he carried out a systematic  campaign against the civilians of Canaan that amounts to genocide.</p>
<p>The  historian Giovanni Garbini argues that “we should not even try to write  a modern critical history of Israel largely on the basis of a single  amalgamated, culturally self-serving, and essentially private version of  history [the Bible]?”</p>
<p>Professor William Dever of the University  of Arizona writes about the Hebrew Bible that “Many of the biblical  stories are legend-like and abound with miraculous and fantastic  elements that strain the credulity of almost any modern reader of any  religious persuasion. All these factors have contributed to the rise of  doubts about the Bible’s trustworthiness.”</p>
<p>In July of 2000, the  New York Times ran a lead story under the title, “The Bible, as  History, Flunks New Archaeological Tests.” Questioning the biblical  stories of the Exodus and Conquest that recounts in lavish and dramatic  detail of the ancient Israelites exodus from Egypt and establishing  themselves in Palestine, calls into question the Zionists’ rationale for  Jewish claims to Palestine.</p>
<p>The American archaeologist and  Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor, Joseph Callaways wrote  in 1985 when he discovered that the city of Ai that is described in the  Bible did not exist: “For many years, the primary source for the  understanding of the settlement of the first Israelites was the Hebrew  Bible, but every reconstruction based upon the biblical traditions has  floundered on the evidence from archeological remains.”</p>
<p>The Bible  and the claim of the Jews as a distinct race have been used as a tool to  cement the inner unity of the Zionist movement and an indispensible  weapon in the struggle for claiming the land of Palestine. The  religio-historical element as a focus of national identity had greater  importance in Zionism than in other national movements. It was religion  in the broadest sense, with all its national and historical  connotations, that provided the justification for the conquest of  Palestine and legitimization of Jews’ return.</p>
<p>Although Semitic  originally referred to certain languages and peoples of the Eastern  Mediterranean that included not only Jews but also Palestinians,  Assyrians, Babylonians and Phoenicians, claim of hostility only toward  Jews is generally known as anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Jews are a religious  body, not a separate biological human group. The history of the Jews  reveals that they have always interbred with non-Jews and many non-Jews  have become Jews. The only valid criterion for determining membership in  the group is confessional.</p>
<p>By insisting that a cultural trait,  Jewishness, is inherited, the self-proclaimed Jews have contributed to  the idea that they belong to an exclusive family, a distinct race, and a  chosen people. Under Israel’s “Law of Return” of Jews to Israel,  Ethiopian Jews (Falashas) were verified as descendents of an ancient  Israelite tribe by testing samples of their males DNA Y-Chromosome. The  claim of identifying the Jewish DNA is the pinnacle of charlatan  science, an ideology driven hoax!</p>
<p>There was no written history  prior to 3,200 B.C. (Before Christ) on Palestine, but archeological  excavations suggest the existence of people living in Palestine as early  as 8000 B.C. As far as the period of pre-pottery stone-age between 8000  and 5000 B.C, Palestine and Syria were inhabited by farmers and  hunters. Their progression from simpler to more complex culture was  evidenced in the development of farming technique, the domestication of  animals and the establishment of towns.</p>
<p>Ancient Canaanites ruled  all Palestine and Jordan until around 1200 B.C, when the Philistines  conquered the southern coastal area. Archaeologists found evidence that  Canaan migrant tribes settled Palestine and Jordan in the later period  of the fourth millennium B.C. Pottery containing offerings in graves  suggest the Canaanites believed in after-life. The Canaanite known  history coincided with the Early Bronze Age that began around 3200B.C,  but some of their settlements have been dated as old as 7000 B.C.</p>
<p>The  indigenous Palestinians, the legitimate owners of the land, are the  descendents of Ancient Canaanites, Philisti nians, ancient Hebrews,  Assyrians, ancient Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims,  Christian crusaders and Turks. The groups that lived in Palestine  fought, interacted and collaborated, but no group was obliterated.</p>
<p>Modern  historians, writers and statesmen should liberate themselves from the  biblical myths when reviewing history even if they believe in a revealed  truth in their private lives. The challenge for them is to sort out  fact from fiction. Palestine belongs to its indigenous population not  the hordes of foreign settlers.</p>
<p><em>&#8211; Hasan Afif El-Hasan is a  political analyst. His latest book, Is The Two-State Solution Already  Dead? (Algora Publishing, New York), now available on Amazon.com and  Barnes &amp; Noble. He contributed this article to  PalestineChronicle.com.</em></p>
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