Shlomo Sand on Israel

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planxty
User ID: 537233

United States
10/28/2008 12:44 PM
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Shlomo Sand on Israel

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A search of the GLP archives failed to yield anything on Shlomo Sand, an Israeli historian who wrote a best selling book (in Israel) on essentially how the jews occupying Israel have no historical right to do so. Here are the details:
[link to darwiniana.com]

Dissident Voice
October 9th, 2008
Israeli Best-seller Breaks National Taboo
by Jonathan Cook
No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic
work has spent 19 weeks on Israels bestseller list and that success
has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israels
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 todays Jews have no historical connection to the
land called Israel and that the only political solution to the
countrys 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 countrys
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 Sands 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 Sands 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 cant explain Jewishness without
exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the
events of this exile, I couldnt 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 proselytising religion,
desperate for converts. This is mentioned in the Roman literature of
the time.

Jews travelled 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 Israels 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 Sands 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 [Israels first prime minister],
believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the areas
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.

Theres 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.

Ive been criticised 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 Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran
and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing
Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books).

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