What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora is historically wrong?
What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under theheel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the verysame “children of Israel” described in the Old Testament?
Andwhat if most modern Israelis aren’t descended from the ancientIsraelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africansand others who didn’t “return” to the scrap of land we now call Israeland establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate themduring World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whoseancestors had lived there for millennia?
What if the entire taleof the Jewish Diaspora — the story recounted at Passover tables byJews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews’ exile fromJudea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape fromthe Pharaoh’s clutches — is all wrong?
That’s the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?,a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sentshockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year.After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is beingtranslated into a dozen languages and will be published in the UnitedStates this year by Verso.
Its thesis has ramifications that gofar beyond some antediluvian academic debate. Few modern conflicts areas attached to ancient history as that decades-long cycle ofbloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians. Each group lays claimto the same scrap of land — holy in all three of the world’s majorAbrahamic religions — based on long-standing ties to that chunk ofearth and national identities formed over long periods of time. There’sprobably no other place on Earth where the present is as intimatelytied to the ancient.
Central to the ideology of Zionism is thetale — familiar to all Jewish families — of exile, oppression,redemption and return. Booted from their kingdom, the “Jewish people”– sons and daughters of ancient Judea — wandered the earth, rootless,where they faced cruel suppression from all corners — from beingforced to toil in slavery under the Egyptians, to the Spanish massacresof the 14th century and Russian pogroms of the 19th, through to thehorrors of the Third Reich.
This view of history animates allZionists, but none more so than the influential but reactionaryminority — in the United States as well as Israel — who believe thatGod bestowed a “Greater Israel” — one that encompasses the modernstate as well as the Occupied Territories — on the Jewish people, andwho resist any effort to create a Palestinian state on biblical grounds.