Israel, which has robbed its Palestinian victims blind since 1947, has another demand to make. It wants them to recognise it as a "Jewish state". Palestinians should laugh this entity's leaders all the way back to Vienna, where Theodore Herzl's Zionist delusions were born.
You see, the secret is out: It now appears that those people who call themselves Israeli Jews are not Jews after all, but the descendants of Eastern European converts to Judaism, who had no genealogical connection to the ancient Israelites.
The story of European, or Ashkanazi, Jews, as it slowly emerges from scholarly research, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.
Take Shlomo Sand, an eminent professor of European history at the university of Tel Aviv, whose book, When and How the Jewish People Was Invented, was published in Hebrew late last year and remained on the best-seller lists in Israel for 19 weeks.
It was recently released in French by Fayard, a noted publishing house, as "comment le peuple juif fut invinte", and in its English translation by Verso, another noted publishing house in the United States.
Professor Sand's thesis is that Israel's rationale as a Jewish state rests purely on biblical mythology, rather than historical fact. In short, it rests on three religio-political constructs: God's covenant with Moses, instructing ancient Israelite tribes to conquer the land of Canaan; the Jews' "expulsion" by the Romans, which resulted in their "diaspora"; and on the moral grounds that justified the establishment of a Jewish homeland following the holocaust in Europe.
The first two, writes Sand, appear not to be based on historical reality but on the stuff of legend, and on fabrications that crumble under academic scrutiny. (The holocaust is not in dispute, though its justification for superimposing a Jewish homeland on Palestine is.)
The legend of the "diaspora", of Israelites exiled by their masters to the four corners of the Roman empire, lacks historical underpinnings — Rome in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD did not, among other things, have the means to effect such a large population transfer from the Holy Land.
So then, whose progeny were the 11 million "Jews" who lived in modern Europe?
This is where Sand builds on a book published in 1976 by the prolific Hungarian-Jewish critic and novelist (Darkness at Noon) called The Thirteenth Tribe, which argued that modern European Jews are in fact descendants of converts, principally from the Khazar Kingdom in Eastern Russia, whose people in 740 had embraced Judaism to avoid being caught in the middle of conflict between the Eastern Roman Empire and its many enemies.
After the Khazar Kingdom was wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, its population migrated to Poland, and later other countries, forming there the cradle of European Ashkanazi Jewery, a community with no direct lineage to the ancient Israelites.
It is, in effect, Khazar converts then who, disguised as Zionists, put forth the claim of primogeniture over the territory of Palestine, including the claim to a "right of return".
Mystery
The plot thickens as Sand moves on. If the Jews of Europe were not genealogically Jewish, but latter-day converts, and if there was no Jewish diaspora brought about by Roman mass expulsions, then what happened to the original Israelites who had seemingly stayed put in the Holy Land?
Sand posits the theory — hold on to your hat — that modern-day Palestinians are these folks' descendants, who merely embraced Islam in the 7th century, as had done virtually everyone in the Levant and North Africa at the time.
If you go along with that notion, then it becomes a bitter irony that, as Zionists, Khazar converts to Judaism beat up on Jewish converts to Islam. Love it or leave it, but in Where and How the Jewish People Was Invented the author proffers the cultivated reader with a large body of meticulously detailed research in support of a theory that sounds all the more credible for the detached academic restraint with which it is advanced.
All of which takes us back to modern-day Israelis' obsession with the idea that everyone and his uncle in the region is out there to get them. Driven by demonic insecurities, perhaps also archetypal fears carried over from their Khazar history, they ask for reassurances, and then more reassurances — including the bizarre reassurance that they really are, honest, Jews living in a "Jewish state". Coming soon: Tides caused by Jupiter.
Palestinians should not kow-tow to, or dignify for one moment, Israel's trivial demands that they recognise it as a "Jewish state".
Instead, they should recapture the ethos, idiom and metaphor that their early poets and patriots imbued their national struggle with, folks who knew how to invoke and envision Palestine as the ancestral patrimony of the Palestinian people.
Without that "assabiya", that propelled them on their journey of national struggle in the 1920s, the Palestinian dream would have become forgotten dust by now.
As the French lyrical writer, Antoine de Saint Exupery, stated: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea".
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
