Israel Can't Hide From Its History Forever
By Greg Felton
(Article first appeared in the May 11, 1997 Vancouver Courier.
Reprinted in the Jan/Feb 1998 Washington Report for Middle East Affairs.)
A country is part fact, part myth. The former is a province of
economists, politicians and other practitioners of the mundane;
the latter principally belongs to history, and is no less important
to a healthy country. For a country to be healthy and united , its
leaders must promote a unifying national ethos replete with
heroes, traditions and celebrations of its past. It's all well and
good to beat the drums of pragmatism, fiscal
and otherwise, but a people who needs to know that it belongs to
a larger community and to have that membership reinforced through
ritual and common celebration. Otherwise, there'd be nothing that
could properly be called a country -- just a community of communities.
However, myths and their attendant celebrations have a dark side.
If used to prop up ideologies and false histories, their innate
mendacity will sooner or later tear a country apart.
This brings me to Israel, which celebrates its 49th birthday on Thursday.
Given the events of the past year, one wonders how many it has left.
Notwithstanding the fact that it was created by a United Nations decree,
Israel is built on a lie.
The lie manifests itself from time to time, as in last year's tunnel opening
and the construction of the latest Jewish colony in Arab East Jerusalem.
In good Zionist fashion, prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu has often
declared that Israel is in the West Band and Jerusalem to stay, and that
all Jews have a historical right to settle there. From the Israeli view, the
Palestinians must accept this before there can be peace. The Palestinians
will have none of it, and for good reason. Although Netanyahu's claim
is familiar with Israeli history, it is entirely fallacious. It fails to
mention the Khazars.
The Khazars were a nomadic Turko-Finnic people who migrated out of
the Caucasus in the second century and came to settle, broadly speaking
in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine. In AD 740, Bulan, the
khagan (ruler) of Khazaria, declared that paganism wasn't good
enough for his people and decided to adopt one of the "heavenly"
religions: Judaism, Christianity or Islam. He sent for representatives of
each faith, but found their arguments unconvincing. Bulan then asked
each of them a question: if they had to give up their creed for one of the
others, which would it be. When the Christian and Muslim both said
Judaism, Bulan had his answer. From that moment, the Khazars lived
according to Judaic law.
The Khazar Empire lasted until the Mongol invasions of the 13th century
forced its Jewish population to flee northwest into Poland, Germany,
Russia and elsewhere. They quickly outnumbered the established Semitic
Jews who had come centuries earlier from the Middle East. We know
these Khazari Jews today as the Ashkenazim, or European Jews.
The history of the Khazars and their Judaic conversion is a documented,
undisputed part of Jewish history, but you see why it causes the Zionists
fits. It proves that the European Jewry is largely Caucasian, not Semitic.
This means that Israel's Zionist founders Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion,
Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir and Golda Meir, for example, cannot
claim affiliation with Israel's biblical past. In fact, the region's Semitic
Jews, Christians and Muslims who have genealogies going back to
biblical times do have a right to live in Israel. It is with good reason
that author Alfred M. Lilienthal declared Judaism's Khazar's heritage
to be Israel's Achilles heel.
The false history of Israel as a homeland for victims of European
persecution is tied up with fallacies of Israel's "war" of independence.
Zionist history says the victorious Jews won nationhood in a war
against superior Arab numbers. We know this to be a fiction. On May
15, when Israel received formal U.S. recognition, well equipped Zionist
forces included: 30,000 fully mobilized regulars, 32,000 second-line
troops; 15,000 settlement police, a home guard of 32,000, as well as
3000-5000 troops from the Irgun and 200-300 from the Stern Gang.
Soldiers in the Arab forces comprised fewer than 20,000 poorly trained
and armed troops, including volunteers of the Arab Liberation Army.
More than falsified history, though, European Jews exploited the
suffering of their own people to further a policy of aggression and
expropriation. As prof. Ilan Pappe of Haifa University wrote in the
Journal of Palestine Studies (winter 1997): " generally
speaking, the Zionists succeeded in persuading large segments of
world public opinion to link the
Zionist cause with the Holocaust. Against such a claim, even able
Palestinian diplomats --and there were not many in those days-
could hardly win the diplomatic game."
(Ironically, the term anti-Semitic, so often used to label critics of
Israel, is a misnomer; European Jews are the true anti-Semites in Israel.)
Within Israel today, Pappe said Zionist version of the truth are
beginning to loose credibility. So-called "New Sociologists"
and "New Historians" are openly criticizing traditional verities,
such as Israel never provokes hostilities, and whole peoples can
be displaced and marginalized in the name of "national security".
They're even exposing the false history of 1948. While some
Zionists are willing to criticize Israel's post-1967 expansionism,
Pappe says the period 1882-1967 is still of limits.
Now that Israel's expansionism in the West Bank is open to general
debate, perhaps one day so too will be the period 1947-48 and maybe
even Zionism itself.
REFERENCES:
Khalidi, Walid. From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism
and the Palestine Problem until 1948. Institute for Palestine
Studies, Washington, DC, 1987.
Koestler, Arthur. The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire
and its Heritage. Random House, New York, 1967.
Lilienthal, Alfred M. What Price Israel? Institute for
Palestine Studies, Washington, DC, 1953.
