Israeli Lebensraum

[Chinahand]

I find the arguments put forward by TJ et al really weak.

 

The descendants of the ancient Jewish people are not a single group who have never changed their religion or culture.

 

The founding myths of an in-migration of the Jewish people from Egypt are archaeologically unfounded with the evidence pointing to indigenous villages adopting a culture in the bronze age involving ritual and food prohibitions - waste dumps mainly contain animal carcasses and the adoption of pig free eating is a pretty clear archaeological signal.

 

That settled population has provided the main genetic stock for all the cultural groups in the area - lots and lots of Jews never left and over the centuries adopted different cultures and religions - whether Christianity or Islam.

 

Certainly there were invaders - and they have inter-married and left descendants, but these were rapidly subsumed into the main stream settled population - a similar process is exactly what happened on the Island - there were invaders but the indigenous population always outnumbered them, simply adopting, and altering, the invaders' culture making it their own.

 

A similar process has happened with the Jewish diaspora, but in this case the Jews were always a minority in the communities they migrated into and hence even with incredibly strict rules on both sides of the cultural divide against inter-marriage genetic markers do show the dilution of the original diaspora.

 

The idea that the Jews are the only remaining people with any ancient inheritance to these lands is false.

 

 

Modern Jews may have the cultural inheritance of the majority culture from a particular historical era of Israel's existence - though that culture has quite definitely evolved and changed over time, but that cultural inheritance is not the full story of the descent of these original people.

 

A large portion of the original Jewish population never left, but stopped being Jewish, adopting different cultural identities which evolved as the historical winds blew whether Crusader or Saracen!

 

TJ totally dismisses this. Insisting that the cultural descent of the Jews is synonymous with ancestry. It isn't.

 

Many of the peasant villagers of Palestine are as much the descendants of the Jews of the ancient era as those who practice modern Judaism.

 

Both populations have absorbed either invader, or host-country genes, but the main difference between them is that one population's ancestry changed their religious mores and the other's did not.

 

 

This makes it impossible to make the argument that one community has exclusive right to the land and the other does not.

That is racial politics of the most disingenuous sort.

[Fichdich]

There is, without doubt, a pyschosis in society that is quick to denouce anyone who remotely makes any kind of "unsupportive" comment about Jews & Israel & label them anti-semetic or, worse, Nazi! If one shopped for Valencian oranges instead of Jaffas that would probably suffice!

But seriously there is no other subject (that I know of) that can so quickly enrage people.

 

Judaism, just like all the other faiths is, in my opinion, a cult. Like Islam or Christianity it makes an exclusive claim to truth, brainwashes with novel beliefs & customs, has an obsessive/faddish devotion to a non-existant deity, is obsessed with sin and controls & manipulates through a culture of fear. That about sums up a cult...

 

 

quote name="Thomas Jefferson" post="930649" timestamp="1409726404"]

 

I am not a sick, nor twisted racist. I have many friends who are Jewish. I have been many times to Israel, worked 12 months on a Kibbutz, in my youth, in the Negev. I have a right to express an opinion. Your mental health problems on Anti Semitism add nothing to this post. The basic tenets of Zionism, along with Biblical nonsense do not legitimise the theft, by a Cult, of an entire land and the expulsion of it's people. Read some real history you fucking moron.

Your entire post is filled with antisemitic venom. Zionism is the belief that Jews should have national self-determination in the land of Israel. Zionism is an essential part of Judaism, which you refer to as "a cult" (no, that's not antisemitic at all, is it?). The Jews did not steal an "entire land" (disinformation). For starters, it is their land, their homeland, where they have lived for 4,000 years, and the only reason Jews ended up in other countries is because they were violently expelled and subjected to genocide by the Romans. It was the Romans, trying to erase the Jewish connection with the land in the 2nd Century CE, who renamed it "Palaestina" and renamed their capital city, Jerusalem, to "Aelia Capitolina". However, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the area, and yes, at various times in history they were a minority, but I fail to see how that has any relevance. Their minority status was due to them being forced out and because of repeated attempts to ethnically cleanse them from the area. The Arabs were just another group of conquerors who stole Jewish land. The Israelis have every right to build new settlements in their own land. You talk as if they just arbitrarily steal land, but they're building on land which was not in use and was either legally purchased from Arab landowners or on land acquisitioned during wars which Israel did not start. How did the Arabs come to own the land in the first place? By violently conquering the area and subjugating the Jews as "dhimmis". It's necessary for Israel to have a buffer zone, because if you remove the West Bank from the map then their country becomes very thin and open to invasion.

[Thomas Jefferson]

There is, without doubt, a pyschosis in society that is quick to denouce anyone who remotely makes any kind of "unsupportive" comment about Jews & Israel & label them anti-semetic or, worse, Nazi! If one shopped for Valencian oranges instead of Jaffas that would probably suffice!

But seriously there is no other subject (that I know of) that can so quickly enrage people.

 

Judaism, just like all the other faiths is, in my opinion, a cult. Like Islam or Christianity it makes an exclusive claim to truth, brainwashes with novel beliefs & customs, has an obsessive/faddish devotion to a non-existant deity, is obsessed with sin and controls & manipulates through a culture of fear. That about sums up a cult...

 

 

People who claim Israel has no right to exist have crossed the line between genuine criticism of Israel and outright antisemitism.

 

Judaism is not a cult. Judaism is not even remotely similar to Christianity or Islam in terms of a culture of fear. For starters, the latter two religions teach eternal damnation and everlasting torment in hell and teach that there is a devil. Judaism, on the other hand, has no such doctrine -- there is no devil or hell in Judaism. There is only God. Also, God is not a "non-existent deity" -- God is real, but then God is also irrelevant to this topic as nobody here is saying Israel's right to exist is predicated on religion. Rather, it is based on 4,000 years of history and archaeology.

[Thomas Jefferson]

I find the arguments put forward by TJ et al really weak.

 

The descendants of the ancient Jewish people are not a single group who have never changed their religion or culture.

 

The founding myths of an in-migration of the Jewish people from Egypt are archaeologically unfounded with the evidence pointing to indigenous villages adopting a culture in the bronze age involving ritual and food prohibitions - waste dumps mainly contain animal carcasses and the adoption of pig free eating is a pretty clear archaeological signal.

 

That settled population has provided the main genetic stock for all the cultural groups in the area - lots and lots of Jews never left and over the centuries adopted different cultures and religions - whether Christianity or Islam.

 

Certainly there were invaders - and they have inter-married and left descendants, but these were rapidly subsumed into the main stream settled population - a similar process is exactly what happened on the Island - there were invaders but the indigenous population always outnumbered them, simply adopting, and altering, the invaders' culture making it their own.

 

A similar process has happened with the Jewish diaspora, but in this case the Jews were always a minority in the communities they migrated into and hence even with incredibly strict rules on both sides of the cultural divide against inter-marriage genetic markers do show the dilution of the original diaspora.

 

The idea that the Jews are the only remaining people with any ancient inheritance to these lands is false.

 

 

Modern Jews may have the cultural inheritance of the majority culture from a particular historical era of Israel's existence - though that culture has quite definitely evolved and changed over time, but that cultural inheritance is not the full story of the descent of these original people.

 

A large portion of the original Jewish population never left, but stopped being Jewish, adopting different cultural identities which evolved as the historical winds blew whether Crusader or Saracen!

 

TJ totally dismisses this. Insisting that the cultural descent of the Jews is synonymous with ancestry. It isn't.

 

Many of the peasant villagers of Palestine are as much the descendants of the Jews of the ancient era as those who practice modern Judaism.

 

Both populations have absorbed either invader, or host-country genes, but the main difference between them is that one population's ancestry changed their religious mores and the other's did not.

 

 

This makes it impossible to make the argument that one community has exclusive right to the land and the other does not.

That is racial politics of the most disingenuous sort.

 

The Jews of today are the literal, physical, biological descendants of the ancient Jews. Jews have not "absorbed" invaders among them -- conversion to Judaism was illegal under Byzantine and Islamic rule and violently suppressed. A Muslim who converted to Judaism would be executed as an apostate (something to look forward to when we're under sharia law). Most of the Jews were expelled. The majority of the Jewish people lived in the diaspora, because the Romans saw to it that the land was as ethnically cleansed as possible (Jerusalem, the Temple, all being laid waste to). The Palestinians are Arabs, most of them entering the area during the British Mandate as economic migrants. Now, I accept that back in time some of the Jews may have converted to Islam (rather than be dhimmis) and so intermingled with the oppressive Arab invaders, although that would be of minimal significance. They certainly didn't morph into "Palestinians" -- they would simply be Arabs; and Israel does have a sizable number of Arab Israelis. Note that they're not called Palestinian Israelis. Just because an Arab might have 1/240th ancestor or something who was Jewish doesn't mean they have a right to the land. The land belongs to the Jewish people [as a nation, a commonwealth of people], not just non-Jews who had some random Jewish ancestor in amongst thousands and thousands of non-Jewish ancestors. Anyway, whatever, I have better things to do....

[Chinahand]

TJ - you are incorrect about intermarriage under the Ottoman Empire:

Link

As ever history is complex and there were periods of tolerance and periods of persecution, but on balance the Ottoman Empire was multi-ethnic and tolerant and intermarriage occurred - especially between Christians and Jews under Islamic Rule; both religions were banned from intermarrying with Muslims, but not with each other.

If you want to look at a detailed review of the genetics try this article, though it's long, nuanced and complicated!

The most plausible explanation for the [genetic] patterns here, supported by uniparental lineages, is that local Jewish populations have admixed with surrounding populations.
...
The Middle Eastern populations were formed by Jews in the Babylonian and Persian empires who are thought to have remained geographically continuous in those locales. In contrast, the other Jewish populations were formed more recently from Jews who migrated or were expelled from Palestine and from individuals who were converted to Judaism during Hellenic-Hasmonean times, when proselytism was a common Jewish practice. During Greco-Roman times, recorded mass conversions led to 6 million people practicing Judaism in Roman times or up to 10% of the population of the Roman Empire. Thus, the genetic proximity of these European/Syrian Jewish populations, including Ashkenazi Jews, to each other and to French, Northern Italian, and Sardinian populations favors the idea of non-Semitic Mediterranean ancestry in the formation of the European/ Syrian Jewish groups.

In the time of Augustus Jews were divided between different sects and persuasions, and there was a welter of diversity. Additionally, in the marketplace of Roman religion Jews were a moderately entrepreneurial group. The dynasty of Herod himself was of convert origin. There was a wide spectrum of Jewish religious practice and belief, from the near monastic isolation of the Essenes, to the engaged but separatist Pharisees, and finally to the wide range of more syncretistic practices which fall under the rubric of “Hellenistic Judaism.” Many scholars assert that it was from the last sector which Christianity finally arose as a Jewish sect, and that Christianity eventually absorbed all the other forms of Hellenistic Judaism. Judaism of the Pharisees, which became Rabbinical Judaism, and more recently Judaism qua Judaism, was shaped in large part by having to accommodate and placate the dominant Christian and Islamic religious cultures in which it was integrated by the early medieval period. Conversion to Judaism from Christianity or Islam was often a capital crime (though conversion from Christianity to Judaism was not forbidden in Muslim lands, while presumably conversion from Islam to Judaism in Christian lands would not have been, though few Muslims lived in Christian lands).
...
[T]he Roman Jewish community was already large in the days of Julius Caesar, and presumably intermarried with the urban proletariat of diverse origins.In an ironic twist these data suggest that modern Jews, in particular the Ashkenazim, but to a lesser extent the Sephardim as well, share common ancestry with gentile Europeans due to the unconstrained character of the pagan Greco-Roman world which Jews were to a great extent strident critics of. Contra Tertullian Athens had much to do with Jerusalem.

[Thomas Jefferson]

Your quotation does not demonstrate a word of what I said to be wrong. The only reference to conversions to Judaism in that quotation relates to the Roman period -- when Judea was still a majority Jewish area and the Pharisees' conversion efforts hadn't yet been gatecrashed by Christianity -- but we're talking about the Byzantine and Islamic period when conversion had stopped due to it being illegal and subject to the death penalty or even vigilante actions against entire Jewish communities. Sorry but after 70 CE (the destruction of the Temple), conversions were few and far between. These genetic "mixtures" you refer to in the Jewish community most certainly date to before the 1st century CE, i.e. 2,000 years ago.

[Fichdich]

Some interesting, informed comments. Anyway, back to the original post, that is, the illegal land grab in the West Bank of some 1,000 acres for a new Jewish settlement WHILST in Gaza 500,000 civilians have been made homeless, 11,100 are wounded, and the death toll is currently 2,143.

Here the maps tell the truth:

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/mapstellstory.html

[Fichdich]

 

There is, without doubt, a pyschosis in society that is quick to denouce anyone who remotely makes any kind of "unsupportive" comment about Jews & Israel & label them anti-semetic or, worse, Nazi! If one shopped for Valencian oranges instead of Jaffas that would probably suffice!But seriously there is no other subject (that I know of) that can so quickly enrage people.Judaism, just like all the other faiths is, in my opinion, a cult. Like Islam or Christianity it makes an exclusive claim to truth, brainwashes with novel beliefs & customs, has an obsessive/faddish devotion to a non-existant deity, is obsessed with sin and controls & manipulates through a culture of fear. That about sums up a cult...

 

People who claim Israel has no right to exist have crossed the line between genuine criticism of Israel and outright antisemitism. Judaism is not a cult. Judaism is not even remotely similar to Christianity or Islam in terms of a culture of fear. For starters, the latter two religions teach eternal damnation and everlasting torment in hell and teach that there is a devil. Judaism, on the other hand, has no such doctrine -- there is no devil or hell in Judaism. There is only God. Also, God is not a "non-existent deity" -- God is real, but then God is also irrelevant to this topic as nobody here is saying Israel's right to exist is predicated on religion. Rather, it is based on 4,000 years of history and archaeology.

God is real is he???!!!! So is Santa & the little fairies near Santon motel.

[Thomas Jefferson]

 

God is real is he???!!!! So is Santa & the little fairies near Santon motel.

 

 

Yes, God is real, but I didn't say "he" is real. Your remark about Santa is asinine.

[Fichdich]

אתה בן זונה טיפש אחד!

 

quote name="Thomas Jefferson" post="930781" timestamp="1409769013"]

 

God is real is he???!!!! So is Santa & the little fairies near Santon motel.

Yes, God is real, but I didn't say "he" is real. Your remark about Santa is asinine.

[spook]

Why do people hate Jews?

 

Because there's a great many people, probably if we addressed their hearts of hearts, most.

 

But Why?

 

I remember soe of my class mates at the age of 11 used to sing (to the tune of Tavern in the Town) a very nasty song about Jews. I also remember asking what was wrong with Jews and go a load of nonsense in reply, but they believed every word of it.

 

So any suggestions, why DO so many people hate Jews?

[spook]

אתה בן זונה טיפש אחד!

quote name="Thomas Jefferson" post="930781" timestamp="1409769013"]

God is real is he???!!!! So is Santa & the little fairies near Santon motel.

Yes, God is real, but I didn't say "he" is real. Your remark about Santa is asinine.

 

 

 

 

 

And who precisely are you calling a stupid SOB, Or is it that you have chosen it as a "signature" because you feel a close association with it? Shame you didn't choose to incorporate vowels as well.

[wrighty]

 

So any suggestions, why DO so many people hate Jews?

 

Envy? They're often portrayed as being well-off or powerful in things like banking and the film industry. Or is it the whole thing about them being 'god's chosen people'?

 

I don't know much about this whole subject, but have found this thread, particularly Chinahand's contributions, to be very interesting.

 

Israel's treatment of the Palestinians seems to be heavy handed (a few kids throwing rocks results in tanks and bulldozers being sent in etc) and many people, me included, don't really like that, but then again, what are they meant to do when Hamas terrorists keep firing rockets at them?

[alibaba]

To pretty much everyone with a functioning brain Israeli has a right to exist. Equally, EVERYONE knows that their treatment of the Palestinians (regardless of provocation) is totally totally shit.

 

That's about it.

[Chinahand]

Well TJ, we are getting closer to a reasoned conversation.

Look, I agree that the historical depth and integrity of the Jews is pretty unique, but it isn't racial purity and is intermixed to a certain extent from communities who have no connection with historical Israel.

You now admit that large portions of the Jewish population in Roman times were NOT descended from people from Israel, but were converts. Believe it or not that undermines your entire argument.

Beyond Roman times there is clear genetic evidence of interbreeding in the Medieval Era. Most especially with Sephardi Jews on the female side where male Jews would travel to find a new community. While numbers were small marriages would be with local girls until the community was large enough to allow Jewish women to travel, or interbreed without too great a consequence! This happened again and again with the spread of the diaspora - it is clearly visible in the genes - the X chromosome and especially the mitochondria of Sephardi Jews is closer to the local populations they are living in than to other Jewish communities.

With Ashkenazi its even more complex and could well involve low levels of inter-marriage, probably via individuals leaving a community becoming cryptic, even converting, but then reintergrating, but often bringing along spouses etc. With fluid diasporic communities there IS a certain flow between communities as individuals who want to maintain their identity are forced for periods to adopt the culture of the majority. Marriages from such episodes complicate the genetic picture - as does pure rape which is also a probable factor.

I'm fascinated by the Khazar ideas - the evidence simple isn't definitive, but there is enough evidence from examining Levite Y Chromosomes to postulate a reasonably large influx of convert DNA into the Ashkenazi communities in Europe as Khazar Judaism collapsed.

The trouble is racists have terribly distorted the evidence to make a political argument that Jews have little descent from Israel. That is as much a lie as TJ's claims that the only people to have any claim to the Palestinian territories are Jews. Both ideas are heinous distortions of a complex reality.

Try reading this article for a critique of a revisionist Israeli historian's book in favour of the Khazar origin of the Jews - which clearly admits what TJ is struggling to admit - that much Jewish ancestry is from converts with no connection with Israel:

No "nationalist" Jewish historian has ever tried to conceal the well-known fact that conversions to Judaism had a major impact on Jewish history in the ancient period and in the early Middle Ages.

As one would expect from a work that reflects a profound knowledge of scholarly studies in the field, the Zionist "Toldot am yisrael" explains that the number of Jews in the Diaspora during the ancient period was as high as it was because of conversion, a phenomenon that "was widespread in the Jewish Diaspora in the late Second Temple period .... Many of the converts to Judaism came from the gentile population of Palestine, but an even greater number of converts could be found in the Jewish Diaspora communities in both the East and the West."

and then there is this brilliant, clear and nuanced exposition about Jewish genetics and population changes which very lucidly explains the complexities of the history, and also brings up the very real modern dilemmas of Biological Judaism.

The trouble is it is very long! And if I'm saying that then you know it's long!!

Presumably, ... adventurous bachelors setting out (perhaps on business ventures) for far lands could not persuade Jewish women to come with them, or else they traveled to their destinations with no intention of staying there. In the absence of rabbis to perform conversions, they married local women who, while consenting to live as Jews, were not halakhically Jewish. By halakhic standards, therefore, their descendants were not Jewish, either, even though their Jewishness was not challenged by the rabbinical authorities. Although such communities must, in their first generations, have known the truth about themselves, this does not appear to have bothered them or anyone else very much.

...

[T]he American-Israeli-British study, ... was designed to ascertain whether Levites, who functioned as priests’ assistants in the ancient Temple and are supposedly also descended from Aaron, have a worldwide genetic signature similar to or the same as the Cohen Modal Haplotype. The answer turned out to be negative, since the Y chromosomes of Levites from different geographical backgrounds proved to correlate no better with one another than they did with the Y chromosomes of non-Levitic Jews. And yet, rather astonishingly, Ashkenazi Levites, when taken separately, do have a “modal haplotype” of their own—and it is the same R-M117 mutation on which the Hebrew University study centered! Fifty-two percent of them have this mutation, which is rarely found in non-Ashkenazi Jews and has a clear non-Jewish provenance.

What is one to make of this finding? An 11.5-percent incidence of R-M117 among Ashkenazi Jews in general is easily explainable: the mutation could have entered the Jewish gene pool slowly, in small increments in every generation, during the thousand years of Ashkenazi Jewry’s existence. (This need not necessarily have been via conversion to Judaism and marriage to Jewish women. Pre- and extra-marital sexual relations, and even rape, widespread in times of anti-Jewish violence, were in all likelihood more common.) But the 52-percent rate among Levites is something else. Here we are dealing not with a gradual, long-term process (for no imaginable process could have produced such results), but with a one-time event of some sort.

Such an event could obviously not have been a sudden influx of Levites into the Jewish community from a Gentile society. Both of our studies, therefore, raise the possibility that the original R-M117 Levites were Khazarian Jews who migrated westward upon the fall of the Khazar kingdom. Of course, since all or most Khazarian Jews were converts (although some may have been Jews who came from elsewhere), few could have descended from Aaron. Yet it is quite possible that some became, or were designated, “honorary” Levites in the course of the Judaization of the Khazarian population. As the American-Israeli-British study observes, Jews traditionally held to “a lesser degree of stringency for the assumption of Levite status than for the assumption of Cohen status,” so that self-declared Khazarian Levites might have fathered lineages whose Levitic pedigree came to be accepted.