Update:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/06/genetics-the-jewish-question/

I should make it clear that Sand’s Khazar origin of Ashkenazim, is controversial still. At the time I wrote “LOE”, I relied on Qumsiyeh and on Koestler’s earlier work. Since then, new genetic research apparently shows that the Ashkenazi are more likely the result of the Jewish diaspora in Italy intermarrying with the central European population. I don’t have the background in mathematics or genetics to verify those conclusions, and the matter is so politicized that I wonder if any research will really change people’s opinions one way or other. I don’t know if this means the Khazar theory is really refuted or whether this just makes the question more complicated. In any case, Ashkenazy certainly do share more, rather than less, with their European ancestors, nor can they in any way claim to be MORE linked by blood to Israel than Palestinian Arabs, who likely descended from the Judaeans of Biblical times. None of this is to suggest that blood should be the basis of a state, of course. Or that origin myths are peculiar to Jewish people and no one else. Far from it. I bring it up, because I’m trying to figure out if there is some merit in criticism of Sand’s work, or not.

Update:

It was the research of Mazan Qumsiyeh, the Palestinian activist, that first informed me of the genetic research relating to this subject, but let’s get it straight from a Jewish researcher, quoted in the New York Times:

“Though no final consensus has emerged on the ancestral link between Palestinians and Jews, Harry Ostrer, director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University Langone Medical Center, who has been studying the genetic organization of Jews, said, “The assumption of lineal descent seems reasonable.”

Update:

There is one part of Sand’s account that I do not care for. And that is his belief that the Davidic and Solomonic kingdom never existed. This strikes me as reaching. Architectural evidence or lack thereof is not the only thing to be considered. An oral and literary tradition of thousands of years surely is strong evidence too. Still, at least the story of the Khazars goes mainstream and the intellectual angels have now joined this fool, who broached the subject back in 2005, believing, as Sand does today, that telling that suppressed truth would begin the purging of bad blood.

ORIGINAL POST

A brave and truthful man takes the first step toward the healing of the Israel-Palestine conflict:

“Sand is scathing about accusations made by Jews living elsewhere that his book is anti-Israel. From the comfort of the diaspora they charge him with sedition. Some say his thesis fuels antisemitism. Overseas donors to Tel Aviv University have called for him to be sacked.

But Sand has voted for Israel with his feet. He is not anti-Zionist, he says, but post-Zionist: accepting modern Israel as a fait accompli. Besides, his interest in the country’s survival as a democracy is not theoretical. His family lives there.

Diaspora Zionists can nurture the Jewish myth of biblical nationhood as dual citizenship alongside their passports from safer states. When they refer to “Israel” and “Jerusalem” in their prayers, they do not have to distinguish between scriptural metaphor and political reality. It is a distinction on which Israel’s survival depends.

“A lot of pro-Zionists in London and New York don’t really understand what their great-grandparents felt about Zion,” says Sand. “It was the most important place in the world in their imagination, as a religious, sacred land, not a place to emigrate.” That “Israel” was a metaphysical destination to be reached at the End of Days. The modern Israeli state is a political enterprise, conceived in the late 19th century, made necessary by the Holocaust, founded in 1948.”

My Comment:

The attacks on Sands’ book have come mainly from people who themselves live no where near the “homeland” they so revere, and who have long lost the characteristic features of the “identity” they claim to be the sole mouthpieces for.

Tamil “Tigers” were funded by ex-Tamil domestic tabbies, comfortably lapping milk in affluent suburbs across the West. BJP’s shrillest Hindu supremacists made sure to post their demands from the tolerant shores of multicultural societies.

And those who attack any mention of Jewish identity do so, really, because their affluent networks are offended by truth and so they too must undermine it.

But truth though it first wounds also heals.

If Zionism or Jewish or Israeli, as words, must be avoided for the sake of not offending the powerful (that is the real reason), then surely one should not mention the names and identities of the less powerful, for offense to them is surely a much greater moral failing. Let us not criticize feminists or women, Americans, or Anglos, or blacks, or whites, or Freemasons, or Gentiles, or fundamentalist Christians, since such criticisms must also have a covert agenda. If one cannot say Jewish or Zionist without verbal contortions ensuing, one should not say Afro-Dalit, or Hutu, or Brahminical or Vedic or Russian or Iranian or German (as in German death cult) or Vatican (as a stand-in for Catholicism) or Goddess-worship (to attack feminists), or even Satanist (who see Satan as a positive life force) for to demonize a nation or culture or way of life or institution is surely no better than demonizing a religion or faith.

Indeed not.

Extreme anti-Semitic statements should be suspect, since they often come from the mouths of paid provocateurs. But by the same token one should also suspect extreme statements against ordinary people working in government outfits. Or extreme statements about America or empire.

But how is it there are never any objections to that kind of extremism?

Reason and balance in all things. That surely cannot be misconstrued as misleading or false.

Dr. Sand having written a brave, most truthful and obviously well-intentioned book deserves all the support he can get, rather than to be undermined.

Some take aways:

1. Ethnocentrism is built into the Jewish religion, but no more than in any other religion, Israel Shahak not withstanding.

2. The formation of Israel constituted a rape, but the child of a rape is not guilty of the rape. Jews who have been brought to Israel have a right to continue where they are.

3. A two-state solution with federated states as the goal is the most practical solution.

4. Compassion for the sufferings of Palestinians and outrage that those were born in a country cannot return there is the reason for his writing the book.

And what is my excuse for returning to this topic over and over?

Lifelong interest in inter-faith dialogue, fascinated attachment to the great Jew Jesus, Messiah or not, historic or not; my love for the wealth of spiritual knowledge and practices embodied in the Hindu tradition and my fear that it will be wiped out or corrupted by imperial ideologues and ethnocentric scholars who are promoting strife in Asia on that basis; the belief that the banishment of the occult traditions in all faiths is the main reason they cannot come to terms with each other; and a belief that human society cannot be ordered correctly without the heavy hand of the state, unless it is reordered rightly from within human beings themselves.