THE WANDERING WHO?

BY GILAD ATZMON

(2/9/08)

Tel Aviv University historian, Professor Shlomo Sand,

opens his remarkable study of Jewish nationalism
quoting Karl W. Deutsch:

“A nation is a group of people united by a common

mistake regarding its origin and a collective hostility
towards its neighbours.”(1)

As simple or even simplistic as it may sound, the quote

above eloquently summarises the figment of reality
entangled with modern Jewish nationalism and
especially within the concept of Jewish identity. It
obviously points the finger at the collective mistake Jews
tend to make whenever referring to their ‘illusionary
collective past’ and ‘collective origin’. Yet, in the same
breath, Deutsch’s reading of nationalism throws light
upon the hostility that is unfortunately coupled with
almost every Jewish group towards its surrounding
reality, whether it is human or takes the shape of land.
While the brutality of the Israelis towards the
Palestinians has already become rather common
knowledge, the rough treatment Israelis reserve for their
‘promised soil’ and landscape is just starting to reveal
itself. The ecological disaster the Israelis are going to
leave behind them will be the cause of suffering for
many generations to come. Leave aside the
megalomaniac wall that shreds the Holy land into
enclaves of depravation and starvation, Israel has
managed to pollute its main rivers and streams with
nuclear and chemical waste.

“The Invention of the Jewish People" is a very serious

study written by Professor Shlomo Sand, an Israeli
historian. It is the most serious study of Jewish
nationalism and by far, the most courageous elaboration
on the Jewish historical narrative.

In his book, Sand manages to prove beyond any

reasonable doubt that the Jewish people never existed
as a 'nation-race', they never shared a common origin.
Instead they are a colourful mix of groups that at
various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion.

In case you follow Sand’s line of thinking and happen to

ask yourself, 'when was the Jewish People invented?'
Sand’s answer is rather simple. “At a certain stage in the
19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany,
influenced by the folk character of German nationalism,
took upon themselves the task of inventing a people
‘retrospectively,’ out of a thirst to create a modern
Jewish people.”(2)

Accordingly, the ‘Jewish people’ is a ‘made up’ notion

consisting of a fictional and imaginary past with very
little to back it up forensically, historically or textually.
Furthermore, Sand - who elaborated on early sources of
antiquity - comes to the conclusion that Jewish exile is
also a myth, and that the present-day Palestinians are
far more likely to be the descendants of the ancient
Semitic people in Judea/Canaan than the current
predominantly Khazarian-origin Ashkenazi crowd to
which he himself admittedly belongs.

Astonishingly enough, in spite of the fact that Sand

manages to dismantle the notion of ‘Jewish people’,
crush the notion of ‘Jewish collective past’ and ridicule
the Jewish chauvinist national impetus, his book is a
best seller in Israel. This fact alone may suggest that
those who call themselves ‘people of the book’ are now
starting to learn about the misleading and devastating
philosophies and ideologies that made them into what
Khalid Amayreh and many others regard as the “Nazis of
our time”.

Hitler Won After All

Rather often when asking a ‘secular’ ‘cosmopolitan’ Jew

what it is that makes him into a Jew, a shallow
overwhelmingly chewed answer would be thrown back
at you: “It is Hitler who made me into a Jew”. Though the
‘cosmopolitan’ Jew, being an internationalist, would
dismiss other people’s national inclinations, he insists
upon maintaining his own right to ‘self determination’.
However, it is not really he himself who stands at the
core of this unique demand for national orientation, it is
actually the devil, master-monster anti-Semite, namely
Hitler. Apparently, the cosmopolitan Jew celebrates his
nationalist entitlement as long as Hitler is there to be
blamed.

As far as the secular cosmopolitan Jew is concerned,

Hitler won after all. Sand manages to enhance this
paradox. Insightfully he suggests that “while in the 19th
century referring to Jews as an ‘alien racial identity’
would mark one as an anti-Semite, in the Jewish State
this very philosophy is embedded mentally and
intellectually”(3). In Israel Jews celebrate their
differentiation and unique conditions. Furthermore,
says Sand, “There were times in Europe when one would
be labelled as an anti-Semite for claiming that all Jews
belong to a nation of an alien type. Nowadays, claiming
that Jews have never been and still aren’t people or a
nation, would tag one as a Jew hater”.(4)

It is indeed pretty puzzling that the only people who

managed to maintain and sustain a racially orientated,
expansionist and genocidal national identity that is not
at all different from Nazi ethnic ideologyare the Jews
who were, amongst others, the leading targeted victims
of the Nazi ideology and practice.

Nationalism In General and Jewish Nationalism In

Particular

Louis-Ferdinand Celine mentioned that in the time of

the Middle Ages in the moments between major wars,
knights would charge a very high price for their
readiness to die in the name of their kingdoms, in the
20th century youngsters have rushed to die en mass
without demanding a thing in return. In order to
understand this mass consciousness shift we need an
eloquent methodical model that would allow us to
understand what nationalism is all about.

Like Karl Deutsch, Sand regards nationality as a

phantasmic narrative. It is an established fact that
anthropological and historical studies of the origins of
different so-called ‘people’ and ‘nations’ lead towards
the embarrassing crumbling of every ethnicity and
ethnic identity. Hence, it is rather interesting to find out
that Jews tend to take their own ethnic myth very
seriously. The explanation may be simple, as Benjamin
Beit Halachmi spotted years ago. Zionism was there to
transform the Bible from a spiritual text into a ‘land
registry’. For that matter, the truth of the Bible or any
other element of Jewish historical narrative has very
little relevance as long as it doesn’t interfere with the
Jewish national political cause or practice.

One could also surmise that the lack of clear ethnic

origin doesn’t stop people from feeling an ethnic or
national belonging. The fact that Jews are far from
being what one can label as a People and that the Bible
has very little historical truth in it, doesn’t really stop
generations of Israelis and Jews from identifying
themselves with King David or Terminator Samson.
Evidently, the lack of an unambiguous ethnic origin
doesn’t stop people from seeing themselves as part of a
people. Similarly, it wouldn’t stop the nationalist Jew
from feeling that he belongs to some greater abstract
collective.
In the 1970’s, Shlomo Artzi, then a young Israeli singer
who was bound to become Israel’s all-time greatest
rock star, released a song that had become a smash hit
in a matter of hours. Here are the first few lines:

All of a sudden
A man wakes up
In the morning
He feels he is people
And he starts to walk
And to everyone he comes across
He says shalom

To a certain extent Artzi innocently expresses in his

lyrics the suddenness and almost contingency involved
in the transformation of the Jews into people. However,
almost within the same breath, Artzi contributes
towards the illusionary national myth of the peace-
seeking nation. Artzi should have known by then that
Jewish nationalism was a colonialist act at the expense
of the indigenous Palestinian people.

Seemingly, nationalism, national belonging and Jewish

nationalism in particular create a major intellectual task.
Interestingly enough, the first to deal theoretically and
methodically with issues having to do with nationalism
were Marxist ideologists. Though Marx himself failed to
address the issue adequately, early 20th century
uprising of nationalist demands in eastern and central
Europe caught Lenin and Stalin unprepared.

“Marxists’ contribution to the study of nationalism can

be seen as the focus on the deep correlation between
the rise of free economy and the evolvement of the
national state.”(5) In fact, Stalin was there to summarise
the Marxist take on the subject. “The nation,” says
Stalin, “is a solid collaboration between beings that was
created historically and formed following four significant
phenomena: the sharing of tongue, the sharing of
territory, the sharing of economy and the sharing of
psychic significance…”(6)

As one would expect, the Marxist materialist attempt to

understand nationalism is lacking an adequate historical
overview. Instead it would be reliant upon a class
struggle. For some obvious reasons such a vision was
popular amongst those who believe in ‘socialism of one
nation’ amongst them we can consider the proponents
of a leftist branch of Zionism.

For Sand, nationalism evolved due to the “ rapture

created by modernity which split people from their
immediate past”.(7) The mobility created by
urbanisation and industrialisation crushed the social
hierarchic system as well as the continuum between
past, present and future. Sand points out that before
industrialisation, the feudal peasant didn’t necessarily
feel the need for an historical narrative of empires and
kingdoms. The feudal subject didn’t need an extensive
abstract historical narrative of large collectives that had
very little relevance to the immediate concrete
existential need. “Without a perception of social
progression, they did well with an imaginary religious
tale that contained a mosaic of memory that lacked a
real dimension of a forward moving time. The ‘end’ was
the beginning and eternity bridged between life and
death.”(8)

In the modern secular and urban world, ‘time’ had

become the main life vessel which illustrated an
imaginary symbolic meaning. Collective historical time
had become the elementary ingredient of the personal
and the intimate. The collective narrative shapes the
personal meaning and what seems to be the ‘real’. As
much as some banal minds still insist that the ‘personal
is political’, it would be far more intelligible to argue
that in practice, it is actually the other way around.
Within the post-modern condition, the political is
personal and the subject is spoken rather than speaking
itself. Authenticity, for the matter, is a myth that
reproduces itself in the form of symbolic identifier.

Sand’s reading of nationalism as a product of

industrialisation, urbanisation and secularism, makes a
lot of sense when bearing in mind Uri Slezkin’s
suggestion that Jews are the ‘apostles of modernity’,
secularism and urbanisation. If Jews happened to find
themselves at the hub of urbanisation and secularisation
it shouldn’t then take us by surprise that the Zionists
were rather creative as much as others in inventing their
own phantasmic collective imaginary tale. However,
while insisting on their right to be ‘like other people’
Zionists have managed to transform their imagined
collective past into a global, expansionist, merciless
agenda as well as the biggest threat to world peace.

There Is No Jewish History

It is an established fact that not a single Jewish history

text had been written between the 1st century and early
19th century. The fact that Judaism is based on a
religious historical myth may have something to do with
it. An adequate scrutiny of the Jewish past was never a
primary concern within the Rabbinical tradition. One of
the reasons is probably the lack of a need of such a
methodical effort. For the Jew who lived during ancient
times and the Middle Ages, there was enough in the
Bible to answer most relevant questions having to do
with day-to-day life, Jewish meaning and fate. As
Shlomo Sand puts it, “a secular chronological time was
foreign to the ‘Diaspora time’ that was shaped by the
anticipation for the coming of the Messiah.”

However, in the light of German secularisation,

urbanisation and emancipation and due to the
decreasing authority of the Rabbinical leaders, an
emerging need of an alternative cause rose amongst the
awakening Jewish intellectuals. The emancipated Jew
wondered who he was, where he come from. He also
started to speculate what his role might be within the
rapidly opening European society.

In 1820 the German Jewish historian Isaak Markus Jost

(1793-1860) published the first serious historical work
on Jews, namely “The History of the Israelites”. Jost
avoided the Biblical time, he preferred to start his
journey with the Judea Kingdom, he also compiled an
historical narrative of different Jewish communities
around the world. Jost realised that the Jews of his time
did not form an ethnic continuum. He grasped that
Israelites from place to place were rather different.
Hence, he thought there was nothing in the world that
should stop Jews from total assimilation. Jost believed
that within the spirit of enlightenment, both the
Germans and the Jews would turn their back to the
oppressive religious institution and would form a
healthy nation based on a growing geographically
orientated sense of belonging.

Though Jost was aware of the evolvement of European

nationalism, his Jewish followers were rather unhappy
with his liberal optimistic reading of the Jewish future.
“From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians
began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a
nation that had been a ‘kingdom’, expelled into ‘exile’,
became a wandering people and ultimately turned
around and went back to its birthplace.”(9)
For the late Moses Hess, it was a racial struggle rather
than a class struggle that would define the shape of
Europe. Accordingly, suggests Hess, Jews better return
and reflect on their cultural heritage and ethnic origin.
For Hess, the conflict between Jews and Gentiles was the
product of racial differentiation, hence, unavoidable.

The ideological path from Hess’s pseudo scientific racist

orientation to Zionist historicism is rather obvious. If
Jews are indeed an alien racial entity (as Hess,
Jabotinsky and others believed), they better look for
their natural homeland, and this homeland is no other
than Eretz Yizrael. Cleary, Hess’s assumption regarding
a racial continuum wasn’t scientifically approved. In
order to maintain the emerging phantasmic narrative, an
orchestrated denial mechanism had to be erected just to
make sure that some embarrassing facts wouldn’t
interfere with the emerging national creation.

Sand suggests that the denial mechanism was rather

orchestrated and very well thought out. The Hebrew
University decision in the 1930’s to split Jewish History
and General History into two distinct departments was
far more than just a matter of convenience. The logos
behind the split is a glimpse into Jewish self-realisation.
In the eyes of Jewish academics, the Jewish condition
and Jewish psyche were unique and should be studied
separately. Apparently, even within Jewish academia, a
supreme status is reserved for the Jews, their history
and their self-perception. As Sand insightfully unveils,
within the Jewish Studies departments the researcher is
scattering between the mythological and the scientific
while the myth maintains its primacy. Yet, it often gets
into a stalling dilemma by the ‘small devious facts’.

The New Israelite, the Bible and Archaeology

In Palestine, the new Jews and later the Israelis were

determined to recruit the Old Testament and to
transform it into the amalgamate code of the future Jew.
The ‘nationalisation’ of the Bible was there to plant in
young Jews the idea that they are the direct followers of
their great ancient ancestors. Bearing in mind the fact
that nationalisation was largely a secular movement, the
Bible was stripped of its spiritual and religious meaning.
Instead, it was viewed as an historical text describing a
real chain of events in the past. The Jews who had now
managed to kill their God learned to believe in
themselves. Massada, Samson and Bar Kochva became
suicidal master narratives. In the light of their heroic
ancestors, Jews learned to love themselves as much as
they hate others, except that this time they possessed
the military might to inflict real pain on their
neighbours. More concerning was the fact that instead
of a supernatural entity - namely God - who command
them to invade the land and execute a genocide and to
rob their ‘promised land’ of its indigenous habitants,
within their national revival project it was them as
themselves, Herzl, Jabotinsky, Weitzman, Ben Gurion,
Sharon, Peres, Barak who decided to expel, destroy and
kill. Instead of God, it was then the Jews killing in the
name of Jewish people. They did it while Jewish symbols
decorate their planes and tanks. They followed
commands that where given in the newly restored
language of their ancestors.
Surprisingly enough, Sand who is no doubt a striking
scholar, fails to mention that the Zionist hijacking of the
Bible was in fact a desperate Jewish answer to German
Early Romanticism. However, as much as German
philosophers, poets, architects and artists were
ideologically and aesthetically excited about pre-
Socratic Greece, they knew very well that they were not
exactly Hellenism’s sons and daughters. The nationalist
Jew took it one step further, he bound oneself into a
phantasmic blood chain with his mythical ancestors, not
before long he restored their ancient language. Rather
than a sacred tongue, Hebrew had become a spoken
language. German Early Romanticist never went that
far.

German intellectuals during the 19th century were also

fully aware of the distinction between Athens and
Jerusalem. For them, Athens stood for universal, the
epic chapter of humanity and humanism. Jerusalem was,
on the contrary, the grand chapter of tribal barbarism.
Jerusalem was a representation of the banal, non-
universal, monotheistic merciless God, the one who kills
the elder and the infant. The Germanic Early Romantic
era left us with Hegel, Nietzsche, Fichte and Heidegger
and a just a few Jewish self-haters, leading amongst
them, Otto Weininger. The Jerusalemite left us with not
a single master ideological thinker. Some German Jewish
second-rate scholars tried to preach Jerusalem in the
Germanic exedra, amongst them were Herman Cohen,
Franz Rosenzveig and Ernst Bloch. They obviously failed
to notice that it was the traces of Jerusalem in
Christianity, which German Early Romanticists despised.

In their effort to resurrect ‘Jerusalem’, archaeology was

recruited to provide the Zionist epos with its necessary
‘scientific’ ground. Archaeology was there to unify the
Biblical time with the moment of revival. Probably the
most astonishing moment of this bizarre trend was the
1982 ‘military burial ceremony’ of the bones of Shimon
Bar Kochva, a Jew rebel who died 2000 years earlier.
Executed by the chief military Rabbi, a televised military
burial was given to some sporadic bones found in a cave
near the Dead Sea. In practice suspected remains of a
1st century Jew rebel was treated as an IDF casualty.
Clearly, archaeology had a national role, it was recruited
to cement the past and the present while leaving the
Galut out.

Astonishingly enough, it didn’t take long before things

turned the other way around. As archaeological research
become more and more independent of the Zionist
dogma, the embarrassing truth filtered out. It would be
impossible to ground the truthfulness of the Biblical tale
on forensic facts. If anything, archaeology refutes the
historicity of the Biblical plot. Excavation revealed the
embarrassing fact. The Bible is a collection of innovative
fictitious literature.

As Sand points out, the Early Biblical story is soaked

with Philistines, Aramaic and camels. Embarrassingly
enough, as far as excavations are there to enlighten us,
Philistine didn’t appear in the region before the 12th
century BC, the Aramaic appears a century later and
camels didn’t show their cheerful faces before the 8th
century. These scientific facts lead Zionist researchers
into some severe confusion. However, for non-Jewish
scholars such as Thomas Thompson, it was rather clear
that the Biblical is a “late collection of innovative
literature written by a gifted theologian.”(10) The Bible
appears to be an ideological text that was there to serve
a social and political cause.

Embarrassingly enough, not much was found in Sinai to

prove the story of the legendary Egyptian Exodus,
seemingly 3 million Hebraic men, women and children
were marching in the desert for 40 years without leaving
a thing behind. Not even a single matzo ball, very non-
Jewish one may say.
The story of the Biblical resettlement and the genocide
of the Canaanite which the contemporary Israelite
imitates to such success is another myth. Jericho, the
guarded city that was flattened to the sounds of horns
and almighty supernatural intervention was just a tiny
village during the 13th century BC.

As much as Israel regards itself as the resurrection of

the monumental Kingdom of David and Salomon,
excavation that took place in the Old City of Jerusalem
in the 1970’s revealed that David’s kingdom was no
more than a tiny tribal setting. Evidence that was
referred by Yigal Yadin to King Solomon had been
refuted later by forensic tests made with Carbon 14. The
discomforting fact has been scientifically established.
The Bible is a fictional tale, and not much there can
ground any glorifying existence of Hebraic people in
Palestine at any stage.

Who invented the Jews?

Quite early on in his text, Sand raises the crucial and

probably the most relevant questions. Who are the
Jews? Where did they come from? How is it that in
different historical periods they appear in some very
different and remote places?
Though most contemporary Jews are utterly convinced
that their ancestors are the Biblical Israelites who
happened to be exiled brutally by the Romans, truth
must be said. Contemporary Jews have nothing to do
with ancient Israelites, who have never been sent to
exile because such an expulsion has never taken place.
The Roman Exile is just another Jewish myth.

“I started looking in research studies about the exile

from the land” says Sand in an Haaretz intervie",(11)
“but to my astonishment I discovered that it has no
literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of
the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they
could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They
did not have trains and trucks to deport entire
populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the
20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was
born: in the realization that Judaic society was not
dispersed and was not exiled.”

Indeed, in the light of Sand’s simple insight, the idea of

Jewish exile is amusing. The thought of Roman Imperial
navy was working 24/7 schlepping Moishe’le and
Yanka’le to Cordova and Toledo may help Jews to feel
important as well as schleppable, but common sense
would suggest that the Roman armada had far more
important things to do.
However, far more interesting is the logical outcome: If
the people of Israel were not expelled, then the real
descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah
must be the Palestinians.

“No population remains pure over a period of thousands

of years” says Sand.(12) “But the chances that the
Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic
people are much greater than the chances that you or I
are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab
Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling,
and that the Palestinians were descended from the
inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don’t
leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the
second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929
that, ‘the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not
have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather,
before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous
and a majority in the building of the land.’”
In his book Sand takes it further and suggests that until
the First Arab Uprising (1929) the so-called leftist
Zionist leaders tended to believe that the Palestinian
peasants who are actually ‘Jews by origin’ would
assimilate within the emerging Hebraic culture and
would eventually join the Zionist movement. Ber
Borochov believed that “a falach (Palestinian Peasant),
dresses as a Jew, and behaves as a working class Jew,
won’t be at all different from the Jew”. This very idea
reappeared in Ben Gurion’s and Ben-Zvi’s text in 1918.
Both Zionist leaders realised that Palestinian culture was
soaked with Biblical traces, linguistically, as well as
geographically (names of villages, towns, rivers and
mountains). Both Ben Gurion and Ben-Zvi regarded, at
least at that early stage, the indigenous Palestinians as
ethnic relatives who were holding close to the land and
potential brothers. They as well regarded Islam as a
friendly ‘democratic religion’. Clearly, after 1936 both
Ben-Zvi and Ben Gurion toned down their ‘multicultural’
enthusiasm. As far as Ben Gurion is concerned, ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinians seemed to be far more
appealing.
One may wonder, if the Palestinians are the real Jews,
who are those who insist upon calling themselves Jews?

Sand’s answer is rather simple, yet it makes a lot of

sense. “The people did not spread, but the Jewish
religion spread. Judaism was a converting religion.
Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was
a great thirst to convert others.”(13)

Clearly, monotheist religions, being less tolerant than

polytheist ones have within them an expanding impetus.
Judaic expansionism in its early days was not just
similar to Christianity but it was Judaic expansionism
that planted the ‘spreading out’ seeds in early Christian
thought and practice.
“The Hasmoneans,” says Sand (14) “were the first to
begin to produce large numbers of Jews through mass
conversion, under the influence of Hellenism. It was this
tradition of conversions that prepared the ground for
the subsequent, widespread dissemination of
Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the 4th
century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in
the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the
number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who
appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians.
But then Judaism started to permeate other regions -
pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North
Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that
stage and had it not continued to convert people in the
pagan world, we would have remained a completely
marginal religion, if we survived at all.”

The Jews of Spain, whom we believed to be blood

related to the Early Israelites seem to be converted
Berbers. “I asked myself,” says Sand, “how such large
Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And then I saw
that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the
Muslims who conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most
of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia al-Kahina’s Jewish
Berber Kingdom had been defeated only 15 years
earlier. And the truth is there are a number of Christian
sources that say many of the conquerors of Spain were
Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the large
Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers
who converted to Judaism.”

As one would expect, Sand approves the largely

accepted assumption that the Judaicised Khazars
constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities
in Eastern Europe, which he calls the Yiddish Nation.
When asked how come they happen to speak Yiddish,
which is largely regarded as a German medieval dialect,
he answers, “the Jews were a class of people dependent
on the German bourgeoisie in the east, and thus they
adopted German words.”

In his book Sand manages to produce a detailed account

of the Khazarian saga in Jewish history. He explains
what lead the Khazarian kingdom towards conversion.
Bearing in mind that Jewish nationalism is, for the most
part, lead by a Khazarian elite, we may have to expand
our intimate knowledge of this very unique yet
influential political group. The translation of Sand’s
work into foreign languages is an immediate must.
What Next?

Professor Sand leaves us with the inevitable conclusion.

Contemporary Jews do not have a common origin and
their Semitic origin is a myth. Jews have no origin in
Palestine whatsoever and therefore, their act of so-
called ‘return’ to their ‘promised land’ must be realised
as an invasion executed by a tribal-ideological clan.

However, though Jews do not constitute any racial

continuum, they for some reason happen to be racially
orientated. As we may notice, many Jews still see mixed
marriage as the ultimate threat. Furthermore, in spite of
modernisation and secularisation, the vast majority of
those who identify as secular Jews still succumb to
blood ritual (circumcision) a unique religious procedure
which involves no less than blood sucking by a Mohel.

As far as Sand is concerned, Israel should become “a

state of its citizens”. Like Sand, I myself believe in the
same futuristic utopian vision. However, unlike Sand, I
do grasp that the Jewish state and its supportive lobbies
must be ideologically defeated. Brotherhood and
reconciliation are foreign to Jewish tribal worldview and
have no room within the concept of Jewish national
revival. As dramatic as it may sound, a process of de-
judaification must take place before Israelis can adopt
any universal modern notion of civil life.
Sand is no doubt a major intellectual, probably the most
advanced leftist Israeli thinker. He represents the
highest form of thought a secular Israeli can achieve
before flipping over or even defecting to the Palestinian
side (something that happened to just a few, me
included). Haaretz interviewer Ofri Ilani said about Sand
that unlike other ‘new historians’ who have tried to
undermine the assumptions of Zionist historiography,
“Sand does not content himself with going back to 1948
or to the beginnings of Zionism, but rather goes back
thousands of years.” This is indeed the case, unlike the
‘new historians’ who ‘unveil’ a truth that is known to
every Palestinian toddler i.e., the truth of being
ethnically cleansed, Sand erects a body of work and
thought that is aiming at the understanding of the
meaning of Jewish nationalism and Jewish identity. This
is indeed the true essence of scholarship. Rather than
collecting some sporadic historical fragments, Sand
searches for the meaning of history. Rather than a ‘new
historian’ who searches for a new fragment, he is a real
historian motivated by a humanist task. Most crucially,
unlike some of the Jewish historians who happen to
contribute to the so-called left discourse, Sand’s
credibility and success is grounded on his argument
rather than his family background. He avoids peppering
his argument with his holocaust survivor relatives.
Reading Sand’s ferocious argument, one may have to
admit that Zionism in all its faults has managed to erect
within itself a proud and autonomous dissident
discourse that is far more eloquent and brutal than the
entire anti-Zionist movement around the world.

If Sand is correct, and I myself am convinced by the

strength of his argument, then Jews are not a race but
rather a collective of very many people who are largely
hijacked by a late phantasmic national movement. If
Jews are not a race, do not form a racial continuum and
have nothing to do with Semitism, then ‘anti-Semitism’
is, categorically, an empty signifier. It obviously refers to
a signifier that doesn’t exist. In other words, our
criticism of Jewish nationalism, Jewish lobbying and
Jewish power can only be realised as a legitimate
critique of ideology and practice.

Once again I may say it, we are not and never been
against Jews (the people) nor we are against Judaism
(the religion). Yet, we are against a collective
philosophy with some clear global interests. Some
would like to call it Zionism but I prefer not to. Zionism
is a vague signifier that is far too narrow to capture the
complexity of Jewish nationalism, its brutality, ideology
and practice. Jewish nationalism is a spirit and spirit
doesn’t have clear boundaries. In fact, none of us know
exactly where Jewishness stops and where Zionism
starts as much as we do not know where Israeli interests
stop and where the Neocon’s interests start.
As far as the Palestinian cause is concerned, the
message is rather devastating. Our Palestinian brothers
and sisters are at the forefront of a struggle against a
very devastating philosophy. Yet, it is clearly not just the
Israelis whom they fight with rather a fierce pragmatic
philosophy that initiates global conflicts on some
gigantic scale. It is a tribal practice that seeks influence
within corridors of power and super powers in
particular. The American Jewish Committee is pushing
for a war against Iran. Just to be on the safe side David
Abrahams, a ‘Labour Friend of Israel’ donates money to
the Labour Party by proxy. More or less at the same time
two million Iraqis die in an illegal war designed by one
called Wolfowitz. While all the above is taking place,
millions of Palestinians are starved in concentration
camps and Gaza is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis.
As it all happens, ‘anti-Zionist’ Jews and Jews in the left
(Chomsky included) insist upon dismantling the
eloquent criticism of AIPAC, Jewish lobbying and Jewish
power posed by Mearsheimer and Walt (15)
Is it just Israel? Is it really Zionism? Or shall we admit
that it is something far greater than we are entitled even
to contemplate within the intellectual boundaries we
imposed upon ourselves? As things stand, we lack the
intellectual courage to confront the Jewish national
project and its many messengers around the world.
However, since it is all a matter of consciousness-shift,
things are going to change soon. In fact, this very text
is there to prove that they are changing already.

To stand by the Palestinians is to save the world, but in

order to do so we have to be courageous enough to
stand up and admit that it is not merely a political
battle. It is not just Israel, its army or its leadership, it
isn’t even Dershowitz, Foxman and their silencing
leagues. It is actually a war against a cancerous spirit
that hijacked the West and, at least momentarily,
diverted it from its humanist inclination and Athenian
aspirations. To fight a spirit is far more difficult than
fighting people, just because one may have to first fight
its traces within oneself. If we want to fight Jerusalem,
we may have to first confront Jerusalem within. We may
have to stand in front of the mirror, look around us. We
may have to trace for empathy in ourselves in case there
is anything left.
1.When And How The Jewish People Was Invented?
Shlomo Sand, Resling 2008, pg 11
2.http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html

3.When And How The Jewish People Was Invented?

Shlomo Sand, Resling 2008, pg 31
4. Ibid pg 31
5.Ibid pg 42
6.ibid
7.Ibid pg 62
8.ibid

9. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html
10. When And How The Jewish People Was Invented?
Shlomo Sand, Resling 2008, pg 117
11.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html
12. ibid
13. ibid
14. ibid

15. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/shlomo-
sands-the-invention-of-the-jewish-people-
book-review.html

http://www.gilad.co.uk/