“I don’t want revenge. I want peace"

Drowning in a sea of lies and propaganda I write down my thoughts on the future of Israel and Palestine. I wonder now if there is anyone in the world who agrees with me even enough to publish this item on a website, if only to promote discussion. See next post.

“I don’t want revenge. I want peace”

These words from a young woman who had just survived a brutal attack by Hamas fighters by hiding in a hole in the ground should be made to echo through Israel, across the border to Gaza and Palestine and around the world, in support of millions on both sides of the border fence trapped between the corrupt and dictatorial ultra-Zionist Netanyahu regime and the senseless, hopeless and ultra-violent oppressive regime of Hamas.

To even begin to imagine a way of moving towards peace between Israel and the Palestinians we need to ask some fundamental questions about the origins of the conflict. How did we get here, is there any truth in the founding myths, does religion help humanity?

Who are the Jews?

The traditional answer is that Jews were from the Kingdom of David and Solomon, Israel and Judea and were driven out by the Romans after the military defeats of the Macabee rebellion and the Ba Kochba revolt, that they became a nation without a home and after the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity were subject to persecution on theological grounds as the supposed killers or betrayers of Jesus, that the Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish because they had escaped from Germany and were allowed to settle beyond the pale at the edge of the Russian Empire. Alternatively, from Arthur Koestler the Ashkenazim had nothing to do with Jews in the bible but were descended from the Khazars who converted to the Jewish religion. What we see now, with the benefit of science, is an alternative reality.

Primary and secondary nomads.

Jews are a distinct population, made up of the tribes of Israel and the Levites, the other ten being fictitious. They are strongly interlinked by languages, culture, family resemblances and multiple connections on the DNA databases and they live as a minority in almost every part of the world. Religion acts as a glue holding the tribes together in the long term but Jews are not defined by it.

Primary nomads are hunter-gatherers who live in a well defined territory and often have an intimate relationship with the land. Indigenous Australians, for example can have a myth that the land they hunt was created for them by an ancestor, the rainbow serpent. They might speak the languages of five surrounding tribes and trade is normal but they defend their boundary and have detailed knowledge of the routes and the water holes. In Monkey Mia, Western Australia, they greet the land and walk barefoot except when entering land of another tribe.

Jews and Gypsies have no such attachment to the land around them but can live in or between population centres, between cities, across oceans and continents. Unlike indigenous people who might have been in one place for 50,000 years the secondary nomads are only as old as urban civilisation. So the Hebrews can be traced back through the myths in the Book of Genesis to a hunter gatherer lifestyle in the “garden of Eden” using a Sumerian word for the wild countryside between the City States, then to the beginning of farming within the fertile crescent and the earliest city states in Pre-Sumerian Iraq, along the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. If we put to one side any references to God, prophesies and miracles the Torah remains a document of some historical significance giving names of real places and real people and indicating a claim of descent from the Hebrew wandering tribes who rejected the city states, left the Royal City of Ur and wandered off in search of a “land of milk and honey”, or viable farmland for cows and bees during the formation of rival City States that were evolving patriarchy, slavery, war and oppression of the poor by the rich regulated by a legal code and sanctified by religion. This biblical scenario would make Jews carriers of the oldest continuous culture in the world, literate and numerate, but never the most powerful and one which has outlasted Sumeria, Babylon and ancient Egypt, the Hellenic Empire, the rise and fall of Rome and world domination by Europe and America. Perhaps by coincidence the year zero in the Hebrew calendar, 3,761 BCE, is within three hundred years of the earliest known writing, in the right place and the right time when it would be possible to have a calendar.

Less is known concerning the origin of the Gypsies, The Romani people and others from earlier waves of migration are secondary nomads from Northern India with no single founder population. It is tempting to link their origins to the other great mystery of Northern India, the disappearance of the Indus Vally civilisation which had more towns and cities than the rest of the world and traded by sea with Babylon. There are no clues in the Indus script, so far unreadable, but the hypothesis would be that Gypsies transported crops and carried skills between cities and were abandoned when the cities collapsed, wandering off into India and eventually west via Iran living on the road dealing in horses and selling their skills at music, dance, advanced metallurgy and fortune telling.

Diaspora and Antisemitism

Attacks on Jews cannot be explained in terms of Christian theology. In 800 BC there was a Phoenician diaspora around the Mediterranean. Traders from the coastal strip of modern Lebanon and northern Israel had built wooden boats from cedar wood and established trading posts around the mediterranean in sites which would later become the cities such as Barcelona, Cadiz and Carthage. Egypt even paid them to explore Africa in a two year trip from the red sea clockwise ending at Alexandria.

By 300 BC the Phoenicians had been replaced by a Jewish diaspora and anti -Jewish riots were reported in Rome. It has been suggested that the replication of one diaspora with another could only have taken place by means of conversion when the old Gods were displaced by the God of Israel. Later, when Christian martyrs were fed to the lions in Rome they were sacrificed not in contrast but equally alongside and with Jews because as far as the Romans were concerned they were just dissident Jews.

Even before there was a Jewish religion accounts of the Exodus from Egypt, the biblical version (but without any reference to divine intervention or prophesies) and other accounts from Egyptian and Hellenic sources are comparable to the Pogroms and the Spanish Inquisition. The Hebrews arrived hungry and impoverished but within a short historical period are rich and successful. The local people are envious and they are either driven out or forced into slavery from which they escape.

The Jewish diaspora in Christian Europe survived and adapted despite riots and pogroms in countries such as England, Germany and Russia. Yiddish culture flourished in the East with its own literature, theatre and a rich musical genre, klezmer, which went on to be a major influence on Broadway and Hollywood.

Ashkenazi Jews

Jews have lived along the rivers of eastern Europe for more than a thousand years, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, having migrated there direct from Israel/Judea/Palestine. Conversion of the Khazars was limited to the ruling elite and in terms of yDNA, the male line of descent shows them to be from Levantine people, very much like the population of Iraq, Syria and Palestine. In contrast the mtDNA shows female ancestry, possibly a genetic bottleneck, mainly from southern Europe, Greece or Italy.

Just as the Phoenicians had traded around the Mediterranean they were settled at key locations on the silk road to trade between China India Persia Arabia and Europe with a Jewish outpost as far away as Kaifeng, Henen province. Kiev, generally believed to have been founded by Vikings as the first capital of Russia, has emerged as the western outpost of the Khazar empire before the arrival of The Rus and Slavs with a Jewish part of the city in the 9th century. It was by then a major trading post for Radhanites, trading between Spain, Persia and China.

The Yiddish language was a creole of Russian Grammer and some Aramaic lexicon which went through a process of “relexification” to incorporate a Germanic vocabulary. It is believed to have been originally a secret language used on the silk road among Jewish traders when German was the language of the road, just as Gypsies have traditionally used the Romani language or back slang to talk among themselves. Yiddish sounds as bit like German but was not spoken by German Jews.

Zionism

There had long been a nostalgia in Jewish culture, a longing to return to the Kingdom of David and Solomon though it is by no means certain that the United Kingdom of Israel and Judea could have existed without being noticed by the Egyptians. There were two reasons why the Zionist ideology appealed only to a minority of Ashkenazi Jews.

Firstly, they were at home in Europe despite the Pogroms, with established settlements and a vibrant culture compared to which ancient Israel was a comparatively brief and bloody interlude in their very long history. Then there were political consequences of a religious revival.

There were Rabbis in every village who claimed to be descended from the Baal Shem Tov, the mystical founder of a Chassidic Jewish revival who killed a werewolf and visited the Meshiach in heaven. He is quoted, or misquoted, in Wickipedia as saying that his followers should ”love all Jews” meaning not just the educated and wealthy but those who find life difficult including the less bright, criminals and prostitutes. The problem with this account is that the Word Yid’n does literally mean Jews (plural) but was also used in Yiddish to mean people, and he was advocating a more general love of humanity inclusive of the most downtrodden and oppressed.

The Chassidic revival had the character of a pre-revolutionary movement expressed in the language of religion, perhaps analogous to Liberation theology within the Catholic Church in South America. Ashkenazi Jews played a significant role in every party of the left in the Russian Empire, from that religious background they became Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Anarchists, Supporters of the Bund and early Utopian Socialist Zionists. None of these had anything in common with the ultra orthodox religious sects in Israel today.

It is not hard to see why Jews were then attracted to Marxism, communism, and later to Trotsky’s vision of world revolution. So it is that the majority of Jews murdered in the gas chambers were opposed to Zionism and in the current political climate, in the UK at least, would be accused of Antisemitism.

After the Shoah there was the most profound change in the Psychology of Jewishness. A founding myth of an escape from slavery in Egypt seemed a trivial event compared to recent history and the general concept that Jews do not fight after the survivors of the Bar Kockba revolt were worked to death building the Coliseum in Rome, the so called Ghetto mentality, was replaced by a doctrine of extreme militarism, beginning with the Ghetto uprisings in Warsaw and Vilnius. Leon Trotsky, a co-leader of the Russian revolution who was born in Ukraine as Lev Davidovich Bronstein but spoke no Yiddish and took no part in Jewish political life said shortly before his murder that there had to be somewhere under the sun where Jews could live.

It is almost incidental that it suited the short term interests of colonial powers to promise Israel as a national homeland for the Jews, the fact is that they had nowhere else to go, they went illegally and in the end they fought the British as well as the Palestinians and allied armies for the possibility of survival. Their choice at the time was between Israel or death.

There can be no moral justification for what Israel has done to the Palestinians, no excuse in terms of any international law, no mitigation because Palestinians were not their enemy and no obvious remedy in the near future, but Israel is a fait accompli, it is there and has nowhere else to go. The Shoah and the Naqba are linked events and the Palestinians suffer its consequences along with the Jews.

The Shoah was not an isolated event but the end result of deeply rooted antisemitism and the incapacity of an oppressive state machine to co-exist with secondary nomads. It could be repeated in the USA or Russia. The conspiracy theories around Donald Trump, the demagogic appeal to fight ‘The Establishment’, the educated elite who supposedly control all the money and the media, are all the language of antisemitism without mentioning the Jews. This is a right wing movement with some similarities to German or Italian Fascism, saved by the accident that Trump has a Jewish daughter and serves as a reminder that Jews along with other minorities are not safe in America or Europe.

The new Jewish militarism was evident in the race to get an atom bomb before Hitler from the original proposal by Einstein and Szilard to President Roosvelt, Oppenheimer who headed the Manhatton Project with a team including Jewish Hungarian mathematicians and then Edward Teller, so called father of the Hydrogen bomb. European Jews had no military tradition but were able to learn from books, to apply maths and science and crucially to argue and debate ideas. If nuclear weapons did not exist there can be little doubt that Israel would invent them.

The Zionist state today faces its greatest challenge, that of learning how not to fight, the pursuit of peace. A new leadership will be needed to start building solidarity between millions of Jews and Palestinians still suffering the consequences of European history.

continued

Religion

There is not much doubt that the Jewish religion evolved from the struggle between opposing classes in ancient Israel and Judea but the original pure monotheism came from Egypt. The Pharoah Akhenaten (beloved of the sun) had abolished the Gods, closed the temples and announced that all life came from the sun then the deity with no human or animal form became more abstract. The empire started to fall apart and the Pharoah vanished after a military coup led by Horemheb who put himself on the throne after the death of young Tutankhamun.

The destruction of the temple as described in relation to the first temple in Jerusalem did actually happen to the Temple at the new city of Akhetaten, near present day Amarna and there was hardly a shred of evidence that it ever existed until broken pieces were found in the Talatat, the inner filling of columns in a much later temple.

Moses, whether a historical or a fictional character was clearly an Egyptian from the Royal Household and somehow linked to the family of Akhenaten.

Belief in an abstract deity was politically significant, especially in slave states of antiquity where the king was God, or the owner of rare and expensive works of art, the idols which had to be worshipped to show allegiance to the state. That was always a problem for the Hebrews, and later for Jews. Their nomadic lifestyle obliged them to be in some way to be “above the nations”.

The Palestinians

In Israel they are called “Israeli Arabs”, presumably on the grounds that they speak Arabic. Elsewhere they call themselves Palestinians and under Ottoman rule they lived in the province of Philistina. So we might ask whether the Palestinians have a complex origin or could they be descended only from the Philistines? The Philistines, or sea people arrived in Canaan about the same time as the Hebrews. They came in boats, perhaps from the Greek islands but little is known about their origins or language. If Palestinians are the sea people we must ask what happened to the earlier population who built Jericho, to the Canaanites who were an advanced culture ahead of Egypt in the Bronze age and the Phoenicians in Northern Israel who carried rare purple dyes and the alphabet through the known world.

There is no evidence that the spread of Islam was achieved by means of ethnic cleansing. Language and religion could change but population remained essentially the same. Modern Egyptians are descendants of people who built the pyramids and Moroccans are an ethnic mix quite different from Arabs. It should come as no surprise that the yDNA of Palestinian men shows them to be Levantine, or local people closely related to Syrian Lebanese and others, including Jews. The y chromosome does not travel alone from one generation to the next alone but is accompanied by all the autosomal DNA which splits and recombines in meiosis spreading and sharing huge numbers of SNPs, (single nucleotide polymorphisms) which is a biological basis for similarity, relatedness and health risks. When Yasser Arafat repeated that he was against Zionism, not against Jews, that Jews and Palestinians were cousins he was just a few years ahead of the scientific evidence.

A probable explanation for now is that Samaritans and Jews in Israel and Judea were descended from Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews and some Egyptian Levites, were converted in large numbers to Christianity then to Islam and apart from the Samaritans the spoken language changed from Aramaic to Arabic. After the arrival of Islam (7th century) some unconverted Jews migrated north to the area of Bessarabia and Ukraine. The sea people were at some stage absorbed into the surrounding population.

So What?

It might be argued that the shared inheritance of Jews and Palestinians, cultural and biological, has no bearing on the political situation in Israel or the rights of Palestinians to return to their homes. There is however a problem for the ideology of secular Zionism.

A religious orthodox or Chasidic Jew could pray every day for “next year in Jerusalem” but for him this would be a spiritual aspiration, something that happened when the Messiah arrived. The idea of Jerusalem being captured by fighting with machine guns was anathema. It would destroy the Jerusalem he imagined.

Zionism was a secular ideology based on a 19th century version of Jewish history, which held that Jews were a nation without a home after being expelled from Israel by the Romans and all Jews, religious or not had the right of return. It would be hard to argue against the extension of that right of return to people of Israel and Judea who stayed and changed their religion but are driven out in modern times, to refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, locked in the Ghetto that is Gaza and into a Palestinian diaspora around the world. A truth based identity politics would at least point the way to unity and solidarity between Jews and Palestinians.

There is now an impasse, an unresolved and seemingly unresolvable conflict in which religious thinking is irrelevant and nationalism and Zionism offer no way of even imagining a route towards peace. This I suggest is a time for Marxist thinking to address the long term issues of nations, states and solidarity with the oppressed.

A two state solution would mean endless war over routes between Gaza and the west bank and over water in an age of global warming. There has eventually to be a single united state with equal rights for those of all religions and none and incorporating ‘aliyah’ the right of return, as a safety valve in cases of mass antisemitism and Islamophobia. The closest historical model would be the ‘kingdom of four religions’ in Moorish Spain and there is a precedent in the oldest organised religion of India, Jainism, which taught tolerance of all beliefs including atheism.

Needed most urgently is a humanitarian corridor for unarmed civilians between Gaza City and the west bank with appeals to Israelis to offer support with water and food.

Robin Jamieson

13/10/2023