The historical and theological
background of the Zionist claim should also be discussed and argued. As history
and religion might seem interrelated, I want to eliminate from the start the
argument of the Promised Land. According to the Bible, the land of Canaan was
given by God to Abraham and his seed – the Jews. This can be easily found in
Torah, in the Bible and in the Qur’an. At the same time, Zion is one of the
biblical names of Jerusalem. Since the destruction of the First Temple in 586
B.C. and the exile to Babylon, the Jews yearned to return to Zion[1].
This is the theological motivation of the Zionist claim to Palestine.
For a non-believer
this whole argument would have no value. In fact, as it is a matter of
religious belief it cannot even be taken into account as a proof. Moreover, bearing
in mind that Palestine is the land of the holy places for all the three
monotheistic religions, one might say that any of them would have equal rights
to the land. Nevertheless, how can anyone prove that the Jews are actually the
same with the ancient Israelities? It is hard to accept the idea that for such
a long period of time a group of people has remained unchanged as they traveled
from one place to another and they’ve been through processes like conversion
and intermarriage.
Here we come to
the historical background of the problem. No one can contest the argument that
Jews originated in Palestine 2000 years ago. On the other hand, this can never
give them the right to claim it for themselves after all this time in the
detriment of its indigenous inhabitants. There are many cases in world’s
history of people and tribes that were forced to move from their homeland to
another place, but no one except from the Zionists promote such an abhorrent
idea of reversing the history.
In fact, Jews
were dispersed by the Romans in AD 70 and they were sent into exile. However,
the mass dispersion was rather small and mainly internal. It is true that some
of them ended up joining the diaspora, but most of the Jews remained in
Palestine. From those, a part converted to Christianity and later on to Islam.
The rest of them were the Jewish minority that could be found in Palestine
before the whole Zionist project started: less than 10% of the population[2].
But Zionism was
born in Europe and not in the Middle East, therefore what concerns us is the
question of the European Jews and their origins. By the 19th century
more than a half of the whole Jewish population was in Lithuania and Poland. Big
communities of Jews could also be found in Russia and in Western Europe, even though
their status and condition was different from one country to another[3].
There are two
main explanations for the origins of the European Jews: the Jewish traders of
the Middle Ages who travelled to the Mediterranean and Western Europe and the
Khazar conversions in the 18th century (East European Jews)[4].
No matter which
explanation we accept or whether we accept them both, it is hard to believe in
the existence of an unbroken chain in between the Jews of Palestine and those
of Europe. This was just one more absurd argument used by the Zionists to convince
people and to justify the return to their “homeland”- Palestine. In fact, keeping
in mind the conversion to Judaism that had been taking place all over the
world, it could not be said that there was such a biological, racial or
national entity as the “Jewish People”[5].
On the other
hand, Palestine became a predominantly Arab country by the end of the 7th
century. Even though it has been inhabited by Muslims, Jews and Christians,
Palestine existed as a largely pastoral community that also had social,
economical, political and cultural strengths, and whose people used a common
language – Arabic. For a big majority the religion was Islam. They were the
owners of the land and that was their home. Even as a province in the Ottoman
Empire, Palestine was still proving a sense of nationalism, of course different
from the European perception of nationalism. Therefore, whereas the Jews can’t
really prove a national identity, the Palestinians were joined together not
only by their land, but also by their common history and language.
And the reality
is even more striking when it comes to numbers that prove once again how the
Zionist claim is more of a “struggle between a presence and an interpretation”[6]. In 1822, according to
Israeli sources, in Palestine there were no more than 24,000 Jews which
represented less than 10% of the whole Arab population. In 1931, the number of
Jews was 174,606 out of 1,033,314, in 1936, they were 384,078 out of 1,366,692
and in 1946 their number was 608,225 out of 1,912,112[7]. The majority of natives
is reflected in those numbers and it was easily distinguishable: they were
mainly Sunni Muslims, but they were also minorities of Christians, Druzes,
Shiite Muslims; they all spoke Arabic.
Having seen the
numbers, the declaration of a right-wing writer in Haaretz would definitely
make no sense: “Our right to Eretz Israel and our right to establish a
sovereign national entity on it does not depend on our numbers, and on whether
we are a majority or a minority.” How can one pretend that a land is his and
deny the existence of such a great minority that had been there from the very
start?! This is one more example of the way the whole Zionist project was based
on an absurd denial.
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