05.09.2024

Ancient myths as today’s weapons

Prime ministers from David Ben Gurion to Benjamin Netanyahu have quoted biblical stories of a promised land, conquest and imperial glory. Jack Conrad shows that, while this owes little or nothing to actual history, it does serve as standard Zionist ideological cover for colonisation, ethnic cleansing and genocide

Modern Zionism is a blood-and-soil nationalist ideology, whose origins lie squarely in the malignant reinvention and growing pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in 19th and 20th century Europe.

Jews, for complex historical reasons, were to be found disproportionately in high finance, the liberal professions, the militant working class and the revolutionary intelligentsia and, therefore, could, albeit half-crazily, be blamed for every perceived evil: the Enlightenment and rising bank rates, Marxism and wars that ended badly, demands for universal suffrage and hyperinflation, mass strikes and Freud, syphilis, jazz and comic books. In short, Jews could be systematically diabolised by the forces of reaction, not least the religious establishment, in the attempt to construct a social bulwark against the incoming tide of democracy, modernism and communism.

However, Zionism - to begin with a fringe on the fringe - unlike other, what might be called ‘normal’, nationalisms, could not aspire to unite a distinct people possessing a common territory, economy, language or even religion. Zionism was a reaction to reaction, a nationalism attempting to make a nation … and that out of a human miscellany who perhaps only shared one defining common characteristic: being the butt of anti-Semitism (not because of religion - Jews were increasingly secular - but because they had a cultural background in the religion, even if only practised by parents or grandparents).

Tsarist Russia and kingdom Poland contained a Jewish population which formed a distinct, Yiddish-speaking nationality. The 1897 census counted around five million of them. Yet Jews lived throughout the world and spoke numerous languages (as they still do). After the 1789 French revolution the general trend in western Europe manifestly pointed towards rapid assimilation and eventual absorption. In Paris and Brussels Jews spoke French. In London, Leeds and Manchester, English. In Berlin, Cologne and Vienna, German.

Hebrew was a dead language: used only by rabbis, cantors and other such traditional intellectuals. And, besides the few religious Zionists, most Zionists were, of course, secular and atheist. They, in particular the Labor Zionists, formed a clear majority at world congresses of the movement. Indeed till the Nazi holocaust - the apoplectic climax of European anti-Semitism - most orthodox Jews considered Zionism something akin to blasphemy. God alone should restore Israel, not man. An eschatological doctrine still defended by sects such as Neturei Karta (who regularly turn out in all their fur and finery for the mass pro-Palestine demonstrations in London and elsewhere to widespread applause).

Nonetheless, against the growing cancer of anti-Semitism, Zionism held out the promise of ‘normal’ nationhood and thereby deliverance from persecution and discrimination. Secular Jews like Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker, Theodor Herzl and Ber Borochov arguably - and such was the claim - only truly discovered their Jewishness through being labelled, targeted or attacked as Jews. And there was, for sure, a tsunami of anti-Semitism: eg, the Catholic church’s ‘Christ-killers’ doctrines, preachings and mob violence; Russia’s closely related Black Hundreds and state-initiated pogroms; the concoction and dissemination of The protocols of the elders of Zion; the Dreyfus affair and Action Française; the ‘anti-capitalism of fools’ peddled by Édouard Drumont, Adolph Stoeker and Mikhail Bakunin; the pseudo-scientific racial theories of Francis Galton, William Ripley and Ludwig Gumplowicz; etc.

Zionism responded not by demanding equality and democratic assimilation. On the contrary, it rejected assimilation and dogmatically insisted that gentiles were by their very nature irredeemably anti-Semitic. Hence the symbiotic, albeit totally unequal, relationship between anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and Zionism, on the other.

Zionism gained a hearing amongst ordinary Jews solely due to anti-Semitism and therefore had no fundamental interest in uniting with other forces - neither to combat nor extinguish what Abram Leon called the morbid symptoms of a “decaying feudalism” in the east and a “rotting capitalism” in the west.¹ Zionism fed off anti-Semitism and often sought an active accommodation with it.

Herzl - the founder of modern-day, political Zionism - famously explained to the tsar’s minister of police, Vyacheslav von Plehve, that by encouraging Zionism he would weaken the revolutionary movement in Russia and vice versa. It should be noted that the Bund, a Jewish organisation, was formed in 1897 - the first mass working class socialist organisation in the tsarist empire. Moreover, Jews, let us add, occupied leading positions in both wings of the even more substantial Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

Herzl, as might be expected, considered that anti-Semitic governments were the very ones which would “have the most interest” in facilitating the Zionist project of organising a mass exodus.² They would be as delighted to see the Jews leave as the Zionists. And between 1881 and 1914 some two million Jews exited the Russian empire - mainly, though, for middle and western Europe, Britain and the United States.

The Nazi regime agreed on a transfer deal for Jews from Germany to go to Palestine in the 1930s. Zionist organisations were also allowed to continue to function - albeit on a low-profile basis. Under the Haavara agreement some 53,000 German Jews migrated to Palestine. Only when plans for mass removal became impossible due to the outbreak of war in 1939 did that policy come to an effective end. Not that this stopped the armed rightwing Zionist Lehi (militant) organisation, or, as it is pejoratively known, the ‘Stern gang’, from advocating an anti-British alliance with Germany and Italy.

As an aside, it could be - indeed it has been - argued, that those anti-Semites who supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine were, or are, by definition, Zionists. That would, of course, make a lot of top-brass Nazis, though not Adolf Hitler, Zionists, but then there is Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Olaf Scholz and Keir Starmer - all of them say loud and clear that they are proud to call themselves Zionists. What they mean, of course, is that they are pro-Israel.

And it cannot be emphasised too strongly in this context that Zionism has always relied on securing an imperial sponsor. First it was Britain, then France and finally the post-World War II global hegemon itself, the United States. That said, here, in this article, we shall stick to Zionism being an ideology, a nationalist movement of an oppressed people, who, in no small part settled in and colonised Palestine, and who have unmistakably gone on to become an oppressor nation, with all that this entails in terms of discrimination, racism, exclusion, etc.

Grand narrative

To begin with, the idea of carving out a homeland in the Argentine and then Uganda was toyed with. But Zionism without Zion could never appeal to the hearts of the masses, especially those in Russia and eastern Europe. The Zionist movement soon decided upon the ‘promised land’ - and therefore the implicit necessity of armed conflict with the indigenous population, the ‘Bedouins’, as they were condescendingly described.

“The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvellous potency,” predicted Herzl.³ And from the early years of the 20th century onwards a steady trickle of Jews arrived from Europe. The deal with British imperialism agreeing to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, the November 2 1917 Balfour declaration⁴ - that and, above all, the Nazi genocide, which, of course, included other Untermenschen - gave migration a massive boost and helped consolidate Zionism as the dominant ideology amongst wide sections of the Jewish masses. Victory in the 1967 Six Day War and US sponsorship did the rest.

A Jewish state for the Jewish people - in Palestine - could be depicted as part of a grand historical-religious narrative. The grandest. Both the ultimate safe house for Jews throughout the world and the continuation, perhaps culmination, of the Jewish story, as recounted in the 24 books of the Hebrew bible, the Tanakh (a collection variously added to by the main branches of Christianity and commonly called the Old Testament). Zionists justified - and continue to justify - the ongoing colonisation, the wars and annexations, the mass expulsions, the reduction of the West Bank to a series of Palestinian reservations and the destruction of Gaza, by citing modern Israel’s “roots in the distant past”.

They, the Zionists, are the (self) chosen representatives of Yahweh’s chosen people. They, the 12 Hebrew tribes having escaped from Egyptian bondage, roamed the deserts of Sinai and Arabia under the leadership of Moses, before turning to Canaan, a land “beyond the Jordan and towards the sunrise”, which had already been promised to them by god almighty himself (Abram, the first of the patriarchs, was told in a vision that to his “descendants I will give this land”⁵). And against all the odds, now commanded by Joshua, the 12 tribes “smote the kings” of Canaan. The Amorites, Hittites, Jebusites, Hivites, Perizzites and Girgashites were all either comprehensively routed or successfully resisted.

Ominously, however, in terms of present-day Palestinians, Joshua’s god told him to slaughter the inhabitants of any city that dared resist … everyone who surrendered was to be sold off into slavery. When it came to the Amalekites, who inhabited the southern borders, they were to be “utterly” destroyed down to the last “man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”.⁶ Subsequently, king David and then his son, Solomon - well, at least according to the narrative - established a fabulously rich empire stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, with a capital in Jerusalem crowned by a magnificent temple. The envy of rulers far and wide, including, of course, the famed queen of Sheba.

True, because of the continued idolatrous worship of other gods, fornication with foreign women and the all-round wickedness of bad kings, Israel’s independence was ended by a vengeful Yahweh. His covenant with the chosen people had been broken. Assyria invaded in the 8th century BCE, then the Babylonians in the 6th century BCE. In both cases members of the elite were subject to forced exile. A biblical account that is seamlessly joined by modern-day Zionists with the sacking of Jerusalem in 73 CE, Bar Kokhba’s 132-36 revolt and the absurd claim that the Romans expelled the entire Jewish population from Palestine. After that they were supposedly a “wandering nation”, foreigners living in foreign lands.

Hence, speaking in July 1950, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, argued in a matter of fact way that it is “impossible to understand the revival of the Jewish state without knowledge of the Jewish people from its beginning”. After many generations, what has been called the Jewish ‘exiled-people race’, had “through incessant efforts” at last returned to its “home”.⁷ Israel had been divinely given to the Jews, so with the 1948 declaration of independence they simply retook what was rightfully theirs.

A claim echoed many times before and since, including by Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Responding to the International Court of Justice ruling that found Israeli presence in the occupied territories to be illegal, he insisted that the Jewish people “are not occupiers in their own land - not in our eternal capital, Jerusalem, not in the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria … the legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland cannot be contested”.⁸ Sinisterly, he, and others on the Israeli right, also compare modernday Palestinians with the ancient Amalekites.

DNA evidence

Over the last 2,700 years or so those whom we might call Jews have been fragmented geographically and subject to many different concrete situations. There have been absorptions through assimilation as well as individual and collective conversions - an argument made by others, not least Shlomo Sand in his best-selling study.⁹ Leave aside his recapitulation of the Khazar thesis, there are the Falashas - the black Jews of Ethiopia.¹⁰ During the time of Jesus it is guessed that a good half of all Jews lived outside Palestine - commerce, not god, being the prime mover. It is, moreover, quite obvious that Jews, especially males, have freely interbred with those whom they lived amongst.

As a result, in eastern Europe, Jews look what we might call eastern European, in north Africa they look what we might call north African, in India they look what we might call Indian. DNA studies of self-defined Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews might well show markers inherited from distant ancestors in the Caucuses or the Middle East. But there are plenty of other inputs - in the case of Ashkenazis, an estimated 40% of their DNA is from Europe.¹¹ When it comes to mtDNA (inherited via the mother), the figure is overwhelming: 80% European (mainly traceable back to “prehistoric” times.) So it is clear that, although Jews maintained “detectable vertical genetic continuity along generations of socio-religious-cultural relationship”, it is also the case that “intensive horizontal genetic relations were maintained” with the “gentile surrounding”.¹² Hence there is no unbroken line of genetic descent, when it comes to world Jewry. So no Jewish ‘racial’ purity (despite Nazi and Zionist claims to the contrary).

No less importantly, there is culture. Whereas in western Europe Jews escaped from the straightjacket of trade and usury and assimilated, in 19th century Russia they formed a Germanic-speaking national minority and in the Ottoman Sultanate they were a generally tolerated, Arab-speaking, religious minority. Historically, therefore, we can reliably say that Jews have had many homelands, many languages, many class locations.

Equally to the point: Palestine has been continuously inhabited by an indigenous population - the majority of whom were once Jewish, but subsequently become Christian, then Muslim. In other words, the descendants of the Jewish masses who rallied to Simon Maccabee, the Nazarene party of James the Just and the Zealots, who rose up and fought the Seleucid Macedonians and after them the Romans in a series of popular revolutions, are, as of now, being oppressed and colonised by a modern-day equivalent of the medieval Crusaders, who, in terms of their late 19th century political origins, had a purely imagined relationship with Palestine.

Legitimisation

Understandably, the fledgling Israeli state was concerned not only with expanding towns, building infrastructure, seizing water sources and fighting wars with the indigenous Palestinians and neighbouring Arab countries. Those in government to begin with, the Labor Zionists - who were, as already mentioned, often avowed atheists - generously financed university archaeological departments, extensive digs and scores of museums to display the artefacts. Not because of any wish to promote disinterested science, but as a form of ideological warfare.

The idea was to legitimise the Zionist state by showcasing what was considered its ancient Israeli antecedents. Stone Age and Bronze Age Canaanite discoveries were mere sideshows; there was, though, complete indifference, if not downright hostility, towards examining Palestine under the Arabs or Turks. Islamic civilisation did not fit with the ideological schema.

Not that the Israeli state is unique in such matters. Modern-day Turkey, for instance, does not seek legitimacy through the Hellenistic culture, which dominated the Anatolian coastline from the Bronze Age till the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Quite the reverse. As a result, starved of funds, Greek ruins are often left unguarded from looters or simply given over to the elements and allowed to steadily deteriorate.

Ever since the Byzantine era, travellers well versed in the Bible have visited Palestine and compared texts and places. But from the mid-19th century onwards - especially after the pioneering work of the American Congregationalist minister Edward Robinson in 1838 and 1852 - archaeological expeditions flocked to Palestine and soon thereafter permanent schools were established. They were typically sponsored by upright British and American Christians determined to re-establish the authenticity of biblical accounts. These men and women passionately believed that archaeology could counter the critical scholars, especially those in Germany, who had concluded, through their detailed literary studies, that the Bible must owe as much to myth as history (hence ‘mythistory’ - a term apparently coined way back in the 1700s).

At first sight, results were spectacular. Using the combined textual-archaeological approach, numerous biblical sites were located. Jerusalem, Hebron, Jaffa, Beth-shean and Gaza had never lost their biblical names. However, other places had become known by Arab names. They were quickly rediscovered and later, using datable pottery shards and other such artefacts, the whole of biblical Palestine was mapped out. It was certainly established that the Tanakh had a real historic basis.

Till the 1970s archaeologists tended to take biblical texts at face value. The Tanakh was viewed as a reliable document in all its essentials. Hence archaeologists went into the field with a spade in one hand and the holy book in the other and proved what the Zionist state wanted to prove: roaming desert tribes, invasion and the sacking of cities, Yahwehite monotheism, David’s unified state, Solomon’s glorious first Jerusalem temple … and all the rest. Scorched walls, fallen pillars and remaining monumental foundations were, for example, interpreted as hard evidence of Joshua’s stunning military achievements.

Biblical criticism and archaeology tended to proceed separately, with each academic discipline considering the other with a suspicion bordering on contempt. Archaeologists, in particular, thought that they had nothing to learn from dusty bookworms. With their microscopes, painstaking excavations and carbon-dating techniques, they were the real scientists.

However, in the 1970s doubts began to surface in the archaeological community about the authenticity of the patriarchs - the heads of the tribal households such as Abraham and Jacob - and the date and scale of the exodus from Egypt. Theories were also developed which suggested that Joshua’s conquest of Canaan might not have been a single, unified, military event. Nevertheless even then, the Tanakh was still considered reliable when dealing with events following the foundation of David’s kingdom (circa 1000 BCE).

Things began to radically change in the 1990s. As explained by archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, new approaches gained traction. Instead of using findings to “illustrate the Bible”, attempts were made to “examine the human realities that lay behind the text”.¹³ The emphasis thereby shifted from associating particular sites with biblical accounts. Instead artefacts, architecture, settlement patterns, animal bones, seeds, chemical analysis of soil samples and long-term anthropological models became “key” to perceiving “wider changes in the economy, political history, religious practices, population density and the very structure of ancient Israeli society”.¹⁴

Especially at its cutting edge, archaeology has thereby drawn progressively closer to the conclusions long upheld by biblical scholars and in certain respects they have gone beyond them. Along with Hebrew inscriptions, pottery fragments and architectural styles, the Tanakh is now seen as another characteristic artefact produced by a people who have to be recreated theoretically in the round.

Till Herodotus the ancients did not write anything we would remotely recognise as history. In that sense the Tanakh has rightly come to be regarded, and therefore reinterrogated by archaeologists, in the same manner as other similar texts: eg, the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, Homer’s Iliad or the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf. Myth is not history, but it can, nevertheless, cast a powerful light on historical reality, if approached discriminatingly and used contextually.

As noted above, biblical scholars and archaeologists alike tended to take for granted the united monarchy of David and Solomon in the 10th century BCE. However, the so-called minimalist school of archaeology - minimalist because of its cautious attitude towards biblical personalities, state boundaries, events, etc - marked a break from this assumption. Finkelstein and Silberman, for example, conclude that there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever of a state formation in Judah - in Jerusalem in particular - till towards the 8th century BCE. That is more than 250 years after David in the generally agreed biblical chronology. All that turns up in the digs intended to unearth the splendours of David’s imperial capital and Solomon’s wondrous temple are the remains of a rather primitive and impoverished hamlet.

Others in the field concur. Take Philip Davies: “The evidence recently accumulated … shows the impossibility of a Davidic empire administered from Jerusalem ... it is necessary for us to exclude the Davidic and Solomonic monarchies, let alone their empire, from a non-biblical history of Palestine.”¹⁵

Embarrassing and infuriating for fundamentalist Christians everywhere, but particularly for the Zionist political and religious establishment in Israel. Not surprisingly accusations rained down: denying the truth of the Davidic kingdom was akin to denying the truth of the Nazi holocaust. But facts are facts and the truth is the truth, no matter how inconvenient.

General crisis

The current balance of opinion amongst the leading authorities in biblical history and archaeology nowadays is that there never were any Hebrew tribes who set out from the Land of Nod on a mammoth trek, who sojourned in Egypt and who eventually crossed the Jordan and then genocidally exterminated the Canaanite inhabitants.

Those who came to call themselves Jews must, in fact, have themselves been Canaanites - but those who lived on the geographical and social margins. Interestingly there is a stela inscription referring to a people “named Israel” living in Canaan by 1207 BCE.¹⁶ Like the Bedouin of recent times these marginal Canaanites shifted between periods of settled agriculture and semi-nomadic pastoralism, depending on opportunities and the vagaries of climate. They were, for sure, not foreigners with a completely alien culture and language.

The late Bronze Age general crisis certainly hit the whole of the eastern Mediterranean during the close of the 13th century BCE. Archaeological excavations in Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt reveal a “stunning story of upheaval, war and widespread social breakdown”.¹⁷ Jericho, Ai and Megiddo were abandoned. Other urban centres were destroyed: eg, Ashdod, Aphek and Hazor. Nowadays this is not put down to Joshua. Rather, explanation is sought in ecological degradation, disease, social revolt due to overexploitation and the raids and dislocation caused by the so-called sea peoples. Doubtless there was a combination of factors at play. But all that was several centuries before Joshua was supposed to have marched Yahweh’s chosen people across the Jordan.

So, instead of a brilliant conquest under the command of a god-inspired hero, an increasing number of archaeologists have come to the conclusion that the ancient Israelites came to dominance gradually and peacefully from among the region’s peripheral population - through a power vacuum, not a military blitzkrieg. In support of this thesis there is the similarity of the pottery and architecture over the whole period. There is no break denoting a changeover from ‘Canaanite’ and ‘Israeli’ style in the late Bronze Age.

As mentioned above, Finkelstein and Silberman give no credence to the biblical account of David and his son, Solomon. Unlike other minimalists they are prepared to grant that perhaps David might have been a real person - even the founder of a royal line (a celebrated basalt inscription has come to light in Tel Dan referring to the “House of David”). However, if he existed, his Israel - ie, Jerusalem and the Judean hinterland - was demonstrably poor economically and weak militarily.

There was, though, another Israel, the first Israel, located not in the south, but in the north. Reaching out from the highland city state of Shechem, it really did gain a pocket-sized empire, along with corresponding cities, temples and fortifications - Samara, Magiddo, Jazeel and Hazor. This state was, however, defeated by the Assyrian king, Shalmaneser V, who besieged and took Samaria in 720 BCE. As the Tanakh tells it, after the city fell the Assyrians carted off the local elite.

In all probability the Judean kingdom in the south first began to develop and invent a grand tradition for itself as a not so loyal Assyrian vassal. In the late 8th and early 7th centuries BCE Jerusalem grows dramatically. Industrial-scale olive oil production starts too. However, the kings of Judea nurtured imperial ambitions of their own, primarily directed towards the north. Israeli ‘reunification’ became the official slogan.

King Hezekiah (727-698 BCE) is known to have rebelled against Assyrian rule, whose armies then proceeded to devastate the Judean countryside in punishment. Sensibly the Judeans sued for peace. Tribute is soon flowing once again to Nineveh. Undaunted, king Josiah (639-609 BCE) was determined to have another go.

Under these circumstances, Finkelstein and Silberman suggest, the opening texts of what is now the Tanakh were composed. Spurred on by Josiah, a whole common saga is invented, whereby the southern - Judean - kingdom becomes the elder brother to the wayward northern - Israeli - kingdom. The 12 tribes of Israel are conjured up to unite them both. Tales of the fabled ancestors are interwoven, along with redactive propaganda describing a whole string of good and bad kings, which explains why the north fell and the south survived. And, like the Assyrians, the Judeans/Israelites become mighty warriors who were alone responsible for the still impressive Bronze Age ruins that litter the countryside from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.

Not only did Josiah miserably fail against the Assyrians, but in 586 BCE the Babylonians - having replaced the Assyrians - invaded and subsequently deported the “mighty of the land”.¹⁸ However, whereas the northern elite disappeared from history, those in the south were permitted to return some 50 years later. The Babylonians were defeated by the Persian king, Cyrus, and it was he who decided to permit the Judean elite (the Jews) to return to their homeland. There was a catch: they were to serve as his agents. The Jerusalem temple was built with his permission and financial aid - not, it hardly needs adding, over the ruins of Solomon’s non-existent marvel. It, the ‘second temple’, was to serve as the religious-administrative centre of a subordinate social order.

From Jerusalem the Jewish elite would oversee the extraction of tribute from the local population and manage the Jewish diaspora (Jewish merchants established themselves in colonies throughout the Persian empire). To facilitate that socio-economic relationship the returned exiles once again reinvented their religious tradition. Doubtless as ignorant provincials they had been awestruck by Babylonian wealth and cultural attainments and were ideologically enthralled by its sophisticated religion. Therefore Babylonian myths - the garden of Eden, the tower of Babel, the flood, etc - were incorporated into the cannon of holy scripts and a whole range of dietary, sexual and social taboos invented, along with what amounted to a henotheism (ie, the elevation of one particular god above all others).

That way the returnees - the people of the book - could legitimise their rule over the masses who had not been deported - the people of the land. Hence for the first time the god of all Israel - Yahweh - emerges fully formed. Before that the Judeans, like the northern Israelis, had been thoroughly polytheistic. They venerated high places and worshipped not only Yahweh, the local deity of Jerusalem, but other, more powerful gods and goddesses, such as El, Baal, Asherah and Marduk. There are numerous references to them in the Tanakh - Baal alone appears some 90 times.¹⁹

I have argued that the “Yahweh cult” and the associated “purity laws” reflected, in no matter how distorted a manner, the class antagonism between the returned elite and the masses: ie, the domination of history or social forces over humanity (in contrast to nature). As Persian vassals the elite had no army - only a religious police force. They had to rely on remaking and then maintaining the Jews as a people-religion.²⁰

Needless to say, none of that matters a jot to Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Bazalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and other members of the national camp. Be they secular or religious, they do not give a damn about historical truth. However, myth, the story of a promised land, of conquest and of genocide - that serves as the standard ideological weapon for a Zionist settler-colonialism, which by the very logic of its political economy is driven to exclude, to expel the indigenous population.²¹ Failing that, there is mass extermination.

1. A Leon The Jewish question: a Marxist interpretation New York NY 1986, p226.↩︎

2. Quoted in I Halevi A history of the Jews London 1987, p152.↩︎

3. T Herzl The Jewish state London 1972, p30.↩︎

4. en.wikisource.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration.↩︎

5. Genesis 12:7.↩︎

6. 1 Samuel 15:3.↩︎

7. D Ben Gurion, ‘Statement of introduction of the law of return before the Knesset’, July 3 1950.↩︎

8. The Times of Israel July 19 2024.↩︎

9. See S Sand The invention of the Jewish people London 2009.↩︎

10. Falashas “descended from ancient inhabitants of Ethiopia, who converted to Judaism”, conclude G Lucotte and P Smets in ‘Origins of Falasha Jews studied by haplotypes of the Y chromosome’ (December 1999) - see pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10592688.↩︎

11. See N Abu El-Haj The genealogical science: the search for Jewish origins and the politics of epistemology Chicago 2012.↩︎

12. See R Falk ‘Genetic markers cannot determine Jewish descent’ Frontiers in Genetics May 2014.↩︎

13. I Finkelstein and N Silberman The Bible unearthed London 2002, p21.↩︎

14. Ibid p22.↩︎

15. P Davies In search of ancient Israel Sheffield 1992.↩︎

16. I Finkelstein and N Silberman The Bible unearthed London 2002, p101.↩︎

17. Ibid p83.↩︎

18. 2 Kings 24: 12-16.↩︎

19. W Herrmann, ‘Baal’ in K Toorn, B Becking, PW Horst (eds) Dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible Grand Rapids MI 1999, pp132-39.↩︎

20. J Conrad Fantastic reality: Marxism and the politics of religion London 2012, p211.↩︎

21. Moshé Machover has insightfully dealt with the uses and, crucially, the abuses of the Tanakh by Israeli government minimisers, parties and propagandists in a recent article: see ‘Promise myth as template’ Weekly Worker July 25 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1501/promise-myth-as-template).↩︎