Thursday, December 03, 2009

Israeli Scholar Disputes Founding Myth

By Morgan Strong
December 3, 2009 (Originally Posted April 12, 2009)

The founding narrative of the modern State of Israel was born from the words of Moses in the Old Testament, that God granted the land of Israel to the Jewish people and that it was to be theirs for all time.

Read on.
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3 comments:

ChMoore said...

For anyone interested, I highly recommend the PBS Nova series "The Bible's Buried Secrets". The episodes can be viewed online.

One of the revelations made is that the original Israelites were likely not of a common ancestry, but a variety of under-priveleged classes of peoples, who assembled into a motley crew looking for a better way towards a universal moral system of fairness and justice. This led to monotheism.

This sounds to me like a history that many Jews could take greater pride in, versus the Zionist idea that God is a real estate broker - which He is not.

The "chosen people" and "promised land" concepts would actually seem to be at odds with the monotheism concept that God loves everyone.

Perhaps what God really chose was a group of people to further monotheism throughout the lands; not so much by force, but by way of the universal fairness and justice of monotheism itself.

Leviticus, after enduring the seven full chapters of animal sacrifice, later says in 19:18 "Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord" and 19:34 "You must regard the foreigner who lives with you as the native-born among you. You are to love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God." - which is one of the earliest versions of the Ethic Of Reciprocity - aka, the Golden Rule.

Fri Dec 04, 09:59:00 AM 2009
sharonsj said...

Logically, some of this makes no sense. If the diaspora is a myth, then Jews never left Israel, Judea and Samaria, but always lived there. How does this support Palestinian claims that Jews took their land if Jews were always on the land? Next is the crap that modern Jews aren't Jews because they have some ancestors who converted a thousand years ago. Is the author claiming that only "racially pure" Jews are really Jews? Is Judaism a religion (yes, it is) or a race (ask Hitler about that one).

Tue Dec 08, 09:51:00 AM 2009
rightly said...

The 'scholar' identifies Jews as a people who developed a common religion and culture after the Exodus from Egypt. This is also another myth. The peoples of Jewish heritage are identified with tribes who followed Abraham in the belief in one God, a God and common myths of creation and flood taken from Sumeria and the Persian God Mythras. whose sect became the foundation for the doxology of the Catholic church.
The "I was here first" idea was invented in the late nineteenth century for political reasons after of common residence and intermingling of tribes over millennia. Disputes were the product of the failure of Western empire building and increasing political strength among peoples held subservient. The contests today are not religious. The contestants are not Israelis and Arabs. The cause is an invented pan-arabist and a pan-judaism, a synthetic idea that has no historic roots. The Islamic claim is promoted by Arab states of different religious sects who would otherwise be at war with each other. Those 'refugees' are held as hostages by the Arabs and those in Gaza and the West Bank who continue this anarchy are not native , but supported by foreign islamic States. The 67 war followed the international agreement to recognize israel as a sovereign state. The expulsion of Jews from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and all the countries where they have made historical contributions to the culture of their native lands is a recent event, not seen since the time of the Inquisition.
The simplistic nonsense of this scholar makes him a denier of Jewish history and represents the worst kind of bigotry, the false theory made to explain personal arrogance and ignorance.
There are people waiting on both sides for peace and security. The myth is in the false history of political anarchists.

Tue Dec 08, 03:06:00 PM 2009

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