THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN UMSEBENZI ONLINE WEEKLY ONLINE JOURNAL OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY. 14TH August 2014, Volume 13 no. 32. The question of Palestine in historical perspective: What does the Bible say? By Future Msebele We have seen on our television screens image after image of Israeli planes and heavy artillery bombarding the narrow coastal strip dominated by the city of Gaza. Hamas, the dominant party in control of Gaza has retaliated by relatively harmless rocket attacks against Israel. Why is Israel attacking Gaza? Who are the Israelis? Who are the Palestinians? In Zimbabwe there is a strong body of opinion which says “This land belongs to the Jews because the Bible says so.” This is indeed a very short-sighted and misinformed statement. When the Christian religion began, it adopted wholesale the Jewish scriptures which we know as the Old Testament. Read the relevant historical portions properly and you will find that there were many different peoples there long before the invasion by the Hebrew tribes who were to adopt and introduce what we now call the religion of Judaism. 18: In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates; 19: The Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, 20: And the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, 21: And the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites. Genesis 15 vs. 18-21 (KJV) Two things are obvious here: firstly that there were other people already living there; secondly, as all would know too well through the European versions of African history - history is mostly written by the winners. It is the Israelites, and not all the other people mentioned who are saying that the land was promised to them! Further on, in the First Book of Samuel Chapter 15, we read that God ordered King Saul to commit genocide against the Amalekites! 1: Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD. 2: Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. 3: Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. Again, Jews regard Jerusalem as their historic capital. But they did not build it: 4 And David and all Israelwent to Jerusalem, which is Jebus; where the Jebusites were, the inhabitants of the land. 5 And the inhabitants of Jebussaid to David, Thou shalt not come hither. Nevertheless Davidtook the castle of Zion, which is the city of David. 1 Chronicles 11 vs. 4&5 (KJV) What we read, then, in the Old Testament is about a group of warlike nomadic tribes with their herds of cattle, sheep and goats, conquering peaceful city dwellers and establishing themselves as rulers. As we study the history of the Jews through the Bible and other sources we find that the people of Palestine/Israel, lying between the two great early civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia (Iraq) were of extremely mixed origin including in their gene-pool both fair-haired Hittites and black Ethiopians. Likewise, when it comes to religion we find that worship of the Golden Calf and of Baal went side by side with the worship of the one God - with different forms of religion being dominant at different times. People who did not originally belong to the Hebrew tribes began to practise the Jewish religion and people that were of Hebrew origin turned to other religions. By the time of Jesus, there were more Jews outside Palestine than in Palestine, many of them proselytes, that is converts. Following unsuccessful Jewish revolts against the Romans in 70CE - when the temple was destroyed and the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132CE, the Jewish leadership left Palestine, leaving behind the peasants who slowly converted - first to Christianity, then later to Islam. Many people do not know that about 15% of Palestinians are Christian - descendants of the earliest Christians. Most of the rest are Muslims. The Palestinians of today, then, are the descendants of the many different peoples that inhabited the land in ancient times - including Jews - since which they have also acquired ancestry from the Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula, West European Crusaders and Turks - all of whom conquered that territory at various times. Israeli Jewish historian Tsvi Misinai states categorically in a piece written in 2009 that “90% of Palestinians are descended from Jews.” At the same time, many people of non-Palestinian origin converted to Judaism. In the Acts of the Apostles: Now when the congregation was broken up, many of the Jews and religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas: who, speaking to them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God. Acts 13 v 43 (KJV) There are a number of other references to proselytes in the New Testament. More than that, we know of many cases of whole communities which converted to Judaism in Yemen, Ethiopia and most spectacularly in the Khazar Kingdom which covered an area now in Russia and eastern Ukraine. In the 8th century CE, an entire Turkic-speaking kingdom, the Khazar Kingdom converted to Judaism, and, although estimates vary, it is definite that a considerable part of European Jewry have Khazar ancestry. How then did Jewish settlers from all over the world come to claim Palestine as theirs? During the 19th century in Europe, nation states began to be formed. Italy became one nation in 1851, Germany in 1871. Others, Poles, Czechs and Hungarians were seeking to form nation states. Some Jews began to ask themselves where they belonged. In 1895, an Austrian Jew, Theodor Herzl wrote a book called The Jewish State. Two years later the First World Zionist Congress took place in Switzerland. Herzl approached the Turkish government for a Jewish settlement in Palestine (at that time part of the Ottoman or Turkish Empire) although permission to establish a Jewish state was refused (despite an offer to assist the Turks pay off substantial debts), small groups of Jews began to settle in Palestine. However, Palestine was not the only place thought suitable for a Jewish National Home, part of British East Africa (now Kenya) was also seriously considered! In Russia in 1910, as the Tsarist Empire grew to a close, and only 7 years before the Russian Revolution. Pogroms - attacks on Jewish settlements by right-wing thugs (the Black Hundreds) took place. Some emigrated to America, a few to Palestine. This group formed a solid core of Jews in Palestine. As fascism grew in Europe during the 1930s, more and more Jews, fleeing persecution, went to Palestine. Following the end of the Second World War, many Jews who escaped Hitler’s attempt to destroy them, fled to Palestine (by then under British control). They began to fight the indigenous people for their land. The newly formed United Nations agreed to partition Palestine into a Jewish and a Palestinian state. In 1948, the State of Israel was formed. They had already seized considerably more land than had been granted to them by the UN. The West Bank became part of the Kingdom of Jordan and Gaza was administered by Egypt. In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was formed and was given immediate recognition by many countries as the sole representative body of the Palestinian people. It obtained UN observer status in 1974. But in 1967, war had broken out between Israel and its Arab neighbours and the Israelis seized both the West Bank and Gaza. Nevertheless, in 1987, the Intifada, the uprising against Israeli occupation, started. By 1993, the Israelis, led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinians led by PLO President Yasser Arafat signed an agreement to recognize both the State of Israel and the State of Palestine. In 1995, Rabin was shot dead by an assassin who represented the extreme right of the Zionist movement. Soon after that, Israel was ruled by a succession of extreme right-wing governments which refused to recognize Palestinian rights and continued to steal Palestinian land and build Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Yasser Arafat was humiliated in front of his own people and in 2004 was poisoned by a radioactive chemical. The Palestinians have been reduced from being the owners of the whole area of what is now Israel and Palestine to being confined to the tiny area of Gaza and a few even smaller enclaves in the West Bank. The Zionist Jews who came to Palestine to flee persecution have now themselves become the persecutors - or as one commentator put it: “The Palestinians are the last victims of Hitler.” Future Msebele is President of Zimbabwe African People’s Union Youth Front (ZAPU Youth Front)
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 11:00:50 +0000
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