Last week the Palestinian president Abbas asked the UN General Assembly to vote for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Israel fights the idea with tooth and nail, and USA’s president Obama find himself in a mess, as he needs the Jewish votes for the primary elections next year.

The amount of Jews in USA is almost the same as in Israel. But the bonds between the Israeli and the American Jews are based on myths rather than facts.

This revealed the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand from Tel Aviv University in his book The Invention of the Jewish People from 2008.

The Book was met with equal amounts of ‘we knew that already’ and ‘it is all a lie’.

The first-mentioned reaction was based on the argument, that it is not unique for Israel to create ideological myths, that confirms the self-perceptions of the country – those kinds of myths are build in every state.

The other reaction, was on the other hand based on a denial of any talk about the Zionist colonization was anything else than the Jews returning to their native country.

Sand’s strength is that his detailed documentation builds on a long number of interdisciplinary examinations from historical sources. Together the myths form an unpleasant pattern, that is used politically against the Palestinians, and can be a part of the undermining legitimacy of the State of Israel. It is in the long run impossible to rely on a right by denying others the same right.

The people that doesn’t exist

But first: Sand’s historical analysis. The conclusion is, that there is no other state in the world that consists of one people. People have always been moving, and with time they are more like they non-religious neighbors than their coreligionists, who live other places in the world. Chinese, Ethiopian and Argentinian Jews look more like their non-Jewish neighbors than Jews that live other places in the world.

The Zionist colonization could not in meantime have existed without an ideological preparation, that fertilized the number of myths of the Jewish peoplehood. The Jewish statehood founding simply needed an illusion of an authentic indigenous people that as ‘Israel’s children’ came ‘out of Egypt’. Because only this myth about Hebrew ancestors could justify the right to Palestine. This made the Zionist historians to emphasize their mutual ethnic origin. The Jews was seen as one biological people.

Persecution as reason

Around year 1900 the secular Jew Theodor Herzl tried to create understanding for the founding of a Jewish State based on the increase in anti-Semitism that followed the flourish of nationalism in Europe and the Dreyfus-affair in France (the case against the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, that in 1895 was sentenced due to espionage, ed.).

Herzl visited heads of states and patrons, that probably saw the need, but weren’t willing to support the project. The Russian Tsar was interested to get rid of the Jews and the growing Zionist movement that he considered just as dangerous as the socialists. But neither there nor at the Osman Sultan, that had the control of Palestine, there were sufficient support for the project.

The English proposed Uganda as home of the Jews, as Herzl earlier had rejected Argentine, where Rothschild already supported Jewish settlements. Herzl considered Uganda, but the Russian Jews did not like the proposal. They considered the biblical county, Palestine, as their home.

Based on this was it a political opportunity to create the illusion of ‘a people’ but not least to use the Bible’s myths as a historic document.

But the Bible is not a historic document. The Old Testament is not the result of historic science. 

On the contrary, newer archaeological excavations finds that there was no exodus from Egypt, and that the big united kingdoms under David and Solomon never existed.

This kind of facts is in meantime encountered with furious displays and attacks about bible abnegation.

No expulsion

The myth about the romans expulsion of the Jewish people has also been used as an historical argument to demand Palestine. But the romans never deported the population in Judea. There is no historical documentation for this. Nevertheless, the idea of the Exile Redemption turned to Exile-Homeland.

During the centuries the Jews yearned for Zion, their holy city, but it never appeared to them to move to Jerusalem. Not even those who lived nearby did a try.

First after the rising nationalism in the nineteenth century which caused attacks on those different and foreign, did the Zionists become an organized movement with demand of an independent state.

It took more than thirty years from the Balfour Declaration (unclassified declaration from 1917, about the British government supporting the idea of the creation of ‘a home for the Jewish people’ ed.), Two World Wars with mass extermination of Jews and a Jewish-Arab war before the creation and establishment of Israel took place in 1948. It didn’t seem to affect the Zionist founders that Arabs inhabited the state they demanded already.

Sand emphasized that he doesn’t doubt Israel’s right to exist – no one would for example today deny USA’s right to exist, although the Americans treated the indigenous population incredibly rough. The point is simply that no country has a legitimate right to deny parts of its inhabitants an independent livelihood.

Sins of exemptions

Of the two most hard-hitting arguments for Israel’s creation – the religious and the ethnic – the ethnic is the heaviest.

In the western world, membership of a religious group gives no right to a territory, whereas an ethnic people often has a country/area that can be argued belonged to its ancestors.

Looking at the people who inhabit Israel today, however, it consists mainly of people who do not have any territorial link to the Canaan Country whatsoever. Most of them originate from the Khazar Kingdom, near Volga, which today lies in Russia. Here a king converted to Judaism, and therefore there were so many Jews in Russia.

The downfall of the kingdom in the 1250s made the Jews wander over the steppes of Ukraine, Russia, Poland and Hungary. The reason for the many Jews around the Mediterranean in North Africa and Europe is that Judaism from the second to the fourth century after Christ was a missionary religion. The wide-spread Judaism around and after the birth of Christ, was not, as some have claimed, the result of the Jews being the only who opposed abortion, or that they as the only one washed their hands before meals. It was however because of Jewish proselytism.

Judaism was at that time a dynamic and expanding religion. As Islam arose in the beginning of the 7th century many Jews converted because of simple practical – and pecuniary – reasons: They converted in order to get rid of the tax.

The Jewish Khazars have not played any role in the history. They were, according to Sand “omitted” from the story twice: First by the Soviet history research and in the wake of WWII. Secondly, by the Zionist history-research after the war in 1967. In both cases it was an ideological necessity, which restored the national memory.

No nation

Is there no Jewish people then? Sands answer is no. With the exception of Eastern Europe where the demographic weight and unique structure of Jewish life cultivated a distinct form of popular culture, and a language, there has never been any Jewish People, as a unique unified entity.

Some of the early Zionists in Western Europe saw Palestine solely as the site of the Yiddish-speaking world. Themselves they felt as Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen or Americans, and they all participated fully in the national wars of their respective countries.

In the meanwhile, while the Zionists succeeded to create the illusion of a people; they never managed to create a Jewish nation. Today, the Jews throughout the world have the possibility to immigrate to Israel, but most of them have chosen not to live under Jewish sovereignty. They prefer to keep another nationality.

Nevertheless, Israel defines itself in the 21st century as a Jewish state and as the Jewish people’s property – which includes Jews everywhere in the world, and not just the Israeli people that inhabits the country.

Politically it means, of course, that Israel appeals for support and loyalty of all Jews throughout the world – not least the American Jews. But as a political form it is more appropriate to define Israel as an ethnocracy rather than a democracy.

According to Sand there was in the 1960s some progress towards a national civil society in Israel, but after the 1967 war, there has been an increase in subjugation of the Arab population between the Mediterranean and the Jordan Valley, and the fictional Jewish ethos has become even narrower. Arabs and non-Jewish workers and their families have no opportunity to become Israeli citizen and can not be integrated in the social life, even if they have lived in Israel for decades, or if their children are born in the country and only speak Hebrew.

It is an unsustainable situation that is kept alive by myths which makes the Palestinians dreams of statehood distant.