Tuesday 13 December 2011

Invented People

Nahida the exiled Palestinian

 EXCERPT:

"The singular triumph of the Zionist movement is that it invented a state and a people - Israel and the Israelis - from scratch. The first Hebrew-speaking child in 1900 years, Ittamar Ben-Avi, was not born until 1882. His father, the brilliant linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, created a modern language for him to speak by improvising from the language of the Bible."

MJ Rosenberg @ Information Clearing House

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EXCERPT:

"This attempt to justify Zionism through genetics is reminiscent of the procedures of late nineteenth-century anthropologists who very scientifically set out to discover the specific characteristics of Europeans. As of today, no study based on anonymous DNA samples has succeeded in identifying a genetic marker specific to Jews, and it is not likely that any study ever will. It is a bitter irony to see the descendants of Holocaust survivors set out to find a biological Jewish identity: Hitler would certainly have been very pleased! And it is all the more repulsive that this kind of research should be conducted in a state that has waged for years a declared policy of 'Judaization of the country' in which even today a Jew is not allowed to marry a non-Jew."

Shlomo Sand. The Invention of the Jewish People. Verso, 2009.

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EXCERPT:

"When we speak of 'Palestinians' or of the 'Arab population [of Palestine]', we must bear in mind their Canaanite origin. This is important because their legal right to the country stems...from the fact that the Canaanites were first, which gives them priority; their descendants have continued to live there, which gives them continuity; and (except for the 800,000 dispossessed refugees [of 1948 along with the 25,000 expelled just prior to and during Israel's first invasion of Egypt in 1956 and the additional more than 400,000 driven out during and after the war Israel launched on 5 June 1967]) they are still living there, which gives them present possession. Thus we see that on purely statistical grounds they have a proven legal right to their own land."

Professor Ilene Beatty, Historian/anthropologist and “Holy Land” specialist:"Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan" 1957
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