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The Quick and Dirty History of Zionism
americangoy.blogspot.com — Theodor Herzl is recognized as the founder of the Zionist ideology. His diary "It is essential that the sufferings of Jews become worse this will assist in realization of our plans. The anti-Semites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews. The anti-Semites shall be our best friends."
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- Kizilbash, on 04/24/2008, -4/+10Here are some quotes from Gush Shalom's Uri Avnery from his latest column:
"THE BIBLICAL narrative connects up with documented history only around the year 853 BC, when ten thousand soldiers and 2000 battle chariots of Ahab, King of Israel, took part in a grand coalition of the kingdoms of Syria and Palestine against Assyria. The battle, which was documented by the Assyrians, was fought at Qarqar in Syria. The Assyrian army was delayed, if not defeated.
(A personal note: I am not a historian, but for many years I have reflected on our history and tried to draw some logical conclusions, which are outlined here. Most of them are supported by the emerging consensus of independent scholars around the world.)
The kingdoms of Israel and Judea, which occupied a part of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, were no different from the other kingdoms of the region. Even according to the Bible itself, the people sacrificed to various pagan deities "on every high hill and under every green tree". (1 Kings 14:23).
Jerusalem was a tiny market town, much too small and much too poor for any of the things described in the Bible to have taken place there at the time. In the books of the Bible that deal with that period, the appellation "Jew" (Yehudi in Hebrew) hardly appears at all, and where it does, it clearly refers simply to an inhabitant of Judea, the area around Jerusalem. When an Assyrian general was asked "talk not with us in the Jewish language" (2 Kings 18:26), what was meant was the local Judean dialect of Hebrew. The "Jewish" revolution took place in the Babylonian exile (587-539 BC). After the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, members of the Judean elite were exiled to Babylon, where they came into contact with the important cultural streams of the time. The result was one of the great creations of mankind: the Jewish religion. After some fifty years, some of the exiles returned to Palestine. They brought with them the name "Jews", the appellation of a religious-ideological-political movement, much like the "Zionists" of our time. Therefore, one can speak of "Judaism" and "Jews" - in the sense accepted now - only from then on. During the following 500 years, the Jewish monotheistic religion gradually crystallized. Also at this time, the most outstanding literary creation of all times, the Hebrew Bible, was composed. The writers of the Bible did not intend to write "history", in the sense understood today, but rather a religious, edifying and instructive text.
...
THE PUZZLE that is occupying the historians is: how did a tiny community of Babylonian exiles turn into a worldwide Diaspora of millions? There is only one convincing answer to that: conversion.
The modern Jewish myth has it that almost all the Jews are descendents of the Jewish community that lived in Palestine 2000 years ago and was driven out by the Romans in the year 70 AD. That is, of course, baseless. The "Expulsion from the Country" is a religious myth: God was angry with the Jews because of their sins and exiled them from His country. But the Romans were not in the habit of moving populations, and there is clear evidence that a great part of the Jewish population in the country remained here after the Zealots' Revolt and after the Bar-Kochba uprising, and that most Jews lived outside the country long before that.
At the time of the Second Temple and later, Judaism was a proselytizing religion par excellence. During the first centuries AD it fiercely competed with Christianity. While the slaves and other downtrodden people in the Roman Empire were more attracted to the Christian religion, with its moving human story, the upper classes tended towards Judaism. Throughout the Empire, large numbers adopted the Jewish religion.
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Since all the national movements in Europe were - more or less - anti-Semitic, many Jews felt that they were left "outside", that they had no place in the new Europe. Some of them decided that the Jews must conform to the new Zeitgeist and turn the Jewish community into a Jewish "nation".
For that purpose, it was necessary to reshape and reinvent Jewish history and turn it from the annals of a religious-ethnic Diaspora into the epic story of a "nation". The job was undertaken by a man who can be considered the godfather of the Zionist idea: Heinrich Graetz, a German Jew who was influenced by German nationalism and created a "national" Jewish history. His ideas have shaped Jewish consciousness to this day.
Graetz accepted the Bible as if it were a history book, collected all the myths and created a complete and continuous historical narrative: the period of the Fathers, the Exodus from Egypt, the Conquest of Canaan, the "First Temple", the Babylonian Exile, the "Second Temple", the Destruction of the Temple and the Exile. That is the history that all of us learned in school, the foundation upon which Zionism was built."
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avner ...- 911ArtStudent, on 04/25/2008, -1/+2^ Great post Kizilbash
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