The prominent Israeli historian Ilan Pappe said, “It is important to understand that the Zionists who established the State of Israel were secular until the 1970s, and their goal was to modernize Judaism. However, they used the holy book politically, not religiously, after realizing that many Christians would support their movement based on what was written in the Old Testament, and they succeeded in this. Over time, they managed to convince the religious among them that colonizing Palestine was a religious mission, even though their goal was never to establish a religious state.
It was always a colonial project, similar to other European colonial efforts, especially those targeting groups who felt unwelcome or wanted to escape problems in Europe. They decided to build a new life on someone else’s land, choosing Palestine, in the heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds, where people were already living. But they did not care, because the Zionist movement believed from the beginning that it had the right to remove Palestinians to build their desired ‘European’ state. They did not want the local population.”
Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, is like Pappe, Benny Morris, Simcha Flapan, and Avi Shlaim. He was one of the Israeli historians who challenged traditional narratives of Israeli history and questioned the founding myths of Israel. They relied on declassified government documents, released three decades after Israel’s establishment, and on extensive archaeological research, which found no evidence in Jerusalem or Palestine of Solomon’s time or David’s Temple, or of a historical entity called Israel, its people, or its land.
Dismantling the founding myths of Zionism and Israel was therefore a difficult task for Sand. In his books, “When and How Was the Land of Israel Invented?”, “When and How Were the Jewish People Invented?” and “How I Stopped Being an Israeli”, Sand denied the existence of a Jewish people exiled from their homeland into the Diaspora. He argued that most Eastern European Jews are descendants of communities and individuals who converted to Judaism at various points in history. Sand has faced hatred and death threats because of his work. His book “When and How Were the Jewish People Invented?” has been translated into more than twenty languages, including Arabic and Chinese.
By Ahmad alsarraf
email: [email protected]
email: [email protected]
