Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Oxymoron of secular Israel's problem with Palestinians


A look at Jewish history reminds everyone of the not insignificant effect of conversions to Judaism. An out-of Israel narrative for all Jews is an oxymoron, just like a secular state fighting for the Holy Land. 
Many Ashkenazim can track ancestors to the Chazars, who claimed to be lost Central Asian Jews with some of their tribes refinding their true religion. 
Sephardim, despite the Early Muslim jihad, can track ancestors to Jewish kingdoms like the Himyarites, who converted in order to find a third way between Ethiopian Christian and Persian Zoroastrian pressure for compliance. 
There are Ethiopian Jews who struggle sometimes for full recognition.
But what do you make of the remaining Bani Israel of Central Asia that have a similar claim like the old Chazar Ashkenazim and are almost exclusively composed of Muslim Afghans, including Taliban? 
The Chazars tracked their ancestry to these Jews and Islamic literature and Pashtu oral tradition establish similar claims. Can people of Jewish descent and Muslim faith, who feel persecuted, settle in Israel that is a secular state for all Jews? 
What happens with the property rights of a Jew in Israel who decides that the old contract with God has been diluted over time and needs reform? 

It's very hard to justify the ongoing land grab of settlers protected by secular Israel from "Palestinians" if you recognize their part of genetic Jewish ancestry that makes them mumarim. The ancestors of the modern Palestinians opted for an improved version of the same old contract with God that both, Christianity and Islam, claim. The story of Israel being devoid of Jews after the wars with the Romans is not supported by literary evidence that mentions Jews in Israel throughout the ages. It's a relict of 19th century historiography.
There were immigrants intermarrying with current Palestinians and conversions to Judaism worldwide. Hopefully, no one goes for a pure blood test in Israel for establishing claims of landowning über- and disowned under-race, but doing it on a confessional basis in a secular state is no less strange. 
Keeping a boiling conflict helps to entrench in front lines without thinking too much about things other than these front lines. The Palestinians defined themselves as Arabs(a lot of people do since the Muslim conquest) and were hostile to the massive inflow of Jewish Ashkenazim immigrants, predominantly from Europe. These were not Sephardim Jews, who shared a common culture with the Arabs.

Arab is in most cases a cultural identification and not connected to being Sunni-Muslim. There are various Christian, including Coptic, and Shia, including Druze, Ismaeli or Bahrani, Arabs. All of them are minority beliefs within the larger Arab community. 
Self-recognition of Arabian identity started with conversions to Judaism of Semitic tribes on the Arabian peninsula in order to form one identity beyond tribal bonds. The Early Muslim jihad established the Muslim ummah (community of all Muslims) as competing identity concept, eliminating Judaism's prominent role on the peninsula. The intertwined Muslim and Arab identity within the ummah was not accepted east of Mesopotamia. Early caliphs specifically referred to Persians(then predominantly Sunni) and Arabs being equals within the Muslim community. 
Sephardim are the cultural catalyst of Arabian identity perception. Nationhood is a European concept since Napoleonic times that secular Pan-Arabs tried to bring into post-colonization politics with various attempts at uniting states (the Arab League is a leftover). Most Arab-designated countries are tribes with flags that own a territory called nation and have very sharp distinctions of tribal claims to spoils from natural resources and taxes.

The conflict in Palestine started with hostility by local Middle Easterners against massive European Ashkenazim immigration. These Ashkenazim wanted to create a state according to their ideas on a land that now happened to be Palestine and not Uganda (PR failure of Jewganda). The Jewish plight and self-defence is as understandable as the Palestinian resistance to one of the last colonization enterprises and the Middle Eastern sympathies with them. Sephardim Jews migrate to Israel not only for economic reasons. Tolerance for different  interpretations of Islam can be a rare good in their former residences, even more so for al kitab, (Islamic legal term for "people of the book", coined for Jews and Christians, who have an acceptable religion, unlike heathen pagans).


The Lebanese were to some level able to reconcile on discovering their common Phoenician ancestors, because they could scientifically counter the fairy tales of who was a Phoenician descendant and who was not.

Seeing Palestinians as people with as ancient Jewish roots as other Israelis, makes the continuation of hostilities utmost difficult and will be hard to counter with any evidence that stands up to scientific scrutiny. It's a jump in mindsets and I believe both sides to be too entrenched in comfortable stereotypes. 
But one step makes the whole conflict a nonsense idea.

Annotated reading on the problems of secular Jewish identity, religion and conversion of religion.
Messianic Judaism in the USA  shows that the dividing lines between the Abrahamic religions are not as clear cut as often thought.
Religious conversions in Israel are news. The fact of being news highlights the bond of confession with problems.

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