THE LOST EMPIRE

“In Search of King David’s Lost Empire” is the title of a piece penned by journalist Ruth Margalit for The New Yorker.

Although it was written two years ago the article is still relevant, perhaps more so today. “The Biblical ruler’s story has been told for millennia, but archaeologists are still fighting over whether it’s true. The evidence of David’s life is sparse. Was he an emperor? A local king? Or, as Israel Finkelstein claims, a Bedouin  sheikh?”   ”Jerusalem, in the tenth century B.C., is an inhospitable place for farmers but a strategic location for men on the run. Human settlement in the Judean highlands is thinly dispersed: five thousand people, spread out in hamlets of about fifty families each. The landscape is rugged, veined with ravines and thicketed with oaks. Rain is unpredictable. To the east lies the desert, hushed and empty. To the west—teasingly close—are the lush lowlands of the Philistine city-states, with their seaside trade routes and their princely homes. Cut off from these coastal plains, life in the hill country is severe. Homes are made of unworked stone; sheep and goats are quartered indoors. There are no public buildings, no ornate furnishings in the shrines. Bands of fugitives, landless  labourers, and tax evaders rove the Judean wilderness. These rebel gangs—viewed by the  neighbouring Egyptians as both a nuisance and a threat—maraud the nearby villages. They collect protection money and pillage the locals, making off with their women and their cattle. They terrorise the Philistines, and then, in a sudden turnaround, offer their services to a Philistine king in exchange for shelter.

Their leader is a wily, resourceful man from Bethlehem, who decides that his people are meant for more than lightning raids and mercenary stints. He sends his men to rout an advancing force, then shares the loot with the highland elders. This wins over the highlanders, and, in time, they make him chieftain of the southern hill area. He takes over the tribal  centre of Hebron, and later captures Jerusalem, another hilltop stronghold. The chieftain moves his extended family to the main homes of the Jerusalem  village, and settles in one himself—a palace, some might call it, though there is nothing extravagant about it. He rules over a neglected chiefdom of pastoralists and outlaws. His name is David.

Israel Finkelstein’s vision of King David—the vagabond, the racketeer—helped make his career as an eminent biblical archaeologist.”

The biblical landscape described by Professor Finkelstein is stark, inhospitable, ostensibly unlike the biblical narrative, but based on “facts on the ground.” Ms. Margalit’s description mirrors the narrative told by Israel Finkelstein.

“The Bible, of course, tells it differently.” Says Ruth Margalit.  “In the Old Testament story, Canaan is where the Hebrews ended their exodus, and where David secured for his people a glorious kingdom. From about 1,000 B.C., he and his son Solomon ruled over a vast monarchy that encompassed four defeated kingdoms, stretching as far north as the Euphrates River and as far south as the Negev Desert. (Archaeologists derive the date from an inscription on a portal gate in the Egyptian city of Karnak, which lists the military conquests of King Shoshenq—thought to be the same king mentioned in the Bible as Shishak.) The United Monarchy, as it is known, represented the golden age of ancient Israel; though it probably lasted no more than a generation or two, its legacy has persisted for thousands of years. According to Finkelstein, for Jews David ‘represents territorial sovereignty, the legend of the empire.’ For Christians, he is ‘directly related to Jesus and the birth of Christianity.’ “For Muslims, he is a righteous prophet who preceded Muhammad. The story of David,” Finkelstein added, “is the most central thing in the Bible, and in our culture.”

“Nadav Na’aman, an authority on Jewish history and a colleague of Finkelstein’s at Tel Aviv University, describes David’s story as ‘extraordinary fiction.’ But he believes that it contains kernels of truth, preserved as the tale was passed down by oral tradition.

In the long war over how to reconcile the Bible with historical fact, the story of David stands at ground zero. There is no archaeological record of Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob. There is no Noah’s Ark, nothing from Moses. Joshua did not bring down the walls of Jericho: they collapsed centuries earlier, perhaps in an earthquake. But, in 1993, an Israeli archaeologist working near the Syrian border found a fragment of basalt from the ninth century B.C., with an Aramaic inscription that mentioned the “House of David”—the first known reference to one of the Bible’s foundational figures. So, David is not just a central ancestor in the Old Testament. He may also be the only one that we can prove existed. Yet to prove it definitively would be exceptionally difficult; Jerusalem of the tenth century B.C. is an archaeological void. ‘I can take a shoebox and put inside everything we have from that period,’ said Yuval Gadot, an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University.

“Finkelstein has pushed Israeli research to the forefront of science, employing precision radiocarbon dating, DNA analysis, and image processing that can examine a three-thousand-year-old potsherd and determine how many ancient scribes were involved in its making. An archaeology lab run by Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science has employed the chief forensic investigator of the Israel Police. Despite their advanced technology, these researchers are still engaged in questions that have persisted for more than a century. From where did the early Israelites emerge? When do we first see signs  of a centralised cult with a single deity? More prosaically, but no less crucially, who was David? Was he the all-powerful king described in the Bible? Or was he, as some archaeologists believe, no more than a small-time Bedouin  sheikh? (Nomad).

“Whenever Finkelstein visited the United States, with its heavy influence of religious seminaries, he was met with antagonism.” Ruth Margalit said. “At a conference in San Francisco, a member of the audience pleaded with him, ‘Why are you saying these things?’ The highly regarded Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research began rejecting his papers but continued to publish his detractors. In hindsight, Finkelstein told me in his office, he understands the uproar over the United Monarchy. ‘The description is of a glorious kingdom, a huge empire, authors in the king’s court, a huge army, military conquests—and then someone like me comes along and says, ‘Wait a minute. They were nothing but hillbillies who sat in Jerusalem in a small territory, and the rest of it is either theology or ideology,’ ” Finkelstein said. “So, someone for whom the Bible represents the word of God views what I have to say with complete shock.”

For decades, Israeli archaeology mirrored the country’s politics: it reconstructed the story of an unlikely conquest and a spectacular military expansion. Finkelstein opened up the discipline to larger questions of how peoples move and states form.

This truncated account doesn’t do justice to Ruth Margalit’s exhaustive,  well written article. It serves as a preamble for the search for post-biblical lost Jewish kingdoms. If you have nothing better to do, try accessing her article with this link https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/in-search-of-king-davids-lost-empire  

Let’s begin with the Samaritans who trace their origin to the northern Israelite tribes who were not deported by the Neo-Assyrian Empire after the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel. They believe that Samaritanism is the true religion of the ancient Israelites, preserved by those who remained in Israel during the Babylonian captivity; this belief is held in opposition to Judaism, the ethnic religion of the Jewish people, which Samaritans see as a closely related but altered and amended religion brought back by Judeans returning from Babylonian captivity. Samaritans consider Mount Gerizim (near both Nablus), and not the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, to be the holiest place on Earth.

Once a large community, the Samaritan population shrunk significantly in the wake of the bloody suppression of the Samaritan Revolts against the Byzantine Empire (mainly in 525 CE and 555 CE). Mass conversions to Christianity under the Byzantines, and later to Islam following the Arab conquest of the Levant, also reduced their numbers greatly. In the 12th century, the Jewish  traveller Benjamin of Tudela estimated that only around 1,900 Samaritans remained in the regions of Palestine and Syria.

As of 2022, the total Samaritan population stands at less than 1,000 people. The Samaritan community is divided between Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and the Samaritan compound in Holon. Males outnumber females in this divided small community; hence its survival now depends to a large degree on imported brides  from the Ukraine. An innovative solution adopted a few years ago,  that brings to mind the era  of the mail-order brides in the U.S. The newcomers are obliged to convert to the Samaritan religion. If the project succeeds it will be doubly beneficial, increasing the sect’s population and gene pool.  

The Samaritans are better known to the wider public through the “parable of the Good Samaritan” related  in the Gospel of Luke.

The  Karaites, a post-biblical breakaway community isn’t really relevant to the search for lost Jewish kingdoms. They remain an almost irrelevant offshoot of Judaism.  

On the other hand, the rise and fall of a late antique Jewish kingdom along the Red Sea in the Arabian Peninsula is definitely relevant.

According to Professor Glen Warren Bowersock, historian of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East, and Chairman of Harvard’s classics department.  “Friends and colleagues alike have reacted with amazement and disbelief when I have told them about the history I have been looking at. In the southwestern part of Arabia known in antiquity as Himyar and corresponding today approximately with Yemen, the local population converted to Judaism at some point in the late fourth century, and by about 425 a Jewish kingdom had already taken shape. For just over a century after that, its kings ruled, with one brief interruption, over a religious state that was explicitly dedicated to the observance of Judaism and the persecu­tion of its Christ­ian population. The record sur­vived over many centuries in Arabic historical writings, as well as in Greek and Syriac accounts of martyred Christians, but incredulous scholars had long been inclined to see little more than a local monotheism overlaid with language and features borrowed from Jews who had settled in the area. It is only within recent decades that enough inscribed stones have turned up to prove definitively the veracity of these surprising accounts. We can now say that an entire nation of ethnic Arabs in southwestern Arabia had converted to Judaism and imposed it as the state religion.

This bizarre but militant kingdom in Himyar was eventually overthrown by an invasion of forces from Christian Ethiopia, across the Red Sea. They set sail from East Africa, where they were joined by reinforcements from the Christian emperor in Constantinople. In the territory of Himyar, they engaged and destroyed the armies of the Jewish king and finally brought an end to what was arguably the most improbable, yet portentous, upheaval in the history of pre-Islamic Arabia. Few scholars, apart from specialists in ancient South Arabia or early Christian Ethiopia, have been aware of these events. A vigorous team led by Christian Julien Robin in Paris has pioneered research on the Jewish kingdom in Himyar.

Through Christian and Muslim rule, Jews continued to be a strong presence in the Arabian Peninsula. This is clear not only from Mohammed’s (often conflictual) dealings with them but also from the influence that Judaism had on the new religion’s rituals and prohibitions (daily prayers, circumcision, ritual purity, pilgrimage, charity, ban on images and eating pork).

In Yemen, the heartland of the Himyarites, the Jewish community endured through centuries of persecution, until 1949-1950, when almost all its remaining members – around 50,000 – were airlifted to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet. And while they maintain some unique rituals and traditions, which set them apart from Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, no one would doubt that they are indeed, the last, very much Jewish descendants of the lost kingdom of Himyar.

With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, Arab tribes sought to conquer North Africa and continue to Europe via Spain. The major obstacle to a conquest of the Maghreb was the presence of a Berber queen in the mountains of present-day Algeria. Her tribe, the Gerawa, had converted to Judaism earlier in the century; their queen, Dahia al-Kahena, either converted with them or was Jewish by birth.

This era signalled the end of the Byzantine dynasty in a geographical area that was home to Byzantines, Arabs and Jews, as well as Christian Berbers.

Kahena was a formidable warrior commanding a strong army. Hassan ibn Ne’uman, an Arab Egyptian prince, successfully defeated the Byzantines in Carthage in 687 and set forth to meet her in battle; she defeated  him decisively. Hassan returned to Egypt, where he awaited reinforcements for about five years. Finally, Hassan assembled an army large enough army to confront and defeat the Berber queen.

The story of the Jewish Berber queen is filled with fact and fiction; lack of contemporary sources makes it difficult to decide how much of the narrative is fact. There are contradictions in different versions of her life and battles. Her age and the duration of her rule are uncertain, although the shortest rule attributed to her is 35 years.

Yet even after peeling away the romanticization, certain facts remain undisputed and are supported by a Judeo-Arabic poem written by local Jews damning her for having created such devastation for her own people. Her success as a warrior stood her in good stead until she chose a self-defeating means of withstanding a second attack by a strengthened Arab army. Her poor judgment led to her own destruction and that of Byzantine North Africa. The defeat that she suffered cleared the way for the Arab conquest of Spain in 711, the only country in Western Europe to experience Islamic rule.

The quest for a long-lost Jewish empire leads to the Khazars a semi-nomadic Turkic people. In the late 7th century AD the Khazars established a major commercial empire covering the south-eastern section of modern European Russia, southern Ukraine, Crimea, and Kazakhstan. They created what for its duration was the most powerful polity to emerge from the break-up of the Western Turkic Khaganate. Along a major artery of commerce between Eastern Europe and South-western Asia, Khazaria became one of the foremost trading empires of the early mediaeval world, commanding the western marches of the Silk Road and playing a key commercial role as a crossroad between China, the Middle East, and Kievan Rus'. For some three centuries (c. 650–965) the Khazars dominated the vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppes to the eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus.

The late 19th century saw the emergence of the theory that many of today's Ashkenazi Jews are descended from a hypothetical Khazarian Jewish diaspora that migrated westward from modern-day Russia and Ukraine into modern-day France and Germany. Linguistic and genetic studies have not supported the theory of a Khazar connection to Ashkenazi Jewry. The theory still occasionally finds support, but most scholars view it with considerable scepticism. The theory is sometimes associated with antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

The search for a long-lost Jewish empire has yielded many legends and few facts.

Most of what I have written is quoted from open sources.  I simply glued them together and waited for an opportune time to write about the quest for the long-lost Jewish empire.

 

Have a good weekend.

 

Beni                                                                                        25^th of August, 2022.

 

 

 

 

 RIDLEY ROAD

Maybe the anti-Israel protests in the UK didn’t warrant a mention in your local news media, just the same, I want to write about them.

'Zionists, go home!' chanted protestors at one anti-Israel demonstration in London. Others carried signs with slogans bearing a similar message. “Stop the Judaization of Jerusalem, Britain, Europe, Ukraine, and the USA," one of them read.

The demonstration publicised as a "Rally for Palestine," was organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in response to the IDF’s three-day Operation Breaking Dawn. 

In regard to the chants, one Twitter user wrote that "they're telling Zionists to go home, doesn't that kind of make them Zionists, too?" 

Jerusalem Post columnist Emily Schrader said, "that's the point… we did."

Last year saw a sharp rise in antisemitism in the UK – especially during Operation Guardian of the Walls in Gaza.

While watching a telecast of the demonstrations I sensed a certain déjà vu recalling a traumatic experience I had in 1947 when I stumbled on a violent confrontation between a British fascist group led by Oswald Mosley and the Jewish defence 43 group in Ridley Road market, Hackney. At that time the market was a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in East London.  I was running an errand for my father when I came across the violent face-off between the two groups.  The police tried to separate them, but the bobbies appeared to be more inclined to favour Mosley and his thugs.  

Within months of the war’s end, fourteen fascist groups and at least three fascist bookshops operated openly across London.

After the end of the Second World war, many fascist groups surfaced again, coalescing around British fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. They held rallies across London and England, agitating against so-called Jewish influence. In response, a group called the 43 Group (after the 43 people who founded it), mostly Jewish ex-servicemen, decided to oppose the fascists by all means necessary, breaking up their meetings continuously. Things came to a head in a series of confrontations in the summer of 1947 in Ridley Road market where the main fascist group regularly held demonstrations. Faced with persistent opposition by Jewish activists the fascist demonstrations gradually petered out. There was a brief resurgence in 1962, but that too was countered by younger Jewish anti-fascist activists.

However, antisemitism can be traced to way back before the appearance of Oswald Mosley’s fascist movement.

During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), some British leaders who were opposed to the war asserted that Jewish gold mining operators and financiers with their large stakes in South Africa were a driving force behind it. Labour leader Keir Hardie asserted that Jews were part of a secretive "imperialist" cabal that promoted war. The Clarion, a paper aligned with the Independent Labour Party  and the Trade Union Congress blamed "Jewish capitalists" as "being behind the war and imperialism in general". John Burns, a Liberal Party socialist, speaking in the House of Commons in 1900, asserted that the British Army itself had become "a janissary of the Jews". Writer and politician Henry Hyndman also argued that "Jewish bankers" and "imperialist Judaism" were the cause of the conflict. 

A possible cause of the groundswell of anti-Jewish sentiments was the considerable growth of the Jewish population in Britain.

From 1882 to 1919, the Jewish population in Britain increased fivefold, from 46,000 to 250,000, due to the exodus from Russian pogroms and discrimination, many of whom settled in the East End of London. My paternal grandparents were among them.

 By the turn of the century, a popular and media backlash had begun. “The British Brothers' League” was formed, with the support of prominent politicians, organising marches and petitions. At rallies, its speakers said that Britain should not become "the dumping ground for the scum of Europe". In 1905, an editorial in the Manchester Evening Chronicle wrote: "that the dirty, destitute, diseased, verminous and criminal foreigner who dumps himself on our soil should be denied permission to land".

One of the main objectives of the Aliens Act in 1905 wa
s to control such immigration. Restrictions were increased in the Aliens Restriction Act 1914 and the immigration laws of 1919.

In addition to anti-immigration campaigners, there were antisemitic groups, notably The Britons, launched in 1919, which called for British Jews to be deported en masse to Palestine. I’ll resist the temptation to comment.

In 1920, the Morning Post published a translation of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, which subsequently formed the basis of a book, “The Cause of World Unrest”, to which half the paper's staff contributed. Later exposed as a forgery, they were initially accepted, with a leader in The Times blaming Jews for World War I and the Bolshevik regime and calling them the greatest threat to the British Empire.

 My earliest recollection of antisemitism was in our neighbourhood in East London when my brother and I were jeered at by other children who called us “Jew boys.” I doubt if they really understood why they were taunting us and we hardly knew why we were different. Even later when the jibes were followed by blows, we understood the need to defend ourselves. So, with our father’s encouragement, we took up boxing as our preferred sport.

Later on, when our family moved to New Zealand I met people who knew very little about Jews and Judaism, especially in remote rural communities.

I’ll conclude by recycling an anecdote that occurred shortly before I left New Zealand on the first stage of my aliya.  

My friend Colin Meltzer persuaded me to join him on a tour of the South Island. He reasoned that there were many places we had never seen and we might not have another opportunity to visit them. His logic was sound and so equipped  with backpacks and good walking shoes we set out heading south. Most of the way we hitchhiked and the particular anecdote I want to relate occurred when we managed to “hitch” a ride on a goods train that crossed one of the passes in the Southern Alps. The stationmaster told us to board the mail wagon at the rear of the train. Colin and I had barely seated ourselves down when we were joined by another free passenger, a clergyman replete with dog collar. Apparently, his parish included hamlets along the line. Anyway, he was delighted to see us believing he had a two-man congregation to preach to. Leaning forward in a friendly gesture he declared “We are all good Christians!”  Colin and I exchanged amused glances and then I leaned forward imitating the clergyman’s gesture and said. “Reverend you are in the minority!” There was a long pause before he realised that he was sitting opposite two descendants of the Messiah’s alleged crucifiers. The expression on his face was unforgettable. As I recall he spent the rest of the journey engrossed in his prayer book.

 

Have a good weekend.

 

Beni,                                                                           18^th of August, 2022.

 

 

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BREAKING DAWN

I doubt if can add anything you don’t already know about operation “Breaking Dawn.” Just the same, I’ll begin with a synopsis of the brief over-the-weekend clash with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The conflagration began  after days of tense uncertainty following the arrest of Bassem al-Saadi, Islamic Jihad’s top commander in the West Bank. The IDF has conducted near-nightly raids across the West Bank since mid-March, in response to a wave of Palestinian terror attacks on Israeli citizens.

While Islamic Jihad did not respond aggressively after Saadi’s arrest, it did issue an ultimatum to Israel threatening retaliation unless certain demands were met, most of all, the release of Bassam al-Saadi. Faced with an imminent threat clearly definable as Casus Belli, Israel had the right to take preemptive action against the PIJ. In the past when faced with similar situations Israeli leaders have taken the advice given in the Babylonian Talmud – “When someone comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first.”  Rather than “Turn the other cheek,” the IDF struck first.

The consequences of a preemptive attack were obvious. Foreign news outlets, international rights organisations, and countries that censured Israel on previous occasions won’t be confused by the facts this time too. They had made up their minds before the first shot was fired.

Predictably, some friends and allies were concerned about international reaction to operation “Breaking Dawn.” When Israel was a fledgling state with less firepower and fewer friends. David Ben Gurion responded tersely to similar concern about international reaction- “It doesn’t matter what the Goyim will say. it’s what the Jews will do that matters.” (My rendition). B.G used the word Goyim in the biblical sense, meaning nations.

Bethan McKernan, reporting from Jerusalem for The Guardian was careful to phrase her account of the events in a way that left the reader wondering if Israel’s narrative could be trusted. Ms. McKernan used the standard “The IDF says…”, “Israel claims,” even in cases where the IDF spokespersons were prepared to provide video footage supporting the Israeli account. Bethan McKernan quoted health authorities in Gaza to add extra weight to her report seemingly accepting their version of events as “the gospel truth.”

Emily Schrader wrote an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post on the problem of bias in the international news media. “Where Palestinian claims are taken for fact, even when they come from terrorist organisations, Israeli claims backed by evidence are regarded with scepticism.” She said.

Here is a case in point: In the immediate aftermath of explosions near Jabaliya refugee camp, Palestinian sources and social media claimed that the IDF had bombed children, sharing disturbing photos of injured and bloodied children across social media channels. The news immediately was picked up by multiple sources in the international media.

The IDF, however, hadn’t operated in that area for hours meaning it couldn’t possibly have been responsible for the casualties.

The Israeli government and the IDF quickly issued a statement and provided aerial video footage of the Islamic Jihad rocket barrage that was fired at Israeli civilian targets but misfired, plummeting back to Jabaliya killing and injuring innocent bystanders. There were other like instances and several failed rocket launchings that caused deaths and injuries. They too will likely be attributed to “Israeli aggression.”

Emily Schrader noted that after the truth was revealed, several media sources updated their information, while most sources didn’t cover the story at all or the fact that hundreds of rockets fell short killing an estimated 16 Palestinian civilians over the weekend (incidentally more civilian casualties than Israel was allegedly responsible for in all of their airstrikes against Islamic Jihad targets).

“The New York Times didn’t initially report on the story, and while both CNN and the BBC mentioned the Jabaliya attack within larger articles about the entire operation, both of them reported it as an Israeli claim that has been disputed. The BBC article stated that Israel accused PIJ militants of accidentally causing at least some of those deaths, adding that the BBC has not been able to independently verify this claim.

 

At this juncture, I want to add a few observations.

 The Gaza Strip is constantly under surveillance by Israeli drones and aircraft. It is the most intensely watched area on the planet. Consequently, PIJ manoeuvres and preparations for an offensive were clearly evident.

On the other hand, the IDF’s preparations for a preemptive attack have been in the making for a long time. They were finely honed, waiting for an opportunity to present itself.

One Israeli munitions expert reasoned that the reason some PIJ rockets misfire could be a faulty production batch or an inferior locally manufactured series that fails to launch properly.

 The London-based print and digital news outlet Asharq al-Awsat posted a scoop divulging information about the assassination of Tayseer Jabari, Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s (PIJ) commander in northern Gaza. However, the same information was openly shared with viewers on TV channel 12. Nevertheless, Asharq al-Awsat gave the following account:

“The assassination came at the start of the military campaign Israel launched against Gaza last Friday.

According to our sources, the IDF deployed two new weapons, including a smart bomb, to destroy the apartment where Jabari was staying.

Sources said that accurate intelligence information about the presence of Jabari in the apartment arrived at eight o’clock in the evening on Thursday.

After confirming Jabari’s whereabouts, Israeli forces carried out their assassination plan. (Margin note: The IDF postponed the assassination several times because uninvolved bystanders were observed nearby.)  

Jabari had been living for days in an apartment located on the sixth floor of the Palestine Tower in Gaza, which is a 14-storey building containing 28 spacious apartments.

Israeli intelligence had previously ‘obtained’ the apartment building’s construction plans enabling it to calculate the dimensions, the type of reinforced concrete used in the construction, and other essential details   

Israeli forces used an innovative way to target Jabari so that the operation caused only minimal damage to the building and the neighbouring area.

The IDF used a bomb that penetrated an empty room in the apartment on the seventh floor. The bomb exploded, destroying just the floor, and collapsing the ceiling on Jabari in the apartment below, killing him.

Seconds later, jet fighters fired seven more missiles from different angles at the apartment to ascertain that Jabari and any possible associates were eliminated.

The objectives of the assassination operation were accomplished in just 170 seconds.”

 

In an op-ed he wrote for the Times of Israel David Horowitz said “Israel got to start, conduct and end this round of fighting broadly as it hoped because Hamas chose not to get involved. This was not because Hamas has abandoned its strategic goal of destroying Israel, but because it does not believe it can destroy Israel right now.

Israeli officials believe Hamas chose not to get dragged into this conflict because it was deterred by last year’s Operation Guardian of the Walls, and because the outgoing coalition has offered economic carrots as well as sticks to Gaza, notably including 14,000 work permits, that Hamas does not want to lose.

Nobody should delude themselves that Hamas is becoming less of a strategic threat to Israel. If anything, the reverse is true. It chose to exercise short-term restraint when under pressure to join its ally-rival in battering the loathed Zionists because it assessed that this better serves its long-term anti-Israel ambitions.”

 

Last but certainly not least the much-improved Iron Dome Defence System chalked up a 96% successful interception rate. About 1,100 projectiles were fired at Israel over the three days of fighting, and thanks to the combination of the Iron Dome, reinforced rooms and a disciplined public, there were no Israeli fatalities.

We are looking forward to a quiet and uneventful weekend.

Take care.

 

Beni                                                    11^th of August, 2022.

 

 

 

 

 THE CANAANITE CONNECTION

“Thus, Joshua struck all the land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings. He left no survivor, but he utterly destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded…. He left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded Moses.” (Joshua. 10:40, 11:15)

Indeed, Joshua did a very thorough job smiting Canaanites of all stripes, unimpeded by human rights investigations, sanctions or a day of reckoning.

With the above text and others in mind, eminent atheist Richard Dawkins complained that the God of the Old Testament was “a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser … a genocidal … megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”.

But then, two nice Jewish boys, George and Ira Gershwin doubted the veracity of the biblical narrative "It ain't necessarily so, it ain't necessarily so, the t'ings dat yo' li'ble, to read in de Bible, it ain't necessarily so” (Porgy and Bess)

Well, it seems that the Canaanites managed to survive the purge of their traditional homeland, passing on their DNA over the centuries to their numerous descendants in modern-day Lebanon and other places.

Most of today’s Jewish and Arabic-speaking populations share a strong genetic link to the ancient Canaanites, according to a new study conducted by an international team of archaeologists and geneticists, including Professor Israel Finkelstein from the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University.

The study concludes that modern-day groups in Lebanon, Israel and Jordan share a large part of their ancestry, in most cases more than half, with the people who lived in the Levant during the Bronze Age, more than 3,000 years ago.

The researchers analysed genetic material from dozens of skeletons found at Canaanite sites across Israel and neighbouring countries, and compared it to the genomes of other ancient populations as well as to modern-day groups.

 “This study suggests there is a deep genetic connection of many Jewish groups today across the Diaspora and many Arab groups to this part of the world thousands of years ago,” said Professor Emil David Reich, a Harvard University geneticist and one of the world’s top experts in the study of ancient DNA.

 Historians know the ancient Canaanites were divided into independent city-states, such as Megiddo, Hazor, and Acre. Most of the texts about them come from external references or later sources, The new study shows that genetically at least, the Canaanites did have a lot in common with each other.

 Most of the recovered genomes could be modelled as having a roughly 50/50 contribution of ancestry from local Neolithic inhabitants and from a group that hailed from the Caucasus or the North-western Zagros mountains, in today’s Iran. For the ancestry of the Canaanites to be split halfway between locals and newcomers there would have had to be an influx of a significant number of people, and a question that begs to be asked is whether this inflow was an invasion or a peaceful migration.

 

“I don’t think we are dealing with an invasion. We have no archaeological evidence of destruction or a major disruption in the Early Bronze Age.” Says Professor Israel Finkelstein.

“The next step in the research will be to continue modelling the ancient populations of the Levant, especially in the post-Canaanite period. It will be interesting to see what happened later on, what was the genetic profile of the people of biblical Israel and Judah, how they were related to us and to their predecessors, and what were the other contributions to the genetic pool along the way.” Israel Finkelstein added.

 

At this juncture, I want to mention a seemingly unrelated news item, but on reconsideration it has a Canaanite connection.

I refer to the tragic death of attorney Raad Mahamid, a resident of Umm el-Fahm who drowned in the Sea of Galilee on July 22. His body was located and recovered by Israeli navy divers on Saturday.

Raad Mahamid fell overboard while sailing with a friend and his brother-in-law about half a mile from the shore. A news report about the accident said he wasn’t wearing a life jacket, but didn’t mention if he knew how to swim.

His body was found after extensive searches by the police, IDF, ZAKA (Rescue and Recovery Organisation) and regional councils, as well as various volunteer groups. He was eventually located using “advanced and extensive technological means,” according to a statement by the IDF and Israel Police spokesperson’s units.

“There is little comfort now because the uncertainty was the hardest to bear, and despite all of the pain, at least they found him,” said Mahamid’s older brother, Na’il, also an attorney, who has been with the search groups since Raad went missing. “This is his destiny. Everything is in God’s hands... We all hoped. The heart said one thing and the mind said another.

Na’il thanked the security forces that searched for his brother, despite the criticism voiced by some people in Umm el-Fahm who complained that not enough was done to find him and that the circumstances would have been different had the missing person been a Jew.

As you probably recall Umm el-Fahm is the epicentre of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement led by firebrand cleric Sheikh Raed Salah. Regardless of the human effort, both official and voluntary invested in the search, it wouldn’t satisfy Raed Salah. Neither would the technological means employed in order to locate and recover attorney Raad Mahamid’s body. The Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement like its mentors the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas doesn’t recognise Israel’s right to exist.

I doubt if Sheikh Raed Salah has read about the Canaanite connection and our shared genomes. If he had, he would probably dismiss it as Zionist propaganda.

 

In order to add a degree of counterbalance I’ll mention the death and funeral of Rabbi Yitzchok Tuvia Weiss who headed the ultra-Orthodox Eda Haradit, a hardline anti-Zionist community. Rabbi Weiss aged 95, died on Saturday and was buried at Jerusalem's Mount of Olives cemetery. Extra police units were deployed and roads were temporarily closed to traffic during the funeral procession.

I’ll hazard a guess and say that the late Rabbi Weiss much like Sheikh Raed Salah would have dismissed the Canaanite connection as Zionist propaganda.

 

Have a good weekend.

 

Beni,                                                               4th of August. 2022.