Denying the Existence of a People

Newt Gingrich's statement about the Palestinians being an invented people is, at the very least, unhelpful. There is no denying that the Palestinians exist now, and it doesn't really matter if they became a national group in 1948 or centuries earlier.

Palestinians are right to be angry at Gingrich. However, they need to take a moment to think about their own hypocrisy. They regularly deny the existence of the Jewish people, claiming that Jews are merely a religious group, not a national one. Even the most moderate Palestinians hold this view, and it is one of the greatest obstacles to peace in the Middle East.

Neither Palestinian or Jewish peoplehood should be denied.

Calling All Israeli Expats

A couple of months ago, I first saw the heavy handed ads calling for Israeli citizens to return home.  A friend had posted them on Facebook, saying he found it disgusting. Many answered with equal dismay - all Israelis, but as far as I know, none living abroad.

What's the problem? In one ad, a child calls his sleeping father with the word "daddy", but the father only wakes up to the Hebrew "Aba". In another, a woman looks at her computer and sees the word "Yizkor" ("Remember"). There's also a yahrzeit candle on the table. Her American boyfriend, unaware that these are symbols of Memorial Day in Israel, doesn't understand why she is sad. The third, most irritating ad, shows a girl having a video chat with her grandparents, who are sitting in front of a Chanukiah (Hanukah Menorah). They ask her what holiday it is and she says it's Christmas. You can watch the first two ads below. The third has been removed from YouTube.

I'm not surprised by the uproar the now discontinued ads caused. I'm just surprised by how long it took Americans to notice it. I'm also perplexed by Immigration Minister Sofa Landver's cluelessness. She doesn't understand why American Jews are offended by something that isn't even aimed at them. Well, Minister Landver, even if they aren't the target audience, they can still see the ads, and at least in the Hannukah/Christmas ad, can interpret the campaign as attacking their own Jewishness.

This teaches us something about official Israeli government ads shown abroad. Whether its the Ministry of Immigration, the Ministry of Tourism or any other agency, ads should also be approved by the Prime Minister and Foreign Ministry, including input from the local embassy and consulates. Someone who knows the local culture should make sure the locals won't find the ads offensive.

Jewish and Democratic

On Monday, poet and translator Salman Masalha, an Arab citizen of Israel, wrote an opinion piece in Ha'aretz where he wrote that a "Jewish and Democratic" state cannot exist:

"There is no such thing as a Jewish democratic state, just as there is no Muslim democratic state. Religion and democracy can never dwell under one roof." (Read the whole article here in English or in Hebrew)

This prompted lots of angry letters to the editor, and today political science professor Shlomo Avineri, a regular Ha'aretz contributor, wrote his own rebuttal:

"In the standard Arab view, "Jews" are comparable to "Christians" or "Muslims." In other words, they are a religious group, not a nation. And it is not only Arabs who think this way: There is no doubt that for hundreds of years, Jewish identity was perceived by Jews and non-Jews alike primarily as a religious identity, and some still think so.

But the essence of the Zionist revolution is the view that the Jews are a nation, and as such, they have the right to national self-determination in a political framework. This principle was accepted by the United Nations on November 29, 1947, in its decision to partition British Mandatory Palestine into two states - Jewish and Arab (not Jewish and Muslim-Christian )."

Later in the article he writes:

"One of the problems that complicates attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is this very issue - the fact that the Arab side has difficulty recognizing that Jews in the state of Israel view themselves as a nation. Identity is a matter of self-definition, not external definition. Just as Jews are not the ones who will determine whether the Palestinians are a people or not (there are more than a few of us who have yet to be reconciled with the existence of the Palestinian people ), Salman Masalha cannot determine whether the Jews are a people or not. It is a question of self-determination." (Read the whole article in English or the original Hebrew)

Needless to say, I'm on Avineri's side here.

Saudi Arabian Searches for Jewish Genome "Hoax"

I'm sometimes very happy to have my Lijit Widget (see it on the left). It shows me how people reached my blog and from where on the globe, and sometimes I have interesting visitors. One of my latest readers hails from Riyad, Saudi Arabia and reached this site by searching for "hoax the genome-wide structure of the Jewish people". I shouldn't reach conclusions based on one internet user, but I must say I'm not surprised that the recent studies showing a genetic link between different Jewish communities around the world would automatically be seen as hoaxes by certain people in the Arab world.

Take This, Shlomo Sand!

Two new studies published in Nature and in the American Journal of Human Genetics prove that Jews worldwide are related to each other and are of Middle Eastern origins. Except for Jews from Ethiopia, Georgia, and certain communities in India, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews are much more similar to each other and to Middle Eastern populations than to local non-Jewish populations.

Read about it in the New York Times, or read the abstracts and articles themselves:

"The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people" in Nature:

Contemporary Jews comprise an aggregate of ethno-religious communities whose worldwide members identify with each other through various shared religious, historical and cultural traditions. Historical evidence suggests common origins in the Middle East, followed by migrations leading to the establishment of communities of Jews in Europe, Africa and Asia, in what is termed the Jewish Diaspora. This complex demographic history imposes special challenges in attempting to address the genetic structure of the Jewish people. Although many genetic studies have shed light on Jewish origins and on diseases prevalent among Jewish communities, including studies focusing on uniparentally and biparentally inherited markers, genome-wide patterns of variation across the vast geographic span of Jewish Diaspora communities and their respective neighbours have yet to be addressed. Here we use high-density bead arrays to genotype individuals from 14 Jewish Diaspora communities and compare these patterns of genome-wide diversity with those from 69 Old World non-Jewish populations, of which 25 have not previously been reported. These samples were carefully chosen to provide comprehensive comparisons between Jewish and non-Jewish populations in the Diaspora, as well as with non-Jewish populations from the Middle East and north Africa. Principal component and structure-like analyses identify previously unrecognized genetic substructure within the Middle East. Most Jewish samples form a remarkably tight subcluster that overlies Druze and Cypriot samples but not samples from other Levantine populations or paired Diaspora host populations. In contrast, Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) and Indian Jews (Bene Israel and Cochini) cluster with neighbouring autochthonous populations in Ethiopia and western India, respectively, despite a clear paternal link between the Bene Israel and the Levant. These results cast light on the variegated genetic architecture of the Middle East, and trace the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant.

"Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry" in the American Journal of Human Genetics:

For more than a century, Jews and non-Jews alike have tried to define the relatedness of contemporary Jewish people. Previous genetic studies of blood group and serum markers suggested that Jewish groups had Middle Eastern origin with greater genetic similarity between paired Jewish populations. However, these and successor studies of monoallelic Y chromosomal and mitochondrial genetic markers did not resolve the issues of within and between-group Jewish genetic identity. Here, genome-wide analysis of seven Jewish groups (Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek, and Ashkenazi) and comparison with non-Jewish groups demonstrated distinctive Jewish population clusters, each with shared Middle Eastern ancestry, proximity to contemporary Middle Eastern populations, and variable degrees of European and North African admixture. Two major groups were identified by principal component, phylogenetic, and identity by descent (IBD) analysis: Middle Eastern Jews and European/Syrian Jews. The IBD segment sharing and the proximity of European Jews to each other and to southern European populations suggested similar origins for European Jewry and refuted large-scale genetic contributions of Central and Eastern European and Slavic populations to the formation of Ashkenazi Jewry. Rapid decay of IBD in Ashkenazi Jewish genomes was consistent with a severe bottleneck followed by large expansion, such as occurred with the so-called demographic miracle of population expansion from 50,000 people at the beginning of the 15th century to 5,000,000 people at the beginning of the 19th century. Thus, this study demonstrates that European/Syrian and Middle Eastern Jews represent a series of geographical isolates or clusters woven together by shared IBD genetic threads.

I wonder what Shlomo Sand thinks about this. His main argument in "The Invention of the Jewish People" is that modern Jews aren't related to the ancient Jews of the Kingdoms of Israel & Judea, but rather are made up of unrelated groups of peoples who converted to Judaism over the centuries, and that most Ashkenazi Jews descend from the Turkic Khazars. Sand's theory, often used by anti-Zionists to delegitimize the state of Israel, has just been proven false once again.

Jews and the Kingdom

I don't know anything about being Jewish in Great Britain. I've never lived there, or even visited. I know quite a few British Jews, mostly those who moved to Israel, but we've never discussed the topic of how it is to be Jewish in the United Kingdom. Two interesting opinion pieces were published recently about just that. David Newman of the Jerusalem Post and Roger Cohen of the New York Times write from different perspectives, about different aspects of "Anglo-Judaism", and are each prompted to write about the issue for very different reasons.

You can go to the links above or read the articles below.

Congratulations, John McCain

Now that Senator Barack Obama has won the Democratic nomination for president, John McCain's chances of becoming the 44th President of the United States of America are very high. I have a feeling that John McCain will win the electoral college by a large margin, though the popular vote will be very close. Obama might even win the popular vote by a percent or two. McCain will win most, if not all, of the swing states.

This isn't wishful thinking. I believe that when the choice is either Obama or McCain, Obama is the lesser of evils. McCain would be a complete disaster. Obama would be a disaster, too, but not as much as McCain.

I didn't like Obama's speech to AIPAC. He went so much overboard, going as far as promising a united Jerusalem, that it became unbelievable. There's no real reason for him to oppose giving East Jerusalem to the Palestinians as their capital other than to win the Jewish vote.

Here's what will be most likely to get him as much of the Jewish vote as possible: picking Hillary Clinton as his running mate. If he doesn't want Bill and Hill on his back, he can choose one of Clinton's top supporters, Ed Rendell, the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania.

Just a thought.