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| He even poses like a liar |
Shlomo Sand, the fake historian who claims that there is no such thing as the Jewish people and that the Land of Israel is a myth - two
arguments that I easily
demolished in the past - was interviewed by the
Palestine Chronicle, and for some reason some
other publications have reprinted it.
Here's another of his laughable lies:
In Judaism there isn’t any traditional patriotism, any tradition of homeland. Palestine, Judea, it wasn’t the homeland of the Jews. And I discovered that the Christians were much more attached physically to the land. And very quickly I discovered that the first Zionists were not Jews; they were your [British] ancestors.
While I have written about Christian
proto-Zionism (and
pre-Zionist Zionism) a number of times, it is absurd to say that it predates the Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel.
Let's look at the Grace After Meals that religious Jews have been saying since at least Talmudic times (unless Sand wants to argue that this prayer it is a myth as well):
We offer thanks to You, L-rd our G-d, for having given as a heritage to our ancestors a precious, good and spacious land....For all this, L-rd our G-d, we give thanks to You and bless You. May Your Name be blessed by the mouth of every living being, constantly and forever, as it is written: When you have eaten and are satiated, you shall bless the L-rd your G-d for the good land which He has given you. Blessed are You, L-rd, for the land and for the sustenance.
...And rebuild Jerusalem the holy city speedily in our days. Blessed are You, L-rd, who in His mercy rebuilds Jerusalem. Amen.
Similarly, in the daily prayers:
Sound the great shofar for our freedom; raise a banner to gather our exiles, and bring us together from the four corners of the earth into our land. Blessed are You L-rd, who gathers the dispersed of His people Israel.
...Return in mercy to Jerusalem Your city and dwell therein as You have promised; speedily establish therein the throne of David Your servant, and rebuild it, soon in our days, as an everlasting edifice. Blessed are You L-rd, who rebuilds Jerusalem.
...May our eyes behold Your return to Zion in mercy. Blessed are You L-rd, who restores His Divine Presence to Zion.
In fact, in the daily prayers we pray for rain
only for the part of the year that it would help the land of Israel!
Every Jew who is remotely familiar with the prayers knows the centrality of the Land of Israel to his or her belief system. According to many rabbis who pre-dated Christian Zionism, dwelling in Israel is a Biblical commandment. And the number of prominent Jews who moved to Israel since the time of the current diaspora is significant.
In other words,
Sand is proven to be a liar yet again.
One other thing that he mentions is interesting:
I tried to read over again Jewish history to see if what I learned in school was right, and I discovered an unbelievable thing, as an Israeli citizen, as a historian – I can tell you that 10 years ago I believed that Judean society was exiled by the Romans. Discovering that it’s a myth, it was shocking for me.
Yes, a person who pretends to be a distinguished historian today
didn't know a basic fact about Jewish history until ten years ago!
Apparently, he never read the
radical 1993 work of that revisionist leftist historian -
Binyamin Netanyahu:
How, then, were the Jews finally forced off the land‘? The most prevalent assumption is that the Jewish people's state of homelessness was owed solely to the Romans. It is generally believed that the Romans, who had conquered Palestine and destroyed Jewish sovereignty, then took away the country from the Jews and tossed them into an exile that lasted until our own century. However common this view, it is inaccurate. It is true that the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. was a highly important factor in the ultimate decline of Jewish power and presence in Palestine. But it was not the exclusive factor; nor did it depopulate the country of its Jewish inhabitants. Therefore. the common refrain about “two thousand years of exile." uncritically repeated by many Jews and non-Jews alike, is misleading. The Diaspora did not begin with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem-vibrant Jewish communities in Alexandria, Babylon, and elsewhere had antedated the Roman conquest by centuries. Nor did the Romans end Jewish national life in Palestine. That did not come until many centuries later. Thus in 135, sixty-five years after the razing of Jerusalem, the Jews under Bar Kochba revolted once more against Rome, “until the whole earth seemed to have been stirred up over the matter," according to the third-century Greek historian Dio Cassius.
Although this three-year Jewish revolt against Rome was also brutally crushed, the country remained primarily Jewish. and shortly thereafter the Jews were granted a considerable measure of autonomous power, an authority that was recognized by Rome and later by Byzantium. In 212 C.E., when the Roman emperor Caracalla bestowed Roman citizenship on most subjects of the empire, he denied that privilege to those who lacked a country of their own. The Jews were granted Roman citizenship, because they were recognized as a people with their own country. This is not to say that they did not continue to rebel, attempting to expel Rome yet again in 35 1. And it should be noted. too, that the great Jewish legal works of the Mishna and the Jerusalem Talmud were composed in Palestine during the centuries of Roman and Byzantine domination, reflecting the dynamic Jewish intellectual life that persisted there even in the face of occupation. In 614 the Jews were, incredibly, still fighting for independence, raising an army that joined the Persians in seizing Jerusalem and ousting the Byzantines from Palestine. The size and vitality of the Jewish population at the beginning of the seventh century may be judged by the fact that in the siege of Tyre alone. the Jews contributed more than twenty thousand fighters.
But in 636, after a brief return of the Byzantines under Her-aclius. the Arabs burst into the land-after having destroyed the large and prosperous Jewish populations of the Arabian Peninsula root and branch. The rule of the Byzantines had been harsh for the Jews, but it was under the Arabs that the Jews were finally reduced to an insignificant minority and ceased to be a national force of any consequence in their own land. The Jews initially vested their hopes in the “Ishmaelite conquerors“ as they called them in contemporary sources, but within a few years these hopes were dashed Arab policy became clear. Unlike previous conquerors, the Arabs poured in a steady stream of colonists, often composed of military battalions and their families, with the intention of permanently Arabizing the land. In order to execute this policy of armed settlement, the Arabs relied on the regular expropriation of land, houses, and Jewish labor. In combination with the turmoil introduced into the land by the Arab conquest. these policies finally succeeded in doing what the might of Rome had not achieved: the uprooting of the Jewish farmer from his soil. Thus it was not the Jews who usurped the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped the land from the Jews.
This is the history that Sand is doing all he can to suppress -
because it is the truth.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Elder of Ziyon
