Israeli Nobel laureate: We should annex now, not 'talk it to death'
Nobel laureate Professor Yisrael (Robert) Aumann gave a special interview to the Jerusalem Post sister publication Maariv ahead of his 90th birthday on June 8.A tale of two countries: The politics of indigeneity in Israel
The Nobel prize winner is famous for holding right wing views. When asked, he said that Israel should annex the Jordan Valley and a portion (30%) of the West Bank on July 1 as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu said he will do “and not talk it to death.”
When asked about the chance of a peace agreement with the Palestinians he said that some things should not be a matter of compromise. “The Arabs are also not flexible, they say everything belongs to them”, he argued. "We Jews should not waiver in our conviction that this is our rightful historical homeland, “dating back thousands of years.”
Aumann won the Nobel prize in 2005 for the contribution his research of Game Theory made in the field of economics.
His research helped understand how seemingly irrational actions might, in reality, be rational when we take into account the situations they work with and the logic guiding them. For example, in his Nobel speech called "War and Peace," he explained how the seemingly irrational act of building enough nuclear bombs to destroy the planet is effective in preventing war because the other side can’t know if these weapons will be used or not.
Aumann joked with the reporter that until he won the prize, he worked in science. But as the prize tends to be the best sales promoter in the world, he said “I now work in sales”, referringg to the sales of his theories.
While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often thought of as a complex and highly-nuanced topic, any understanding of the conflict ultimately revolves around a single question, the question of who is indigenous to the land. All the differing perspectives on Israel boil down to whether they consider Jews or Arabs the original inhabitants of the region.
A common narrative regarding indigeneity is that Palestinians are the original inhabitants of the land, and anti-Zionists frequently make claims based on the premise that Palestinians are the indigenous people and Israelis are the occupiers.
Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, stated to the UN Security Council, that “[W]e are the descendants of the Canaanites who lived in the land of Palestine 5,000 years ago, and continuously remained there to this day.”
Linda Sarsour, an Arab-American activist tweeted, “Jesus was a Palestinian of Nazareth.”
Jonathan Cook wrote in The Electronic Intifada that Israel is systematically “Hebraizing” Arab city names in order to erase an Arab connection to the land, and accused Israel of turning al-Quds into Yerushalayim, al-Nasra into Natzrat, and Jaffa into Yafo. In doing so, the article assumes that the Palestinian connection to the land is longer than that of the Jews.
But do the facts support these claims that Palestinians are the original inhabitants of the land?
Linguistic analysis provides insight into this central question. In the 2nd millennium BCE, the inhabitants of Canaan, what is modern-day Israel, all spoke a language called Proto-Canaanite. Over time, their language underwent a phonetic shift known as the Canaanite Shift, which was characterized by a transition from an ā vowel to an o vowel. All the languages that descended from this Proto-Canaanite language had this o vowel in place of the ā, while the other Semitic languages from outside the region of Canaan kept the original ā.
The effect of the shift is still noticeable today. For example, the word for peace in Hebrew is Shalom, demonstrating the vowel shift, whereas Arabic keeps the ā vowel in Salām: Hebrew’s vowel shift indicates it was historically spoken in Canaan, while Arabic’s lack of the vowel shift suggests it developed outside of Canaan.
The Electronic Intifada article claims that the Arabic name of Yafa is the original term for the place, but as the true indigenous people would have used the vowel-shifted name of Yafo, as Hebrew does, the truth is laid bare: Arabic doesn’t fulfill the criteria to be a native language to Israel. The linguistic patterns of Arabic are consistent with the historical context –– Palestinians are Arabs, who are indigenous to the Arabian peninsula, but their indigenous claims do not extend to Israel.
"People of certain lineages of people who want to delegitimize our leaders... who will say Linda is anti-Israel...”
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) June 6, 2020
That’s a longgg convoluted way of saying ‘blame the Jews’. pic.twitter.com/JmyPLMXoZT