The New York Times reviewed a book called The Invention of the Jewish People, which has been released for the first time in English after having been a best-seller in Israel. The apparent motivation of the book’s author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, is revealed in this passage of the review:
Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past . . .
Since Professor Sand’s mission is to discredit Jews’ historical claims to the territory, he is keen to show that their ancestry lines do not lead back to ancient Palestine.[Note 1.]
Without even knowing (never mind evaluating) Professor Sand’s specific claims, which the Times describes as a mixture of “respected scholarship with dubious theories,” I dismiss his theory out of hand because of the blatant irrationality of its thesis. There should be no claims to property because of one’s racial makeup. Any statement of the form, “X deserves (or does not deserve) Y because he is of the race Z,” is explicitly racist and thus, irrational. This goes for people arguing both for and against Jews on these grounds.
My position is, of course, a broad philosophical one, not a narrow legal one. There may well be some technical reasons to argue for this or that racial lineage to satisfy a particular legal condition that enjoys “legitimacy” in the eyes of the United Nations. But satisfying the United Nations is not the same as exercising reason, to say the least; the two categories hardly ever overlap.
The fact is that generations have passed since the British Mandate established a homeland for Jewish people, and in that time, the settlers turned an inhospitable desert into an oasis of prosperity. They managed this extraordinary feat not because they were Jewish, but because they valued life over death, freedom over slavery, reason over mysticism, industrial civilization over nomadic primitivism, the rule of law over savage tradition. While their neighbors clung to a perpetual refugee status, holding victimhood and need as claims to property they did not earn, the settlers of Israel, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, built a relatively free and civilized nation.
Today, Israel and the other Middle Eastern nations provide a vivid example of the role of ideas in history and culture. Despite the presence of some bad ideas in Israel (religious mysticism, communism and other leftist political leanings, a suicidal embrace of multiculturalism) that serve to dilute its moral standing, the essence remains clear. Israel compared to its neighbors is the embodiment of Enlightenment values amid a hostile medieval primitivism, as stark a contrast as that of West Berlin and East Berlin during the Cold War.
The citizens of Israel belong there because they earned it. Anyone who is sincerely interested in solving problems in the Middle East would do well to throw off their racist and religious prejudices and turn to modern civilization: reason, individual rights, and capitalism.
1. “Book Calls Jewish People an ‘Invention’,” The New York Times, 23 Nov 2009.