Jay Geller’s May 13 LTTE (“An appeal to reconsider”) begs for a response to confront the glaring omissions and contradictions in the transparently Zionist agenda which he presents.
Certainly, as he contends, “religion and nationalism (ethnicity) were coterminous” in the ancient world of the Holy Land. But when he puts forward this ancient history as an antidote to what he calls the “misinformed rhetoric” at Case Western Reserve University about the Israel-Palestine conflict, he has lost touch with political reality in the 21st century.
He must know that Israel claims to be “the only democracy” in the Middle East. And he must know that joining statehood with religion violates a core value of democracy, the separation of church and state. Of course, eliminating that separation is exactly the goal of Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right religious coalition, much like the Christian Evangelicals in the U.S.
There is more. Geller claims that describing the I/P conflict as “white people oppressing brown people” is a misapplication of America’s “binary racial thinking.” He says that the majority of Jews in Israel came from countries where they were indistinguishable from their Arab neighbors and often spoke Arabic. True enough, as this is the textbook definition of the “Mizrahi Jews” in Israel who are “brown.”
The glaring omission is that the majority of Jews who founded Israel, who immigrated after the Holocaust, were arguably “white.” They spoke Yiddish and/or the language of their country of origin. They are defined as the “Ashkenazi” and constitute a large percentage of Jews in Israel as settler-colonialists. A large majority of Jews in the U.S. are Ashkenazi and are settler-colonialists along with the rest of us in relation to indigenous native Americans here.
The Ashkenazi were the ones who committed the war crime known as “ethnic cleansing,” which Palestinians remember as their 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by Jewish militias like the Stern Gang. See the book entitled “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” by the highly respected Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. His credibility earned him a speaking engagement at Cleveland City Club.
As a footnote, for many years the dominant Ashkenazi Jews racially oppressed not only the Palestinians but the darker-skinned Mizrahi, so much so that the Mizrahi resisted by forming a Black Panther party modeled after ours in the U.S.
In addition, facts from genetic research support the thesis that the Ashkenazi are European and lack a significant genetic connection to the Holy Land. The geneticist Mazin Qumsiyeh, former director of cytogenetics services at the Yale and Duke medical schools, documents this reality. So does the genetic scientist Eran Elhaik of Johns Hopkins University.
In his book, “Sharing the Land of Canaan,” Qumsiyeh generously states his desire to share the ancient land and live in peace with Israelis, whether Mizrahi or Ashkenazi, who now oppress his people. Unfortunately, Israel’s Zionist governments, ever since 1948, have shown no such inclination.
For further reading, the Israel historian Tom Segev, in his book, “Elvis in Jerusalem,” describes in great detail the challenging cultural diversity of Israel, including the new Russian immigrants, the Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem and American Jews making “aliyah” to Israel as religious settlers in the West Bank.