Canaanites - BrainGlutton, show me one of them. OTOH, Jews are 14M of them, now and here.
Must we?
Nevertheless, all the praying imaginable won’t help one to take and keep territory. That requires the entirely practical matter of securing the cooperation of your neighbors (i.e. they recognize the territory is yours and won’t try to take it) and/or maintaining a military that can make it painfully expensive for them if they do try to take it.
Actually, if old-school biblical rules were still in effect, Israel would be quite a bit larger than it is now, covering all conquered territory from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, the entire Sinai Peninsula, large pieces of southern Lebanon and Syria, etc. The conquered populations could’ve been driven out or forcibly converted or put the sword or whatever. I mean, if we’re using history as a guide, that’s how things were done, right?
Silberman and Finkelstein’s thesis is that Jews are – or at least the Old Testament Hebrews were – Canaanites – that is, indigenous inhabitants of Canaan, not immigrants/conquerors from Mesopotamia or Egypt as the Bible says. They consider that version national propaganda from a time when conquest was deemed to confer better title to territory than indigenous status would.
Both Jews and modern Palestinians are descended from Canaanites.
…were to find modern Ashkenazik jews and palestinians closely related? Would they stop shooting at eachother?
And also from Philistines, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Europeans (Crusaders), Turks – every people that has ever conquered or held Canaan for a significant period or even passed through it in significant numbers.
H.G. Wells, in his Outline of History, compared the Jews in ancient Palestine to “a man who insists on living in the middle of a busy highway.”
Doubtful. There’s no quarrel more bitter than a family quarrel.
I thought that the biblical claim is that the Palestinians are the children of Ishmael, and so are already closely related to the twelve tribes?
So, why would more evidence towards close relations between the two groups cause peace to break out?
There’s a native tradition among the Arabs – that is, those of what is now SA – that they are descendants of Ishmael. The Bible says only that Ishmael had twelve sons who settled everywhere from Assyria to the border of Egypt.
The modern Palestinians, of course, are of mixed descent, as noted above.
And to avoid confusion:
There’s also Esau, son of Isaac, brother of Jacob/Israel, who became legendary ancestor of the Edomites.
And Canaan, son of Ham, grandson of Noah, legendary ancestor of the Canaanites. The verse “a slave of slaves shall Canaan be to his brothers” may be Hebrew national propaganda to justify oppression/displacement of non-Hebrew Canaanites. (The Hebrews might have been indigenous to the region but their was always some cultural distinction between them and their neighbors; for one thing, you’ll never find pig bones at a Hebrew archaelogical site, however ancient.) This “Curse of Ham” much later was invoked to justify black slavery (Africans being identified as Ham’s descendants.) Ain’t history som’n?
Thanks for breaking that down for me, BG.
Israel’s right to exist has absolutely nothing to do with who occupied that territory hundreds or thousands of years ago. Nor does the Palestinian’s claim to that land.
If you want to start giving back the land in the middle east to the people who occupied it even 100 years ago, well… good luck to you. Many of the ME borders are artificial in exactly the same way that Israel’s was - drawn up by fiat by occupying powers. The Kurds, for example, aren’t exactly happy with the breakup of their state into three parts, and they’ve suffered horribly as a result of losing their autonomy. Yet I don’t see a lot of support around the world for Kurdish terrorists attacking Turkey, Iran, and Syria, or for that matter much support for Kurdish independence from Iraq. Can you imagine the uproar if the Kurdish government supported launching rockets into cities full of civilians in Turkey or Iran?
Israel has every bit as much right to secure its borders and live in peace as any other country. It maintains that right through force of arms, as do other countries.
The real problem Israel has is that its neighbors want to destroy it, and its neighbors, through virtue of having a lot of oil, have money and wield a lot of influence in the world. Therefore, they have big sponsors in the U.N. As a result, Israel gets the shaft unless America or a couple of other countries stand up for it, and then America gets hated too.
None of this has anything to do with the legitimacy of the Israeli state. It’s as legitimate as any other country on the planet.
The greatest argument for the state of Israel is that they are there now and they have the military capability to stay there. The historial and Biblical stuff is moot.
Who has the authority to “give back” Israel anyway? There is no World Government.
Actually, they never had an autonomous state (though they were promised one in the Treaty of Sevres).
Well, in theory the Israelis could give it ‘back’. They don’t seem too inclined to do so, though.
They have no more ability to give back Israel to the Palestinians than America has to give back the US to the native Americans. There is no way enough of a majority of Israeli’s would ever feel strongly enough to basically cut their own throats…or leave their homes to, what? Go live in some other country? :dubious:
-XT
Seeing as you support the right to exist for Israel, historical association doesn’t really matter, but do you believe in the concept of special rights for aboriginal people in general ?
This sounds familiar. Only they never got to say “mission accomplished”.
This is such a hard statement to make sense of, though. Rights that are “special” in what way, and who is or is not “Aboriginal”?
Perhaps I should use the term “indigenous” instead of aboriginal.
Here’s some Articles in The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. I can’t seem to cut and paste the long url. these special rights are collective rights. For example they don’t apply to immigrant groups like say the ehtnic groups in Canada.
Article 3
Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right
they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social
and cultural development.
Article 4
Indigenous peoples, in exercising their right to self-determination, have the
right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local
affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions.
Article 5
Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct
political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, while retaining their right
to participate fully, if they so choose, in the political, economic, social and cultural
life of the State.
Article 6
Every indigenous individual has the right to a nationality.
I’m not sure that the UN has a sanctioned list but a loosely defined criteria is a historical presence in the region, Jews have lived in Palestine for 3000 years have they not?
So if this ethnic group pursues their right to self determination declares independance from Britain and they’ve been there for 3000 years, I don’t see why they don’t qualify for the indigenous people’s right to self determination.