Apartheid

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opposed to the allegedly revelatory – claim to Palestine. (And the revelatory claim must by its
own very nature remain ethnocentric in kind.) Many non-Jews have in fact converted to
Judaism through history, mainly through intermarriage, but also collectives, for example, the
inhabitants of the Khazar Empire, which consisted of an almost entirely non-Semitic
population in a large area around the Caspian Sea. The Khazars converted to Judaism in the
seventh and eighth centuries AD for political reasons (mainly in order to buttress the pressures
from the neighboring Muslim and Christian powers). The Khazar Empire was eventually
destroyed by Mongol invaders, and a great portion of its inhabitants fled, mainly into what is
today Eastern Europe. Of course, this renders the ethnicist, apartheid Basic ‘Law of Return’ to
Israel for all Jews (and for Jews only) arbitrary and even senseless if Jewishness is to be
defined biologically, as well as plain discriminatory. Furthermore, around one million Jews –
and 300,000 others who have become or are in the process of becoming Jews – have
emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel. There are still another million Jews in
Russia today, and many Zionists are doing their best to entice them and many others to
immigrate to Israel. 640
The first break-up of the proto-Afroasiatic language – the hypothesized ancestor of the
Semitic languages (including Hebrew and Arabic) as well as of ancient Egyptian, Hausa and
Iraqw (spoken in Nigeria and Tanzania today) and other languages – is commonly assumed to
have taken place no more than 10,000 years ago. The people who spoke this language most
likely resided near or in the northern part of the East African Rift valley. All six or more
branches of the Afroasiatic language family except the Semitic branch are geographically and
historically confined to Africa. Moreover, the Semitic sub-family is also confined to Africa
except for a minority of languages, including Arabic and Hebrew. 12 of the 19 Semitic
languages still spoken today are only spoken in Ethiopia. 641 It therefore makes much sense to
assume that the ancestors of many if not most Jews and Palestinians were all Africans as
recently as 10,000 years ago. 642 At the very same time, however, there was already a fortified
village at Jericho in Palestine, undoubtedly populated by non-Semites. Thus, the Israeli
constitutional claims to Palestine, Cana’an or the area ‘from the river of Egypt
unto…Euphrates’ as primordially Jewish land are rendered even more senseless. The
Palestinians, however, are tied to the land in an unbroken chain at least since long before the
British mandate, not unlike the dispossessed Blacks in Rhodesia. Not only the landowners and
the former landowners among the Palestinians should be counted here, but also those who
belong to the land, and to whom the land belongs in a cultural sense.
Nonetheless, some Jews – and it is practically impossible to say who – do have a kind
of relationship with historical Palestine which is historically deeper than the Whites’ to South
Africa: a difference of degree, however, rather than of kind. A culture, which has for a long
time reiterated the phrase ‘Next year in Jerusalem’, should not be expelled from it, nor be
denied access to the city. However, there is, crucially, nothing in this phrase that implies
statehood for the Jewish people, nor is there anything that prescribes exclusion of others from
Jerusalem. Primarily, the phrase expresses and symbolizes hope for the future as well as
commemorating pain over expulsion. It is also a reference to the Kingdom of Heaven, which
is by definition not a place on earth. If Jews come in peace or live in peace, why should they
640
See Koestler: The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, 1976, Wexler: The Khazars, The
Writings of Israel Shamir, no date. See also N.N.: Russia’s Putin Meets Jewish Leaders, March 19, 2002 and
footnotes 338-343, above. For the wider problem of biased justification attempts through history and especially
through archaeology, see Fagan: Israel – Archaeology (General Feature): Digging for History or Politics in
Israel? 2000; Said 2003: 45-50. Against the grain of recent, mainly biblically and nationalistically inspired,
Israeli archaeology, Leeman 2004 argues that the origin of the Jewish religion may lie in Western Arabia. On the
intellectual appropriation (and obfuscation) of Historical Palestine, which has retroactively obliterated
Palestinian history or turned it into footnotes of Israeli history, see Whitelam 1996.
641
Diamond 1998 (1997): 383
642
Bernal 1991 (1987): 11f