Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Huh? The vast majority of modern Jews have DNA, which, by comparison to the DNA of the various populations of the Levant, verifies that at least a major portion of their ancestry is traceable to the ancient Israelites--or whatever name you prefer for them. The history of the ancient Jews or Israelites is hardly fictional, since they are referred to by both the Greeks and Romans.
The "Britons" always had a penchant for rewriting history, as evidenced by the very name they stole from the Celtic people whom the Anglo-Saxons marginalized and/or drove away when they helped themselves to the abandoned Roman colony on Britannia.
I'm sure they found some poetic justice in offering Palestine to the Jewish refugees, most of whom would much rather have gone back to their homes in Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam, even if they had been reduced to bomb craters. After all, the Brits took it from the Ottomans as the spoils of war, and as far as they knew, nobody was living there... at least nobody important. Gen. MacArthur was desperate for a place to send the people he had been put in charge of, after watching the ones who tried to go back to their homes in Poland be shot down by the Poles. No one spoke up to offer Slovakia, Baja California, Cornwall, Kyushu, South Island or Idaho, so they got Palestine.
It was the last gasp of the moribund British Empire, a gigantic "fuck you" to the whole world, as they settled the Jews in a place where they were surrounded by Muslim people who hated them just as much as, or perhaps more than, the European Christians, and moreover where a tribe of those people were already living.
Until WWII, Zionism had never been a dominant religious or political philosophy among European Jews. It was the 19th century equivalent of the La Raza or Aztlán "movement" among young second-generation Latinos in the U.S. who spoke little or no Spanish, were well-assimilated Americans, and attended universities where they learned about a culture they'd never been part of. But when they found themselves living for months in "Displaced Person" camps with half of their population methodically slaughtered and no country--not even America--prepared to accept millions of them (the Haitians, bless their hearts, took in as many as would fit on their tiny impoverished island, for which Rev. Pat Robertson rewarded them by saying they deserved their earthquake), a shit-hole in the middle of the desert that had once been named "Judea" started to look pretty good.
The safest place the Jews ever lived was China, where a tribe wandered to after striking out in its own direction during the Diaspora. The Jews obeyed the law, valued education, paid their taxes, understood business, and observed personal and community hygiene, which made them first-class citizens in the eyes of the Chinese. Without the hostility they had become used to, they mingled freely among the Chinese, marrying them and ultimately disappearing through assimilation, leaving a few old synagogues and some Chinese people with unusually large noses as evidence of their existence.
This chapter in their history has not been lost on the leaders of today's Jewish communities. The elders of American Jewry--the second-safest place they've ever lived--complain in their community venues that something has to be done to keep their children from vanishing into the Melting Pot; that the biggest existential threat to the Jews as a people is assimilation.
Indeed, with every passing year the younger generation of American Jews speak out more stridently against the policies of Israel, distancing themselves from a Holocaust that is nothing but a newsreel to them and happily driving German cars. For several years now (IIRC this entire century if not longer), more disillusioned Israelis have emigrated to the USA than starry-eyed idealistic American Jews have packed up and moved to Israel. The net migration of American Jews to the "Holy Land" is, in stark fact, negative!
