Where do you think Jewish people come from?

[BlessedIsTheFruit]

Antisemitism is at full volume at the moment and I caveat this post with saying that I have absolutely no wish to make Jewish MNers feel uncomfortable but as an an atheist with no connection to Israel this really makes my blood boil.

I see so many SM posts about the Jews having 'colonized' Israel and Judea & Samaria, not having any claim to the land, not being indigenous and of course being 'Europeans settlers'.

They can't answer where they actually come from though so I thought anyone on here who shares their views might be able to give an answer and how they came to that conclusion.

I understand that Jews are an ethnicity with Judaism as their religion. Being Jewish is not a religion. Jews are still today spread out all over the world with the majority living in Israel and the US.

This has come into focus since the UK Government sanctions on Jewish businesses in Judea & Samaria recently with Jewish communities living there classed as 'illegal settlers'.

It's almost as if Jews and Judea have no connection at all.

So AIBU to ask where the Jews originated from if not from there?

I don't feel this belongs on the CITME board as although the war in Gaza has amplified beliefs, this not directly about that.

They didn't start the most recent war as an expansion intent, despite claims on this thread - it was in response to the mass terrorist attack.

If you believe in an eye for an eye, as both cultures do, an appropriate response would've been approx 2,000 Palestinians killed or injured. It's been rather more than that. It wasn't a 'response' but an excuse.

As to 'what now?' - Fuck knows, but I'd take a guess that the richer side will defeat the other one. It already has, more or less. A new generation of Arab survivors, having grown up under attack, will convert their collective trauma into aggression and the whole thing will miserably continue in various forms.

@ErroltheSwampDragon That was in the response to the comment "We don’t normally go round allocating land on the basis of who lived there 2000 years ago."

But whatever I'd have said, you would be determined to take offence. If you are looking for an apology you'll not get one.

The resulting war was aimed at disabling Hamas, not at revenge. Claiming it was an eye for an eye is you projecting your views of Israel as a country.

The Arab survivors could try not constantly firing rockets at their more powerful neighbour for a bit, perhaps.

The sanctions seem completely unworkable. How does the British government determine whether dates or honey or whatever is going through customs belong to a settler or not? Will they look at the name and say ‘that sounds Jewish so it can’t come in’ or ‘that sounds Muslim / Arab / Christian, so it can ’ If so, I find that really disturbing. Where does a Yemeni Jewish refugee who settled in the area some time ago sit in relation to these sanctions? What about the Muslim with an unusual name that’s not recognised? This thought experiment highlights the absurdity and unpleasantness of trying to sanction people for their ethnicity.

The Palestinians and Israeli Jews are both direct descendants of the Canaanites (who included the Akkadians, Hittites and Jebusites).

this was published by the University of Tel Aviv
https://english.tau.ac.il/news/canaanites

Most of today’s Jewish and Arabic-speaking populations share a strong genetic link to the ancient Canaanites, according to a new study conducted by an international team of archaeologists and geneticists, including TAU’s Prof. Israel Finkelstein from the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures.

The study concludes that modern-day groups in Lebanon, Israel and Jordan share a large part of their ancestry, in most cases more than half, with the people who lived in the Levant during the Bronze Age, more than 3,000 years ago.

Wow, that statemen is quite something. Arab milities launched attacks on Jewish communities after the resolution. You read that and you think that the Arabs did nothing.

They completely ignore the siege on Jerusalem, ignore the "Arab Liberation Army" which entered the civil war before the British had left, ignore the massacres carried out by arab militias in the civil wE.

Then they also ignore the fact that once the Brits left, five Arab armies invaded Israel! What offensive did Israel carry out?

That statement is clearly politically motivated.

Displacement and partition invariably cause suffering. Ethnic Germans suffered, Hindus/Muslims suffered in partition of India, Greeks and Turks in their own population movements. And remembering that whatever land the arbas held, they displaced 100% of the Jewish population like in the old city of Jerusalme. THe diplacement was on both sides - but one side won.

That's a bit disingenuous. The current Israeli system , inherited from the Ottoman one and disliked by many Israelis, only allows religious marriage. Thus lots of couples having 'Cyprus weddings' as they don't want religion involved, for whatever reason. I'm sure a large amount of people would be fine with gay marriage and civil unions, even more likely, but the current system makes that very hard. Hopefully will change some day.

@GarlicSomething ,

‘If you believe in an eye for an eye, as both cultures do, an appropriate response would've been approx 2,000 Palestinians killed or injured. It's been rather more than that. It wasn't a 'response' but an excuse.’

That is a pretty outrageous comment. Would a proportionate response to 9/11 to kill 5,000 random terrorists and leave Bin Laden standing? And you have completely omitted to mention the innocent hostages, which have no part in any war.

I am really hesitant to call someone an antisemite on the basis of one post on MN, but this comment is either antisemitic or shows a complete lack of empathy.

Imagine if your young adult daughter had been at a festival, which was raided, and she was dragged from her fun by organised gun wielding thugs and raped and murdered. What would be a proportionate response?!

7/10 was an outrage, worse than 9/11 in both proportion of people in a country killed and method. It had zero to do with a legitimate grievance or some kind of cycle of violence.

I think it's pretty clear that the person I replied to absolutely does think that.

Certainly not looking for an apology from you nor am I offended, I just think you are wrong.

It would be nice if you reflected on how you are contributing to a climate of hate and fear, but I doubt that will happen.

Come on, you said it was a response to Oct 7.

Israel has its Iron Dome, which seems pretty effective. I wished long ago that Palestine - or Gaza at least - could have one, too. If they won't stop having a go at each other, it'd be better to be equally well defended.

While repeating that I think Hamas is awful, it's difficult to buy the portrayal of Israel as victim. This is a very unbalanced conflict in which Palestinians are, yet again, suffering greatly.

As I also keep saying, though, I don't think it will ever stop completely.

This a tad hyperbolic! I don't believe in an eye for an eye. It's archaic, cruel and ultimately pointless.

Disagreement with emotionally-loaded support for everything Israel does is not antisemitism.

Always and forever. Despite what the Islamofascists on here would like to think.

After 7/10, Israel had every right to go after Hamas, and it was always going to be brutal. However, to me, they didn’t seem to do enough to protect the civilians or to have clear war aims.

Equally, when Iran’s many proxies and Iran joined, Israel had every right to go after them.

What does seem to have happened, though, is that Israel realised that this was an opportunity for expansionism, aided by Trump. I am not sure it wouldn’t have been very different were the Democrats in office. In the last year or so, the war aims, and language around them do seem to have changed from beating Hamas to taking land permanently and towards quite a racist version of a ‘Greater Israel’, including ethnic cleansing.

This is egregiously wrong and why we are sanctioning the settlements, which doesn’t go far enough as far as I am concerned.

Believing that Israel is behaving in an outrageous and racist way, though, had no correlation with Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state or for Jews to have a safe sanctuary in an increasingly antisemitic world.

People are way too polar about Israel, and far too many get involved who know little and are passionate because they are right/left wing and have never been nor are interested in visiting the area.

AIBU to ask why historical, Jews have been so disliked?

Yes, if there had been no persecution some would probably have wanted to return but the urgency wouldn't have been the same.

'a place they had always yearned to go back to'- that's definitely true for many, but one of the tragedies of Jewish history is that lots of people have been happy to live in the places they've been, whether Spain, Germany, various Middle Eastern countries - until persecution has forced them out. Eva Figes, a child refugee from Germany herself, reviews a good book on German Jews here.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview19

Notably, the Kaifeng Jews of China faced no religious persecution until the 20th and this centuries (as the Communist state fears any potential subversion by religious or other minority groups), since China isn't a majority Abrahamic religion country, among other reasons, and they mostly stayed through the centuries. Bene Israel, the Indian Jews, might well have stayed mostly in India too if not for Partition, where there were fears that heightened religious fanaticism would trigger persecution of them (I don't think this end up happening).

And of course, many Jews now have preferred to live in US, Canada, UK, France, Australia and so on rather than Israel. The question is : will this continue to be safe? Which we shouldn't have to ask, but unfortunately we do...

Same reason Gypsies have. Scapegoating.

People have always scapegoated selected groups. When it's an ethnic group, endogamy helps the bad actors to claim that they consider themselves better than everyone else - yet they force endogamy on them by forbidding intermarriage.

There are African tribes/races that suffer this within their regions, but I'm too lazy to check details. The point is that it's depressingly easy to 'other' a group and rally hatred against them.

A big reason is that they were often forced to be middlemen minorities in European societies. Amy Chua and Thomas Sowell have written about the way these kinds of groups can be unfairly targeted-Chua in World On Fire, Sowell in Race and Culture & Markets and Minorities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleman_minority

Sowell explains his theory here. I don't fully agree as I think religion was a big factor but I think he has a point.

https://www.hoover.org/research/anti-semitism-generic

Another is that they are Abrahamic religion so historically Christians and Muslims have seen them as threats often. Indian Jews and Chinese Jews experienced virtually no prejudice historically because they were in societies where Abrahamic religions were not the majority, among other factors.

I am really so much not and was trying to lighten the mood with my comments.

By taking offence easily you are definitely contributing to the hate though, which is pretty sad really.

If your comments were trying to lighten the mood, why did they only support one view point?

Are you suggesting there would be less antisemitism if Jews just allowed people to make more "light-hearted" comments about us?

Wow is right.

A complete absence of any mention of the well documented 1948 war in which 5 established Arab armies invaded the fledging State of Israel, one day after it's inception, with the intention of 'pushing the Jews into the sea', a euphemism for another genocide of Jews.

Much the same as the massacres of Jews by the Arabs before 1948, the decades of Palestinian terrorism (they literally invented plane hijacking for political purposes and the massacre of an Olympics team for political purposes) with the stated intention of annihilating Israel, invisible Hamas in Gaza hospitals and the claim that the current war is an Israeli expansionist project as Oct 7th = pffttt.

I think it's blatantly clear what agenda @GarlicSomething is working to.

That smell is very pungent.

Re religion, for a long time the Bible was interpreted as saying Jews in general carried ancestral guilt for Jesus' murder. Jews were often seen as evil for rejecting Jesus and arguing he didn't fulfil Messianic criteria or at best as misguided people who needed to be converted.

This is why I think Sowell's theory doesn't fully cover the reasons, as these were important factors which don't occur in other cases of middleman minority persecution.

I'm not anti-semitic. If my comments are something that would be recorded as anti-semitism then, yes there would be a lot less anti-semitism if such comments were not counted as such.

Funny that you say Israel didn't do enough to protect civilians

By Omer Shem Tov

Hamas kidnapped me from the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 and held me in Gaza for 505 days, much of that time in apartments in active combat zones. There was much to fear in captivity. Hunger. My captors. Never seeing my family again. But I also feared the Israeli air force. The Israeli pilots overhead had no idea where I was. Sometimes when my captors expected an Israeli attack was coming, they fled and left me behind. If an Israeli bomb killed me, Hamas would win twice: I would be dead, and Israel would be responsible.

One of my captors told me his mother had received a phone call warning her to leave her home because an Israeli strike might put her in danger. The call came from the Israel Defense Forces. Hamas knew where I was and left me to die. Israel didn’t know my location, but it knew where my captor’s mother was and called to make sure she wasn’t killed accidentally. There I was—kidnapped, starved and tortured by her son—while my army was trying to keep his mother alive.

Israel desperately wanted me home. But not at any price. There were Palestinian civilians between Israel and me. So Israel dropped leaflets, sent messages, made phone calls and ordered evacuations. It tried to minimize NAZA, or collateral damage.

I also saw what death meant to the other side. One day, my captors celebrated after Hamas fighters killed Israeli soldiers. The next day, Israel bombed the area where I was being held. The explosions came about 10 seconds apart. I was terrified. The terrorist beside me was delighted. To him, every explosion was proof of success: Look what we made Israel do. Look how much we hurt them. I understood something then. For Hamas, destruction itself could be victory. As long as there was death on either side, Hamas could win.

Hostages Like Me Were Also ‘NAZA’—Collateral Damage - WSJ

Because you killed the best of us, the nicest ones, the gentlest ones and we're the ones you got left with - the surviving stubborn ones. Oh well.