In a screed at American Thinker against Rosie O’Donnell, Eileen F. Toplansky lays out the facts concerning Jews “returning” to their “homelands” in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere.
The Jewish homeland is, in fact, Israel, and has been “since time immemorial”:
There are archaeological remains that attest to this fact. The holy books of the Jews and the Arabs also confirm this. So Jews don’t have to go back home ~ they are already home. The Jews in Europe, Asia, and America are in the Diaspora because they were summarily expelled from countries throughout the ages. The term “wandering Jew” comes from the historical facts that Jews were expelled from England in 1290; from France in 1393; from Berne, Switzerland in 1427; and from Spain in 1492, to name only a few places.
In her book From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, author Joan Peters, proves with historical data and other archival information that Jews did not displace Arabs in Palestine-just the reverse: Arabs displaced Jews. In fact, the blurb of this 1984 book relates that:
A hidden but major Arab migration and immigration took place into areas settled by Jews in pre-Israel Palestine; that a substantial number of the Arab refugees called Palestinians in reality had foreign roots; that for every Arab refugee who left Israel in 1948; there was a Jewish refugee who fled or was expelled from his Arab birthplace at the same time. . . .
Recently, filmmaker Pierre Rehov created the film entitled “The Silent Exodus” about these Jews who were kicked out of their Middle Eastern homes. Between 1946 and 1974, there were a million of forgotten Jewish fugitives expelled from the Arab world. These Jews had been living in Arab lands for thousands of years but their homes were stolen from them; they literally had nothing but the clothes on their backs when they fled. They were received in Israel. They did not remain refugees; they had no special United Nations agency to assist them. Israel welcomed them and they rebuilt their lives.
Related, and linked here for reference, “Genetic Evidence Shows Common Origins of Jews“, by David Bernstein at the Volkh Conspiracy. From The New York Times:
Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East share many genes inherited from the ancestral Jewish population that lived in the Middle East some 3,000 years ago, even though each community also carries genes from other sources — usually the country in which it lives.
But note this comment by Bernstein:
I don’t think that Zionism, etc., depends on whether Jews really have common genetic origins or not, anymore than Palestinian identity is any more or less real depending on whether, as some claim, a large percentage of “Palestinian Arabs” had immigrated rather recently from other countries in the Middle East. But I do think that manipulating history for ideological purposes is bad…
Tags: Israel, Jewish Homeland, Jews, Zionism