TheSanhedrin.NET

[Binyomin]

A tragic misunderstanding
Times UK
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article5504478.ece

A small group of Jews and Arabs are using an old theory and new genetic research to redefine - and, hopefully, one day to end - the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

James Hider

In a bustling fish restaurant in Jaffa, the ancient sea port just south of Tel Aviv, an Israeli Jewish man tries to convince the eatery's Arab owner that everything he has ever thought about his Palestinian heritage is wrong - that the conflict that has killed so many and which is claiming hundreds more right now in Gaza - has been nothing more than a tragic case of mistaken identity. Khamis Aboulafia, a well-known figure in the Israeli Arab community, listens politely as Tsvi Misinai, a retired computer expert and pioneer of Israel's IT sector, reveals the burning vision that has consumed him for years. He believes that the Palestinians with whom Israel is at war are, in fact, descendants of Jews who stayed on the land when the Roman legions sent most of their countrymen into exile 2,000 years ago.

When he hears that he may be a long-lost relation of a Jew, rather than of Arab stock, Aboulafia - an educated man who speaks Hebrew as fluently as Arabic - does not ask his guest to leave. Instead, he nods slowly. “Why am I willing to accept the idea?” he says. “Because all of the other ideas have fallen down.”

After a century-long struggle with guns and tanks, human bombs, soaring walls and settlements on remote,windswept hilltops, a small group of Jews and Arabs are now using an old theory and new genetic research to redefine - and, they hope, end - the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With the death toll from the latest round of carnage in the Gaza Strip topping 900 people, Misinai believes that his quixotic cause is more pressing than ever.

The theory was originally developed by David Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister. But it has gained a new lease of life since a study into a rare blood disorder shared by Jews and Palestinians revealed a closer genetic match between the communities than between Palestinians and other Arabs. “It's all a tragic mistake, a tragic misunderstanding,” said Misinai, who divides his time between tracking down Palestinians who acknowledge their Jewish heritage, and lobbying ministers, ambassadors, religious leaders and activists in both communities.

His relentless pursuit echoes the work, more than a century ago, of Theodor Herzl, the spiritual founder of modern Zionism, who petitioned emperors, sultans and politicians for the creation of a Jewish homeland - which for a while was slated to be set up in British-run Uganda.

“It takes time for people to get used to the idea. Assume that you are brought up to think that this is your enemy, and they are brought up to think that we are the enemy. And telling them now, this is a mistake, we are brothers,” said Misinai, a portly 62-year-old with a brown goatee and boundless energy. He admits that it could take decades for the communities to come to terms with his “revolutionary” theory, but he takes comfort from Ben Gurion's saying: “In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.”

Instead of waiting for his own miracle, Misinai is enlisting an increasing number of Israelis and Palestinians. He has already recruited some unlikely supporters, from a Fatah official, to the secretary of the Sanhedrin, a council of 200 rabbis based on the biblical rulers of Jerusalem. Misinai has also taken his idea to at least one Israeli Government minister, who expressed interest but asked not to be identified. According to his theory, when Jewish fighters waged a series of unsuccessful campaigns against the occupying Roman forces in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the Romans exacted a heavy price: they destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and exiled the vast majority of Jews.

Those who ended up in the Diaspora - mostly city dwellers - were determined to keep their Jewish identities during exile. But according to Misinai, many were allowed to stay behind to work the fertile uplands of Judea and Samaria - now known as the West Bank - to supply Rome with grain and olive oil.

Gradually, these people lost their ethnic identities, converting first to Christianity under Byzantine rule and then to Islam, as power in the land changed hands and rulers sought to homogenise the population, either through force or the offer of social privilege and tax incentives.

“We, the Jewish people, have kept our Israeli or Jewish identity by the book, by our religion, but we disengaged from the country,” said Elon Yarden, a lawyer and close associate of Misinai, who has also written on the subject. Those who stayed behind, in what became Palestine, “did not leave the country, but lost their identity”.

Misinai first heard the theory from his father, a German Jew who fought in the Royal Artillery in the Second World War. He rekindled his interest after the 1991 Gulf War, when world leaders were talking about a new order in the Middle East. After the failure of the Oslo Accords a decade later, he gave up his career and threw himself full time into his new brainchild. “From 2000, this has taken over my entire life,” he said.

The theory challenges the definition not just of Palestinians but also of Jews, always a contentious issue in a country based on Jewish identity but deeply divided among religious and secular strands. Misinai's ideas have met with interest and scepticism. Some ultra-religious Jewish settler leaders welcome the idea with open arms, since they believe that once all the biblical land of Israeli is populated with Jews, a new era of peace on Earth will be ushered in. “They like this, they are starving for this,” said Misinai. He insists that by emphasising Jewishness as a nationality, he can sidestep the thorny religious issue of who qualifies and who does not.

“If they want to stay Muslim, let them stay Muslim, we don't care about your religion,” he told The Times at his large villa in a flower-filled street in Rehovot, a sleepy town near Tel Aviv. “But the majority will stay Jewish from the national, ethnic point of view. An individual can be ethnically Jewish and his religion can be Muslim, or Christian. As in the UK, someone can be a British citizen and be a Muslim or a Jew.”

In this part of the world, however, nothing is simple. Dov Stein, secretary of the Sanhedrin council of rabbis, is a supporter of Misinai's theory, but rules out accepting Muslims into the country on the grounds that it would be a violation of the Jewish people's covenant with God, enshrined in the Torah scripture. “We can't ignore the fact that these communities of ‘Arabs' were forced [to convert], they are the children of the children of forced families,” he said. “It's obvious that we want them back, but also obvious, not at any price. If the price should be that they see themselves as Muslims, we won't receive them. And they remain enemies. They have to give up Islam.”

While Stein's group is trying to find some common points between the two faiths to attempt to bridge the divide, he reiterated that merely being “Jewish” would not be enough. He recalled the bitter civil war fought in the 2nd century BC between the so-called Hellenised Jews, who accepted the culture of their Greek overlords, and the resistance of the Maccabeans, who upheld stricter traditions.

“According to the Bible and our faith, we don't say this country belongs to the Jewish nation because God gave it Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” said Stein, a thickly bearded man, who lives in Jerusalem. “This is an additional reason. It's because we hold the Torah - if not, we don't have the right to the country. That's why we can't receive them, even a Jew who is not believing, it will be a disaster.”

Yet a process of transformation is under way in many areas. Like Aboulafia, many Arab Israelis, especially in Galilee, speak Hebrew as well as Arabic - and mix the two liberally - 60 years after the Jewish state sprung up around them.

A number of Palestinians acknowledge their Jewish roots, although many say that doing so is more risky since the two intifadas, or uprisings, fought against Israel. In Hebron, the main city in the southern West Bank which was a renowned city in biblical days, several families and tribes quietly acknowledge their Jewish background.

“Avi” is from one of them. From the village of Yatta, near Hebron, he speaks fluent Hebrew and has even adopted a Jewish name. He has a family in Yatta but works near Tel Aviv as a welder. With his piercing blue eyes, many of his Israeli friends are unaware that he is Palestinian.

“It didn't surprise me,” he said, when his grandparents told him that the family had moved to Yatta centuries before from the Jewish kingdom of Khaibar in the south-western Arabian peninsula. Khaibar flourished in the centuries after the destruction of the Jewish temple before being destroyed by the Fatimid Muslim dynasty in AD1037. The population fled, some to India and China, others back to the land that their ancestors had migrated from centuries before. “I knew my grandparents came from Khaibar, and they told me that they became Muslims. We are Muslims now,” he said.

His attitude to his roots shows some of the complexities faced by Misinai's budding project. The occupation of the West Bank, and the confiscation of land by Jewish settlers since 1967, has created deep-seated animosity, regardless of whether the land-grab was done by foreigners or fellow citizens. “Land was taken from us by Israel,” said Avi, who preferred not to be identified by his Arabic name as his family still lives in Yatta. “We are angry that this land was taken, we don't care who's a Jew and who's a Muslim. Some people, because they are so angry, are ready to become a shaheed [martyr], to kill. We have a problem which is very severe.”

Avi has studied the Koran and the Bible, and believes that faith is a personal matter. “I am a Muslim, I believe in Islam,” he said. He is disappointed by Israel's policies in the West Bank. “If they were to set a good example, the majority of the Palestinians would want to join [Israel]. Most won't change their religion, some will, but most will be ready to be part of it, with or without changing their religion. Once the circumstances are right, they will be open about their origins.” Avi has distributed booklets outlining the theory to some of his closer associates in the West Bank. “We are taking the Jews and Arabs and putting them into a blender without knives,” he said.

At a meeting at Misinai's house, three men - an Arab Israeli, a Bedu from Gaza and a Palestinian working in Israel - recently discussed ways to spread the word. “We should do it the same way as Hamas, it should be grassroots, with small groups spreading the word,” said the Palestinian, a man in his forties, who asked not to be identified. Such work is not without risk. Misinai said that one of his Arab co-workers was caught by Palestinian police taking photos of doorways where mezuzahs - Jewish prayer icons - had once been attached to houses in a West Bank village. The man was jailed for 45 days.

The Bedu, who goes by the adopted Hebrew name Ovadia Yerushalmi, said that many of his fellow desert-dwellers - most of whom have been corralled into poor townships in the Negev region by the Israeli authorities - are of Jewish origin.

“Originally, the Beduin were forced to convert to Islam because of the threat of the sword,” he said. Many Beduin now serve in the Israeli Army as scouts.

Other Palestinians are intrigued by the idea as a novel way to peace, but are wary of Misinai's assertion that as many as 86 per cent of the population is descended from ancient Israelites. “It is believable,” said Suleiman al-Hamri, a Fatah official from Bethlehem. “I believe that we come from the same origin and sometimes, because of political reasons, some people changed their religions.” He said that more research was needed into the claim. “Should we use it to solve the conflict between the Palestinians and the Jews, or should we use it to give more credit to one side or the other? We want to use it for peace.”

There is still much scepticism though, even among those Arab scholars who find the theory intriguing. “It's an entertaining idea, he makes you think about history and that's why I like it, not as a political theory,” said Dr Mahmoud Yazbak, an Israeli Arab and an expert on Middle Eastern history at Haifa University. “When you take such a theory into the political arena, people will become angry. I don't have any feeling against this idea, but if he wants to take this into politics, it would be a problem for me.”

Indeed, for some it smacks of identity theft, similar to Turkey's claim in the last century that its large Kurdish minority were simply “mountain Turks who have forgotten their language. “The famous story of Zionism is that this was a land without a people for a people without a land, and it's back to that,” said Dr Boutros Dali, a veteran Arab-Israeli scholar. All the same, he admitted that it was “a wonderful idea, if Misinai can convince people they are Jews...If we are Jews, there's no reason for an Arab Israeli conflict.”

Doubts about the project were aired even by Ariella Oppenheim, one of the doctors who investigated the similarities between the Y chromosomes of Palestinian and Jewish men. “Tsvi Misinai has his optimistic ideas that this is going to help, but I'm less optimistic,” she said at Ein Kere hospital in Jerusalem. She denied that there is any such thing as a “Jewish gene”. Rather, she said, genetic studies pointed to the geographical origins of a population. “I think there are very strong ideologies here, and we know also that sometimes brothers fight,” she said, citing the brutal mini-civil war in Gaza in summer of 2007 between the secular Fatah and the Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement.

Aboulafia, the restaurateur, also said that Misinai faces an uphill struggle to convince people on both sides of the divide who are deeply entrenched in their own identities. “Maybe not in our generation, but the next,” he said.

But amid all the scepticism, there is one element that may give the theory some heft, in the same way that would have encouraged the original conversions centuries ago: the increasing desperation of those living in occupied territories.

One Palestinian village elder, whose West Bank community is surrounded on the three sides by Jewish settlement fences and on the fourth by the separation barrier with Israel itself, looked hopeful when informed of Misinai's mission.

“How soon could we become Jews?” he asked eagerly. “In time for next year's harvest?”

James Hider's book The Spiders of Allah: Travels of an Unbeliever on the Frontline of Holy War will be

published by Doubleday on January 15 at £12.99.

Copies can be ordered for £11.69 with free delivery

from The Times BooksFirst on 0845 2712134

[AharonBenjamin]

B"H

According to this theory are only some of the Palestinians thought to be of Jewish origin or is this referring to the majority or even all of them?
_________________
nanach~

[Binyomin]

You can download the statistics in a PDF booklet at this website:
http://www.the-engagement.org/

I think the number was less than half of the Palestinians living in Israel.

Kol tuv
Binyomin

[AharonBenjamin]

B"H

Shalom R'Binyomin, I see that at the link you provided they cite the ratio as being 86%.

[DennisTate]

[DennisTate]