It’s election time, ladies and gentlemen, once again. It is the presidential candidates’ time to line up and take part in an Israel love fest.
It’s time for Zionist-funded electoral campaigns and solid promises to do the utmost and maybe the impossible for the “United States for Israel”.
The 2012 White House elections have unleashed a fierce race amongst the presidential hopefuls — who come this year in all colors, sizes and IQs — to kiss ass and suck up to the Israeli lobbies in the land of the free and home of the brave.
Sleeping with the enemy
And since all the candidates have consumed almost all the usual tricks to tout their own “do for Israel” credentials starting from accusing the Palestinians of hindering the peace process and denying Israel’s right to exist …. Right down to calling them terrorists, the republican White House hopeful, Newt Gingrich, has found himself in a position where he has to come up with a brand new trick that would enhance his approval rating in the race to the white house.
Being an expert on solutions for winning the future, Gingrich didn’t waste much time and decided to not only do the utmost but also the impossible for Israel’s sake by calling the Palestinians an “invented” people who could have voluntarily evacuated their homeland and chose to live elsewhere.
While I could conceal my annoyance over Gingrich’s outrageous and deceitful statement, which lacks both the minimum historical awareness and political wisdom, I find myself unable to hide my disgust of his disgraceful conduct.
Mr. Gingrich, as a presidential hopeful and a longtime politician, is supposed to be, in a way, representing the mainstream American diplomacy when he speaks to the foreign media — unless the Jewish channel is not considered that.
And if he as a person was not embarrassed to openly brown-nose Israel in that unprecedented and degrading manner, then he should have uttered those nonsense comments in a less public session, like at his country club and amongst the circle of Zionist financiers of his campaign who certainly would have been ecstatic to hear him ranting that way.
But for him to publicize this hate speech in a televised interview and furthermore repeat it during the presidential debates is an affront to the whole American diplomacy and a dangerous indication for a paradigm shift of that diplomacy in the Middle East.
Who allowed this plumpy Gingrich to act as Israel’s advocate while ironically running for the presidency of the United States? Who told him that he can put on his racist mask, erase decades of peace brokering, albeit not entirely successful, and start messing up the politics of one of the most volatile places on earth while hallucinating about its documented ancient history?
The Arabs and the Palestinians, whom he likes to see invented and therefore movable or even invisible, will not take his statement as a twisted attitude of some republican candidate but another proof of the American flagrant biased policy in the Middle East.
The last thing the United States needs right now as its troops are pulling out of the Iraqi swamp and being kicked out of the Afghan-Pakistan Death Valley is another (needless) stir of the anti-American sentiments in that part of the world.
Only Mr. Gingrich doesn’t think so. Appearing in his debates foolishly standing by his offensive remarks and apparently drunk with the encouraging feedback he gets from his Israeli friends, this former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives irresponsibly insists on sketching the landscape for the most dreadful political forecast in the Middle East.
It is ironic to see the millions of patriotic Americans rallying on the streets and literally occupying the country in protest over what they called the corporate greed and at the same time we find candidates like Gingrich so sick and blinded with greed they can’t feel the danger nor the shame in sleeping in the same bed with the real enemy.
How did America end up in that humiliating situation, where its presidential frontrunners are but a bunch of clowns who are always willing to dance to Israel’s favorite tune?
I take a look at all the 2012 presidential hopefuls and I fail to find any hope in them as they frantically compete with each other to suck up to Israel as if the American presidential polls will be held in Tel Aviv.
Mr. Gingrich has every right to brown-nose, kiss ass and suck up to whomever he likes. He has the right to relinquish his national identity and pride … but he has no right to strip the Palestinians of that pride and identity while doing so.
Obviously, for someone that historically ignorant, Mr. Gingrich must have been tipped by one of his aides that what really troubled Israel recently is the release of Shlomo Sand’s bestseller book “The Invention of the Jewish People”.
Let’s talk history; history will tell who was invented
In that book, Prof. Sand attempts to prove that Jews now living in Israel and other places in the world are not at all descendants of the ancient people who inhabited the land of the Philistines in the late Bronze Age.
Prof. Sand is saying that nowaday Jews, who have been immigrating since over a century now to the land of Palestine, are but varied peoples that converted to Judaism during the course of history in different corners of Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean Basin and adjacent regions like in Yemen and Iraq.
According to Sand, the description of Jews as a wandering and self-isolating nation of exiles, who wandered across seas and continents, reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland is nothing but “national mythology.” And therefore the Jewish people, historically speaking, and as Mr. Gingrich likes to call it, are invented.
But since Mr. Gingrich likes to see his ranting about the Palestinians as factually correct history …then maybe we should do it his way and talk history…only this time let’s do it right, but first I would like to introduce Professor Ze`ev Herzog to Mr. Gingrich.
Prof. Ze’ev Herzog teaches in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. He took part in the excavations of Hazor and Megiddo with Yigael Yadin and in the digs at Tel Arad and Tel Be’er Sheva with Yohanan Aharoni. He has conducted digs at Tel Michal and Tel Gerisa and has recently begun digging at Tel Yaffo. He is the author of books on the city gate in Palestine and its neighbors and on two excavations, and has written a book summing up the archaeology of the ancient city.
Prof. Herzog belongs to the modern generation of Israeli academic archeologists who have been digging, in a truly scientific approach, all over the land of Palestine ever since the establishment of the state of Israel but more extensively after 1967, in an attempt to reach some sort of a historical proof that would legitimatize the ancient Israelite story and therefore could back up and maybe make sense of the current Zionist land grab of Palestine.
After decades of extensive and arduous archeological excavations and search, Prof. Herzog and many other Israeli archeologists, such as Prof. Israel Finkelstein et al, reached a robust conclusion that somehow resembled Prof. Sand’s thesis of the invention of the Jewish people. Only in addition, they concluded that the greatest chunk of the Israelite story according to the Bible is a mere myth – the interesting parts of it copied out from both the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian mythologies and the remaining tedious details are just tribal narratives invented by the minds of the Hebrew scribes of the old testament.
Archeology and history of Palestine “Right or Albright”
Apart from the Bible, the first mention in history of the Philistines dates back to the late Bronze Age 1150-1200 BCE. They are unmistakably mentioned in Egyptian texts, as inscriptions on the walls of “Medinet Habu” the majestic temple of king Ramses III that documented the war with the Sea Peoples. The Philistines are one of them, who inhabited the coastal land from Phoenicia down to Egypt. And the Philistines appear once again in the work of the Greek historian Herodotus in the middle of the 5th century BCE.
The archaeology of Palestine developed as a science at a relatively late date, in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The main push behind archaeological research in Palestine was the country’s relationship with the Holy Scriptures. The first excavators in Palestine were biblical researchers who were looking for the remains of the cities cited in the Bible.
Archaeology assumed momentum with the activity of William Foxwell Albright, who was convinced that if the ancient remains of Palestine were uncovered, they would furnish unequivocal proof of the historical truth of the events relating to the Jewish people in its land. But it didn’t take long before “the spade and the Bible” school of Albright proved not right.
The biblical archaeology that developed following Albright and his pupils brought about a series of extensive digs at the important biblical tells: Megiddo, Lachish, Gezer, Shechem (Nablus), Jericho, Jerusalem, Ai, Giveon, Beit She’an, Beit Shemesh, Hazor, Ta’anach and others. The way was supposed to be straight and clear: every new finding should contribute to the building of a harmonious picture of the past.
Slowly, cracks began to appear in the picture. Paradoxically, a situation was created in which the glut of findings began to undermine the historical credibility of the biblical descriptions instead of reinforcing them.
The explanations became ponderous and the picture inelegant as the pieces didn’t fit together smoothly.
Here is a summary by Prof. Herzog, from his famous article “Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho” published in Ha’aretz Magazine, Friday, October 29, 1999 that explains why the harmonious picture of the historicity of the Promised Land collapsed:
Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs’ acts are legendary stories, we did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, we did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon. Those who take an interest have known these facts for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and doesn’t want to hear about it
This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal territory. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.
Most of those who are engaged in scientific work in the interlocking spheres of the Bible, archaeology and the history of the Jewish people—and who once went into the field looking for proof to corroborate the Bible story—now agree that the historic events relating to the stages of the Jewish people’s mergence are radically different from what that story tells.
In other words, the Israelite history is invented and therefore the Zionists could have settled somewhere else than Palestine — Uganda, for example, as had been proposed by Herzl at the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basel on August 26, 1903.
Indeed, Mr. Gingrich, the British Uganda would have been a wiser choice and a better place to accommodate the influx of Jewish immigrants … it would have saved the Palestinians the unnecessary massacres and the ongoing ethnic cleansing, but most importantly it would have saved us the aggravation of listening to your pathetic tampering with the history of Palestine.