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The Aboriginal Rights of the Jewish People

(Tablet) Allen Z. Hertz - The rejection of Jewish peoplehood requires a wholesale denial and repudiation of recorded history and physical evidence - the books of the Greeks and the Romans, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, large sections of the hadith of the Prophets, archaeology - stretching across millennia that shows that the Jewish People is among the oldest of the world's peoples. Now, 30 years of genome research has produced evidence showing that most of today's Jews are to an appreciable extent genetically interrelated and significantly descended from Jews of the ancient world. Jews have always claimed rights to visit and/or dwell in their ancestral homeland. And they have stubbornly done so for more than two millennia. The presence of Jews in their ancestral homeland is not an expression of colonialism or imperialism. Jews joining other Jews in Eretz Israel are entirely unlike the 17th-century Pilgrim Fathers who built English settlements in America, and can never be compared with Dutch Boers in South Africa or the French in Algeria. Yusuf Ziya Pasha al-Khalidi was for ten years mayor of Jerusalem. As a Muslim, an Arab and an Ottoman subject, he wrote a letter on March 1, 1899, to the chief rabbi of France, saying, "Who can contest the rights of the Jews regarding Palestine? Good Lord, historically it is really your country!" The great Arab People is aboriginal to Arabia, not the Holy Land. Judaism, the Hebrew language, and a self-identified "Jewish" People were already in Eretz Israel about a thousand years before the ethnogenesis in Arabia (circa 600 CE) of the Arab People. Arabs always knew the Koran to say that Allah had promised "the Holy Land" to the Jews, all of whom would return there by Judgment Day. The writer was senior adviser in the Privy Council Office serving Canada's Prime Minister and the federal cabinet, including with respect to aboriginal issues.
2017-02-10 00:00:00
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