so who are we fighting?
who are we?
who?
hmm.. good questions.. well i have actually heard about this before and it kind of makes sense.. but many palestinians apparently do derive from the original inhabitants.. us? maybe..
apparently when we were banished from the land not everyone was cleared out.. only the influential people and their possies.. a lot of people were still left here.. most of which ultimately converted to christianity and then to islam..
but not all..
haaretz - through the story of 4 palestinians - opens a can of worms that our conflict has largely neglected.. could it be that we are fighting "ourselves"? and that the "other" is nothing but our reflection in the mirror?
i recently chatted to a phd grad of geneology who strongly supported this theory ie that palos and jews are one people.. something to do with halpotypes etc.. i'll leave it up to her to comment if she so pleases..
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
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10 comments:
Fascinating and highly credible. Would you post the link to the haaretz article? Their search engine is... well, uh, er, not functional. Thanks for your continuous sharing of an array of regional true tales: the macro and the micro.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but there's an awfully good chance that the Palestinians are genetically closer to whoever was there thousands of years ago than most Israeli Jews are.
But then again, for me at least, that was never really the point. I mean, we all came from somewhere in Tanzania, but I don't think that means I have the right to claim Dar es-Salaam as my own...
T: most welcome - oops ill edit the post - in the meantime http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1032272.html
S: while there is no evidence to suggest that - especially with key palestinian families including names like masri (egyptian) and iraqi (self explanatory) etc - even if it were true - that does them no favours.. every nation is allowed to evolve.. they parted from the stream.. the jewish people as a people are sadly enough not based on genetics but rather on matrilineal continuity..
im not justifying our connection to the land through genetic relevance - but rather saying that if we are in the midst of a conflict with "another" people - perhaps we can reconsider what makes them the "other" if we realise that in fact we are not cousins but rather brothers..
Hello, Lirun. I found your blog via Ricardo As one who values justice and peace, I appreciate what you are doing.
So far as the story in Haaretz is concerned, I can identify with the four. My maternal family converted from Judaism to Christianity in Germany, probably about 250 years ago. The conversion was never openly discussed, but memories were passed from generations to generations, along with a beautiful necklace that holds a Star of David.
Shalom, Lirun.
hello nick
thanks for the kind words and welcome :)
im curious - what does that mean to you.. and how come 250 years later your family still carries this collective memory..
do you know why they converted?
Thank you, Lirun.
My grandmother came to the United States from Germany as a teenager at the end of the Nineteenth Century. She met my grandfather on the boat crossing the Atlantic and were married in the U.S. They had eight children; my mother was the youngest.
My grandfather was killed in an accident when my mother was eighteen months old, so neither she nor I knew him. My grandmother died when I was 4 years old, so I have but vague memories of her.
As the story goes, my grandmother continued regular correspondence with her family in Germany. In 1938 she told her (mostly adult) children that she wanted to return to Germany for “one last visit” with her relatives. She did and spent 4 months visiting them. When she returned, she brought the necklace and the Star of David with her. A year later, when World War II began, told her oldest two children that she believed that our German relatives would not be alive at the end of the war. With the exception of a few cousins, she was right. After the war she could not locate the majority of her family.
Her younger children were told this story by the two oldest after my grandmother’s death in 1954. The necklace was passed on to my mother’s oldest sister. My mother is the last surviving female of the eight siblings; one brother remains alive. A few years ago she gave the necklace to my sister, whose daughter recognized the Star of David and asked about it. It was only then that my sister and I heard its story.
I believe that my mother’s ancestors converted to Lutheranism for the same reason that the father of Karl Marx—whose name was Herschel Mordechai and the descendent of a long line of rabbis—converted Lutheranism: it was socially, politically, and financially expedient not to be Jewish in Eighteenth Century Prussia. Marx’s father desired to study and practice law and Jews were not permitted to do so.
I have studied history since I was a small child. Modern European history was my specialty in undergraduate school and the more I read about Hitler and has gang, the more I wanted to know. I felt repulsed by the evil and physically sickened by the Holocaust. Later, when I was in seminary (I am an ordained Christian minister) I had the fantastic experience of meeting and talking with Elie Wiesel, whose words and stories deeply touched me.
A few years ago, shortly after my sister and I learned the story of my grandmother’s visit to Germany and the necklace, I was writing a blog post about Auschwitz when I was suddenly hit by the thought that my relatives may have been murdered there. That’s what it means to me.
I apologize for the length of this comment.
Blessings, my new friend.
hey
thanks so much for sharing.. its certainly an interesting angle..
i guess in so many ways we are all related.. here you are - a clear non jew who - in addition to being derived from jewish roots - shares one of the darkest moments of our history through your own family losses..
national identity is so fluid.. its quite amazing..
when people get along the questions are less significant because they remain largely hypothetical.. but when people disagree and start to make difficult decisions based on such distinctions - thats when the suffering inevitably begins..
it is always facsinating when we look at other people and suddenly realise that we are looking at ourselves.. and all it takes to make that change is a small recognition of a deeper commonality..
To say that Jews were forced to convert is a bit over the line as Jews and Muslims lived side by side since Islam came to earth. But I sure love these questions, and I always say that my greeaaaat grandfather was a Jew, then when Jesus came he converted to Christianity and when Musilms came he converted to Islam. But does it realy matter? Not to me. I know i'm part of this land and I realy hope that Jews and Palestinians were borthes and not only cousins. But Judaisim is a relegion, Palestinians are a nation and people who happen to be Muslims and Christians and athiasts, so the comparison is not accurate
Hey Lirun
I'm sorry for the late comment, just that things are really busy this semester.
Yes Palestinians absolutely are the descendants of canaanites, so are the Lebanese. We have not studied Jewish populations in our labs but papers have been published about the jewish populations and putting all this data together, they all share the same haplogroups. so take a snapshot in time, 3000 years or so ago, canaanites were the inhabitants of present day syria, lebanon, israel, palestine and jordan ..
I will post something today, check it out.
P.S. My PhD is in cell biology and i'm doing genetics now not geneology :)
amitie
go mirvat - the link to her post is
http://mirvat.blogspot.com/2008/11/its-finally-out-httpdownload.html
thanks for the corrections ya hilwa :)
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