Ancient Ancestry, Israel And Palestine

Wednesday, 25 September 2024, 6:16 pm
Opinion: Keith Rankin

Esteemed Israeli intellectual Shlomo Sand published The Invention of the Jewish People in 2008 with a new edition in 2020. He sees the popular concept of peoples – popular in the late 19th century (when we were obsessed with ‘race’) and again in the last decade or so when we have renewed that obsession with race (calling it ‘ethnicity’) – as quite problematic. Cultures and languages are real of course; but we prefer to imagine ‘peoples’ in terms of shared ancestry. Thus, the Jewish People are commonly seen as the biblical descendants of Isaac, son of Abraham; with special reference to the classical Kingdom of David (Judea and classical Israel) that existed in the Levant about 3000 years ago.

There is a real problem, in that the Jewish People are commonly considered to be both an ethnicity and a religious faith. We don’t conflate these two identity markers with respect to other ‘peoples’. Simon Schama – a renowned New York based Jewish historian – introduces his television series The Story of the Jews by showing clearly that Judaism is a faith only, and not an ethnicity. Shlomo Sand notes, in his introduction to the 2020 edition, that most of the Jewish population in the year Zero CE (when Jesus Christ was a young child) were comparatively recent converts, and that the people who have lived continuously in the Levant – eg the Palestinians – will have more biblical Israeli ancestry than have the modern Jewish population.

I would like to infuse this discussion with some simple ancestral numeracy.

3,000 years ago represents about 120 generations, taking us back to our 118-times-great-grandparents. If we go back that many generations, then all people alive and dead today have precisely 1,329,227,995,784,915,872,903,807,060,280,344,576 places in our family tree for that generation; approximately a billion octillion places.

The global population in 1,000 BCE is believed to be about 50 million. That means, on average, each living person in that year features 2.66 octillion (let’s say 3 octillion) times on each of our family trees. Now of course some ancient people will feature more than others. Each Palestinian today probably features each ancient Israeli about 150 octillion times in their family tree (assuming an ancient Israeli population of less than one million). Whereas, based on Shlomo Sand’s research, each person who identifies as a Jew probably has each ancient Israeli only 15 octillion times in their 118-times-gg-parent family tree slots. Modern Palestinians are almost certainly about ten times more infused with the blood of the sons and daughters of Isaac than are the present soldiers of the Israel Defence Force (and of the ‘freedom fighters’ of Haganah and Irgun who preceded today’s IDF).

So, what are these people fighting each other over? Land. Liberal-democracy is based on the sanctity of private property, including land. Many people identifying as Israelis are living on land dubiously acquired from people identifying as Palestinian; with the descendants of the previous occupants of those lands living (and dying) today in ‘refugee camps’ in Gaza, Judea, Samaria, and Lebanon.

Why cannot these Levantine people just settle with each other, create a post-apartheid liberal secular state in which all races and religions are constitutionally equal, and compensate the descendants of the dispossessed for the loss of their land? And not further dispossess Palestinians of their land.

The time for ‘peoples’ pushing narratives about ‘other peoples’ being ‘human animals’ is truly well past; there never was a time that such narratives were appropriate. Almost more shameful is the way that too many influential people in the ‘liberal democratic west’ buy into these grotesque Israeli narratives, and don’t register concern at the suppression of narratives counter to the ‘Israel-says’ version of the news.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

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Keith Rankin

Political Economist, Scoop Columnist

Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.

Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.

Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.

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