Another controversy flared in early 2008 when Shlomo Sand, a
history professor at Tel Aviv University, published a book in Hebrew
called When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? According to a
sympathetic review by the Israeli journalist Tom Segev, Sand debunks
Israels official history that todays Jews are descendants of the Jewish
community in Palestine 2,000 years ago, a community that was supposedly
exiled by the Romans in 70 ad. He argues instead that
most of the Jews and Christians in the region converted to Islam
several hundred years later, when the Arabs conquered Palestine.
Interestingly, this view was shared by at least two of Israels founding
fathers, Yitzhak Ben Tzvi and David Ben-Gurion. They believed
that many modern Palestinians were descended from the regions
Jews. In the 1920s the pair even dabbled with a plan to convert the
native Palestinians back to Judaism, only abandoning the idea when
confronted a decade later with an intensification of Palestinian resistance
to Zionism during the Arab Revolt of 193639.
source:Book {Disappearing Palestine
Israels Experiments in Human Despair
Jonathan Cook}
history professor at Tel Aviv University, published a book in Hebrew
called When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? According to a
sympathetic review by the Israeli journalist Tom Segev, Sand debunks
Israels official history that todays Jews are descendants of the Jewish
community in Palestine 2,000 years ago, a community that was supposedly
exiled by the Romans in 70 ad. He argues instead that
most of the Jews and Christians in the region converted to Islam
several hundred years later, when the Arabs conquered Palestine.
Interestingly, this view was shared by at least two of Israels founding
fathers, Yitzhak Ben Tzvi and David Ben-Gurion. They believed
that many modern Palestinians were descended from the regions
Jews. In the 1920s the pair even dabbled with a plan to convert the
native Palestinians back to Judaism, only abandoning the idea when
confronted a decade later with an intensification of Palestinian resistance
to Zionism during the Arab Revolt of 193639.
source:Book {Disappearing Palestine
Israels Experiments in Human Despair
Jonathan Cook}