"Plastic Hebrews"

When Fake Identity Meets Real Genocide

Many people watching the news coming out of Western Asia would presume that Hebrew has been the language spoken by Jewish people throughout history.

But for nearly 2,000 years, Hebrew was as dead as Latin - and much like Latin, was read, understood (and to a far lesser degree spoken), by only a tiny percentage of educated people, and then used mostly in a scholarly, academic, mercantile, or religious context.

Even 2,000 years ago in the Roman administered Levant, Hebrew was not the daily language spoken by all Jews. Aramaic (a related Semitic tongue) had become the lingua franca of the region’s indigenous populations, with Greek and Latin also widely used due to Hellenistic and Roman hegemony over much of Western Asia.

People of the Jewish faith had begun spreading-out over much of the world even before Greek or Roman control of the Levant, and over the intervening centuries the Jewish diaspora almost always spoke the dominant language in whichever country they happened to be born - just as Catholics could be found speaking Spanish, Gaelic, Italian, French, German, and dozens of other languages.

Aside from classics scholars, for centuries the only people with a good grasp of Latin tended to be Catholic clergy and theologians. Likewise, only scholars and rabbis tended to have a good grasp of Hebrew.

The Jewish people are comprised of many distinct communities, based on location and traditions - the Mizrahi (Arabic Jews), Sephardim (Iberian Jews), Ashkenazim (Central and Eastern European Jews), et al.

Broadly speaking, Sephardic Jews are those who fanned-out across the Mediterranean during antiquity, with a particularly large and successful community forming in Visigothic (Western Gothic/Germanic), and later Muslim, Iberia (what is now Portugal and Spain).

Over many centuries, these Sephardic Jews of Iberia spoke languages including Arabic, Old Spanish, Old Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, and Ladino - the latter also known as Judaeo-Spanish.

The Ashkenazi Jews are generally considered to be those who spread out northwards from The Levant (Greek and Roman Palestine) into mostly Slavic and Germanic lands. The most well-known language spoken by many Ashkenazi Jews past and present is "Yiddish", a name which is more or less a dialectical variation on the German word for "Jewish" ("Jüdisch", in which the German "J" is pronounced like an English "Y" - "Yoodish", which became "Yiddish").

Yiddish is essentially German, with a smattering of words from Slavic and Romance languages, along with a sprinkling of Hebrew, Aramaic, and other loan words from the many countries through which the Ashkenazi Jews had passed over the centuries.

[Diagram showing prominent Israelis with their original family names]

The actual Hebrew language spoken by Israeli politicians in contemporary news bulletins is a language brought back from the dead - mostly by 19th and 20th century Zionist settler-colonizers of Palestine.

And all of the Israeli leaders and politicians of the 20th century with names like Netanyahu, Ben-Gurion, Shamir, etc. represent a Zionist ideological desire to carry names which harken back to an ancient time (2,000 years ago) when land and language were still together under the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea.

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Apologists for Zionism and Israel's illegal settlements claim ceaselessly that "Jews are indigenous to Israel, we cannot be colonizers in our own land".

This is a disingenuous, absurd and illogical argument.

Let's imagine something roughly equivalent.

Imagine millions of Irish-Americans today claiming a birthright to colonize and resettle the entire island of Ireland - Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland - while basing their claim in large part on the territory held by High King Brian Boru over 1000 years ago in 1014 CE.

Innumerable political and demographic changes have occurred in Ireland in the 1,000 years since Brian Boru and his allies won the Battle of Clontarf against a combined Irish/Viking army. 

The Gaels have been in Ireland since the Iron Age, and descendants of those Gaels remain the majority in Ireland today.

But since the time of Brian Boru, the island of Ireland has also endured invasions and immigration waves of Vikings, Normans, and later Elizabethan and Stuart English, Scottish, and Welsh settler-colonizers.

Ireland has also absorbed many other immigrant peoples including Flemish tradespeople, Palatine German refugees, French Huguenots, members of the wider British Quaker community, and of course Jewish and Romani people.

The Irish have witnessed and taken part in sundry rebellions, uprisings, and wars in the four hundred years since some of their ancestors began fleeing Ireland, emigrating to places like France, Spain, and North and South America (among many other lands).

Unlike what happened with the Jewish population in Palestine over the past 2000 years, the Irish - the Gaels - never became a minority in their colonized home country.

During the height of the Anglo Ascendancy in Ireland, right up to the First World War, the British always ruled over a Gaelic majority, just as the British Raj in India saw perhaps only 20,000 politicians, elites, soldiers and civil servants ruling and administering for scores of millions of East Indians.

After the failure of the Second Jewish Revolt (against the Roman Empire) 1,900 years ago, the province of Judaea became part of a larger Roman province called "Syria Palaestina". The region was later ruled by the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), various Muslim caliphates (7th to 16th centuries), and eventually by the Ottoman Turks (16th to 20th century).

Over these 1,900 years, the Jewish population of this region dwindled, mainly due to massive out-migration. By the start of WWI, Jewish people comprised perhaps a mere 5% of the population of Palestine under Ottoman rule…

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Following victory in the First World War, European colonizing powers such as France and the UK broke their promises to their Arab allies, and carved-up the lands of the Ottoman Empire among themselves.

For reasons too numerous and complex to go into here, the British in Palestine began to allow a torrent of European Jewish-Zionist immigration into Palestine.

When this torrent became a flood, and Zionist terrorists began attacking not only Arabs, but even the British Army, the UK washed its hands of the mess it had created, and withdrew.

Now imagine that the UK had done the same in Northern Ireland back in the 1970s at the height of The Troubles - a sudden and complete withdrawal of civil administration, police, and military.

Imagine that instead of allowing Northern Ireland to become a self-governing province BASED ON THE MIXED POPULATION PRESENT AT THE TIME OF WITHDRAWAL (A POPULATION WHICH HAD DEVELOPED OVER FOUR CENTURIES), picture instead a couple of million Catholic Irish-Americans from Chicago and Boston arriving en masse in places like County Down and County Antrim, saying "This belonged to the O'Neill family 500 years ago. All non-Catholics and non-Gaels out."

Ridiculous, right?

This analogy is of course far from perfect. British settler-colonizers were only truly in political control of Ireland for about 400 years (early 1600s to early 1900s), and even after losing control of 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland during the 1920s, they were still actively oppressing and treating the indigenous Irish of Northern Ireland as an underclass right up to the 1970s.

Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Ottomans had been in control of Palestine for almost 2,000 years before the British got their hands on it after WWI, and the tiny ancient Jewish minority population of Palestine was far from being an oppressed MAJORITY (as was the case in Ireland).

But still, let’s run with the analogy.

Arabs conquered the Eastern Roman Byzantine province of Palestine during the 630s, almost exactly 1,000 years before the English under Elizabeth and James conquered Ireland.

And whereas the English brutalized the Irish for their religious beliefs, and tore down and burnt Irish monasteries, the Arab Muslim invaders of Palestine lifted the Christian Byzantine ban on Judaism which had been in place there.

That’s right. Arab Muslims made Palestine a place more religiously tolerant than it had been under Christian rule.

Anyway, let’s fast forward to the 1900s, with a certain section of European Jews convincing themselves that they should have a God-given right to return a land they had left nearly 2,000 years ago.

Imagine AMERICANS with partial and distant Irish ancestry - raised thousands of miles away from Ireland, steeped in USA culture, history, and politics for decades and even centuries - imagine these “plastic Irish” arriving en masse in Belfast, County Down, County Antrim, and ordering people whose families have lived in those places for over 400 years to get the hell out - based on a territorial claim made by a king who died centuries ago...

Imagine these Irish-Americans from Chicago and Boston then clearing entire towns and villages all over Ulster through ceaseless campaigns of violence and terrorism? 

Violence and terrorism directed not only at the Irish Protestant community, but at ANY group daring to oppose their "return to their homeland"?

Imagine the entire US American military machine (along with billions upon billions in American and Irish-American funding), being put at their disposal as they bulldoze Belfast and rip up crop fields in Tyrone...

Imagine these Americans then posturing, claiming to be reviving Irish culture.

Imagine them basing their territorial claims and Irish identity on their religion, and the stories of Fionn mac Cumhaill and Cú Chulainn from ancient Irish texts like the Táin Bó Cúailnge.

Then imagine these interlopers attempting to obscure their true origins and reinventing themselves by assuming faux Gaelic names...

"Behold the son of Eire, Frank Gillespie of Chicago." 

Oops.

I meant "Proinsias Mac Giolla Easpaig".

"Netanyahu" my arse.

Your name is Mileikowsky. Your father was Polish, and your mother was a Lithuanian who arrived in Palestine via Minnesota.

I'll leave you, dear readers, with the text of an open letter sent to The New York Times by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and other prominent, decent, and admirable Jewish people in 1948, the year in which Israel unilaterally declared its independent statehood on the land of the Palestinian people. 

Just three years after the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, these people had the moral courage to speak out when they saw wickedness and injustice being perpetrated by their own people.

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TO THE EDITORS OF NEW YORK TIMES:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.

Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin's behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.

The public avowals of Begin's party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.

Attack on Arab Village

A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants (240 men, women, and children) and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.

The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.

Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model.

During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.

The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.

Discrepancies Seen

The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a "Leader State" is the goal.

In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin's efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.

The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.

ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ,

HANNAH ARENDT,

ABRAHAM BRICK,

RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO,

ALBERT EINSTEIN,

HERMAN EISEN, M.D.,

HAYIM FINEMAN, M. GALLEN, M.D.,

H.H. HARRIS,

ZELIG S. HARRIS,

SIDNEY HOOK,

FRED KARUSH,

BRURIA KAUFMAN,

IRMA L. LINDHEIM,

NACHMAN MAISEL,

SEYMOUR MELMAN,

MYER D. MENDELSON, M.D.,

HARRY M. OSLINSKY,

SAMUEL PITLICK,

FRITZ ROHRLICH,

LOUIS P. ROCKER,

RUTH SAGIS,

ITZHAK SANKOWSKY,

I.J. SHOENBERG,

SAMUEL SHUMAN,

M. SINGER,

IRMA WOLFE,

STEFAN WOLFE.

New York, Dec. 2, 1948