Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Children of Abraham.


There is no Israel/Palestine conflict, because there are no Palestinians! Its all been a misunderstanding.

Well that's the gist of the opinion of one researcher, who has approached the New Sanhedrin - a fringe (or maybe not so fringe - they are headed by noted Talmud scholar Adin Steinzalts) religious group and asked them to declare West Bank Arabs to be Jews

According to Haaretz:

Four Palestinians from the Hebron Hills contacted a group of rabbis on Tuesday and claimed to be the descendants of Jews who were forced to convert to Islam.

The Palestinians were accompanied by Zvi Mesini, a researcher who wrote a book on the subject and assisted them in learning more about Judaism. According to the Palestinians, their families had removed mezuzahs from their doors in order to avoid harassment by their neighbors.

One of the Palestinians said he still kept a tefillin he received from his father's uncle and another told the rabbis that his family had once secretly lit candles on the Sabbath and for Hanukkah.

Mesini told the rabbis, members of a group called the New Sanhedrin, that he believes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are descended from Jews.

"Such evidence renders the conflict redundant," Mesini said. "It proves that Judea and Samaria belongs to both the recognized Jews and the unrecognized Jews."

After convincing the Rabbis, he will have to convince the other 6 million or so Palestinians.

Not that he is wrong. We are all after all brothers and sisters: if not descendant from Jacob (and how many Jews are really descendant from Jacob - even Maimonides recognized that most Jews where not) than from Abraham, and if not Abraham, then from Adam. Its just that, that fact doesn't seem to move most people.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Next some crackpot is going to "prove" that the Chocktaw are Jews who sailed in a dhow around Africa landed in Florida and walked to Alabama.

It will be based on the fact that a rawhide thong might have been from T'fillin, and they had been using slings like King David used to kill Goliath.

3:36 pm  

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