Please add my name.

Bravo!
What a brave initiative.

You are bunch of sad so called intellectuals.You are indeed free to express your perverse opinions but try expressing some dissent if you were a Fatah official in Gaza. See how quickly you would be thrown off a building ,stabbed or just tortured to death.
Israel is subjected to most vile racist daily attacks and all you and your cohorts can manage is this juvenile grandstanding.
Grow up the lot of you. Pull the computer out of your arses and switch your brains on.

Thank you for this generous and courageous initiative.

Of course, the Right of Return was instituted to allow Jews to return to OUR ancestral lands. Similar “return” laws exist throughout Europe – Ireland, Germany, Sweden…

I also find it ironic that these Jews, so sensitive to the plight of occupying another people’s land, are THEMSELVES situated on occupied Aboriginal lands in Australia! How are those Aborigines faring these days? I suppose it’s another matter once you’ve exterminated the natives, save a few token ones for show. Nevertheless, justice is justice, right?

Wash that blood off your hands before you start pointing fingers.

1. Shlomo Sand is not a historian of Jewish history, and has no qualifications to write of it in a professional capacity. His conclusions been completely ridiculed by his colleagues who are competent in Jewish history.

2. You obviously haven’t read his book either. What he relates is nothing earth shattering. Sand establishes a straw man – that the Jews as an ethnic/racial group were purged from Judea, that the Jews of today do not racially reflect the Jews that were expelled, and that this voids their claims to the land. He further asserts that early Zionists used the history of expulsion, and the promise of return to the land, as an emotional weapon to rally Jews in support of the State of Israel in the 19th and 20th century.

First, the history.

The Romans destroyed Judea not once, but twice. The first massacre was in 70 A.D., when much of the cities, including the Jerusalem and the Temple in Jerusalem, were leveled, their urban residents either massacred (between 1-1.5million) or taken as slaves back to Rome (several hundred thousand).

With the destruction of Jerusalem, and the religious and political authority that rested there, the religious leadership was reestablished in Yavne, where began a centuries-long process of developing Rabbinical Judaism.

About 60 years after the first destruction, the Romans instituted new edicts, forbidding Jews from living in Jerusalem, placing restrictions on Jewish religious worship, etc. Again, the Jews rebelled – the Bar Kochba rebellion. By the time it was put down, another half million to a million Jews were dead, 50 fortified towns and a thousand village had been razed by the Romans.

After this, the Romans refused to allow any Jewish political or religious leadership (often one and the same) in what had once been Judea, and went about essentially purging the land of Jewish identity, including renaming cities. The land was emptied of vast numbers of people – the Romans had killed 2 million people, many others understandably fled the genocide. Irrigation, commerce, agriculture, the things that enable a nation to function, all fell apart. A few primarily religious and insular communities remained, particularly around the cities of Tzvat, Tiberius, Hevron and Jerusalem, and continued to remain for centuries. The focus of Jewish communal and religious life shifted to the untouched, unified and wealthy Jewish communities in the Diaspora – Mesopotamia, Egypt’s Alexandria, eventually Spain.

That more or less covers the Dispersion, and is the authoritative history as confirmed both by Jewish Talmudic and modern academic scholarship. Shlomo Sand’s assertion that the Jews were not purged from the land, but that they melted wholesale into other nearby peoples and eventually accepted Islam has no foundation, whereas it has been documented that, after the destruction of Judea, twice, swells of Jewish refugees poured into Jewish communities throughout the ancient world.

Second, Sand says that the Jews of today are not racially the same Jews as those which were dispersed by the Romans, and thus have no claim to the land. He quotes sketchy research on a Jewish kingdom of Khazaria that existed for a short time in the Balkans during the Middle Ages. The largely Turkic people, the Khazars, situated on the borders of Islam to their south and Christendom to their north, chose to convert to Judaism in order to maintain independence from both. It appears that only the ruling class converted however, and the kingdom existed for only a few decades before being overrun.

Furthermore, the Jews are not a race. Lineage is maternal, yes, but genetics (what was once termed “bloodline”) are not a criteria of importance in determining Jewish identity, as conversion enables anyone to become a Jew. Throughout the centuries, countless numbers have done so, from nearly every society among which the Jews have lived, including from within the Roman legions themselves.

The very notion of race is a Western invention, as every people experience genetic inflows and outflows – there is no such thing as a “pure race”, and never has been. The very association of “purity” with a particular “race” is another strange Western invention. The Jews are not a race – there are black, white, brown, yellow and purple Jews – and we have never defined ourselves as such, which is why we accept converts, no matter their origins. You’ll never hear an educated Jew complain about “diluting the bloodline” by accepting converts.

What we Jews are is grouping of tribes. Semitic tribal laws related to affiliation are quite different from notions of race (which are strangely associated with purity) invented in the West. When a woman of one tribe marries a man of another, she takes his tribe, or, rather, that tribe absorbs her. From that point on, she is bound by the specific characteristics of that tribe.

There was a time when Jews identified themselves by tribe – Benjamin, Issachar, Zebulen, Gad, etc. – and were geographically situated based on their tribal lands in Israel. Due to a complicated history, the ten northern tribes were forcibly evicted and scattered by an Assyrian king throughout his empire. Some believe Kurdish Jews are a remnant of one of those lost tribes. Because of this bloody history, today we are no longer certain who belongs to which tribe, though this will be resolved with the coming of the Moshiach.

So, Jewish converts don’t need to be genetically similar to other Jews in order to claim a right to return to the land. They are “in the tribe”, as it were, and are immediately afforded the spiritual and historical connection to the land that every other Jew inherits by birth.

Again, the land of Israel is a spiritual inheritance to all Jewish people, no matter their origin. This is not a fact contested by any Jewish religious authorities, and never has been. There is an unbroken record of history and scholarship of Jews from the destruction of Judea to the founding of the State of Israel. Shlomo Sand’s book is a prime display of ignorance that enables the abuse of history for political ends.

My sensitivity to our common humanity is first demonstrated through an accurate retelling of history, in the context of attempts by some, like Shlomo Sand, to eliminate Jewish identity and connection with the Land.

I was not alive in 1948. My priority is not to defend difficult decisions made long ago, in a time of war, but to examine the best approaches to achieve peace today, with a minimum of bloodshed.

I don’t see how this petition, and the actions of your organization, furthers that goal.

To Antony Loewenstein in particular
This is good grist for your mill. From your previous writings its apparent that there is NOTHING in your opinion that Israel does which is right/correct/just.

To you its a clear case of Bad Israel vs Good Palestinians & Arabs. Of Wrong Israel vs Right Palestinians & Arabs – but nary a bad word about the actions of the Arabs/Palestinians/Iranians. That just ain’t the way of the world Antony. There is wrong on both sides here. There is suffering on both sides.

However the overarching problem of the area is of course that most of the Arab states. Palestinians and Iran will not recognise Israel’s right to exist. Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syria’s President Assad are in furious agreement on that fact, apparently together with are you Antony.

Which other country’s very existence is verbally and/or physically threatened on a regular basis? None – only Israel’s.

Thus whats your solution? Israel should fold? – Well thats not going to happen. Israel should cease being a Jewish state? Go tell Turkey,Iran,Syria etc etc not to be Muslim states. Israel should open its doors to anyone who wishes to settle there? Fantasyland.
As a secular Jew I admonish your actions in the strongest possible terms. I condemn you also your faux-altruism. You ratchet up the ante at every opportunity – not for the greater good but in order to generate a living for yourself. Shame upon you.

PS Antony I think its a bit rich for you to describe yourself as a best-selling author. BookScan stats don’t appear to back you up on that one either.

why do you beleave israel has the right to this area of land?
did the bible mark out the latitude and longditude of the promised land?
was it given to you by God? or by the british empire?
its rather ironic that your so called promised land has given nothing but anguish to the israeli people.

Prehaps one day Israel will see the wrong they do in the name of thier god.

Prehaps you should adopt another form of holy book with but one sentence on in its pages:

“Do to others what you would like to be done to you”

when the time comes that those oppressed rise againstisrale. I will not pitty any who call themselves an Israelite but let them rot in their own creation.