A brief excerpt from the "When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?" by Shlomo Sand from Tel Aviv University. Currently not available in English, a translated edition should be available in English this summer from Verso Press.
One comical fact is that the great exodus out of Egypt never happened. Another fascinating detail...Jews were rampant proselytizers.
"Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population, who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.
A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal nation, reconstituted on the land of its ancestors, to justify internal discrimination against its own citizens. It will remain difficult to imagine a new Jewish history while the prism of Zionism continues to fragment everything into an ethnocentric spectrum. But Jews worldwide have always tended to form religious communities, usually by conversion; they cannot be said to share an ethnicity derived from a unique origin and displaced over 20 centuries of wandering."
http://mondediplo.com/2008/09/07israel
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html
One comical fact is that the great exodus out of Egypt never happened. Another fascinating detail...Jews were rampant proselytizers.
"Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population, who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.
A global ethnocracy invokes the myth of the eternal nation, reconstituted on the land of its ancestors, to justify internal discrimination against its own citizens. It will remain difficult to imagine a new Jewish history while the prism of Zionism continues to fragment everything into an ethnocentric spectrum. But Jews worldwide have always tended to form religious communities, usually by conversion; they cannot be said to share an ethnicity derived from a unique origin and displaced over 20 centuries of wandering."
http://mondediplo.com/2008/09/07israel
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html
