Jews, Like Palestinians, Are 'Indigenous' to the Middle East

The Hamas-embraced idea that Jews have no place in Israel fosters extremism on both sides.

Leftists who openly celebrated the horrifying Hamas attacks in southern Israel argued that the end—the liberation of Palestine "from the river to the sea"—justified the means, including the indiscriminate slaughter of young rave revelers, elderly Holocaust survivors, children, and babies. Although that is a minority position even among harsh critics of Israeli policy, it reflects a more widely endorsed view that Jews, as "settlers" and "colonizers," have no legitimate claim to any of the country's territory and no business living there.

That view, in turn, is based on a simplistic morality tale that pits white European oppressors against "indigenous" people, eliding Israel's demographic roots and the ancient Jewish connection to the land. While this missing context is unlikely to faze people who see mass murder as a noble and heroic act of resistance, it is relevant for anyone who can imagine a less bloody resolution of Palestinian grievances.

In a speech last August, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who supposedly is committed to a peaceful settlement with Israel, asserted that "the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites," meaning it is impossible for them to be victims of anti-Semitism. Abbas was invoking a theory positing that the Jews of Europe descended from the Khazars, a Turkic tribe that supposedly converted en masse to Judaism in the ninth century.

According to a 2016 summary by genetic researchers Ariella Gladstein and Michael F. Hammer, however, "Ashkenazi Jews are not closely related to modern populations that best represent the Khazars." Rather, they "appear equally close to both Middle Eastern and European populations," and they "likely arose from a genetically diverse population in the Middle East."

Notably, Abbas did not address Mizrahim, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who account for about 45 percent of Israel's Jewish population, compared to 32 percent for Ashkenazim. Overall, a 2000 study found, "a substantial portion" of Jewish and Arab Y chromosomes (70 percent and 82 percent, respectively) belonged to the same chromosome pool, results that were consistent with "previous studies that suggested a common origin for Jewish and non-Jewish populations living in the Middle East."

A 2001 study by the same researchers, which found "a high degree of genetic affinity" among Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Kurdish Jews, also found that Jews were "even closer to populations in the northern part of the Middle East than to several Arab populations." The authors suggested that "the Y chromosomes in Palestinian Arabs" reflected "early lineages derived from the Neolithic inhabitants of the area," which "are part of the common chromosome pool shared with Jews," combined with the impact of subsequent migrations from the Arabian Peninsula.

While genetic research belies the notion that Jews are newcomers to the Middle East, it gets you only so far. In particular, it does not address conflicting land claims based on much more recent developments.

Israel's founding in 1948, which most Jews celebrate but most Palestinians remember as the Nakba (catastrophe), involved a mixture of prior land purchases, arbitrary line drawing by the United Nations, and a war in which the nascent state was attacked by the combined armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Some of the 700,000 or so Palestinians who fled their homes planned to return after the anticipated Arab victory, while others were forcibly expelled.

Israel's defenders have long argued that it could rightly claim land won in defensive wars—in 1967 as well as 1948. They have noted that Israel absorbed Jewish refugees from Arab states and wondered why Arab states could not likewise absorb Palestinian refugees.

While there is something to these arguments, the overall message—that Palestinians should suck it up and start over somewhere else—is less than completely satisfying for anyone who values individual rights and peaceful coexistence. But that no-compromise position is only reinforced by extremists who take a similar view of Jews, whether or not they are prepared to endorse the final solution that Hamas prefers.

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