We Think We Know …

John B. Wells, former host of Coast to Coast AM and host of Caravan to Midnight once said, “We think we know, but we don’t.” Almost all Christians believe, as I once did, that the reestablishment of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Over the years I have become disabused of that notion as I read and studied world history and religion. I came to accept the theory that the Ashkenazi Jews who founded modern Israel are not descendants for the Hebrews of the Bible, but of the Khazarian Empire. For that reason, the reestablishment of Israel in 1948 is not a fulfillment of prophesy. While I still maintain that I’m right about that, it seems that it’s more complicated than I thought. The truth will likely shock the modern day Evangelical Christian who contends modern Israel can do no wrong, that blessing modern Israel will lead to blessings, and who supports modern Israel in its drive to exterminate the Palestinian people.

The authorities (likely under Jewish pressure) have argued against the Khazarian Theory of Jewish origins for many years. A recent and more influential in mainstream circles argument has been made in the widely-praised international bestseller The Invention of the Jewish People by Professor Shlomo Sand, a dissenting anti-Zionist Israeli historian, whose English translation had been released in 2009, a year after the original Hebrew edition. Excerpts follow:

All of this supports Sand’s central thesis that by the time of the late Roman Empire only a rather small fraction of its large Jewish population could actually trace their roots back to the Israelites of the Bible. For example, in the half-century since Israel’s conquests of the 1967 war, waves of determined Israeli archaeologists and historians have made every effort to uncover evidence of the wealthy and powerful Jewish state of King David and King Solomon, but have found almost nothing at all. This suggests that the story of their mighty kingdom was either entirely fictional or so wildly exaggerated that it amounted to the same thing, with those famous Biblical figures actually reigning over a tiny, impoverished scrap of territory, so unimportant and obscure that it was totally ignored in the chronicles of the major states of the Middle East and also by Herodotus when he compiled his very hefty regional history a few centuries later.

Consider also the belief that the Jews were expelled from their homeland following the failure of their repeated revolts against the Romans in the first and second centuries AD. This story of the Jewish Exile is probably almost universally assumed by Jews and Gentiles alike, constituting a central ideological pillar for the “restoration” of a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel in 1948 and the ingathering of Jews from across the world that soon followed. However, it has absolutely no factual basis and is accepted by few if any reputable scholars. Although the victorious Romans certainly might have exiled a thin stratum of the vanquished Jewish elites as punishment, they had no policy of deporting entire populations, so the ordinary Judeans who survived their defeat surely remained exactly where they were, merely suffering a loss of political independence.

As Sand persuasively argued, over the centuries many of those Jews eventually converted to Christianity then later to Islam following the Muslim conquest, and they are the ancestors of today’s Palestinians, leavened by an admixture from all the various conquering groups of the last two thousand years, including Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks. Thus, the direct descendants of the ancient Judeans lived continuously in their homeland prior to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The tremendous historical irony that the current Palestinians—now suffering horrifying massacres in Gaza—are almost certainly the closest lineal descendants of the Biblical Israelites was highlighted by Sand and had been similarly emphasized by Beaty in his 1951 book.

Thus, despite a long series of military conquests and foreign overlords, the Israelites of the Old Testament had remained in place for well over two thousand years, annually plowing their fields until they were brutally uprooted and expelled from their ancient homeland by Zionist militants in 1948, a story I had told in a lengthy article last month.

We thought we knew, but we didn’t. It would appear likely that those Christians so rabidly defending modern Israel may actually be supporting the genocide of the last remnants of the Hebrew people.

The entire review of Sands book may be read here.