[malandrew]

In 1872, less than 4% of Palestine was Jewish. It was 17% in 1931. 33% in 1948 when Israel was formed.

The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi. Ashkenazis are from Khazaria and converted to Judaism between 740 and 920 AD. Even from this population, there is a bottleneck around 600 to 800 years ago where the population was down to 350 individuals [1].

By and large very very few Jews in Palestine/Israel are able to claim Levantine/Semitic genetic ancestry.

Many Palestinians and other Levantine people in Palestine who now practice Islam are far more likely have to have ancestors that were once Jewish that actually lived in historical kingdom of Israel prior to 70 AD when Titus and Vespasian crushed a revolt there.

The ancestors of these folks that today practice Islam in Palestine likely converted to Islam sometime after 637 AD when Arabs started to settle in Palestine.

It's pretty commonly accepted all over the world since basically forever that ownership is bequeathed from parents to children. This means that those who are Islamic today but whose genetic ancestors practiced Judaism in the past and lived in the historical kingdom of Israel have far greater claim to the land than folks who have no genetic ancestry to the Kingdom of Israel and instead have ancestry with no genetic relationship that converted to Judaism about 1105 to 1285 years ago.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/ashkenazi-jews-descend-from-35...

[JumpCrisscross]

> those who are Islamic today but whose genetic ancestors practiced Judaism in the past and lived in the historical kingdom of Israel have far greater claim to the land

Broadly speaking, any philosophy that rests on an oldest-claims-first metric are guaranteed to cause violence.

Information degrades the further we go back; you’re prioritising the wishy-washiest sources of truth. And the nature of human migration and interbreeding means the further you go back, the less likely you are to find genetic ancestors of the people who currently control the land. The people alive on the land you want them off. People with guns.

(The theory is also fundamentally based on the notion that racial migration is wrong. Immigrants to America have less claim than white Americans, who have less claim than natives, except for all the natives who were conquered each other because they moved around too.)

[jonathanstrange]

It's not about the certainty of the information. The fact is that humans have always and will always migrate in large numbers for a vast number of reasons, and these migration movements are the main sources of cultural and linguistic change. So, any ideology with historical justification, based on how people in a region lived a long time ago is going to create wars because other groups lived there at other times, and ethnic and linguistic groups constantly change and evolve. Named regions, ethnic group boundaries, countries, and their delimitations change over time.

> The theory is also fundamentally based on the notion that racial migration is wrong.

There are no human races, though, at least not ones based on phenotypical traits. Genetic analysis can reveal indications of regions and ethnic origins but these are barely linked to phenotypical traits and cannot be inferred from the latter. Linguistic communities are the bearers of a shared culture, not anything related to the bogus and outdated concept of "human races." It's also worth pointing out that the claim that "racial migration is wrong" does not follow from any of the other considerations, nor is it needed to support them in any way. I suppose you meant to say the opposite, that the view that racial migration is wrong cannot be morally justified because historical justifications are wrong? Otherwise I don't get the final remark.

[JumpCrisscross]

> There are no human races, though, at least not ones based on phenotypical traits

Race is a social construct. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real. The constructs of “Israeli” and “Palestinian” are as real and deadly as the geographical boundaries they each draw.

> suppose you meant to say the opposite, that the view that racial migration is wrong cannot be morally justified because historical justifications are wrong

If one’s ancestors define legitimate claims to where one can live, then one cannot legitimately live where one’s ancestors were not. In a weird way, the historical returners do a full swing to the xenophobic anti-immigrant types. (There are people who I’ve heard seriously argue that accepting Palestinian refugees is literally genocide.)

[patates]

> Information degrades the further we go back

Exactly. Otherwise, anyone could claim anything since we all share the same ancestry, going back to the same primates or something[0]. We should focus on the issues at hand and work to avoid making the situation worse. Forcing all Israelites or Palestinians to leave is not a feasible solution. The problem needs to be addressed through peaceful negotiations and immediate support for those in need.

[0]: Dumbed down on purpose.

[klipt]

> The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi

Wrong, Mizrahi are the majority.

> Ashkenazis are from Khazaria

I don't know hope you did it, but wrong again, DNA studies show Ashkenazim have a large Canaanite DNA component. The other part is largely Italian due to admixture within the Roman Empire which forcibly annexed Judea.

[slt2021]

if you trust DNA study, you should know that the same DNA studies show that Palestinians are the ones who are native to the land of Palestine, not ashkenazi!

[klipt]

They're both native to the land.

[slt2021]

you cannot claim to be native to the land, just based on some fairy tale non-scientific religious book, and stuff that happened some 2000+ years ago.

even if you decide to trust the religious book, you should know that jewish exile is a G-d's punishment for sins and a gift - so that jewish people can be a light to other nations and build a better world for everyone

[klipt]

> DNA studies

[malandrew]

Thanks for the correction.

[jdietrich]

>The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi.

That's simply untrue.

https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/noah/files/2018/07/Ethnic...

[wqaatwt]

> Ashkenazis are from Khazaria and converted to Judaism between 740 and 920 AD

Probably not worth reading your comment past this sentence.

You’re confusing something…

They are from Eastern Europe through the way of Germany and probably Italy (where they likely did quite a bit of mixing with the local before becoming mostly genetically isolated) prior to that.

[slt2021]

leading jewish scholars in Israel have published research in support of Khazarian theory, for example Shlomo Sand: Invention of jewish people

https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Jewish-People-Shlomo-Sand/d...

[wqaatwt]

If I started claiming that the Welsh are refugees from Atlantis would that make me a leading Celtic scholar?

[slt2021]

You argument is against zionism

[Aloisius]

The Khazar hypothesis is b.s. peddled by a white supremacist (Ernest Renan).

Genetic studies have found no substantive evidence of a Khazar origin among Ashkenazi Jews.

[slt2021]

False, there is a lot of wiggle room open for interpretation in your “DNa studies”.

I need to tell Israeli professor of history Sholomo Sand from Tel-Aviv University that he is a white supremacist antisemite for pushing his Khazarian theory and bringing all the receipts in his book

https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Jewish-People-Shlomo-Sand/d...

[Aloisius]

Yes, genetics studies are open to interpretation, but not the interpretation that Ashkenazi are completely unrelated to other Jews. The evidence simply does not support that.

Sholomo Sand is not a geneticist nor was his hypothesis based on genetics. The fact that he's a Israeli history professor doesn't mean much here. The man didn't want to be a Jew, religiously or ethnically, and found the most complete way to accomplish it.

[slt2021]

No, the claim of ashkenazi as being native to the Filistine while completely ignoring arabs who have vastly more native component of DNA by any measure.

Also jewish DNA is closest to northeastern anatolian component that is being suppressed as non politically convenient

[slt2021]

Sand's book is coauthored by Eran Elhaik a geneticist and bioinformaticion.

Eran's analysis backed up Sand's theory of jewish nation based on DNA

[kaba0]

I don't think this "claim to land" works in the modern age.

Countries were established and fought for in blood all thorough history, and the winners kept their land. End of story.

Unless we are talking about some remote village, every single country was funded on blood and violence, and after a certain point it just makes no sense to track it.

[xg15]

By that logic, the claim that the land is exclusively(!) Jewish because this used to be the territory of the Jewish state ~2000 years ago works even less though.

[malandrew]

Fair enough. With that in mind, at what point does it no longer make sense to track it?

There must be some principled position where you can argue when it does and or does not make sense. In the case of this conflict, we're talking about a conflict where a few folks that directly experienced it are still alive and that many folks whose parents experienced it are still alive.

The Nakba is more recent than the Holocaust by a few years. Should it get the same treatment? Countries like Germany are still paying reparations.

In the US, we constantly have discussions about the institution of slavery in the US that ended in 1865. Jim Crow laws are more recent injustice however and only ended in 1865.

The Ukraine likewise had the Holodomor. There's actually a fascinating video of Abe Foxman of the ADL speaking with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, telling him that it would be unproductive to talk about "your genocide, our genocide", but at the end of the day that's what we have here and it only seems fair to give comparable treatment for comparable catastrophes.

Speaking of catastrophe, I've always found it somewhat ironic that the word Nakba and the word Shoah (the original vernacular used to describe the Holocaust before it was replaced in the late 60s) both have the same meaning. Nakba is Arabic for catastrophe and Shoah is the Yiddish word for catastrophe.

I'm not saying where that line should or should not be, but it only seems fair that if we're going to draw a line that victims of different but comparable injustices should be given comparable treatment.

[Yawrehto]

Minor correction, Shoah is Hebrew. See eg Yom HaShoah (literally: day of the catastrophe), Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day.

[SurgicalDoc_UK]

Genealogical research shows the strongest link between the ancient Canaanites and the current middle east population is with the Palestinians and Lebanese. There are some genetic links between Palestinians and the ancient Israelites with this theory that many converted to Islam after the invasion.

However, you are correct in that many historians describe the population was added to, and never replaced. Supporting the DNA links.

From this I would conclude that the Palestinians are indigenous through the pre-colonial link. Most Jews in Israel are not indigenous but they share cultural links and lets not forget the wars they won in 1948 and 1967.

What is bizarre, is the ban on genetic testing for Palestinians and this pseudo-history in Israel that Palestinians never existed. Something distorted is being taught in Israel at many levels.

[woodruffw]

You’re conflating two theories: one widespread, and one fringe. The theory that the Ashkenazi population experienced a bottleneck is widely accepted; claiming that Ashkenazim are actually a remnant of the Khazar Khanganate[1] is both fringe and typically associated with antisemitic conspiracies.

(Note that I say antisemitic, and not in a manner that involves conflation with Zionism: going against the overwhelming majority of generic evidence to make a claim about a Jewish ethnic group that doesn’t even majority reside in Israel reeks of a blood-and-boden anger against Jews because of who they are.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi...

[malandrew]

Fair enough. I didn't realize that the Khazar hypothesis was fringe. I've seen it pretty widely cited and assumed it was more commonly accepted.

What is still fair to say is that many Jews in Israel do not actually have a continued occupation of that land going back thousands of years as was claimed by the person I was originally responding to.

4% in 1872 is a very low number. Absent the mass immigration that diluted the local population and a Nakba that expulsed many, that 4% population there in 1872 would still be about 4% of the population today give or take a few percentage points assuming the fertility rate of that 4% and the 96% percent that were not Jewish were comparable.

Many of the Jews that are in Israel today are of European descent (i.e. no thousands of years of continued occupation of Palestine) and many of the Jews that are in Israel today that are of Arabic descent are there due to Zionist terrorism from the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah prior to 1948 and the mass migration from around the Arab-Israeli war. For example, Avi Shlaim from Oxford University has given numerous interviews on the terrorism committed by Zionists in Iraq to coerce the Middle Eastern Jewish populations to concentrate in Palestine as part of the Zionist project.

What is indisputable is that the claim of a continued presence of Israel/Palestine by Jews going back thousands of years really only applies to a very small percent of Jews in Israel. The reality is that that number is most certainly dwarfed by the quantity of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine that can claim to have "lived there for thousands and thousands of years" per the person I was replying to.

[woodruffw]

> I've seen it pretty widely cited and assumed it was more commonly accepted.

Where?

I think blood-and-boden arguments for territory are bad, full stop. Israeli Jews shouldn't use them to justify continuing to displace Palestinian Arabs, and Palestinian Arabs shouldn't use them to justify displacing the millions of Jews who live there now.

To the best of my knowledge, the overwhelming scientific consensus considers Ashkenazi Jews descendants of Levantine ethnic groups, with both Southern European (Roman period) and Northern European (medieval onwards) admixtures. Some people use this to make irredentist arguments, which leads to ridiculous (and antisemitic) responses like the Khazar hypothesis. But the solution is to observe that irredentism is wrong full stop, not to attempt the erasure of Ashkenazi ethnic identity.

[malandrew]

> Where?

Can't think of any particular sources off the top of my head. It shows up from time to time in different places.

> I think blood-and-boden arguments for territory are bad, full stop.

I generally agree. I generally argue for reciprocity and even handedness. If someone else claims a certain argument as legitimate, then it's fair to use that same argument for counterclaims. In this case, the person I was replying to was making the "blood-and-boden argument", which means it is fair to apply that same argument to the counterclaim for those against whom they feel entitled to the same territory.

Me? I have no dog in this fight as my ancestry is so far removed that I can't claim it. My take is that if you go back in your ancestry and you can't point to a single named ancestor in your family tree (unbroken. you have to know everyone between you and that person), then you really can't claim connection to a place as you can't physically place a specific ancestor in a specific community (town, city, village), much less a controlling interest or other form of ownership. I've researched my family tree back to about the 1500s. That's about as far back as 99% of people can claim because written records largely dry up in the 1500s, with the exception of some folks with ties to nobility.

In your opinion, what is a good argument for territory?

> To the best of my knowledge, the overwhelming scientific consensus considers Ashkenazi Jews descendants of Levantine ethnic groups.

A question I have there is how far back to do you have to go to reach that ancestry. Pretty much all Europeans have paternal and maternal haploproups whose origin is in the Middle East. In fact, I would reckon that the only individuals in Europe today that don't claim ancestry to the Middle East would be folks whose ancestors migrated directly from Africa to Europe. Almost everyone else from Europe is going to be able to claim the Middle East. https://vimeo.com/50531435

> But the solution is to observe that irredentism is wrong full stop, not to attempt the erasure of Ashkenazi ethnic identity.

Makes sense. I'm going to incorporate that into my understanding here. Thanks for the corrections.

As a followup, I just did some googling and it looks like Ashkenazi Canaanite ancestry likely originated around 1000 BC.

According to Wikipedia, it looks like the Northern Kingdom of Israel was established around 900 BC and the Kingdom of Judah existed around 850 BC.

Correct me if I'm making a logical error here, but this would suggest that Ashkenazis likely originate from a voluntary diaspora and not a involuntary diaspora (like in 70 AD), if they share genetic ancestry to the region from around or just before the Kingdom of Israel and Judah were established (unless they were expelled by their own. i.e. the equivalent of different denominations and ideological schisms).

That all said, I'm still with you that blood-and-boden arguments are bad, but if folks are going to make that claim it's still worth asking questions about whether that claim is any stronger than the blood-and-boden arguments presented by others.

[woodruffw]

> In your opinion, what is a good argument for territory?

If I had one, I would be a moderately successful philosopher instead of a moderately successful software engineer :-)

I don't think there's a good "just" definition for control of territory: claims of original or ancestral ownership are hard to verify (and subject to this kind of hell-in-a-cell irredentism), while "working" definitions uniformly favor the most ruthless or powerful party.

Instead of arguing for rightful possession on lines of originality or power, I often think counterfactually: who would, all things being equal, be the ideal stewards of a piece of land? Under that framing the answer is almost always a secular, liberal democracy where national ties are more significant than ethnic or religious ones.

Very few of those exist, and the ones that do are strikingly imperfect.

> A question I have there is how far back to do you have to go to reach that ancestry.

It really depends on what you mean by "reach." As noted above, the Ashkenazim had a significant population bottleneck event, and are genetically distinguishable from other peoples living in Central and Northern Europe. Whether that makes them "closer" to Levantine ancestry or not depends on your perspective: you could argue that they admixed relatively little given their isolation from their original ethnic group, or you could argue that the admixture that occurred was proportionately significant.

> Correct me if I'm making a logical error here, but this would suggest that Ashkenazis likely originate from a voluntary diaspora and not a involuntary diaspora (like in 70 AD), if they share genetic ancestry to the region from around or just before the Kingdom of Israel and Judah were established (unless they were expelled by their own. i.e. the equivalent of different denominations and ideological schisms).

I don't know if it's a logical error or not, but it's an incomplete picture:

* The Jews that became Ashkenazim left the Levant in multiple waves, for multiple reasons (anthropologists will say things like "push and pull factors," which really just means "some were pushed out by hardships, and others were pulled away by opportunities, etc.").

* The likely ancestry of Ashkenazim dates back to ~900-1000BC, but this doesn't itself represent a date range for when they left the Levant. To make it intuitive: there's no distinction between someone living in the Levant in 300 BC with that ancestry and someone living outside the Levant with that same ancestry: they'd look the same in terms of the genetic record.

* Historical records aren't very detailed for the period, but a significant record of Jewish Levant-Europe migration comes from the decades following the Bar Kokhba revolt. Josephus (who is Jewish, but is writing as a Roman citizen) records around 100,000 enslaved on just one occasion among several[1]. These slaves were likely transported further into the empire for labor in both Greece and Italy, which in turn is a likely explanation for the Southern European genetic component within the Ashkenazim.

TL;DR: There's more than one factor that explains the flight of Jews from the Levant. However, our strongest historical record for large scale migration strongly suggests that the bulk of what became the Ashenazim arrived in Southern Europe in the first and second centuries, and then moved further into Central and Northern Europe during the Late Empire and Early Medieval periods. That migration was in turn primarily caused by "push" factors (mass enslavement and murder following the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt), followed by subsequent "pull" factors (subsequent normalization of Jewish status in the Roman empire, stable lives outside of a post-temple Levant, etc.).

[1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2850/2850-h/2850-h.htm#link6...

[weatherlite]

> In 1872, less than 4% of Palestine was Jewish. It was 17% in 1931. 33% in 1948 when Israel was formed.

Where's the issue ? I thought you Woke people wanted to see more diversity and empowerment of minority groups in the world

[malandrew]

I think you're confusing me with other folks on HN. I value cohesive high trust societies so I'm personally in favor of assimilation and much more gradual changes to any culture.

I think a change from 96% to 67% in 76 years is a catastrophe for culture indigenous to a region, and it's not a surprise that the Nakba followed such a rapid change without assimilation. The rate should be one where outsiders coming into a society become part of that society instead of splintering the society.

In chemistry terms, it's the difference between a solution, emulsions, suspensions and mixtures. In my mind, the goal should be cultural "solutions". If the rate of change is such that you end up with enclaves that resist mixing, then that leads to decline of trust and civic engagement. You end up with a society that is highly political and fragmented and liable to balkanize and potentially engage in armed civil conflict.

[hmcq6]

Let me break this down in terms you can understand.

The DEIsraelis are doing a genocide.

Do you see the problem now?