Imaginary narrative denies Jews their history

DAVID SAKS

The inscription on the seal reads, “Belonging to Hezekiah [son of] Ahaz, king of Judah”. Chizkiah HaMelech is ranked with David and Shlomo as among the most righteous of Jewish kings, which was certainly not the case with his father.

Both, though, were Jewish kings who reigned in the Biblical Land of Israel nearly 15 centuries before the emergence of Islam and the Arab-Islamic colonial occupation of Eretz Yisrael that swiftly followed.

As we know, the Hezekiah bulla won’t have any impact on Islamist and leftist propaganda against the Jewish State, just as all the previous archaeological discoveries have failed to make any difference.

Actually, the prevailing claim now goes that Hezekiah, like all the kings and prophets before and after him, were in reality Palestinians, while today’s Jews are colonial usurpers from Eastern Europe (or Central Asia).

When it comes to denying Jews their right, historic or otherwise, to Israel, historical evidence has never come into it. As always, though, archaeological windfalls of this nature reinforce our sense of connection with Eretz Yisrael as the cradle of our heritage as well as the physical land of our forebears. During the seemingly endless centuries of exile, it was no more than an abstract reality.

Politically-driven attempts to fabricate an imaginary Palestinian narrative while writing the Jewish people out of history altogether do, nevertheless, raise some interesting questions about a people’s right to a particular piece of land.

In the US, for instance, the claim generally made by, and on behalf of, the Native American population is that “their” land was “stolen” from them by white European settlers. The same is said for the Australian aborigines.

For my part, I don’t buy this, at least not completely. It is certainly true that gross injustices were inflicted on the native populations of both countries, and that this resulted in their being forcibly dispossessed of territories they had occupied for centuries – millennia in the aborigines’ case.

For all that, let’s look at the prevailing demographics at the time of European settlement, from the 1600s in the case of the US and late 1700s in that of Australia. Accurate figures are impossible to establish, but scholarly estimates for the population of the US in 1600 range from two to seven million, in other words, as being at most barely half the population of modern-day New York.

The aboriginal population of Australia was considerably less – the upper-estimate puts the figure at no more than 1,25 million whereas according to some it was as low as 315 000. Today, the US is home to some 300 million people and Australia to 20 million and they could both easily incorporate four or five times as many (China, only slightly larger than both countries, has nearly 1,4 billion people). 

Thus, when Europeans began arriving, North America (from Mexico upwards, at any rate) and Australia were barely settled at all. The question is, could those already living there reasonably claim to have exclusive rights to so vast, rich and as yet undeveloped part of the world, simply because they were there first?

Obviously not – whites migrating from an overcrowded Europe surely had a right to make new homes for themselves in a largely unsettled North America and Australia. In a perfect world, the native populations would have recognised that the days of their having the entire land to themselves were over and that they would have to adjust accordingly – no more relying on occasional buffalo hunts, for example, but getting down to disciplined crop growing and livestock raising like everybody else.

For their part, whites would have dealt tactfully and sensitively with the locals they encountered, helping them to make the transition as smoothly and painlessly as possible. Human beings being what they are, of course, what inevitably occurred was a series of violent confrontation, with the weaker side going under. 

Even with regard to South Africa, the “you stole our land” charge so central to the whole approach of the EFF and their ilk is not so straightforward. Fair enough, one might say such a thing about the northern and eastern parts of the country, but what about the whole Western and Southern Cape region?

Here, the indigenous people at the time of the first European settlement were the Khoisan people – “Hottentots”, as we called them in the bad old days. Apart from the fact that strictly speaking, they today no longer exist as a distinct racial grouping, having been absorbed into the large mixed-race “Coloured” population, they were very different from blacks of the type who constitute the majority of the South African population today.

So far as the Western and Southern Cape go, the latter are relative newcomers, in most cases having only arrived during the last hundred years or so. This underlined for me the absurdity of this year’s #RhodesMustFall  campaign at UCT, where black students railed against white colonial usurpers despite being in a part of the country where whites had preceded them by centuries.