James Veverka: Promises derived from religious lore, 'we were here first' won't cut it

To The Daily Sun,

"Divine rights" derived from religious legends and "we were here first" aren't legitimate Israeli claims. Sheila Kufert noted that archeological gigs "show the Jews in the land of Israel going back thousands of years." Jewish tribes did rule in the region for some centuries in the first millennium BCE but that's all. It's screwball to claim that a people can arbitrarily return over 2,000 years later and kick the indigenous population out. Who does that in modern times?

In 1945, the British Mandatory Power estimated that Jews owned 576 square miles of land in Palestine and indigenous Arabs owned 5,020. This disparity persisted into 1947 and provided strong arguments for the UN members opposed to the partition plan. Like European Jews, Palestinians and other Arabs in the Ottoman Empire developed a nationalist streak in the 1800s. When the Ottoman Empire fell after 623 years, Palestinian hopes for the right to self-determination were high. So right from the beginning of Theodor Herzl's Zionist World Congresses, the Palestinians and other Arabs in the region vehemently opposed having their land transferred to someone else by fiat. They'd been there for millennia uninterrupted.

Like Jews, Palestinians are descendants of the original Canaanites. Canaan was the Bible's "promised land." In recent genome studies, Palestinians share 80% of their genome with the original Canaanites. A 2021 study by the New York Genome Center found that the DNA of modern Palestinians matches that of Bronze Age Canaanites. A 2020 study published in Cell found that Palestinians, Jordanians, and Syrians share around 80% of their ancestry with the ancient Canaanites. A 2017 Cambridge University study found that the present-day Lebanese population is largely descended from the ancient Canaanites, inheriting more than 90% of their genes. Promises derived from religious lore and "we were here first" won't cut it.

James Veverka

Laconia