Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Shlomo Sand colleziona stroncature

Anti-Zionist Demography
By David  Nirenberg
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=2454
The Invention of the Jewish People
by  Shlomo Sand, trans Yael Lotan
Everyone  has heard of Attila and his Huns, who fought their way on pony
back from the northern borders of China to the lands today called France,
where they were defeated in 453 CE. Theirs was only the first of a
series of migrations from cCntral Asia that repeatedly reshaped the
Christian and Islamic world over the next thousand years, and the
conquests of their successors, though less famous, were more enduring.
Akatzirs and Avars; Bulgars, Khazars, and Kök Türks; Ogurs, Onogurs
(with their allies the Hungarians), Quturgurs, and Uturgurs; Polovtsy,
Pechenegs, Qumans, and Sabirs; and of course, the Mongols: these and
many other of the diverse peoples whom scholars today assign to the
semi-geographic, semi-ethnic, and semi-linguistic category of Altaic or
Turkic, all left Central Asia for destinations that eventually
encompassed vast expanses of Europe, Asia, Asia Minor, and even Africa
(the Mamluks of Egypt).
The Khazars rank among the more obscure
of these peoples. They left no records in their own language and few in
other languages. We do not know when they first entered the world of
Late Antiquity or when they disappeared. From Greek, Armenian, Muslim,
and Jewish writers, we learn everything we know about the polity, called
  the “qaganate,” that they established. It seems to have stretched, at
its height, from Kiev in the North East to Crimea in the South West. It
lasted more than three hundred years, gradually falling to the Rus after
  965 CE. We do not know the exact location of its capital, Atil,
somewhere near the lower Volga—a tent city, apart from a few ceremonial
buildings, because the Khazars clung to their steppe ways. They gathered
  in cloth yurts during the winter, dispersing for war and pastoral
activities in summer. This textile architecture disintegrated after
their disappearance, foiling archaeological attempts to discover
material traces of the qaganate’s glory.
If the Khazars are scarce in ancient sources, they are wildly
overrepresented in modern ones. Unlike their contemporary rivals the
Alans, Bulgars, or Pechenegs, the Khazars have been the subject of two
modern bestsellers—first Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe (1976),
and now the book under review. On the World Wide Web they are far more
populous than they ever were in their own time—ninth-century Muslim
geographers estimated their fighting force at around ten thousand—peopling
half a million sites like the “Illuminati Conspiracy Archive” and
“christusrex.org.”
(The latter has put Koestler’s book online, with a preface suggesting
that his suicide in 1983 was in fact a murder by the Mossad.) Why should
  this obscure Turkic tribe be so interesting today?
The answer
lies in the intersection of late antique and postmodern geopolitics. The
  Khazars, like other steppe nomads, entered a world divided between two
religious superpowers—the Christian Roman Empire (Byzantium) and the new
  Islamic caliphate—both competing to draw them into alliance. Such
alliances took many forms, from the military to the matrimonial. In 732,
  for example, the Byzantine emperor Leo III married his son Constantine
to the daughter of a Khazar qagan. A generation later, the caliph
al-Mansur ordered his governor of Armenia to marry a Khazar princess,
which he dutifully did. Turkic polities were promiscuous in their
loyalties; their chief goal was to secure their independence. And this
same goal seems to have governed their decisions about another form of
alliance: that of religion.
Invading nomads confronted complex
cultic choices in their new lands. They could cling to their ancestral
paganism, thereby separating themselves from their conquered subjects
and from the surrounding powers with which they were contending. Or they
  could associate themselves with one side or the other through
conversion. The choice was not always a free one. After the Muslim
general Marwan chased the Khazar qagan up the Volga in 737, the qagan
capitulated and agreed to become a Muslim. Among the Bulgars—the
Khazars’ rivals and relatives—Khan Boris tried to pursue a more
deliberate strategy in the early 860s. He sent Pope Nicholas I a list of
  more than one hundred questions about the Catholic faith, to which the
pope carefully replied. Boris calculated that the Christianity of a
distant pontiff promised more autonomy than that of a hegemonic
neighbor. But when the Byzantines heard of the plan, they invaded
Bulgaria, persuading Boris to accept baptism from the Orthodox
patriarch.
At more or less the same time, a Byzantine cleric
named Constantine was participating in a religious debate at the Khazar
court. Constantine would later win fame and sainthood as St. Cyril,
“apostle to the Slavs,” but the battle he was fighting at Atil in 861
had already been lost. Sometime earlier in the century, after a debate
between representatives of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, the Khazar
qagans had rejected the religions of the two empires to their south and
made the highly unusual choice to become Jews.
So much for
ancient geopolitics. What about the postmodern? Even the more paranoid
pages of the Web can help us here, for some of them point to the 1947
meetings of the United Nations’ “Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine” at
Lake
Success, New York, where on October 18 Jamal Husseini, vice-president of
  the Arab Higher Committee, took
  up the question of the racial relationship of the East European Jews to
  the Khazars. He quoted at some length from the Jewish Encyclopedia…to
support his contention that the Jews of Eastern Europe—who, he said,
were the creators of the Zionist movement—were descended from the
Khazars, a people of Turkish origin, without any connection with
Palestine. Mr. Husseini also stated that… whether the present non-Jewish
  inhabitants of Palestine are of Arab origin is irrelevant. They are
there, he said, in actual possession of their country since remote
periods of time, and they need have no other association to establish
their claim thereto…
Chaim
  Weizmann, Husseini’s respondent in these debates, did not take up the
topic. He merely replied that the justification for a Jewish homeland in
  Palestine was not race but “the facts and urgencies of life itself.”
Husseini’s argument suggests that already by 1947 the Khazars had made
one more migration, this time into the heart of the modern debate over
the establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East.
SHLOMO
  SAND does not mention Husseini’s speech, but his book takes up its
theme. Its thesis is three-pronged. There exists a conspiracy of
“traditional Zionist historians.” Those historians tell “lies” about
the
  Jewish past. These lies underwrite the creation of a uniquely racist
state in Israel. Sand wants to convince us that from the very origins of
  Jewish historical writing, and especially since the beginnings of
Zionism, the “authorized historians” have peddled an essential untruth
about the Jewish people, in order to suppress an essential “truth.” The
lie is that all the world’s Jews are descendants of people exiled from
Judea when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE and crushed the
subsequent revolts. The truth is that the vast majority of the Jews of
the Diaspora are descendants not of Judean exiles but of converts from
other times and places: most important, the Khazars, whom Sand thinks of
  as the progenitors of most of the Central European (Ashkenazic) Jews
who migrated to Palestine and Israel in the twentieth century.
According
  to Sand, the lie is essential because it casts the establishment of a
Jewish polity in Palestine as the rightful restitution of an ethnic
inheritance. This ethnic myth in turn enables the racism that Sand sees
in many policies of the Zionist state, such as those on citizenship,
regularly denied to the descendants of Palestinians who fled or were
expelled during the war of 1948, but granted to claimants from the
Diaspora who can show that they were born of a Jewish mother or
establish (regardless of parentage) that they have been persecuted as
Jews. Conversely, Sand’s truth is essential because he believes that if
the Jews of Israel are indeed descendents of converts rather than of
biblical Judeans, then the “Jewishness” of the state is nothing but an
illegitimate fantasy. Once that fantasy is exposed it will be easier to
see why the state must abolish all distinctions between Jews and
non-Jews. Until that happens, Israel will remain a racist state. In
short—unlike others who have embraced the Khazars—Sand’s effort to
“dream” Jewish history anew is not intended as an indictment of
Israel’s
  existence but only of its existence as a Jewish state.
UNLIKE
  SAND, I don’t believe that training as a historian qualifies me (or
anyone else) to pass judgment on the legitimacy of states, but it does
give me grounds for doubt about Sand’s historical arguments. Some of my
worries are merely constitutional: I tend to agree with Johan Huizinga’s
  warning, issued from the ruins of Europe in 1919, that “there is no
more dangerous tendency in history than that of representing the past as
  if it were a rational whole and dictated by clearly defined interests.”
  Other doubts have to do with Sand’s assumptions. Why should we believe
that the need for a Jewish state was predicated on fantasies of racial
identity rather than on Weizmann’s “facts and urgencies of life,” such
as the urgent (in 1948) sense that without a refuge, Jews could not be
secure from persecution? Still other doubts arise from the lingering
racism in Sand’s own logic. Is he suggesting that ethnic nationalism is
legitimate when the genealogies that justify it are sound? If Diaspora
Jews really were primarily descended from Judeans, would an Israeli
“ethnos-state” be ethically unimpeachable? (This problem is not trivial,
  given the weakness of Sand’s historical arguments for mass conversion.)
  But let us leave all these vague worries aside. The book’s contents,
judging from its reception, are clearly fascinating and deserve to be
engaged. Are most Jews descended from converts? Has a Zionist conspiracy
  replaced the true history of the Jewish people with a false one? And is
  the purpose of this conspiracy the production and perpetuation of a
racist state?
First the converts: Sand’s search for them does not
  quite begin at the very beginning—as Edward Said did when he invoked
theories of Moses’ Egyptian origins to negate Jewish claims to ethnic or
  religious distinctiveness. His starting point is ancient Judea: a dry
and hilly place, unfit for intensive agriculture. This inhospitable
terrain could not, he argues, have produced all the Jews who ended up in
  the Diaspora. Even before the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in the
first century, many Jews lived in places like Egypt, Syria, Rome, and
Spain. Population growth rates in the ancient world were not very high,
and if we assume that those growth rates were constant and consistent,
then how could a region as small and poor as ancient Israel have
produced enough Jews to account for all those found outside it? Sand
pokes fun (sometimes well deserved) at some of the attempts of
nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century scholars to explain the
phenomenon, such as the higher fertility of the Jews, their religious
commitment to reproduction, or their refusal to practice the infanticide
  so common as a means of family planning in the ancient world. His
conclusion: the many Jews dispersed throughout the ancient world cannot
have been descended from Judeans. They must have been converts.
This
  basic demographic logic provides both spring and escapement for The
Invention of the Jewish People. But the assumptions that underlie
it, and the deductions it produces, should be tested against what we
know of the real world. At the level of assumptions, for example, no
demographer would deny that the population growth rate of the ancient
world was much lower than that of the modern. But neither would any
serious demographer deny that there could be wide variations within that
  growth rate. Measured from the third century BCE to the first century
CE, a surplus-extracting city like Alexandria in Egypt grew much more
quickly than the vast surplus-surrendering rural areas whose taxes built
  the metropoles of the Hellenistic and Roman world. Is it such a
surprise, then, that the Jewish population of Alexandria burgeoned as
well? Philo of Alexandria, writing in the early first century, estimated
  the Jewish population of Egypt at the wildly implausible figure of one
million. Whatever the actual figure, it was clearly high. Some of that
population was drawn from converts, but the evidence does not allow us
to speak with any conviction about proportions. On the contrary,
Egyptian sources say little about converts, though they often tell us
about Jewish immigrants from Judea.
My point is not that the
majority of Egypt’s Jews were descendants of Judeans: the evidence is
too frail for such claims. I am simply trying to convey the flavor of
Sand’s methodology, which consists in imposing a spurious demographic
logic on the past, one that often flies in the face of the surviving
evidence. Some of his case studies—such as his claim that the Sephardic
Jews of North Africa and Spain are descended from Berber converts—strike
  me as scandalously weak, perhaps because that field is my specialty.
Others, such as his arguments about the Jews of Yemen, seem more
defensible. But in every case, his goal is not to make sense of the past
  through the sources, but rather to reduce the past to his will.
CONSIDER
  ONCE AGAIN those remarkable Khazars, whose conversion to Judaism
provides Sand with his most important arguments. The sources tell us
that their leader, the qagan, converted to Judaism circa 800, and that
henceforth qagans could only be chosen—the office was not
hereditary—from among those notables who were Jews. But the sources do
not suggest that all the Khazars converted. As the geographer Ibn Rusta
wrote in 903, “their supreme chief professes the Jewish faith, as also
do the war lords and nobles who are with him, and the rest of the
Khazars profess a religion similar to that of the Turks.” Moreover, the
Khazars were a small minority ruling over a loose confederation, and the
  peoples under their dominion remained what they were: Muslim,
Christian, and pagan. In 912, according to Ibn Masudi, when the qagan
allowed a troop of northern Rus to pass through his realms on their way
to attack the Muslim ports on the Caspian, his Muslim subjects (which
included his bodyguard!) rebelled and wiped out the Rus. Clearly the
Khazar polity had not heard the early modern dictum of cuius regio,
eius religio. The religion of the qagan tells us very little about
the religions of the peoples he ruled. To make matters worse, some
documents describe the migration of “many Jews… from all the Muslim
cities and from Byzantium” into Khazaria. I suppose someone might try to
  argue, on the basis of such documents, that most Khazar Jews were
actually descended from Judeans.
Such an argument would be
disingenuous, but no more so than Sand’s preference for the claim that
the “bulk of the great Khazar tribe” converted to Judaism. In his zeal
to discover a non-Jewish genealogy for the Jews of Eastern Europe, he
imposes modern conceptions of state religion on the fragile evidence
left behind by an early medieval Turkic tribal confederation. A decade
ago, Tony Judt described a similar argument (Arthur Koestler’s) as “a
bizarre, misguided attempt to demonstrate that the Ashkenazi Jews of
Europe are descended from Khazar tribesmen of the Caucasus, and thus
need feel no special affinity for, nor obligation toward, Israel and the
  traditional Jewish heritage.” Judt’s endorsement on the front cover of
Sand’s book suggests he finds this version less misguided, but from a
historical point of view I can’t see why. I don’t object to
demystifications of the foundations of Israel or any other modern
nation. But if those demystifications are achieved by mystifying the
past, we should not call them “history.”
Perhaps this criticism
is beside the point, for what is original about this book is not the
history. As Sand puts it himself, “much of the information in this book
has always been known.” Even the book’s essential argument—that the
world’s Jews are a mixture of many peoples, not a “Chosen People”
descended from Abraham—has been made by countless authors, from the
ancient world to the modern. Medieval Christian polemicists—eager to
maintain the truth of Scripture while debunking the claims of the
rabbis—focused on the Diaspora, explaining that the Roman conquerors of
Jerusalem put no women aboard the ships that carried the survivors into
exile, so the males had taken Muslim or pagan women as wives. Their
living descendants were therefore not real Jews but bastards, without
any ongoing claim to the covenant. The Enlightenment was more thoroughly
  skeptical, and since Voltaire the number of reputable historians
willing to defend the historical existence of Abraham—let alone the
descent of the Jews from his lineage—has rightly dwindled to zero.
In
  short, Sand is tilting at a very tattered straw man. The endurance of
that straw man as a credible target for critiques of Jewish identity
raises troubling questions, but even more disturbing is the technique
Sand adopts to make his arguments seem bold and novel: his adoption of
conspiracy as narrative mode. Interviewed by Andrew Marr on the BBC,
Sand was quick to correct Marr’s use of the word conspiracy: Marr: “In
some sense would you say that
therefore there has been a conspiracy to hide what you have…”
Sand:
  “No, not a conspiracy, we have to be careful.”
Yet
  his book constantly invokes the vocabulary of conspiracy, if not the
word itself. On the one hand there are the “authorized” historians, the
hard core of the “corps of intellectuals who control the nation state,”
“high priests of memory,” clerics of the “chosen ‘history.’”
These
historians are the “agents of culture,” “Israeli memory-merchants,”
“memory agents”: undercover enforcers of the false memories that
underpin the racist Jewish State. A rogue historian is needed to unravel
  the unreality these agents create (think Neo in The Matrix, or Sarah
Palin). “Unfortunately, few of my colleagues—the teachers of history in
Israel—feel it their duty to undertake the dangerous pedagogical mission
  of exposing conventional lies about the past.” Shlomo Sand has accepted
  the mission.
Although Sand doesn’t justify (or apparently even
acknowledge) his choice of genre, I can think of good reasons to adopt
conspiracy as a mode of narrating the past. There is a deep structural
affinity between conspiratorial theories of knowledge, with their
dynamics of repression and revolutionary emancipation, and the
cannibalism so characteristic of the cult of Clio, in which each
generation of historians devours its parents. And for consumers,
conspiracy translates reading into revelation, an induction into
liberating knowledge in defiance of censoring power. These attributes
make conspiracy a powerful tool with which to destabilize our sense of
the past. The DaVinci Code provides a good example: its account of
Jesus’ canonical adult life as the product of two millennia of
ecclesiastical suppression did more to defamiliarize the history of
early Christianity than any number of scholarly studies on New Testament
  apocrypha and pseudepigrapha.
SAND OBVIOUSLY INTENDS his
deployment of conspiracy to achieve a similar defamiliarization of
Jewish history, but the effect is rather the opposite. The problem is
not that Sand’s conspiracy is so contrived (have Jews ever stopped
writing about the Khazars since Hasdai ibn Shaprut first discovered them
  in the tenth century?); nor that the conclusions Sand comes to in his
quest for “historical truth” are so suspect. Accuracy has never been a
prerequisite for shattering the illusions that the present holds about
the past. The problem is that instead of asking us to become reflective
about our myths of Jewish identity, Sand simply reinforces another myth
long on offer—that of Jewish obsession with genetic chosenness. Instead
of encouraging reflection, his method favors projection and fantasy, a
danger heightened by his efforts to align Jewish myths of identity with
the most discredited forms of nationalism available. He repeatedly uses
German vocabulary (völkish) to describe Zionist historiography
and compares the Jewish historians he criticizes to the academic
architects of National Socialism. He sees, for example, “ironically” no
difference between the “imaginary idea of nationhood” of Yitzhak Baer,
the first professor of history at the Hebrew University, and the racist
and nationalist assumptions that led Baer’s German professors to welcome
  Hitler.
Similarly in the life sciences, Sand implicitly aligns
the laboratories of the Jewish “race-nation” with those of Nazi racism.
Israel’s scientific establishment is, according to his last chapter, a
“puppet” manipulated from within by the “racist hunchback” of Jewish
theology. His arguments are gleaned from the silliness of the popular
press; about the science itself his claims are few and misleading. He
sees racism in Israeli biologists’ preference for comparing genetic
material from known population groups—for example, comparing haplotypes
of Ashkenazic Jews with those of Yemeni ones—rather than “random
sampling of genetic material whose ethnic origin is not known in
advance.” But geneticists everywhere, even in unimpeachably democratic
Scandinavia (a leader in behavioral genetics), look first for alleles
where they most expect to find them, searching, say, for genes
associated with breast cancer in women that suffer from it. This is not a
  racist plot, but the universal scientific practice. No matter, Sand
does not need to worry about the details of science, for what he really
argues is that Israeli research is racist simply because it takes place
in a Jewish state: “in a state which the law prevents marriage between a
  ‘Jew’ and a ‘non-Jew’… Jewish-Israeli research cannot be entirely
free
from crude and dangerous racism.”
And what about this law of
marriage? To a historian of race it looks rather peculiar, for it is not
  a law but an absence of law: there are no civil unions in Israel.
Jurisdiction over marriage and divorce is assigned to the clergy
(Jewish, Christian, and Muslim), who refuse to bless the union of
individuals from different faiths, thereby impeding intermarriage
between Jew and non-Jew—and Muslim and non-Muslim. The state does not
forbid such marriages, and registers them when they are contracted
elsewhere. (Cyprus is the routine choice for interfaith couples.) This
surrender of jurisdiction over marriage to the clergy constitutes, to my
  mind, a dangerous abridgment of marriage rights. But it does not look
much like the völkish racism of the Nüremberg laws, the
anti-miscegenation statutes of the U.S. South, or South Africa’s
apartheid laws, with which Sand’s rhetoric tries to associate it.
The
  other pillar of Sand’s “race-nation,” the Law of Return, certainly
lies
  at the heart of whatever it means for Israel to be a Jewish State. It
applies to (1) any Jew living in the Diaspora or (2) a child and a
grandchild of a Jew; the spouse of a Jew; the spouse of a child of a
Jew; and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a Jew by birth
who has voluntarily changed his religion. This second clause (as amended
  in 1970), suggests that it is susceptibility to persecution as a Jew in
  the Diaspora, rather than fantasies of racial identity, that motivate
the law. Sand does not pay much attention to this clause, because he
sees persecution as an artifact of the past. Anti-Semitism, he says, is
no longer a serious threat. He focuses his criticism on the right of
return of every Jew, and on the key question it raises: who is a Jew?
The simple answer, according to rabbinic law, is (1) anyone born of a
Jewish mother and (2) anyone who converts to Judaism in accordance with
rabbinic law. We might think of an analogy here with citizenship by
birth and by naturalization. Of course, the simple answer does not do
justice to a complex world, and a number of important cases touching on
these issues have come before Israel’s Supreme Court. But although Sand
would have us believe that, when faced with such complexities, Israelis
yearn for “some genetic marker to reveal a person’s Jewishness,”
neither
  rabbinic nor secular law allows any place to phenotype or genotype.
There is no genetic evidence to support the claim of some seven thousand
  members of the Kuki-Chin-Minzo peoples (from Northeastern India) that
they are descendants of the lost tribe of Manasseh, but the Sephardic
rabbinate recognized them as Jews, and many have since become citizens
of Israel.
MY CRITIQUE of Sand’s argument is not a defense of
  the Law of Return. The law certainly privileges one religious
classification over others in the multi-religious state, with an
explicitness that sharply distinguishes Israel from most Western liberal
  democracies. (An interesting exception: Spanish law grants citizenship
to anyone who can prove descent from Jews exiled in 1492, but not to
descendants of exiled Muslims and Moriscos.) There may be reasons for
such a law—such as the belief that Jews require a refuge from
persecution—and there may be dangers associated with it, including the
danger of resonances with racism. No matter where we live, we will be
called upon to think critically about questions involving citizenship,
religion, and race—as in the case currently before the British courts,
about whether the definition of Jewishness used by state-funded Jewish
schools in admissions violates the Race Relations Act of 1976. But Sand
is not trying to encourage critical thought. On the contrary, he wants
to short-circuit reflection by painting every aspect of the Jewish state
  in the same flesh-tones of racism.
Some readers will feel that
none of these quibbles matter. After all, Israel’s Law of Return does
privilege Judaism within the state. Its lack of civil unions does impede
  intermarriage between Jew and non-Jew. These and other laws deploy
religious classification to discriminate among Israel’s citizens. If
these discriminations produce sufficiently grave injustice, then doesn’t
  the fight against them legitimate itself, regardless of historical or
conceptual error? Why not adopt as our own some version of the words
with which a twelfth-century Christian biographer of the prophet
Muhammad (Gautier de Compiègne) dismissed the significance of any
mistakes he might have made: “One may safely speak ill of a man whose
malignity transcends and surpasses whatever evil can be said about him.”
I
  do not think this willingness to divorce moral certainty from a
commitment to knowledge can lead to either ethical or historical justice
  (I leave open the difficult question of what such justice might be). We
  seem caught in an epistemological Catch-22: everyone wants to speak in
the name of historical truth, but few believe in the tools by which that
  truth is claimed. History therefore proceeds as vilification, each side
  attempting to associate the other with unquestionable evil: the Zionist
  can only be a Nazi racist, the anti-Zionist a Nazi sympathizer,
Holocaust denier, and anti-Semite. This must be why The Invention of the
  Jewish People makes no attempt to think critically about the questions
it raises, preferring to offer readers familiar fantasies to facilitate
their projections. This is a shame, because the book’s subject—the
interplay between citizenship, biology, religion, and other forms of
imagined identity—is one of fundamental importance not only to Israelis
and Palestinians but also to the citizens of every modern state, for
these remain the tools by which all nations maintain their cohesion.
IT
  SHOULD SHOCK US that the most important variable determining the life
chances of all human beings in the world today remains the citizenship
into which they are born, a citizenship largely defined in terms of
biological descent. If this does not bother those of us in Western
democracies as much as it might, it is perhaps because we have learned
to turn a blind eye to the exclusions and discriminations that our own
polities systematically wreak in defense of sovereignty, prosperity, and
  common culture. But we live in an age when questions about the
inter-relationship of citizenship, religion, and bio-politics loom ever
larger, even in enlightened Europe (witness the passing of a Swiss
constitutional referendum to strip its Muslim citizens of religious
rights their co-religionists enjoy daily in Israel). The case of
Israel—an ostensibly liberal democracy founded as an explicitly Jewish
state and maintained with frequent violence—poses these questions with a
  sharpness that is easier to recognize. We are right to recognize those
questions, and to ask them of Israel, but we need to do so in ways that
make us more, rather than less, reflective. This then is the real
failure of The Invention of the Jewish People: it teaches us too
little about the “imagined identities,” biological and religious among
many others, that produced the state of Israel and even less about those
  that produced and reproduce the states we all live in. This book could
not be more timely nor its topic more important, but it is only a
symptom of the disease, not its cure.
David Nirenberg is the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor at the
University of Chicago, where he teaches in the Committee on Social
Thought and the History Department.
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=2454

 Anti-Zionist
e un bel biglietto di sola andata per il Chomskystan con tanto di
cittadinanza israeliana revocata? Sareste più coerenti con lo standard
"democratico" attuale in Israele.