Zionists rewrite history

This woman is from an ethnic group, the Chin Kuki Mizo peoples, from India’s northeast state of Manipur. According to historians, they emigrated from China about 6,000 years ago. In the 19th C., most were converted from animism to fundamentalist Christianity by missionaries who repressed all attempts at syncretism between the two traditions. In 1951, one of their religious leaders dreamt they were one of the ten lost tribes of Israel who, according to the Bible, were deported from the Kingdom of Israel in the 8th Century BCE. Although most of the Chin Kuki Mizo people rejected this claim, a small group of them who call themselves Bnei Menashe Jews appealed to the State of Israel (starting under Golda Meir) to convert to Judaism & be allowed to emigrate under Israel’s Law of Return, which admits Jews from anywhere in the world to citizenship. And the story only gets nuttier from here.

Enter Michael Freund, an independently wealthy New Yorker & graduate of Princeton with an MBA from Columbia. His grandmother was once president of Hadassah, the Zionist women’s organization. After moving to Israel as a Zionist settler, he became deputy director of communications & policy planning under Netanyahu; a columnist for the conservative Jerusalem Post; & founder of Shavei Israel, a rabidly Zionist group that scouts the world for “lost Jews,” i.e., lost tribe claimants, those exiled from Spain during the Inquisition beginning in 1492, & those dispersed by pogroms or WWII. Most who remained in Spain during the Inquisition converted or feigned conversion to Catholicism. The exiled dispersed throughout Europe & North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, New Spain, North America (southwestern), Central & South America. Because the Inquisition was active in many of these places, they became what is called, “crypto-Jews,” hiding the practices & insignia of Judaism & pretending to adopt Catholicism. Like with every diaspora of such duration (now over 500 years), most eventually lost their connection to Judaism (through intermarriage & assimilation) but some retained a syncretic form of it in family rituals. The history of this diaspora is extremely interesting & not unlike the cultural mélange created by mass migrations of peoples all over the world.

Freund as a rabid ideologue of Zionism, promotes a religious & mystical link of Jews to Israel. Jewish ethnicity is fetishized & mystified as if there is a memory of such ancestry in our genes. So Freund began combing the planet for “lost Jews,” from the diaspora 2,700 years ago, to that of the Inquisition, to the one from WWII. In his work, he was aided by generations of fundamentalist missionaries who have claimed to find remnants of the ten lost tribes--from India to China to Central & Latin America. Freund attempts to evade the actual history of people & centuries of cultural assimilation by running DNA tests on people to see if they have Jewish genes--when some of them have been outside the Middle East for 2,700 years or more! This is where you see just how nuts & grotesque Zionist ideology really is.

Freund & his group have lobbied for several years to get Bnei Menashe recognized as a lost tribe & admitted to Israel. In 2005, an Israeli rabbi authorized that & about 1,700 (who are required to become Orthodox) relocated to Israel, taking up residence as settlers in Gaza & the West Bank. That decision was reversed at one point & Israel denied them visas but they are again being allowed admittance. Fifty are now heading for Israel, including the woman here who is saying goodbye. They are of course the victims of cynical manipulation. Only a halfwit or a crazed Zionist like Freund could think they have ancestral roots in the Middle East; they are pawns in Israel’s accelerated process of settlement in the West Bank. And they will likely pay a price in human suffering.

Not only does this episode show that modern Zionism is borrowing pages from the book of fundamentalism; its apartheid policies against Palestinians expose its affinity with the Spanish Inquisition. The great philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, whose ancestors were Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain & Portugal (beginning in 1492), once said, “We study the past neither to laugh nor cry, but to understand.” Whereas Zionism rewrites the past to camouflage its crimes & turn fable into history.
(Photo by Anupam Nath/AP)