The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

11 min readMar 25, 2024

The Accusation Jewish People Are Not A People

Anti-Zionist activists will often dismiss the idea of Israel as a Jewish homeland by saying there was no necessity for it to be where Palestine was, that Jews could have gone to some unpopulated area somewhere else, in some unspecified area of the globe. In 1968, the Palestine Liberation Organization declared Jewish people were not a people at all, just the adherents to a religion. They may cite Herzl, an early founder of the Zionist movement, briefly considering South America or Uganda as a destination for Jewish people. I cannot see how anything can be inferred from Herzl at some point considering alternatives to the Middle East as a homeland for the Jewish people.

The Hebrews are the indigenous people of the Israeli land, along with the Palestinians ( indigeneity can be complicated ). The religion of Judaism grew out of the ancient political challenges of the Hebrew people, who have been native to that land going into pre-history. Genetic surveys have demonstrated both Palestinians and Jews, regardless of where the Jews migrated to, are equal parts Canaanite, which was the historic people of that land.

Go deeper: The genetic relatedness of Israelis and Palestinians: 2009 study by Kopelman, et al

Go deeper: Follow-up genomic study focused deeply on European Jews

I am going to assume for the sake of discussion the Exodus story in the bible is mythic history and did not literally happen and stick to what we know from secular archaeology and history. The Hebrew presence in that land dates continuously far back into pre-history, apparently without interruption based on the archeology.

Israel does not equal Judaism. It equals being Hebrew. Judaism grew out of the political project of merging the desert raiding people in south Canaan who worshiped the sky/thunder God Yahweh with the agricultural/river people of the north, who worshiped El, the father of a pantheon of Gods and sometimes called The Bull. Yahweh was a war god, very similar to Thor actually, as the raiders were similar to the Vikings. The Yahweh worshippers were basically desert Vikings and were probably the ones who had the run-in with Pharoah at some point, as there is archeological evidence of ancient Egyptians mentioning Hebrews ( Hubaru, to the Egyptians ) causing trouble on the outskirts of the kingdom, which would be consistent with the Yahweh raiders harassing Egyptian settlements.

The Exodus story, with its mandated monotheism, was basically a political tool to get the various Hebrew tribes to put aside their two gods so they could come together as one Hebrew people, with one tribal god.

The reason there is a Golden Calf as the idol in the Exodus story ( didn’t it ever seem like a weird choice to you? ) is because “graven images” of the two gods, such as El depicted as The Bull, were interfering with the political unity project, which required the desirable myth that the two people’s were one and worshiped the same tribal god; the Sinai story in its ancient context was a warning to the El people to stop it with all that making of images and idols of their bull god.

The image of Moses descending from Mt. Sinai with clouds and thunder around it is a call out to Yahweh the thunder god, as the traditions of El were being assimilated into the worship of Yahweh, and the people below with the golden calf have sinned because their idol made it too obvious El was not Yahweh. The reason the first two commandments are about having no other god and having no graven images, is making images made it obvious the people had different gods, and it was interfering in the political unity project.

Similarly, the reason the God of the Jewish religion has no name ( “I am that I am” ) is to eliminate two names for two Gods, which was causing political issues for the unity project.

Hence, from the Hebrew people Judaism was born, in the land of Canaan, a myth created because the warlike desert raiding people of Yahweh wanted to settle down and have peace with the river farming cattle people of El, and they invented one national god who could not be pictured or named to help them overcome differences. They called this unified nation Israel, after the mythical common patriarch they decided to believe in. A bit later, perhaps after the northern kingdom had suffered setbacks at the hands of the Assyrians, the southern kingdom seems to have elevated this national god to the universal God we associate with monotheism today, laying the groundwork for the birth of Christianity and then of Islam.

It’s a love story. It is not a national identity which is intrinsically against anybody else.

For over 1,500 years, Jewish people have built our synagogues with the front doors facing Jerusalem, and we have said our daily prayers facing Jerusalem. For that same period, we have ended our prayers on Passover, our most holy holiday, by saying, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Our entire religious annual round consists of dividing the mythic story of our arrival into the promised land of Israel into equal parts, and reading it to each other from New Year to New Year, over and over again, for more than 2,000 years. Even Jesus did this.

To say that the idea of forming a Jewish homeland in the … Jewish homeland … is “random” stretches the term “random” beyond recognition. It was anything but random. It was the most natural thing in the world. We are not so much Jews as we are the Hebrew people, who have had a continuous presence in that land for probably 5,000 years.

Sometimes Palestinian advocates like to point out that many Jews at the time opposed the Zionist project and use those people’s words against Zionism. Some still oppose it. What’s missing from this polemic is that this opposition wasn’t to the idea of Israel being a Jewish homeland, but was instead religiously based and predicated on a strain of religious Jewish thought holding that Jews should only re-establish sovereignty in that land after the messiah comes. In some cases, it was a matter of pragmatics from some secular Jewish people who thought having a homeland could create problems for Jewish people in Europe ( who they worried might get kicked out ).

The idea being, all Jews agree that Israel is our ancestral homeland but some meshuga religious nuts think we should wait for the messiah before going there and a few secular Jews around 1900 were vastly overoptimistic about the safety of Jewish people in Europe. There’s nothing “random” about choosing Israel as the Jewish homeland. Zionism is a mostly secular project about the return of the indigenous Hebrew people of that area to their homeland. I would argue to this day it is the religious nuts who have mostly messed it up ( they constitute many of the West Bank settlers ).

The Palestinians are ALSO indigenous to that area. We should have lived together as brothers but that has gone askew.

The darkness in the hearts of the anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian crowd is a blindness about pogroms and other injustices and oppressions in Europe and the Muslim world, which were predicated on the idea that Jewish people did not belong there and should go back to where they came from. With Zionism, we decided we had had enough and would go back to where we came from, and needed to for our own safety, and now are being told: i) we didn’t really come from there, or ii) it’s been too long therefore we don’t belong, and iii) we deserve all the violence Palestinians can deliver; and iv) so just get out of Israel and go back to where you came from.

Read that last paragraph again. Slowly. It’s important. The people whom everyone told to go back to where they came from went back to where they came from and are now being told to leave and go back where they came from.

So, you know, the attitude among Zionists ( myself included ) is, “F* you.” Christian and Muslims long ago lost the right to tell us where we can and cannot live.

Go deeper: The ancient Hebrews and their two gods, El the Bull and Yahweh the War God

The 1948 UN partition represented an Israel which was thrice diminished from the Jewish people’s historical nation. The first diminishment was in the mandate itself, as the original Hebrew lands also included parts of what is now Syria and Lebanon and these were left out of the mandate due to competition between the British and the French. The second diminishment was Winston Churchill’s passage of Article 25 of the Mandate of Palestine, to amend the original mandate, setting aside 70% of the land to be an Arab state. The third diminishment was the 1948 UN resolution, which took land west of the river and further set aside territory for yet another Arab state on a mandate territory which already included an Arab state.

Israel is really just a small reservation for the Jews inside a much larger territory which used to belong to the Hebrew people. The Jews in Israel are like other indigenous people who were conquered and diminished.

The framing of the whole conflict being about “Palestinians” who have no state is false from the outset. Palestinian identity as we know it today artificially splits off the Arabs east and west of the Jordan, and emerged as a national identity movement for the Arabs west of the Jordan only in the 1960’s, and that identity distinguishes itself from the Arabs east of the river mainly by its historically hostile relationship to Jewish self-determination in the western lands. There is no traditional distinction of language, religion, culture, literature, education, or tribal affiliation which make the Arabs west of the river meaningfully different from those east, which would be the usual demarcations of a distinct people and national identity.

Instead of these usual markers, “Palestinians” as a people are distinguished mostly by their hostilities with Israel and their historic clash and the narrative of the “Nakba” with its war of return. It’s a problem. Without the Palestinian’s narrative of the Nakba and everything they have built around it, which intrinsically implies Israel must be extinguished from the map, there’s not much which makes them, them. Their identity is so wrapped up in the relationship to Israel rather than anything intrinsic which distinguishes them, they must hold onto it, almost metaphysically.

Again and again in their history, having this antagonism at the core of their national identity has created pain for both Palestinians and other people. For example, a lot of people are confused why Arab countries don’t do more to help the Palestinians or take them in. There’s this sense that Palestinians are poor, desperate, good people who have been given a raw deal.

In reality, the Palestinians have a checkered history with other countries as well as with Israel, and this history is responsible for their predicament. For example, the Palestinians were thrown out of Kuwait in 1991 for collaborating with Saddam Hussein, and celebrating his invasion and overthrow of the Kuwaiti government. You can read about it here,

Go deeper: Kuwaitis angered by Palestinian cooperation with Iraqis
Go deeper: Palestinian’s expulsion from Kuwait after Gulf War I

Driving this point home, it was not just Kuwait. The Iraqis themselves kicked the Palestinians out of Iraq after the fall of Saddam because the Palestinians were closely aligned with him and his Baath party, accepting exorbitant privileges from his government in exchange for doing some of its dirty work. You can read some of it by clicking on the links below.

Go deeper: Iraqis turn on Palestinians after Saddam’s fall
Go deeper: Palestinians in Gaza mourn the death of Saddam

But what about Jordan, the Kingdom next door to the West Bank? The Palestinians were once citizens there, between 1950–1967. Israel had no control over them or the West Bank. They were a majority and had significant representation in its legislature. In substance if not in name, Jordan was a Palestinian state. But, in 1951, they assassinated Jordan’s king because of rumors he would accept the partition, effectively making peace with Israel. Here, you can read about it,

Go deeper: Palestinian gunman assassinates Jordan’s King Hussein

Then in 1970, the Palestinians started a civil war in Jordan called Black September, and tried to assassinate his son too. Here, you can read about it,

Go deeper: PLO expelled from Jordan, after Palestinians try to overthrow Jordanian government

Then, in 1975, Palestinians started a civil war in Lebanon to overthrow its government. Here, you can read about it,

Go deeper: The Palestine Liberation Organization starts war in Lebanon

Then, Hamas alienated the Egyptian government by supporting and carrying out terrorism in Egypt, leading Egypt to withdraw all support from Gaza. You can read about it here,

Go deeper: Egypt brands Hamas a terror organization

This last one is the actual reason Gaza was such a closed territory, supposedly like a prison camp ( although in reality there were at least twenty roadlike smuggling tunnels into Egypt through which Gazans could travel and conduct commerce ). In the world’s media, you will read Israel was responsible for “controlling Gaza” and making it an “open air prison”, but Israel could only close its own borders with Gaza. If the Gazans had a good relationship with Egypt, Israel’s closures would not have mattered so much, as the Palestinians could have come and gone as they pleased at the Egyptian border to Gaza. Unfortunately, the Egyptians were almost as scared of the Gazans as Israelis were.

Why are Palestinians and Israelis stuck in a caged death match? The proof is above. Everyone who has ever touched the Palestinians has been bitten so hard they want nothing to do with them. They are happy to leave them on Israel’s doorstep as a destabilizing force for the Jews to deal with. Israel will not allow a Palestinian state because they also do not want to be bitten, because Israelis have a mortal fear Palestinians will use their state as a base to launch further attacks to destroy Israel, just as they have similarly used every other territory on which they have been allowed freedom.

The core problem is the Palestinian national identity is constitutively built on the idea of destroying Israel and retaking the land. Without that idea, they are the same nation of people as the Arabs east of the Jordan river and could have just lived as citizens of Jordan, peacefully. As a result of this almost definitional commitment to hostility, they treat every host they ever have had as another vehicle for their war rather than an opportunity to build good lives for themselves or for others. It is a problem.

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

All Chapters:

0. Foreword to Zionism and Anti-Zionism

1. The Gish Gallop of Anti-Zionism

2. Genocide or Just War?

3. For Hamas, The Suffering Is The Point

4. What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

5. The Hebrew People, Not the Jewish Religion

6. Chosen For Their Insignificance, Not Their Superiority

7. The Incoherence of, “I am not anti-Semitic. I am just against Zionism.”

8. Refugee Immigration, Not Settler Colonialism

9. How the Zionists Saved ( Not Conquered ) Palestine

10. The 1920’s And The Spread of Hate