Lately I have been wondering how Israelis created such a strong sense of nationality for such a recently invented place. It strikes me as a brilliant tactic on Zionists’ part, that Jews with ancestry from all over the world have been able to unite under the idea of Israel. From what I observe, the success of creating a strong national identity occurred due to three main factors: development of a common language, a shift of Jewishness from primarily a religion to an ethnicity, and twisting the parts of the Old Testament in order to legitimize a new nation-state.
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1. Language
The Hebrew language, as spoken now, was created to further the Zionist cause. For over two thousand years, Hebrew ceased to exist as a spoken language as Jewish communities moved around the world and adopted the languages of their new homes. Hebrew existed only in ancient religious texts and had vocabulary limited to archaic and religious concepts of the Hebrew Bible. Only educated religious Jews could converse with other upper-class Jews, as similarly only educated Christians could converse across regions with other Christians in Latin.
Until 150 years ago it was nobody’s mother tongue. It was only in the late 1800s that Jewish activist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda began reviving Hebrew as a modern spoken language in an attempt to further Zionist ideology. He understood that Jews would need a common language to legitimize a future Jewish-only country. He immigrated to Jerusalem from the Russian Empire in 1881, where he and his wife raised their son Itamar Ben-Avi as the first native Hebrew speaker in almost two centuries.
In the 19th Century, Jewish intellectuals were tasked with inventing a new Hebrew lexicon with words that encompassed modern life. They borrowed grammar and syntax from Arabic, Aramaic, and Latin. Words were directly borrowed from or modeled after European languages, especially English, Russian, German, and French. It was constructed deliberately to be Semitic in appearance even though it was heavily European in phonology. The earliest speakers of Modern Hebrew were from Germany and Poland, so calques from Yiddish, their native language, were also integrated.
At the time, many saw his work as blasphemous because Hebrew was the language of the Torah and therefore thought of as too holy for everyday use. However, after the British Mandate carved Palestine into partly an ethno-state, and Jews began immigrating from all over the world, the practicality of having a common language became clear.
The Academy of the Hebrew Language still has to invent about 2,000 new Hebrew words each year to encompass modern life. They actively resist incorporating English words into Hebrew vocabulary in order to preserve a sense of nationality, which is difficult when half of Israelis come from a place where English is their first language. This is inline with the first Zionist colonizers in Palestine, who would attack and destroy the property of any Jew who spoke a language other than Hebrew.
2. Religion to ethnicity
To create a cohesive ethno-state, it is imperative to mesh commonly shared religion with ethnicity. This is especially essential since Israelis claim indigeneity to a land their ancestors haven’t been in for thousands of years, if ever. My family has been in the United States much longer than Israel has been around, but I certainly don’t claim to be native. Yet this is exactly the logic that colonizers of Israel use to justify their occupation of Palestine.
There is no evidence of a single Jewish prototype, and scientists have not found blood group frequencies that indicate common ancestry amongst all Jews. A biological definition of Jewishness is meaningless, especially considering that many people’s Jewish ancestors who lived in ancient Palestine converted to Christianity or Islam, and other ethnic groups converted to Judaism. Jewishness is rather socially determined — a socionome — whose boundaries shift depending on the politics of whoever is asked to define it.
Chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA studies indicate Middle Eastern origin with some Jewish populations, but shared genetic ancestry among the entire diaspora has not been found. For example, Ashkenazi Jews are more similar to each other than with non-Jews, but also have no similarities with Ethiopian Jews or even many current Israeli Jews. In this case, 80 percent of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry comes from women indigenous to Europe, while only eight percent comes from the Middle East. The rest is uncertain. Almost none of the Jews in modern Israel are descendants of the original Jews of Palestine from biblical times, but rather the descendants of Europeans who had converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages.
While there is no genomic hallmark for Jewishness, they clearly have been persecuted on a racial basis. The fact that Jews have been oppressed as if they were a cohesive race has had deadly consequences despite the science that suggests they have no unifying genes. This is the core of antisemitic thought, though — that European Jews are fundamentally different than other Europeans, that all Jews are racially separate from others in their home countries. This was the foundational idea behind so-called scientific antisemitism, which insisted that Jews were different from Christians and that they were not actually European at all. The Zionist project has the same goals as antisemites: to remove Jews from Europe and to remove them from other countries around the world. This is why until the mid 1900s the majority of Jews were anti-Zionist and saw Zionism as an anti-Jewish movement.
3. Biblical interpretation
Most religious texts have been twisted at some point to justify war, and it should go without saying that no book should be used to justify genocide. I do not personally follow any religion and view the Bible more as story than a historically accurate document, but the impact of religion on how people view what is happening in the world cannot be understated. Recently people have used the Bible to legitimize the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and Israel’s occupation.
However, the modern ethno-state conveniently named “Israel” is not the heir of God’s promises to ancient Israel. One cannot equate ancient Israel, which was a theocratic society made up of 12 tribes (which later were ruled under a monarchy) with modern Israel, which is an evil secular settler-colonial state. Even if it were somehow the same continuous nation, it still would not be the heir to the land that was conditionally promised to Moses then Abraham in the Old Testament.
God told Abraham that he will bless Israel with people, protection, provision, and land, with one caveat: only if Israel obeys God’s law. Yet Israel committed sin and broke the covenant, so were cast into exile. The Lord “rejected all the seed of Israel, and afflicted them, and delivered them into the hand of spoilers, until he had cast them out of his sight,” it’s written. Later in the Bible, God did promise a new covenant that was not conditional like the prior one. However, it is Jesus who brings this new covenant, which includes all people, who are given the entire earth (see Romans 9:6-8, Galatians 3:28-29, Ephesians 2:11-15). Everyone would therefore be blessed because, Christians believe, through Jesus we all became equal.
By framing the displacement and genocide of Palestinians as a biblical battle, Israelis and Christians alike can explain their actions as ethical. But the modern state of Israel was not and could not have been imagined in biblical times. It is grossly immoral to reference the ancient texts to show how what is happening now is God’s will. It is a smart maneuver on the part of Zionists, though, as people tend to blindly believe those who can twist holy texts for political gain. And unfortunately, when a person believes that they are killing in the name of God, it it very difficult to persuade them to stop by words and legal rulings alone.