Sand, himself a European Jew born in 1946 to Holocaust survivors in Austria, argues that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews because they shared a common religion, not because they possessed a direct lineage to the ancient tribes of Israel.
However, at the turn of the 20th Century, Sand asserts, Zionist Jews began assembling a narrative to justify creation of a Jewish state by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion and that they had primogeniture over the territory that had become known as Palestine.
The Zionists also invented the idea that Jews living in exile were obligated to return to the Promised Land, a concept that had been foreign to Judaism, Sand states.
If Sand's thesis is correct, it would suggest that many of the Palestinian Arabs have a far more substantial claim to the lands of Israel than do many European Jews who arrived there asserting a God-given claim.
Sand theorizes that many Jews, who remained in Judea after Roman legions crushed the last uprising in 136 A.D., eventually converted to Christianity or Islam, meaning that the Palestinians who have been crowded into Gaza or concentrated in the West Bank might be direct descendants of Jews from the Roman era.
Disputing Sand's Thesis
Contrary to what might be expected, leading Israeli academics don't dispute the core point of Sand's argument, that the Diaspora was a myth. Rather, they have focused on disparaging Sand as a scholar whose expertise is primarily in European history.
Israel Bartal, dean of humanities at the Hebrew University, agreed that the Diaspora was a myth, but lashed out at Sand's claim that Zionists intentionally created it.
"Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions," Bartal wrote in the newspaper Haaretz. "Important groups in the Jewish national movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely."
"The kind of political intervention Sand is talking about, namely, a deliberate program designed to make Israelis forget the true biological origins of the Jews of Poland and Russia or a directive for the promotion of the story of the Jews' exile from their homeland is pure fantasy."
In other words, Bartal, like some other critics of Sand's book, is not so much disputing Sand's historical claims about the Diaspora or the origins of Eastern European Jews, as he is contesting Sand's notion that Zionists concocted a false history for a cynical political purpose.
Still, there can be little doubt that hard-line Zionists like Netanyahu and Danon exploit the Diaspora myth when addressing American audiences, including the U.S. Congress. In his speech on Tuesday, Netanyahu declared that no one could deny the "4,000-year-old bond between the Jewish people and the Jewish land."
This emotional appeal brought further applause from both Republicans and Democrats. However, Sand's research suggests that the Palestinians, as descendants of the ancient Israelites, have their own historic bond to the land, arguably greater than that of Netanyahu, whose father was born in Poland and settled in Palestine in 1920.
However, on Tuesday, members of Congress were not interested in weighing complex legal and moral questions about who has the stronger territorial claim to the Holy Land. Nor were they thinking about what might be in Israel's -- or America's -- long-term interests from finally making the compromises needed for peace.
They were simply eager to demonstrate their unwavering support for Israel, for personal or political reasons. On the political side, the Republicans want to drive a wedge between influential Jewish-Americans and the Democrats, while the Democrats want to prevent that from happening.
So, the two sides bounced up and down cheering a foreign leader, even as he continued down a course that could lead to disaster for Israel and the Palestinians -- and as he challenged the policies and prestige of the President of the United States.
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