The modern State of Israel often justifies its existence with the myth that today’s Israelis are the direct descendants of the ancient Israelites — “God’s chosen people” — and thus entitled to the “Promised Land” biblically given to the Israelites 3,000 years ago.
The ideological cocktail of the largely secular colonial project wrapped in religious rhetoric, is cheered on by some Western evangelical fundamentalists to hasten their End Times fantasies, even if it means dropping 5,000-pound bombs on Palestinian children.
In reality, the historical and genetic evidence paints a very different picture. The indigenous Palestinian people have far more claim to being the offspring of the ancient peoples of Palestine — including the Israelites, who constitute a small slice of the land’s history — whether ethnically or spiritually. Instead, modern “Israelis” are immigrants with no ancestral ties to the land.
Below, we dismantle Zionist mythology with history, science, and a healthy dose of common sense.
Ancient Israelites ≠ modern “Israelis”
The ancient Israelites were an Iron Age Hebrew-speaking tribal people living in parts of Canaan (roughly today’s historic Palestine). They emerged around 1200–1000 BCE and eventually formed the biblical Kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
However, there is no unbroken Israelite lineage that leads to the modern State of Israel. On the contrary, history records that the Israelites as a distinct people disappeared long ago.
Assyrian and Babylonian exiles
The northern Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) fell to Assyria in 721 BCE, and ten of the 12 Israelite tribes were deported and gradually assimilated by other peoples, effectively vanishing from history. [1]
The southern Kingdom of Judah fell to Babylon in 586 BCE; much of its population (the Judeans) was exiled to Mesopotamia. During this exile, the Israelites lost their distinct identity and even their ancient language. It was in this period that the term “Jew” (from Judean) arose, referring to the religious community of people from various ethnic backgrounds who embraced the faith of the Israelites.
In other words, after the 6th century BCE, “Israelite” ceased to be an ethnic label in any meaningful sense — it became a religious identity open to others by conversion. Jewish scholars note that post-exilic (i.e. “after the exile”) Jews included many people of diverse origins united by the Torah, not one “pure” bloodline.
Hellenistic and Roman Era
Some Jews (followers of the Torah) returned to Judea and rebuilt a Temple (516 BCE), but over the following centuries, Palestine was conquered by various empires (Greek, Roman, etc.). After a failed revolt against Rome, the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, and Jews were again dispersed. [2]
Crucially, many inhabitants of the land — likely including some descendants of the Israelites — stayed put through these upheavals. They gradually adopted new identities and religions (Christianity in the Byzantine era, and later Islam after the 7th-century Arab-Muslim conquest).
By the time Islam entered these regions, there was no ethnically distinct “Bani Isrā’īl” nation left — only communities of Jews, Christians, and others.
Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, an Emeritus Professor at Tel Aviv University and former Zionist, argues that modern Jews are not a direct ethnic continuation of the ancient Israelites. He describes Zionist claims of racial continuity as a modern nationalist invention. [3]
Scholar Joseph Massad bluntly calls the assertion that White European Jews descend directly from ancient Hebrews “preposterous” and “absurd”, noting that Palestinians are far more likely to carry true Israelite lineage. [4]
In fact, the consensus of modern archaeologists suggests that the Israelites (as a large group) emerged from the native Canaanites, native to Palestine for some 4,000 years. [5]
This suggests thorough intermarriage and a subsuming of the Israelites with local Palestinian communities. The archaeological and genetic continuity is so evident that modern historians doubt an Israelite invasion altogether.
According to biblical scholar Mark Smith,
The record would suggest that the Israelite culture largely overlapped with and derived from Canaanite culture…
In short, Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature. Given the information available, one cannot maintain a radical cultural separation between Canaanites and Israelites for the Iron I period.“ [6]
To accommodate the scriptural narratives of their coming from Egypt, one can also reason, from the archaeological evidence, that the subsumption of the Israelites into local communities occurred almost at the instance of their arrival.
Recycling of the name “Israel”
Modern “Israel” (established in 1948) relates to ancient Israel in nothing but name, which it hijacks from a significant historical tradition, grafting an ancient spiritual history onto a contemporary political project that is intensely secular at heart. [2]
In short, calling today’s European immigrant population in Palestine “Israelites” because they named their state “Israel” makes as much sense as calling White colonists in South Africa “Zulus” because they happen to live in Zululand. It’s a blatant propaganda trick.
The myth of a “chosen people”
Zionists and their supporters often invoke the Bible, claiming,
God gave this land to His chosen people, the Israelites.”
This argument not only blurs the obvious distinction between ancient Israelites and modern Israelis, but also conveniently ignores the fine print in scripture altogether.
In the Bible, God’s promise of the land to Abraham’s descendants was repeatedly made conditional on faithfulness and justice. See, for example, Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, which list blessings and curses.
The Israelites, according to the Bible and Qur’ān, broke their covenant multiple times, falling into idol worship, injustice, and disobedience to God’s commands. As a result, they were invaded and exiled.
Simply put, the biblical “Promised Land” was never an unrestricted, eternal voucher, but was contingent on moral and spiritual duties. The Israelite mission was to uphold monotheism and justice, not to create a master race.
As such, when today’s Zionists — carrying out genocide and flunking their own theology — claim “we are God’s chosen people”, one must respond with two questions:
- Who are you, if clearly not of the Israelites?
- You’re “chosen” for what exactly, if clearly not for justice?
Palestinians are the indigenous heirs
Who, then, are the Palestinians? Far from being recent interlopers, the Palestinian Arabs (Muslims and Christians) are the native, indigenous people of the land. They are a mixture of all the peoples who have lived in Palestine since ancient times.
This includes Canaanites, ancient Israelites, Judeans, Greeks, Romans, Arameans, Arabs, and others who, over millennia, made this land their home.
When Zionist forces expelled some 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 (the Nakba), they were uprooting families that had been firmly settled in Palestine for hundreds or thousands of years.
Genetic and historical evidence
Modern genetic studies reinforce this historical narrative. DNA analyses show that Palestinian Arabs share a significant portion of their ancestry with the ancient Canaanites and Israelites of the Bronze and Iron Age Levant.
A 2020 study published in Cell found that both Palestinians and certain Middle-Eastern Jewish groups have at least half of their genetic ancestry from local ancient peoples of Canaan and the Levant. [7]
The same studies show that the average Palestinian Arab and the average Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jew are often closer genetically than, say, a Polish-descended Ashkenazi Jew is to a Yemeni Jew.
By studying Middle-Eastern Jews and peoples, one genetic study found that:
Archaeological and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites.” [8]
It concluded that the rivalry between them today is cultural and political, not racial or genetic. [8]
In an almost poetic irony, this means that Zionist racial slurs directed at “Arabs”, such as “sons of…” this or that, are in fact slurs against their own proclaimed ancestral mothers.
After all, if anyone’s carrying the blood of ancient Israelites, it’s the people they’re mocking. Nothing says “chosen” like resurrecting a dead language, before using it to curse at the people who spoke it!
Also, this means that when Israeli soldiers shoot a Palestinian teenager in Hebron, they are, more often than not, killing someone who carries far more of ancient Israel’s DNA than the soldier himself.
Admissions by Zionist founders
It might surprise those who swallow the “Palestinians are foreigners” propaganda to learn that early Zionist leaders themselves knew that the Palestinians were native and of Israelite stock.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (another founding father) wrote a book in 1918 arguing that:
Arab peasants of Palestine are the descendants of the ancient Hebrew farmers.”
They noted that the fellahin (peasant farmers) in many cases had Jewish ancestors who adopted the Arabic language and converted to Islam or Christianity but “held on to their soil” through the ages and in the face of persecution. [9]
Ben-Gurion wrote that the rural Palestinian population:
…present to us one racial strand and a whole ethnic unit, and there is no doubt that much Jewish blood flows in their veins — the blood of those Jewish farmers who converted but remained on their land.” [9]
Similarly, Zionist Labor leader Berl Katznelson and others observed that many Palestinian family names, traditions, and features suggested Jewish forebears.
Zionist thinker Ber Borochov even stated,
The local population in Palestine is racially more closely related to the Jews than to any other people, even among the Semitic ones.
It is quite probable that the fellahin in Palestine are direct descendants of the Jewish and Canaanite rural population, with a slight admixture of Arab blood…” [10]
These admissions were later hushed up because they inconveniently imply Palestinians have the primary claim to indigeneity. Zionism found it hard to justify a new colony by European Jews if the actual natives were in fact long-lost members of the Hebrew nation!
Meanwhile, the bulk of Zionist immigrants in the 20th century were Europeans (Ashkenazi Jews) with ancestral roots in places like Poland, Russia, and Lithuania, or other non-Middle Eastern regions (e.g. Ethiopian, North African, and American Jews).
To be clear, pointing this out isn’t about winning the racial game over Palestine, which is only really employed by Zionism as a racist venture. Instead, it is to debunk the claim that Zionist Israelis somehow are the ancient Israelites in a way Palestinian Arabs are not. That claim is ridiculous on every level — historically, genetically, and religiously.
Secular colonial enterprise draped in holy garb
One of the great ironies of the whole situation is that Zionism itself began as an avowedly secular, even atheistic movement. The early Zionist leaders were mostly not religious; they were political nationalists influenced by European colonial and nationalist ideas in the late 19th century.
Theodor Herzl, the so-called father of political Zionism, was a thoroughly secular Austro-Hungarian journalist who envisioned a European-style nation-state for Jews, not a theocratic kingdom of David. Herzl was so irreligious that he didn’t even circumcise his son and at one point considered Uganda as a site for a Jewish homeland. [11]
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s primary founder, explicitly described himself as an atheist from a young age and had “no great sympathy for the elements of traditional Judaism” — yet he loved to quote the Bible in speeches to give his political aims a veneer of ancient legitimacy. [12]
In fact, many Orthodox Jews in the early 20th century opposed Zionism as a heretical idea, arguing that Jews were not to retake Jerusalem by force before the Messiah.
Even today, Israeli society is largely secular. According to a 2016 Pew Research Center study, about half of Jewish Israelis identify as hiloni (secular) — essentially non-religious. And yet, a majority of Israeli Jews — 61 per cent according to one survey — say they believe “God gave Israel to the Jews”. [13]
In daily life, Israel is not some pious city on a hill but a high-tech consumerist society which boasts beaches, nightclubs, and gay bars. The Zionist project is, at its core, a colonial settler enterprise, mirroring other settler-colonial ventures (like the Americas, South Africa, etc.) — except it has had the added twist of using ancient religious lore to market itself.
Nothing to do with the Torah
Israel’s laws and policies today are not based on the Torah; they are based on ethnonationalism and security paranoia.
Notably, some of the most vocal supporters of the “Israelis are God’s chosen Israelite descendants” trope are actually American evangelical Christians who often outdo Israelis in zeal. These zealots support Israel’s crimes not out of love for Jews but because they think it’s a prelude to the Second Coming.
In this perverse alliance of convenience, secular Zionists get political backing and Christian extremists get to indulge in their end-of-days role-play while actual Palestinians are sacrificed on the altar of this myth.
Inventing a “nation”
Creating a new nation-state required creating a national identity, and Zionists went to great lengths to forge a connection between their modern newcomers and the ancient past.
Historian Nur Masalha, in Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, documents how Zionist settler-colonialism tried to fabricate a historical narrative. By appropriating everything from ancient history to falafel, the Zionist movement constructed a pseudo-indigenous identity for their state.
Theft of Palestinian language
Part of this cultural appropriation included reviving the Hebrew language after it had been largely dormant as a spoken tongue for centuries.
But the “Hebrew” spoken in Israel today (Ivrit) is not even close to what Moses or David spoke; it’s essentially a constructed, modernised language. The revival led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the late 19th to early 20th century had to invent or borrow thousands of words to handle modern life. Thus, modern Hebrew borrowed plenty of vocabulary from European languages and Arabic.
Early Hebrew speakers were Yiddish-native Jews who literally translated Yiddish phrases into Hebrew calques or word for word translations. [14]
Modern Hebrew has even adopted Arabic slang for local flavour, the language of those very people they displaced.
Theft of Palestinian cuisine
Beyond language, Zionist nation-building involved heavy appropriation of Palestinian and broader Middle Eastern culture — often without credit or with deliberate erasure of the Arab origins.
Israeli tourism brochures and restaurants worldwide proudly advertise “Israeli hummus”, “Israeli falafel”, and so on, even though hummus, falafel, za’atar, knafeh, etc. are all dishes of longstanding Palestinian and Levantine Arab heritage, “learned from the Palestinian population”. [15]
Theft of Palestinian names and places
Even more literally, Zionists appropriated place names and geography.
After 1948, a concerted campaign of Hebraising place names took place. The new authorities renamed some 2,800 natural features and localities with Hebrew names, replacing the Arabic (and often millennia-old) names. [16]
For instance, Bayt Jibrin (an old Arab village name) became “Beit Guvrin” and Salama was renamed “Kfar Shalem”. Hundreds of villages that were ethnically cleansed had their names wiped off the map and replaced by Hebrew ones often drawn from biblical references to vaguely nearby ancient sites. Language and names were used to create a pseudo-biblical facade for what was in fact a modern colonial takeover!
Genetic and cultural evidence shows that Palestinians are the progeny of the ancient inhabitants (including ancient Israelites), whereas many Israeli Jews hail from far-flung diasporas with only tenuous ancestral links to Palestine. The Zionist movement, led by secular colonialists, leveraged religious myths to legitimise its enterprise and today, a genocide.
The sooner the world recognises that Zionist colonisation rests on a pack of historical lies and fantasies, the sooner it can stop indulging this 19th-century-style ethno-supremacist nationalism, and stand, at long last, with the indigenous people fighting to dismantle it.
Source: Islam21c
This article was originally published on sarim.blog.
Notes
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ten-Lost-Tribes-of-Israel
[2] https://www.islam21c.com/opinion/uncovering-the-unabashed-lies-between-peterson-and-netanyahu/
[3] https://crescent.icit-digital.org/articles/israeli-historian-s-study-of-the-origin-of-jewish-people
[4] https://www.jstor.org/stable/4289780
[5] https://www.bartehrman.com/who-were-the-canaanites/
[6] Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002), ISBN 0‑8028‑3972‑
[8] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11543891/
[9] https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/early-zionists-and-arabs
[10] https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/77959
[12] Michael Prior (12 November 2012). Zionism and the State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry. Routledge. pp. 293–. ISBN 978-1-134-62877-3. Retrieved 20 May 2013.
[13] https://www.jta.org/2016/03/08/israel/six-surprising-findings-from-pews-study-of-israelis
[14] Nur Madalena Masalha, Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (London: Zed Books, 2018 [paperback ed. 2023])
[16] Muhammad Amara, Arabic in Israel: Language, Identity and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
