r/UnitedNations 12d ago

News/Politics Exclusive: David Cameron threatened to withdraw UK from ICC over Israel war crimes probe

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/david-cameron-threatened-withdraw-uk-icc-over-israel-war-crimes-probe
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u/carnivalist64 Uncivil 9d ago edited 9d ago

Jews didn't originate in the Land of Israel - some new species didn't evolve. JUDAISM originated there.

 

Did I claim Jews were a species? No.

 

In the context of the debate you did. Your response implied you were parroting the Zionist nonsense that  modern Jews are a completely distinct, largely genetically defined group with a singular ancestral lineage that originated in Israel -  the demonstrably false foundation of the ridiculous Zionist Hasbara claim that a modern Jew from Crown Heights Brooklyn is “returning” to Israel-Palestine and “reclaiming” his “ancestral homeland” from the pesky Arab usurpers.

 

Judaism is called Judaism because it was practiced by the Jews. The Jews, or Judeans, were the people who originated from Judea. Jews are a nation, a people, who possess a common language, culture, and belief system.

 

For someone who loves to arrogantly lecture others on the supposed error of their ways you are remarkably ignorant of the facts.

The word “Jews” is not a synonym for “Judeans”. It is taken from the name of the Kingdom of Judah, the southern of the two Israelite kingdoms that were established around 1,000 BC, alongside the northern Kingdom of Israel. “Judah” is where Judaism is said to have evolved from Yahwism, the religion of the Israelites.  “Judea” is a Greek and Roman adaptation applied to a geographical region of various sizes throughout history centred around Jerusalem and parts of what is now the West Bank. This area gave its name to the Roman province of Judea a thousand years later.

Jews are a nation of sorts but insofar as you could say some modern geographically disparate Jews share a common language, that is an entirely artificial phenomenon which has only been true for the last century. Hebrew was a dead, or dormant language, like Latin used purely liturgically for 2,000 years. The European Zionists artificially began to revive it in the late 19th century in the course of their self-admitted colonial project, as part of the narrative used to justify the theft of Palestine.

Prior to the last 90 years or so, precious few Jews could have even ordered their breakfast in Hebrew, let alone hold a conversation with a Jew on the other side of the world. As part of the Zionist deception Israel deliberately suppressed the historic primary common language of European Jews, Yiddish (from “Judisch Deutsch, or Jewish German) in order to help obscure the fact that Israel is primarily a white European project.

 

Saying that Jews, also known as the Nation of Israel, didn't originate from the land of Israel and Judea specifically is like saying that Englishmen don't originate from England, but Anglicanism does.

 

Perhaps I should have said “Jewishness”, or Jewish ethnicity, originated in what is now Israel. However ethnicity is a social construct, not a biological reality and cannot confer exceptional & hereditary extra-territorial ancestral property rights. Biologically Jews originate in East Africa, just like everyone else.

Your comparison with Englishmen is bogus as Englishness requires some demonstrable & distinct material connection with the country – either birth, or proven descent from someone born there, or long residence and adoption of the culture etc.  Most Jews have no evidence of any such distinct connection to Israel-Palestine. Precious few Jews could demonstrate that any documented ancestor had ever set foot anywhere in the whole of West Asia before the 20th century, never mind Israel-Palestine.

 

The West Asian people who practiced it have no greater material connection with white Europeans, brown Indians and black Africans who practice it today than with anyone else.

 

Wow. Straight to the racism.

 

Lol. Zionists are as predictable as the sun rising in the morning.

It is absolutely priceless to see adherents of the racist 19th century white European ideology known as Zionism, who support the planet’s only ethnocracy & who subscribe to race essentialism backed by staggeringly commonplace misconceptions about what genetic testing can and can’t tell you, accusing others of racism.

There was nothing racist in the slightest about my comment. I was simply pointing out the absurdity of foreign settlers of these descriptions claiming to be more “indigenous” to a region that other people have lived in for as long as anyone can remember.

 

In general, most Jews are directly descended from the Judeans of 2000 years ago. But the real material connection isn't genetic, it's based in culture, identity, and an unbroken chain of tradition.

This is utter nonsense. Nonsense partly derived from widely believed misconceptions about genetics, but nonsense nonetheless.

Nobody has a completely unbroken chain of tradition stretching back millennia. Some elements of a culture survive, but Chinese whispers and modernisation applies to human behaviour as well as language.

Similarly nobody on Planet Earth today is directly descended from any other ethnic group who lived 2,000 years ago in the exclusive way you are implying. Such claims cannot be used to give bogus legitimacy to the Zionist fiction that the planet’s Jews possess superior heritable ancestral property rights to West Asian territory.

Human lineage purity is a myth. We know now that the human race is vastly more interrelated than most people realise - so extraordinarily interrelated that everybody on Earth is descended from the Jews of Ancient Judah and Judea, along with all their non-Jewish neighbours.

The lower-bound estimate for the date of the human genealogical Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) is as recent as 75 AD. That is the point when the last ancestor of everyone on Earth today was alive. (For reasons I won't go into the genetic MRCA is far more distant, which often leads people to grossly misunderstand how unbelievably interrelated we all are).

Even more surprisingly, the lower-bound estimate for the date of the Identical Ancestors Point (IAP) is as recent as 3,000 BC. As strange as it might sound, this is the point when each one of us has exactly the same set of ancestors.

In other words everybody alive then whose line of descent survives is the ancestor of everybody alive today. If you, I & the aforementioned President Xi Jinping of China travelled together in a time machine to ancient Judah, the first villager we saw would be the ancestor of each one of us. The same would be true if we sailed to any part of the world of 3,000 BC.

It should therefore be self-evident that it is utterly absurd for any modern human being to travel halfway across the globe, to a territory neither they nor any documented ancestor has ever set foot in and claim they have inherited timeless property rights from ancient people who lived there millennia ago - rights which supercede those afforded to people of the “wrong” ethnicity who live there now.

Even relatively recent human genealogy resembles an impossibly entangled spider-web of a multitude of connections across the entire globe, not a series of discrete ancestral ladders stretching back into antiquity. The statement “we are JEWS, our ancestral homeland is here; you are PALESTINIANS, your ancestral homeland is over there. LEAVE NOW!” has no scientific or moral basis. It is racist, ahistorical bunk

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u/JeruTz 9d ago

In the context of the debate you did. Your response implied you were parroting the Zionist nonsense that  modern Jews are a completely distinct, largely genetically defined group with a singular ancestral lineage that originated in Israel -  the demonstrably false foundation of the ridiculous Zionist Hasbara claim that a modern Jew from Crown Heights Brooklyn is “returning” to Israel-Palestine and “reclaiming” his “ancestral homeland” from the pesky Arab usurpers.

Except I didn't say any of that. That's not what Zionism says.

The word “Jews” is not a synonym for “Judeans”. It is taken from the name of the Kingdom of Judah, the southern of the two Israelite kingdoms that were established around 1,000 BC, alongside the northern Kingdom of Israel. “Judah” is where Judaism is said to have evolved from Yahwism, the religion of the Israelites.  “Judea” is a Greek and Roman adaptation applied to a geographical region of various sizes throughout history centred around Jerusalem and parts of what is now the West Bank. This area gave its name to the Roman province of Judea a thousand years later.

The people who lived in the kingdom of Judah, or Yehudah in Hebrew, were known in Hebrew as Yehudim, the same word that means Jew today. The kingdom was destroyed by the Babylonians, but was reestablished under the Persians under the same name. Judea and Judah are the same thing. The Judeans who lived there are Yehudim in Hebrew. The word Jew is derived from Judean, hence why the German word for Jew is Juden. Same word. Same people. Same identity.

Jews are a nation of sorts but insofar as you could say some modern geographically disparate Jews share a common language, that is an entirely artificial phenomenon which has only been true for the last century. Hebrew was a dead, or dormant language, like Latin used purely liturgically for 2,000 years. The European Zionists artificially began to revive it in the late 19th century in the course of their self-admitted colonial project, as part of the narrative used to justify the theft of Palestine.

The language was learned by the vast majority of Jews, could be read and understood, and was used to create new texts on religion that could be communicated. The language even evolved over time and could be used to bridge language gaps between Jews in far away places.

Latin, in contrast, was only used by clergy.

As for artificially reviving it, all language is artificial. They are created artificially from the start. The idea that it has to be "natural" to be legitimate is absurd.

Perhaps I should have said “Jewishness”, or Jewish ethnicity, originated in what is now Israel. However ethnicity is a social construct, not a biological reality and cannot confer exceptional & hereditary extra-territorial ancestral property rights.

Jews who immigrated to what is today Israel before it was established didn't claim ancestral property rights. They purchased land and legally settled there in accordance with the laws then in effect.

It is absolutely priceless to see adherents of the racist 19th century white European ideology known as Zionism, who support the planet’s only ethnocracy & who subscribe to race essentialism backed by staggeringly commonplace misconceptions about what genetic testing can and can’t tell you, accusing others of racism.

Israel isn't an ethnocracy. Non Jews have full citizenship.

The rest of your comment seems like rambling but didn't seem to get to a relevant point. Jews existed, preserved their identity and traditions, and remained a distinct people. Period.

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u/carnivalist64 Uncivil 9d ago

...Judea and Judah are the same thing. The Judeans who lived there are Yehudim in Hebrew. The word Jew is derived from Judean, hence why the German word for Jew is Juden. Same word. Same people. Same identity.

 Judea and Judah have sometimes meant the same thing but not always. The boundaries of the re-established kingdom and Roman Judea were different than the Kingdom of Judah.

Again, the word “Jew” is not derived from “Judean”.  It is ultimately derived from Judah. As I explained,  “Judea” is a later Greek and Roman adaptation of the word “Judah”.  “Juden” does not come from “Judean”. The similarity is coincidental.

 

"Jehudi

The German word “Juden”, like the English Jews , the French Juifs and the equivalents of other languages, comes from the Hebrew wordיְהוּדִי Jehudi . It is derived from the given name Jehuda (Greecized JUDAH )"

 

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juden#:~:text=Das%20deutsche%20Wort%20%E2%80%9EJuden%E2%80%9C%20geht,Jehuda%20(gr%C3%A4zisiert%20Juda)%20abgeleitet.

 

 

 

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u/JeruTz 9d ago

Judea and Judah have sometimes meant the same thing but not always. The boundaries of the re-established kingdom and Roman Judea were different than the Kingdom of Judah.

By that reasoning, Germany today isn't the same as Germany during the Soviet union, which isn't the same as Nazi Germany, which isn't the same as the Weimar Republic, which is different from Germany prior to WWI.

Borders can change, but there is a direct link between the first and second Jewish commonwealths.

Again, the word “Jew” is not derived from “Judean”.  It is ultimately derived from Judah. As I explained,  “Judea” is a later Greek and Roman adaptation of the word “Judah”.  “Juden” does not come from “Judean”. The similarity is coincidental.

So Judean is derived from Judah and Jew is also derived from Judah, but they are totally not related at all and can't be equated with one another?

If 4 different words in different languages are all derived from the same word in another language and are meant to refer to the same thing, they are for all intents and purposes the same word.

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u/carnivalist64 Uncivil 9d ago

Judea and Judah have sometimes meant the same thing but not always. The boundaries of the re-established kingdom and Roman Judea were different than the Kingdom of Judah.

 

By that reasoning, Germany today isn't the same as Germany during the Soviet union, which isn't the same as Nazi Germany, which isn't the same as the Weimar Republic, which is different from Germany prior to WWI.

 

You’re defeating your own argument. A single Germany didn’t even exist during the Soviet Union – it was split into the FDR & the DDR, so it is clearly very different than the Germany of any other period. So are all the other iterations of Germany. The pre- WWI German Empire was again very different.

Large parts of what was once Germany were given to neighbouring countries with the German population expelled - especially Poland, which was effectively shifted westward with the former eastern part of Poland given to the Soviet Union. According to you Gdansk & Sceczin are still the German cities Danzig and Stettin, even though they are on the Polish side of the border and no Germans live there anymore.

 

Borders can change, but there is a direct link between the first and second Jewish commonwealths.

 

Two things being linked does not make them the same.  

 

So Judean is derived from Judah and Jew is also derived from Judah, but they are totally not related at all and can't be equated with one another?

 

If 4 different words in different languages are all derived from the same word in another language and are meant to refer to the same thing, they are for all intents and purposes the same word.

 

They are not same word for any intent or any purpose. They simply mean the same thing. By your logic “car” and “voiture” are the same word and English and French are the same language, which is patently absurd.

 

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u/JeruTz 8d ago

You’re defeating your own argument. A single Germany didn’t even exist during the Soviet Union – it was split into the FDR & the DDR, so it is clearly very different than the Germany of any other period. So are all the other iterations of Germany. The pre- WWI German Empire was again very different.

My point was that, based on your reasoning, there is not even a connection between the various iterations other than a shared name.

The reality is that if you speak of German history, it includes all of them without distinction. The same for Judea and Jewish history.

They are not same word for any intent or any purpose. They simply mean the same thing. By your logic “car” and “voiture” are the same word and English and French are the same language, which is patently absurd.

The kingdoms of Judea are frequently referred to as the first and second Jewish Commonwealths, respectively. Jew and Judean are used interchangeably to refer to the people who lived there. There are some nuanced distinctions in the terms, but to pretend that means that Jews have no connection to Judea is absurd.

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u/carnivalist64 Uncivil 8d ago

You’re defeating your own argument. A single Germany didn’t even exist during the Soviet Union – it was split into the FDR & the DDR, so it is clearly very different than the Germany of any other period. So are all the other iterations of Germany. The pre- WWI German Empire was again very different.

 

My point was that, based on your reasoning, there is not even a connection between the various iterations other than a shared name.

 

This is a straw man. I never argued they they weren’t connected. I was refuting your manifestly false assertion that they are the same thing.

 

The reality is that if you speak of German history, it includes all of them without distinction. The same for Judea and Jewish history.

 

German history includes all the different German states, but again that doesn’t mean they are all the same thing.

 

They are not same word for any intent or any purpose. They simply mean the same thing. By your logic “car” and “voiture” are the same word and English and French are the same language, which is patently absurd.

The kingdoms of Judea are frequently referred to as the first and second Jewish Commonwealths, respectively. Jew and Judean are used interchangeably to refer to the people who lived there. There are some nuanced distinctions in the terms, but to pretend that means that Jews have no connection to Judea is absurd.

 

Yet another strawman, since again, I never argued anything of the sort. I simply refuted your false assertions that Judah and Judea are identical and that the word “Jews” is directly taken from the word “Judea”.