Shlomo Sand, l'ignorant des sables, présente son livre à Londres

"Si les juifs n'ont jamais vraiment existé, comment se fait-il que l'islam et la chrétienté ont passé tellement de temps à les supprimer?" (Seth J. Frantzman)

Contexte: Hébreux, juifs et sionistes : omissions de L'Histoire, par Alain Michel, historien israélien et rabbin.

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Shlomo Sand , professeur à l'Université de Tel Aviv, est allé présenter son livre sur "l'invention" du peuple juif à Londres. Il a déclaré à la BBC:

"Je ne suis pas sioniste. Je ne me définis pas moi-même comme antisioniste ... mais je ne suis pas sioniste... Je ne mets en question l'existence d'Israël. Quand je parle à des étudiants arabes je compare la naissance de l'Etat d'Israël à un acte de viol. Mais même l'enfant issu d'un viol ... il faut le reconnaître ... aujourd'hui je ne mets pas en question l'existence d'Israël, comprenez-vous ?"

Jonathan Hoffman a assisté à la présentation de son livre. L'événement était organisé par le magazine de gauche The New Statesman (qui a dû s'excuser en 2002 pour avoir publié un dessin antisémite sur une des ses couvertures, voir ci-dessous). Il en parle sur le site Harry's Place, Shlomo the Sandlout (Shlomo, l'ignorant des sables). Extraits :

"On Monday night I went to hear Shlomo Sand who is doing three London meetings this week to promote the English translation of his book "The Invention of the Jewish People". In the book Sand attempts to prove that the Jewish people never existed as a “nation-race” with a common origin. His thesis is that Jews are a rag-tag collection of flotsam and jetsam that at various stages of history just happened to adopt the same religion. He argues that for a number of Zionist ideologues, the mythical perception of the Jews as an ancient people led to racist thinking. [...]

I had a chance to see the book before the talk. The final chapter is full of lies, here is an example:

Page 281: "The most important mission to be undertaken by the new state [of Israel] was the renewal, as best it could, of those who definitely did not regard themselves as Jews."

And then he slips into the overtly antisemitic:

Page 292: "Jewish and Democratic - An Oxymoron?"

Page 313: "To what extent is Jewish Israeli society willing to discard the deeply embedded image of the "chosen people"?"

I told him his book was antisemitic, citing the “chosen people” trope. I asked him how it was that the Khazars could "demographically probably" be the fathers of the 3 million Polish Jews who existed in the 20th century, when they had no Khazar names, spoke Yiddish and contained numerous Cohens and Levis who could not possibly be of Khazar ancestry (such status is obtained from the patrilineal line and cannot be obtained via conversion). (Frantzman makes this point). I also asked him why he wrote the book - was it for notoriety or was it for money?

He failed to answer. He also failed to answer Richard Millett who pointed out that Hamas was not prepared to give the Jews any land area (Sand had said that the Jews were allocated too much land by the UN in 1947). Richard was heckled - uproar broke out. The meeting ended and I heard Sand got even more loutish later. It is a toss up between Sand and Caryl Churchill (of Seven Jewish Children) as to who distorts Jewish history more.

As Seth Frantzman writes: "If the Jews never really existed then why did Islam and Christianity spend so much time suppressing them?""

Couverture controversée du New Statesman (14/01/2002) : "Une conspiration kosher ?" Mortimer Zuckerman et Bernard Harrison citent cette couverture comme un exemple du nouveau antisémitisme. (Source: Wikipedia)