JEWS - BROWN? WHITE? BLACK?
THE PARADOX OF JEWISH IDENTITY
Medium article / By Antoun Ananias (Sighted Sun 7th April 2024)
This is a copy of a Medium.com article by Antoun Ananias sighted Sun 7th April 2024
Barbara Sreisand, Ashkenazi icon
The discussion section of this article was recorded and is published with consent of the interlocutor. Some parts may be used in a docu-drama scheduled for production by Apple Inc for fall 2025.
Barbara Streisand, Ashkenazi icon, as a girl
Barbara Streisand, Ashkenazi icon, 2019
Israeli Ashkenazi Natalie Portman as a girl
Israeli Ashkenazi Natalie Portman
Ashkenazi Debra Messing as a girl
Ashkenazi pro Israel activist Debra Messing
Yemeni Israeli Mizrahi Jew
Israeli Mizrahi Jews
Israeli Mizrahi Jews (Yemeni?)
Israeli Arab/Mizrahi Jews
'What do you identify as, Ant?'
I am sitting with my therapist, Sara, looking out at the sea. Our session is over, but I am her last slot, so afterwards, she likes to have a drink and chat and unwind.
'So, come on, what identity, Ant?' She has asked this several times in previous meetings and never got an answer.
'Sorry, Sara, I don't have any inner dream selves - if that's what you're fishing for.'
'A dream self is our perfect little self-image, which Diderot says everyone has inside themselves.'
'I don't have one. I never imagine myself in a good light.'
'But you're free to aspire to an identity, surely?'
'I aspire to living without pain and to sleeping, as much as I can in fact.'
Sara brings some cocktails from another room. I have no idea what they are. I pretend to sip one to be polite.
'In UK high-schools,' Sara says, 'teachers have to ask their students what each identifies as. One boy says "a girl", although clearly he is not, one girl says "black", although she looks white, another boy says "white", although he is South Asian, and one girl identifies as "a cat".
I am not particularly interested in any of this, but I have the draft of a paper I want Sara to translate into current Hebrew and Russian.
'Look,' I say, 'kids experiment with identities. They don't know who they are yet, and maybe they never will. But they can't walk about naked, they have to appear as something recognizable, something legible to others, so they join a tribe. But really, they are still inchoate.'
'Like from a primal soup, they can become anything?'
'Sara, I never had this luxury of self-identifying. An identity was thrust on me. If you're Palestinian, you don't get to be a cat.'
'So, just like us Jews, defined by the Nazis as "Juden" by our physical features, our protuberant noses, our fleshy lips, our dark eyes, our curly hair, whether we have short arms, or are circumcised.'
'Right, except the Nazis were morons. That system didn't work. If Himmler or any senior Nazi saw a Jew who had Aryan features, they let them go. And inspections with their crappy biometrics did not work, as some Jews looked more German than the Germans.'
I want to show Sara part of my paper, and let her dictate corrections into my phone. But she has strayed onto its topic, so I decide to show her parts of the paper as we chat.
'In the last couple of years, a lot of Ashkenazi Jews have identified as "Brown", I say. 'Maybe they do this as they feel their connection to the Israel is being questioned. Maybe they do it because they don't like whites or the US they live in. And so, claiming to be "Brown", they cite those same non-Aryan features the Nazis used. But they make a fundamental mistake. Yes, some Ashkenazi have curly hair, or protruberant noses, or even off-white skin. They see that as proof they are descended from the Israelites. But actually, the Ashkenazi acquired these features from Southern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern people. They have negigible Israelite DNA, frequently none at all. Ashkenazi is a cocktail of Southern European, mainly Greek, also Iraqi, Arab, but mainly European DNA.'
Sara looks mildly scandalized. Her face is uncontrolled for a moment, as it would be if she was being pleasured and forgot herself.
'So Sara,' I say, ' it's like this, the Nazis were shadow chasing. They thought they were exterminating the Israelites, but these "Juden" were not Israelites. They have a distinct Ashkenazi genome all of its own.'
Sara, who is of Russian Jewish descent, starts to look more curious than scandalized. Curiosity is an expression she rarely wears, as she thinks she knows pretty much everything. I pull out some color charts and other data from 'Nature' and a paper from 2022, a former colleague of mine worked on, from 'Cell', the house journal of genetics. I also pull out pie charts that break down the DNA of a sample of typical Ashkenazi Americans and a short documentary about covert DNA testing in Israel
'Oh,' Sara says, 'but DNA testing is only banned here as they say it hurts families when new fathers are discovered. Also, religious Jews don't like samples being removed from dead bodies, but you're implying this is some sort of sinister cover-up.'
'If it isn't, why is Palestinian DNA testing also banned and our labs raided and our geneticists imprisoned or exiled?'
'So, your big cover-up theory is that Jews are just a religion like any other. All the talk of us being one special race, endogenous, matrilileanly pure, it's BS, well, I can tell you Ashkenazi look similar, you can see we're related.'
I let Sara take in the full implications of the Askhkenazi charts.
'Some Ashkenazi look similar, but not to Israelites, Sara, because you would think the Mizrahi Jews are Echt Jews - after all, they are indigenous to the Middle East. They were living in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, and the Maghreb, so surely they are descendants of the Israelites, right?'
Sara reads this correctly as a rhetorical question that is not going to end predictably. She slides the window closed, looks quickly in the mirror, makes two adjustments to her hair. Although she is in her Fifties, Sara does not wear visible make-up. She seems satisfied with tanning deeply, so her shrewd shrink's cornflower eyes appear as if from behind a mask.
'But if Judaism is just a religion,' Sara says, 'why are genetics even relevant, Judaism is a belief system, and so it is the intensity of its adherents that counts, not who is an Israelite?'
I raise my eyebrows and gesture at the newly-built tower blocks along the beach, with the remains of demolished older buildings still just visible.
'Agreed, that is what it is, just a religion like any other, but a key argument of Zionists is that Jews had a continuous presence in and around Israel, and even if these Jews have only had a marginal presence, they are still, the Zionists' claim, the descendants of an original people of this land, the Israelites.'
Sara smiles, as if nonchalantly. She does not want me to feel that, as one scientist to another, any politics intrude into the data laid out before her.
'Look,' I say, 'this wild notion of a people coming back to take over a land after 2000 years away, and expelling and murdering its inhabitants in the process, is an outrage to natural justice, to international law and totally unprecedented in all history. It is a freak event in the worst sense, in the sense that freaks are psychos that do not care how many skulls they crush. This crime occurred only because Europe and the US needed a quick fix for their Shoah guilt. No Shoah - no Israel.'
'But that the Shoah was exploited to permit a second crime of expelling the Palestinians is not a new argument.'
'But it does not need to be new to be true.' I wait as Sara fixes more drinks. I have hidden mine by my feet, so she assumes I have drunk it, but I have never drunk alcohol for as long as I can remember.
'Think of the Celts who ruled Britain in the first millenia,' I say. 'The Celts were spread out all over Europe, from Spain, across France, to Italy and Switzerland. But the great religious sites were in Britain - Stonehenge and the other main stone circles.'
Sara sips her drink. She holds her drink well. I suspect she fixes weaker drinks for herself.
'Alright, so these Celts,' I say, 'get dispersed, like the Israelites, by the Romans, then by the Anglo-Saxons. A few remain on the fringes, but most are scattered and interbreed to the point that it is now virtually impossible to find Celtic DNA in Europe. So imagine, if suddenly a horde of people saying they were Celts, but who were not even genetically Celts, decided suddenly to invade Britain and throw out the British.'
Sara laughs. 'That would be totally absurd, but then we live in an absurd space.'
'Ah, but that's nihilism, a Nietzschean argument, a Nazi argument, and you're meant to be a rationalist and a healer.'
Sara lowers her eyes. My sudden anger has unnerved her. She is one of Israel's top shrinks and not used to being upraided. But her curiosity as to how my story ends gets the better of her, and so she smiles back at me wryly.
'I'm not a Zionist, or I wouldn't be treating you. If I have political views, they are inclusive ones.'
I believe her. I have overheard her on the phone, swearing colorfully about Netanyahu and half his cabinet. She is progressive but perhaps has still not entirely transcended a certain Jewish narcissism, which is predicated on a notion of racial purity, a notion the papers and graphs in front of her have given the lie to.
'There is only one gold standard for Israelite DNA,' I say. 'That is the DNA extracted from the fossilized remains at Megiddo and Abel Beth Maacah.'
I show her the unique but predicable QPADM Canaanite DNA mix, which comprises 30% Natufian (the local farmer group), 42% Anatolian nomads, with minority Ubaid and a trace of Filistine —the Sea People, not be confused with Palestinians. Then, I show her various charts, which show the presence of that Israelite DNA in the various ethnicities of the Middle East. There is only one reasonable conclusion to draw from the data. The direct descendants of the Israelites, those Israelites who were stubborn or remote enough not to be dispersed by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Romans, and the Muslims, are the so-called "Arabs" of Palestine and the Levant — except they have far less Peninsula Arab blood, at most 5% in them, than the Mizrahi Jews. The purest Palestinian DNA replicates the original Israelite DNA to a degree unprecedented in genetics, while the Jews of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, the Maghreb, and Yemen exhibit mostly African, Iraqi, Mediterranean, and primarily Arab DNA. The irony of the Ashkenazi invasion of Palestine, and the influx of Arab Jews that followed expulsions, must be one of the most grotesque and brutal in all history. You have one European group, falsely claiming descent from the Israelites, expelling and massacring the true linear descendants of the Israelites.
The charts below speaks for themselves, as does the other data. The Ashkenazi are a unique genome, principally European, barely related at all to the Israelites. The Mizrahi are heavily interbred with whichever Arab and North African countries they settled in. The greatest concentrations of genuinely descendant Israelites are the indigenous people of Akkre (90%+ match), Al-Quds (89%+), Bethlehem (90%+), Jericho(89%+), Haifa (88%+), Hebron (90%+), Jenin (90%+), Nazareth (91%+), Tulkarem (90%+), Ramleh (88%+), Nablus (circa 90%), Ramallah (circa 90%), Yaffa (circa 90%) Gaza (83%); albeit Gaza has a higher admixture of Filistine DNA — not to be confused with Palestinian- due to Pharoah Ramses 3rd coralling this advanced Sea People in Gaza, where they interbred with the local Canaanite population.
The connection between Jewry and the Israelites is at best a tenuous one, and at worst a dangerous piece of pseudo-history that has legitimated terror, ethnic cleansing, systematic torture and the brutal repression and elimination of the descendants of the Israelites who are the only continuous and indigenous inhabitants of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea.
Despite persistent and often brutal attempts to suppress this genetic secret, the genie is out of the bottle and will never be quiescent again until the rights of the Palestinian, the people whose DNA trail stretches back no less than 15,000 years, for virtually all of recorded history, are released from one of the most vicious and prolongued persecutions in history so that they can once more enjoy their ancestral land in peace.
References:
[IB Note: YouTube search
for 'Isreal's Forbidden DNA wars' link
Local copy of clip 1 link
Local copy of clip 2 link]
Ashkenazi proportional DNA chart (from Nature)
Ashkenazi proportional DNA chart 1 (from PD index)
Genetic proportional chart from Ashkenazi medieval 13th century graveyard
Colour chart of Ashkenazi genetic matches/similarities
Edward Said, a Christian (Israelite) Palestinian whose features give a glimpse back to how the Israelites might have actually appeared
Edward Said and his sister affording a glimpse back in time to the true appearance of the Israelites
Palestinian children of pure bloodline descent giving a glimpse of the appearance of the Israelites
Rashid Khaldi, a Palestinian of mixed Israelite and pure Arab DNA, again affording some idea of the original Israelite
Black Palestinian Fatima Bernawi and Leila Khaled; both evincing more diverse aspects of the Palestinian gene pool
Palestinian women asserting their rights in their ancestral homeland
A Palestinian resistance leader exhibiting the typical Palestinian bloodline physionomy
"Ashkenazi IDF soldier" exhibiting typical North European features
"Ashkenazi IDF" soldiers" exhibiting typical North European features
The author (91.7% Israelite DNA)
Differential chart showing proximity of regional ethnicities to the original Israelite DNA.
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