Jawad Anani

According to the Israeli neo-historian Shlomo Sand, the history of the Jewish people is concocted and was mostly rewritten in the 19th century.

Sand’s book, The Invention of the Jewish People, published in 2008, presents a new narrative that the Zionist movement rejects outright. Yet the facts that he presented are not easy to dismiss as unfounded.

The myth of the Jewish Exodus after the Roman destruction of the Kingdom of Israel does not hold water. It is even bigger than the claim that the Prophet Moses took with him 4 million Jews who were lost in Sinai. Most of the population of the Second Kingdom opted to stay put, and eventually many of them converted to Christianity, while the majority embraced Islam.

The main dilemma that the Jews face is to determine whether “Jewishness” is a religion or a nationality. The obvious answer is that it is a religion and can never be a nationality. The same thing applies to the other two monotheistic religions. Despite the minute number of believers in the Jewish faith, they come from almost everywhere in the world. Shlomo Sand also believes that most of the Jews in the world are converts and not the descendants of Jacob, the grandson of Abraham. If some Jews prove to be Israelites, the overwhelming majority come from other regions in Northern Europe, the Caspian Sea countries, and Russia. Other neo-historians have raised fundamental questions about the false claims on which the current Israel was based. One could argue that Israel itself is an offshoot of the Sykes-Picot agreements but was created twenty-seven years after the Hashemite kingdoms of both Iraq and Jordan. I raise the question in response to arguments that the Sykes-Picot arrangements in the region have already exhausted their purpose and that the region needs to be reordered.

One of the proponents of this idea is Robert Kaplan, who wrote two books that stirred controversy. The first was The Coming Anarchy, and the second was The Revenge of Geography. In the latter book, he proposed a reevaluation of the political entities produced after World War I because they were customized to serve the interests of imperial powers rather than those of the ethnic groups of the expanded Middle East region. In other words, he proposed the reshuffling of the region in a way that would grant each ethnicity its own independent state.

The book raised doubt about the real intentions of its author. Was he defending ethnic rights, or was he trying to create chaos that would lead to small ethnic states where Israel could exercise its hegemony over all of them while legitimizing its existence as a strictly Jewish state?

The current turbulent events in the Middle East do not point to further fragmentation. In the days when Kaplan’s theories were hot currency, the New York Times published, on September 28, 2013, a new map of the Middle East. Syria would be divided into three entities (Kurdish, Sunni, and Alawite), Iraq would be segmented into three entities, Libya into two, Yemen into two, and Saudi Arabia into five.

Looking back at that article opens a very existential question for Jordan. Although the New York Times article does not mention Jordan specifically, this may subvert or obfuscate the real intentions of Israel towards Jordan.

His Majesty King Abdullah II is apprehensive about such an idea, as is indicated by his subtle political and diplomatic activities as well as his political statements. No matter how big or small the chances of intervening in Jordan (alternative homeland or part of Greater Israel), the risk is too big to forgo. The task of offsetting that is arduous but doable.