How many people, and what ethnicity lived there right before it became called Israel in 48?
I have to find the sources HD . . . have used them before . .majority were arab ethnicity. The partion required many arabs to leave their land and relocate . . because there were so many more arabs than "jews"
What advantage does the U.S. have from backing them so?
Strategic access to the Middle East and oil reserves if military action is needed.
Where did the name Ashkenazi come from and why is the word nazi in it?
Howard, not taking sides, just learning.
Here is some information for you HD:
Origins of Ashkenazim
Although the historical record itself is very limited, there is a consensus of cultural, linguistic, and genetic evidence that the Ashkenazi Jewish population originated in the Middle East. When they arrived in northern France and the Rhineland sometime around 800-1000 CE, the Ashkenazi Jews brought with them both Rabbinic Judaism and the Babylonian Talmudic culture that underlies it.
Yiddish, once spoken by the vast majority of Ashkenazi Jewry, is a Jewish language which developed from the Middle High German vernacular, heavily influenced by Hebrew and Aramaic. (By comparison, the Greek or Latin influence on Yiddish was much less significant). Recent research in human genetics has also demonstrated that a significant component of Ashkenazi ancestry is Middle Eastern.
European Jews became called "Ashkenaz" because the main centers of Jewish learning were located in Germany.
"Ashkenaz" is a Medieval Hebrew name for Germany. (See Usage of the name for the term's etymology.)
________
Today, Ashkenazi Jews constitute approximately 80% of world Jewry,[4] but probably less than half of Israeli Jews (see Demographics of Israel). Nevertheless they have traditionally played a
prominent role in the
media, economy and politics of Israel. Tensions have sometimes arisen between the mostly Ashkenazi elite whose families founded the state, and later migrants from various non-Ashkenazi groups, who argue that
they are discriminated against.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews
There is a booklet written decades ago by an Ashkenazi Jew who immigrated to Israel and married a Sephardic Jew along the way, and tells of his disillusionment and discrimination they experienced due to her being Sephardic. I cannot remember the name of this work right now.
You may be very interested in this article:
Post-Zionism and the Sephardi Question
by Meyrav Wurmser
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2005
A growing group of Jewish Israeli professors is challenging the legitimacy of the Israeli state from within. Many are Mizrahim, as the Sephardi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa are increasingly called, and do so from a distinctly Mizrahi outlook. In July 2004, for example, a poem appeared online entitled, "I Am an Arab Refugee":
When I hear Fayruz[1] singing,
"I shall never forget thee, Palestine,"
I swear to you with my right hand
that at once I am a Palestinian.
All of a sudden I know:
I am an Arab refugee
and, if not,
let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.[2]
The author is not a Palestinian refugee but rather an Israeli Jew. His name is Sami Shalom Chetrit, a Mizrahi professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who, along with Mizrahi academics like Ella Shohat, Eli Avraham, Oren Yiftachel, Yehouda Shenhav, Pnina Motzafi-Haller and others has developed a radical critique of ethnic relations in Israel. True to post-Zionism, an intellectual movement that believes that Zionism lacks moral validity, post-Zionist Mizrahi writers believe that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state. According to Mizrahi post-Zionism, the Mizrahim, about half of Israel's Jewish population, are "Arab-Jews," who like the Palestinians are victims of Zionism.
According to Shohat, Zionism is a white, Ashkenazi phenomenon, based on the denial of the Orient and the rights of both Mizrahi Jews and the Palestinians.
This view contradicts the mainstream Zionist narrative, which maintains that Zionism saved Mizrahi Jews.[7] According to this view, the Mizrahi Jews were devout Zionists who deeply wished to leave the Diaspora and return to Zion.[8] Zionism saved these Mizrahim when persecution in their Arab and Iranian homelands intensified after Israel's independence. It also rescued them from the backwardness of Arab society and introduced them to the technology and culture of the civilized world. Zionism helped them to overcome the disadvantages of the illiterate, despotic societies from which they came.
In contrast, post-Zionist Mizrahi writers believe that this official Zionist account is false and needs to be de-constructed. They maintain that the Mizrahim did not come from backward or primitive societies. Cities like Alexandria, Baghdad, and Istanbul were great metropolises of wealth and culture. Most Mizrahim had been exposed to Western culture and ideas since they came from countries once subject to British or French rule. The Mizrahim were also largely literate, if not highly educated. Most men and even some women could read the Torah.
The post-Zionist writers also attack the claim that the Mizrahi Jews longed to immigrate to Israel. In reality, they argue, as loyal residents of the Arab world, Zionism played a relatively minor role in the Mizrahi world-view. Despite the role that the longing for Zion played in their religious lives, they did not share the European-Zionist desire to leave the Diaspora. Even after the Holocaust, post-Zionist writers maintain, Mizrahi Jews remained largely opposed to Zionism and lived peacefully with their Arab neighbors. Yehouda Shenhav, professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, writes in his study of the Jews of Iraq that the Mizrahim were never really Zionists. Instead, he argues that the Ashkenazi establishment encouraged their immigration less to protect the Mizrahim and more to address its own need for cheap labor.[9] Instead of saving the Mizrahi Jews, Zionism only ruthlessly displaced an entire community, Shenhav maintains, and removed its members' right to determine their own future. Pursuing this logic to its end, he argues that Zionism cannot be considered a liberation movement for all Jews. It liberated European Jews but enslaved the Mizrahim who, like the Palestinians, are an abused Third World people suffering under the yoke of first world Ashkenazi oppressors.
The Mizrahi academic embrace of post-Zionism is an attempt to address a broader, genuine problem. Post-Zionist Mizrahi writers present a compelling account of the systematic economic and ethnic discrimination that they personally, their families, and Mizrahi Jews in general have faced since the establishment of Israel to the present day. They provide evidence of discrimination and racist attitudes beginning with the early years of statehood.
One of the worst examples of the anti-Mizrahi discrimination involves The Ashkenazi Revolution published in 1964 by writer Kalman Katzenelson in which the author argues that the Mizrahim suffer from irreversible genetic inferiority that endangers the superiority of the Ashkenazi-Zionist state. He called for the establishment of an apartheid regime that, among other limitations, would abolish their political rights. He also objected to mixed marriages and demanded the prohibition of the Hebrew language because it resembled Arabic too greatly. Instead he demanded that Yiddish become the national language because of its supreme Germanic origins. His book was a bestseller until Ben-Gurion banned it.
A great deal more at:
http://www.meforum.org/article/707
After you read that article, here is the booklet I spoke of above documenting the descrimination an Ashkenazi Jew and his Sephardic wife experienced in Zionist Israel, plus much more. . . it will generate a great deal of consternation among those who are pro-zionist. They will do exactly what he predicts within it:
A CHALLENGE
THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK ARE EXPECTED TO BRING A STRONG REACTION FROM THE ZIONIST JEWS.
I am well aware of the tactics of you, my Zionist brethren, use to quiet anyone who attempts to expose any of your subversive acts.
If the person is a Gentile, you cry,
"You're anti-semitic" which is nothing more than a
smokescreen to hide your actions.
But, if a Jew is the person doing the exposing, you resort to other tactics.
- First, you ignore the charges, hoping the information will not be given widespread distribution.
- If the information starts reaching too many people, you ridicule the information and the persons giving the information.
- If that doesn't work, your next step is character assassination. If the author or speaker hasn't been involved in sufficient scandal you are adept at fabricating scandal against the person or persons.
- If none of these are effective, you are known to resort to physical attacks.
But,
NEVER do you try to prove the information wrong.
The Life of an American Jew
in Racist Marxist Israel
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/israel.htm
We see all of the above responses (except physical attacks which do not generally occur in online forums for obvious reasons), in such threads as this thread from Zionists here at CF. . . . . .
We have already had the "anti-semitic" card played . .it will continue to be played as it has always been played by Zionists here. We have had some of the rest as well. Such responses will only grow stronger and stronger, yet no real debate will occur . .why? Because they cannot legitimately debate the facts.
Such responses are quite telling, as the author states:
But, if you resort to crying, "Lies, all lies ", and refuse to debate the material you will, in effect, be telling the American people that what I have written are the true facts.
.
