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EXODUS 23:9 SEZ ‘LEAVE ANATEVKA BEHIND!’ (SEZ I!)
This question pops up with me on a fairly consistent basis: how many other MOTs see the point, let alone the advantage, of Israel cultivating connections not only with sub-Saharan African countries and peoples (including the growing number of black Jews or Hebrews) but with indigenous peoples worldwide, such as North America’s First Nations, aka Native Americans?
I’m serious: the Jews are so called, as Bibi himself pointed out, because they come from a place called Judah or Judea. And Eretz Israel was home to the Twelve Tribes of Israel until 722 B.C.E. and descendants of the previously lost Ten Tribes are now emerging from the woodwork, such as the descendants of Manasseh now returning from Assam in northeastern India. The return of the Ethiopian ‘Jews’, although a more accurate term might be ‘Hebrews’ or ‘Israelites’ (don’t they claim descent from the tribe of Dan, or are they further south, or both?) is well known and hailed by all of us who are uninfected by racism.
But by whatever name, the house of Israel, formerly known as Jacob, are the indigenous people of the land variously known as Eretz Israel, the Holy Land or southern Syria. Most of us know Hadrian fastened the name ‘Palestine’ to try in vain to erase the memory of ‘Judea’ from it, so I won’t use it! As an indigenous people returned to their ancestral land, does it not behoove Israel and Jews worldwide to form alliances and friendships with other indigenous peoples around the world? I certainly think so; to me it makes all the sense in the world!
In Israel as in the rest of the world…