Israel is the only country in the world that absolutely refuses to give its name as a nationality to its citizens. According to a report in the Israeli news media, the Supreme Court has rejected Israeli nationality in a recent ruling saying “it could undermine the Jewish character of the state”. The ruling came after a group of Israelis petitioned to designate the Israeli nationality as the national identity of Israel, arguing that “without a secular Israeli identity, Israeli policies will have to favour Jews and discriminate against non-Jewish minorities”. These Israelis were trying to stop the steady slide of the Zionist state toward the pit of apartheid and racism and to protect democracy in a state heading to be a Jewish theocracy.

To those civil-minded Israelis, a Jewish state means a religious state that is ruled by the rabbis/priesthood whose religious authority determines these days in Israel who the faithful believer, a blasphemer, a true or not a true Jew are. Indeed, the ruling of the court confirmed the fear of secular Israelis when it says: “rejecting the Israeli nationality is to protect Israel’s founding [Zionist] principle to be a Jewish state [only] for the Jewish people”, thus, negating equal rights for non-Jews. The Judaism practised today in Israel is a Judaism that is being ruled by the Western Talmud, the very book rejected by the American reform Jews and every secular-minded Jew of conscience in our world, because it is a racist book written by Ashkenazi rabbis that is now considered as holy as the Torah or more! Talmudist Judaism and democracy can never coexist as two powers ruling the same state which is the very reason that civilised countries separated the church from the political authority of the democratic state.

Tribe that survived

Until now, the Israelis have failed to agree on a nationality from among the three available choices; the Israeli, the Jewish and the Hebrew nationalities. Major historical, anthropological, theological and recently scientific obstacles rule out the possibility to adopt any of the three nationalities/identities. The original meaning of Israel, according to the Torah, is at the centre of the theological notion. When Prophet Jacob, in his inner struggle, overcame his materialistic self/ mind, his name became ‘Israel’, a combination of two syllables; “Isra” which means “walking in the darkness” and “El” which means the “Lord”. Thus, ‘Israel’ means the one who walks in the darkness of the material world with his Lord. The state of Israel is Prophet Jacob’s spiritual state and is not one of a political/material core. There has never been a mention of a ‘kingdom of Israel’ in the Torah or in history. Therefore, the Israeli state of higher consciousness is that of Prophet Jacob. The biblical meaning of a Jew is a person from the tribe of Judah (the only tribe of the twelve sons of Jacob) that survived, while the rest of the eleven tribes were “lost”. In other words, the tribe of Judah, the brother who conspired with his other ten brothers to kill their brother Joseph, the righteous, was the only tribe that kept the monotheistic principle intact and the other eleven tribes were dissolved in the melting pot of paganism after the Exodus from Egypt. Judaism simply means the religion of the tribe of Judah and its monotheistic message was not given the name of Abraham who received it, or the name of Moses who received the Torah. Therefore, a Jew must be a descendent of the Semitic Hebrew tribe of Judah, a tribal identity and not a nationality, because for the tribe of Judah is the Hebrew nationality.

The second reason that invalidates the Jewish nationality is the scientific discovery that shocked all the Ashkenazis. A recent genetic analysis of the Ashkenazi Jews, the European Jews who converted to Judaism in the 7th century, provided the evidence that specified their origin from the maternal root that is not Semitic and has no connection, whatsoever, to the lineage of Abraham nor to Jacob who became Israel. The Western Talmud written by the Ashkenazi Rabbis specifically defines a Jew as the one who must have a Jewish mother with a Semitic lineage to Abraham and Jacob/Israel, but the genetic analysis ruled out this Talmudist condition, thus making the vast majority of the Ashkenazis as non-Jews. That also eliminates the Jewish nationality as the national identity in the Zionist state.

Hebrews are “the ones who crossed over from the desert of Arabia”. Prophet Abraham made three crossings with his band, “the Hebaros”, Al Abiroon in Arabic. The first was from Arabia to Acadia in Iraq, the second was crossing over “the two rivers” in Iraq, and the third was crossing the River Jordan to enter the land of Canaan which also was known in the Torah as the land of the Philistines. As a matter of fact, Philistine, the land of Canaan became Palestine in Latin, but it is still Philistine in Arabic to this very day! Therefore, the only true Hebrews in the Zionist state now are the Arab Jews, who with the Arabs, Christians and Muslims have one father, Prophet Abraham, a historical fact that makes the Hebrew nationality invalid because it excludes the Ashkenazis. This means that Zionism which was founded to establish “a Jewish state for the Jews” is null and void, religiously, anthropologically and even scientifically.

Indeed, the Eastern Talmud of the Arab Jews who converted the Ashkenazis into Judaism is called “the Palestine Talmud of Jerusalem” which was written in “the Jewish old Palestinian Aramaic language” thousands of years ago. The Jerusalem Post used to be called from 1932 to 1948 “the Palestine Post”. It is the same with “the British mandate on Palestine” as proclaimed by the League of Nations and endured later at the UN.

Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopaedia.