Jews are "Phoenicians", Palestinians are "Jews"

[Update: please read my 2012 independent analysis of Western Jews, Palestinians and other populations of West Asia, which adds some interesting nuances but in essence confirms what is said here].

This does not seem just another paper on Jewish genetics but more like The Paper. While it is pay per view and hence I haven't been able to read it in full , the material I could see at Dienekes' blog (same as in the supplementary material) is most revealing. I think this research will mark a before and after in Jewish genetics and also gives some interesting hints on other populations, specially in West Asia and North Africa.

Doron M. Behar, Bayazit Yunusbayev, Mait Metspalu et al. The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people. Nature, 2010. Pay per view but supplementary material freely accessible.

One of the good things is that finally comparison with Turks and other populations from that area where early Jewish Diaspora in the Hellenistic-Roman era is known to have lived, rather than in Palestine, in a time when Judaism (several sects including eventually Christianism) was still actively proselytizing.

Unlike what I used to think, Western Jews (Sephardi and Ashkenazi) do not cluster too well with the Turkish sample but they cluster almost perfectly with Cypriots and Lebanese. They seem to have no particular relation with Palestinians (nor Druze nor Negev Bedouins) but these also appear clearly different from other Arabs and in general any other sampled population.


This K-means analysis is for me the answer to all these endless discussions on the origin of Jews and Palestinians. Western Jews seem essentially to have coalesced in the Cypriot-Phoenician area probably by, essentially, conversion. Palestinians seem to be a uniquely distinct population, albeit somewhat admixed with their neighbors, which may well originate with the local Neolithic and certainly must have been there in early historical times.

In other words: Palestinians are most likely to be the true descendants from the Jews of the Biblical period, rather than modern Western Jews who seem more as originating from a Phoenician-Cypriot population which converted to Rabbinic Judaism for whichever reasons.

Other Jewish populations also seem to originate in conversion episodes but from different genetic pools. Hence Yemeni Jews appear as genetically Arab, Ethiopian Jews as Ethiopian, Indian Jews as Indian and Iraqi-Iranian Jews as Iranians. There may be some fine threading to enrich this overall picture but the essentials seem very clear in any case.

Anyhow, Moroccan Jews appear as just another branch of Western Jews (no particular relation with Moroccans is apparent) and I have not been able so far to identify the closest population to the small sample of Uzbek Jews. Also Turco-European Jews seem at least somewhat admixed with Europeans, something that was already well known.

As for other populations, I find interesting that an specific autosomal component of NW Africans has been detected (for the first time as far as I can tell). Many specific clusters have obviously not been detected because of the relative shallowness of the K-means analysis.

The supplementary materials have other interesting graphs, PC analysis of autosomal, Y-DNA and mtDNA genetics and a global K-means analysis of relevance when observing some peripheral Jewish populations specially but also providing some general hints on other populations (a very wide sample, specially in Eurasia).

I must cheer and congratulate the authors of this research for finally addressing the debate on Jewish (and Palestinian) origins with a worthy extended sample of many many populations, including key ones such as Turks, Cypriots and Lebanese (among others). The wording of the abstract doesn't say things as clearly as I do but their data speaks volumes.

Update: A reader, Joe, tells me that H.G. Wells already suggested this Phoenician true origin of Jews. In his book A Short History of the World, chapter XXII, he wrote, speaking of Semitic peoples, once all powerful but then defeated by the Indoeuropeans (Persians, Greeks, Romans):

Is it any miracle that in their days of overthrow and subjugation many Babylonians and Syrians and so forth, and later on many Phoenicians, speaking practically the same language and having endless customs, habits, tastes and traditions in common, should be attracted by this inspiring cult [Judaism] and should seek to share in its fellowship and its promise? After the fall of Tyre, Sidon, Carthage and the Spanish Phoenician cities, the Phoenicians suddenly vanish from history; and as suddenly, we find not simply in Jerusalem but in Spain, Africa, Egypt, the East, wherever the Phoenicians had set their feet, communities of Jews.

See also the discussion on Atzmon 2008.


Update Nov 21: a free copy of the paper is available here (PDF).

Prision 1391: the Israeli Guantanamo

The People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (marxist, secularist) denounces the impunity and secrecy of the israeli death camp known as 1391.

Like other police stations bult by the British, mostly used as milatery bases by Israel nowadays, this prision is only known by a code number, 1391. But it is not just a military base: it is an ultra-secret detention center where, like the case of somewhat better known 'X-Ray' camp, most people who enter there never go out.

Placed in the West Bank, not far from the Green Line, it used to be identified by a sign with that number (and nothing else) but nowadays it has been 'erased' from any records, even maps and aerial pictures by Israeli military censorship.

While the X-Ray camp is known to have 662 prisioners, all jailed anonymously without charges nor any legal notice, nobody really knows how many people is suffering at 1391. The testimonies of the few prisioners released suggest that it has many immates, many prisioners from Lebanon, captured during Israeli occupation of the south of this country, including possibly four Iranian officers kidnapped in Beirut in 1982.

The few available info strongly suggest that torture is normal in that secret prision. Political prisioner Mustafa al-Dirani, kidnapped in Lebanon in 1994, and officially acknowledged to have stayed at 1391, denounced he had been raped by several soldiers.

Other people known to have been kept in 1391 are the popular Palestinian leader Marwan al Barghouti and a businessman called Baschar Jadallah, together with his nephew Mohammed Jadallah, captured after ilegally crossing into Jordan. Mohammed Jadallah denounced that he had been forced under torture to sign a document where he figured as member of Hamas. Baschar instead was not tortured physically, maybe due to his age (50), but he was dumped in isolation for months.

He was in a small windowless cell of 2 square meters (what a bed may occupy) that was painted in black and had a tenuous light on day and night. He had no access to legal help nor was allowed to talk to other prisioners. When he asked for his location he was told that he was "in the Moon". He was blinfolded every time he was moved around and only allowed to see in enclosed spaces.

Psychiatrist Dr. Yahukim Stain, from Jerusalem, declared based on the testimony of Jadallah and other prisioners that the torture method used in 1391 is a well studied one intended to weaken the resistence of prisioners and submit them totally to interrogators. The pain generated by tortures or the threat of them, together with the thought of death and oblivion cause major pshicological damage and a state of panic.

The testimonies are all coincident in the perception of humidity, stinky matresses, the seldom empty bucket used as latrine, a perpetual very high noise that prevented sleep and a an air conditioning always extremely cold.

Torture practices (declared illegal in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court) were also denounced by Hanna Fredman, of the People's Comitee against Torture. Recents stats indicate that 58% of Palestinian prisioners were submitted to such abuses like kicking, harsh beatings, violent vibrations, forcing them to stand or sit in unconfortable positions for long periods as well as being cuffed at hands and feet so tightly that was painful. To these practics the direct testimony of Mohammed Jadallah adds sleep deprivation and denial of physiological evacuation, being thrown cold water if he did not complain. Also he was shown pictures of his family and recieved threats that hey would suffer if he did not collaborate.

British citizen Yehad Shuman, accused of belonging to Hizbullah, also went through that prision in 2001. He was violently beaten by some 15 soldiers and threatened this way: "you have to acknowledge or it will be your end and nobody will know what happened, or you acknowledge or you die".

Also, there has been concern that USA could be hiring such secret prisions, specially for Iraqi prisioners. It is known that the North American power is doing that with other allies of the region, such as Jordan or Egypt and many think that, Israel being such a primary US ally, is probably no exception.

Source: La Haine (in Spanish).

Important Bronze Age findings in the Eastern Mediterranean

From Stone Pages - Archaeonews.

Maybe the most important one is the finding of melted bronze at the earliest Canaanite layers (c. 3000 BCE) of Sidon, Lebanon, suggesting that the Bronze Age in West Asia could date to even before the Canaanites period itself. This finding is part of the archaological campaign at this site carried by the British Museum, that has dealt mostly with Canaanite burial practices and associated rituals. (Read the full article).

The other finding is that of a late Bronze Age town at the site of Pyla, near Laranaca, Cyprus, dating to the 14th and 13th centuries BCE in its older layers and showing continuity until the Roman period. The site, known as Vigla, is on small plateau looking at the British colonial outpost (aka "military base") of Dekhelia. (Read full article).

Research journalist jailed in Germany

Jürgen Cain Külbel, a former GDR policeman recycled into research journalist has been sentenced to ten days of jail under weak legal pretexts. VN considers that he has been punished for political reasons, as he has repeatedly denounced the political bias and lack of evidence in the research of the murder of the Lebanese billionaire and politician Rafik Hariri, and more specifically because denouncing that the Commissioner of the UN International Independent Investigation Commission into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri had financial binds with the perpetrators, and that his main aide is a CIA agent involved in the ongoing wave of kidnappings in Europe.

Full article: A Voltaire Network collaborator jailed in Berlin.

Interview with Külbel on the Hariri process: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri: A Biased Investigation.

Antimilitarist Israeli animated documentary hits Cannes

Waltz with Bashir is a documentary film on the memories of a soldier (Ari Folman, the director) who took part in the Sabra and Chatila masscre of Palestinian refugees. The massacre was technically perpetrated by fascist Christian Lebanese militias allied with Israel but the Israeli army, under the command of Ariel Sharon, was surrounding the camps making sure nobody could escape.

Folman says:

You are 18 years old, they send you there, you go there on a plane. You land at the international airport in Beirut and you see people get killed for nothing.

When you look at it now, the rage and the anger is even stronger than it used to be before I made the film.

Maybe that's because I established family in the last five years and I have suddenly three kids. I look at them and they're boys and think: 'I will never let them do the same things I did.'

This film is one of the things in order to persuade them not to take part in any violence whatsoever.

Looks promising.

More at BBC: Animation tipped for Cannes glory.

Near East in max alert as US destructor patrols nearby.

Saudi Arabia has called its denizens to leave Lebanon soon after the US warship "Cole" was posted near unstable Lebanon.

Saudians are quite privileged US allies and they probably know something. It could be a routinary warn like the one issued last month but its coincidence with the massacre in Gaza, the deployement of this US warship and the unexpected retreat of Turkey from Kurdistan after the USA commanded it (apparently) suggests that something is being plotted by the high Imperial circles.

But:

Nabih Berri, the parliament speaker, who is aligned with the opposition, has linked the deployment of the warships to Israel's raids in the Gaza Strip.

"The target [of US warships] is Gaza. It is aimed to allow what must happen in Gaza to happen without anyone moving to support [the Palestinians]," he said.

"This is a real threat, not merely a muscle-flexing."

Berri also said that the US military move was designed to focus attention on Lebanon "in order to cover up the massacres being committed in Gaza".

"This [US] fleet comes to back Israel so that it can complete its plan," he said.

Whatever the case, it looks like the situation is really hot right now, not the less because of the Israeli impune genocide.