WHITE House reporter Helen Thomas, who died on July 20, was banished from the Washington press corps not because she tormented presidents from Kennedy to Bush Jr but because she uttered what to America’s powerful Israel lobby was blasphemy. She remarked that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine”. Asked where they should go, she said “go home”. Asked where precisely, she said “Poland, Germany”. That ended a brilliant journalistic career, even though she had spoken a profound historical truth germane to Israel’s 1950 law of return, “authorising” Jews anywhere in the world to “return” to Palestine.

As a number of Western and Jewish scholars point out, the Zionist movement was led by Russian, Polish and Baltic Jews whose ancestors had never been to Palestine. These scholars include John Rose, Sir John Bagot Glubb (Glubb Pasha), and Arthur Koestler, a Jewish scholar who emphasised this point in his novel The Thirteenth Tribe.

Like Encyclopaedia Britannica, they all trace the ancestry of eastern European Jews — Ashkenazim — to the Khazar state.

The Khazars were a Turkic tribe, which founded in the seventh century a state between the Caspian and Black seas. The state was prosperous, because of revenues from lucrative trade with the Byzantine and Arab empires. The population followed Buddhism. However, a major source of worry for the Khazar rulers was the constant wars between the Byzantine and Arab empires.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica “the most striking feature” of the Khazar state was the apparent adoption of Judaism by the Khaqan and the ruling elite in the middle of the eighth century. The precise circumstances leading to the adoption of Judaism by the Khazars are not clear, but, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the “fact itself is undisputed and unparalleled” in Eurasian history.

John Rose, himself a Jew, attributed economic motive to the conversion. Quoting Abramski et al, Rose says “trapped between the Islamic and Byzantine empires, the pagan Khazar elite converted to Judaism late in the ninth century as a means to maintain its political independence and integrate itself into the Jewish trading network” (Myths of Zionism, p48).

Glubb Pasha emphasises this point in his autobiography: “Fearing that if they became Christians they would become a satellite of Constantinople and, if Muslims, followers of Baghdad, the great Khan of the Khazars with all his people accepted Judaism” (Sir John Bagot Glubb, The Changing Scenes of Life p137).The Khazar state ceased to exist in the 10th century, Russia incorporating it in its empire, and the Khazar people melted into Eurasia between the Baltic coast and Ukraine. That’s how the Baltic states, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Hungary and eastern Germany came to have large Jewish populations. Says Glubb Pasha, “Eastern Europe was peopled by great numbers of Jews of Turkish and Slavic origin who were not descended from the ancient Israelites” (p137).

According to Glubb Pasha, “the myth that the Jewish ‘race’ was living in Palestine until AD 70, and that the Jews were then driven from their homeland by the Romans, is completely untrue” (p 136). Rose supports this point when he says the Roman action in Jerusalem did not constitute Jewish diaspora, since a majority of Jews were already living outside Palestine, mostly in the Middle East. The Jews, he says, had been living in Iraq for 2,500 years since the Babylonian captivity, and they were utterly indifferent to events in Palestine. Ashkenazi Jews thought of a separate state for themselves because there was no place in the world where the Jews were persecuted the way they were in Russia and eastern Europe. No wonder, the idea of a Jewish state occurred to Ashkenazim as the only way to escape persecution. The founder of the Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, was from Hungary, while Chaim Weismann, who headed the Zionist movement after Herzl’s death and became Israel’s first president, was from Russia. Also from Russia was Menachem Begin, the terrorist who became Israel’s prime minister. Other leading and fervent Zionists from eastern Europe included Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Shamir, both from Poland, Golda Meir, born in Ukraine, and scores of others. Today these migrants from eastern Europe say they have “returned” to Palestine.

Helen paid the price for speaking the truth in a country where the president is asked to break his speech and go to a room to take a telephone call from an Israeli prime minister, who orders him to ask his secretary of state to vote in the Security Council the way he wanted.

The writer is a staff member