Historical truth important but let’s not forget the moral issue

NADAV COHEN (Letters, June 2) must be aware that Zionism began as a secular movement and is in fact strenuously resisted on religious grounds by increasingly vocal Orthodox Jewish scholars, such as Yakov Rabkin, whose book, A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, is most enlightening.

Despite the fact that Zionism began as a secular movement, Mr Cohen begins by repeating the biblical myth of “returning to… the land of their forefathers”. Quotes from two leading archaeologists (Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Neil Asher Silberman of the Belgian institute of Archaeology) show up this myth for the nonsense it is: “The historical saga contained in the Bible — from Abraham … to the rise and fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah — was not a miraculous revelation, but a brilliant product of the human imagination”; and “The archaeological evidence points to a period of a few decades [in which a strong Israel existed] between around 835 and 800 BCE’.

The idea that something that happened almost 3,000 years ago can form the basis of a claim to sovereignty today is nonsense.!