I must be going senile, rylah... I mixed up everything. I got the wrong book by Sand and Gurion.
It isn't "
The Invention of the Jewish People" but "
The Invention of the Land of Israel":
And it's not Gurion's personal diary, it's an article he wrote during WWI.
My bad.
From Sand's book (if you're not rylah and have little interest in the IP conflict, feel free to read only the bolded parts):
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Early in this process, in order to entrench the conception of the Jewish right to the Land, major Zionist activists such as Israel Belkind,
David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and others attempted
to prove that the Arabs of the country were ancient descendants of the Jews. However, the revolt of 1929 put a quick end to the “ethnoracial unification of these two components of the people.” (p. 8)
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In addition to this effective technology for the preservation and dissemination of a formative historical mythos, it was also necessary
(1) to erase, in a seemingly unintentional manner, all memory of Judaism having been a dynamic and proselytizing religion at least between the second century BCE and the eighth century CE;
(2) to disregard the existence of many Judaized kingdoms that emerged and flourished throughout history in various geographic regions;
(3) to delete from collective memory the enormous number of persons who converted to Judaism under the rule of these Judaized kingdoms, providing the historical foundation for most of the world’s Jewish communities (
FOOTNOTE 1); and
(4) to downplay statements of the early Zionists—most prominently those of
David Ben-Gurion, founding father of the State of Israel who well knew that an exile had never taken place and
therefore regarded most of the territory’s local peasants as the authentic offspring of the ancient Hebrews. (
FOOTNOTE 2)
FOOTNOTE 1 Specifically, I am referring to the Adiabene kingdom of Mesopotamia, the Himyarite kingdom of southwestern Arabia, the kingdom of Dahyā al-Kāhina of northern Africa, the kingdom of Semien of eastern Africa, the kingdom of Kodungallur of the southern Indian subcontinent, and the great Khazar empire of southern Russia. It should come as no surprise that we are unable to locate even one comparative study that attempts to explore the fascinating Judaization of these kingdoms and the fate of their many subjects.
FOOTNOTE 2 For an example, see Ben-Gurion’s 1917 article “
Clarifying the Origins of the Felahs,” in David Ben-Gurion, We and Our Neighbors, Tel Aviv: Davar Press, 1931, 13–25 (in Hebrew)
