This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
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Notes -
Fascinating thread on the genetics of the area from a few days ago:
A bunch of people then take him to task in the comments for not sufficiently addressing Ashkenazi Jews.
One thing that's confusing me here is his statement [slightly trimmed] "the Jewish groups splitting off and going to Europe and North Africa, etc, are the only ones who didnt convert to either Islam or Christianity". Were there no jews who never left the area but also never converted to christianity or islam? Did they just not exist, or are they just missing from these genetic samples (perhaps they so completely mixed with immigrant jews that they're no longer a distinguishable population?), or am I just blind? The closest included sample geographically is
Syrian_Jew
.The various Jewish Diaspora groups mostly died out or were/are very tiny. Modern Jews are mostly descended from European Jews even after the Holocaust. These European Jews are descended from a very small group that migrated from the Levant into Europe shortly after Muslims took over the Levant.
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/ashkenazi-jewish-genetics-a-match
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Modern day Israel likely was continuously inhabited by Jews; although at times (eg towards the end of the crusades) this number might have dropped to the high hundreds or low thousands. Damascus and other cities in modern day Syria had much higher Jewish populations for the majority of this time, and they regularly travelled across the levant. So it’s likely that any remaining ‘Judean’ Jews would be part of the Syrian Jewish grouping.
What is certain is that for much of the last 2000 years far less than 5% or in many cases even 1% of the global Jewish population lived in Israel, although a larger percentage lived in the wider MENA region.
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Interesting, the Samaritans are the closest (virtually identical because of endogamous marriage) to the ancient bronze age Canaanites:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sca_esv=573522448&q=samaritan+people&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiv0ZaC8faBAxXpwAIHHaa4DYIQ0pQJegQICxAB&biw=1127&bih=732&dpr=2
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