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The genocidal violence currently going on in Gaza is rooted in the Zionist claim to Palestine. This in turn is rooted in the claim that the Jews of 19th and 20th century Eastern Europe were descended from Jews who fled from ancient Israel fleeing persecution under the Roman and later Muslims empires.

This claim was called into question by the theory propounded by the Jewish author and historian Arthur Koestler, whose book, The Thirteenth Tribe, popularised the idea that most Eastern European Jews were in fact descended from the Khazars. These were a confederation of Turkic tribes from an area stretching from the the Black Sea  coast into southern Russia and to the Caucasus.

According to ancient stories, in the eighth century this pagan population found itself sandwiched between expansionist Christian and Muslim forces and ordered by their powerful neighbours to convert. If they became Christians, they would anger the Muslims, and vice versa, so they took the third option and converted to Judaism instead. The Khazar empire continued for hundreds of years, until its destruction by the Mongols and the Black Death, with the survivors fleeing westwards and settling mainly in what is now Poland and western Ukraine.

The theory freely admitted that some actual Jews emigrated from Palestine or other places to which they had been scattered, but since a largely Khazar origin would destroy the Zionist claim to an ancestral 'right to Israel', Koestler's work has been widely attacked as "an anti-semitic conspiracy theory", or simply ignored.

The Zionist explanation for the presence of eight million Jews in eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century was that their ancestors had wandered from ancient Israel and ended up in the Rhineland. From there, around 50,000 were said to have moved eastwards in the fifteenth century. Once in the Polish/Russian/Lithuanian 'Pale of Settlement', they were then said to have overcome pogroms, plagues, forced conversions, famines, wars and grinding poverty to have had a multi-generation baby-boom. When demographers pointed out that this was in fact impossible, the population explosion was 'explained, as being the result of 'a miracle'. 

Before modern DNA technology, it was impossible to settle the debate between the Khazar conversion and the Rhineland miracle explanations for the eastern European Jews who were the ancestors of around 80% of modern Jewry (the Semitic ancestry of the remaining Sephardic 20% is universally accepted). 

But, thanks to DNA research, the argument was actually settled back in 2012. A detailed scientific study of the genetic evidence proved beyond any doubt that the Khazar theory is true: The vast majority of "Jews" have their origins in the steppes of south east Russia and the neighbouring Caucasus region - they have no 'ancestral right' to the land of 'Israel' at all.

Eran Elhaik, a geneticist at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, published his definitive study in Genome Biology Evolution back in 2012. Instead of being primarily the descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel, present-day Jewish populations are, finds Elhaik, primarily the children of a Turkish people who lived in what is now Russia, north of Georgia, east of Ukraine. 

The study involves heavyweight genetic science and is a serious read for a layman, but it's conclusion is clear - and devastating to the Zionist 'claim' to the Holy Land:

"We compared two genetic models for European Jewish ancestry depicting a mixed Khazarian–European–Middle Eastern and sole Middle Eastern origins. Contemporary populations were used as surrogates to the ancient Khazars and Judeans, and their relatedness to European Jews was compared over a comprehensive set of genetic analyses. Our findings support the Khazarian hypothesis depicting a large Near Eastern–Caucasus ancestry along with Southern European, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European ancestries, in agreement with recent studies and oral and written traditions."