Newsweek Editor Claims ‘Zionist Cry Babies’ Have No Ties to Israel in Twitter Rant

High-level editor of Newsweek Middle East evoked what some called anti-Semitic tropes in a lengthy Twitter exchange on September 6.

In responding to a flurry of online criticism of a piece published by Newsweek Middle East titled “Where is Palestine?” Leila Hatoum alluded to the notion that Eastern-European Jews have no ancestral or historic connection to the Middle East....

...The rightwing website the Tower also highlighted a two-year-old tweet in which Hatoum evoked the “Khazar hypothesis,” used historically “to say that Jews are not the Chosen People of God,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, “and that they are making a false claim to Israel.” According to the hypothesis, Ashkenazi Jewry come originally from a kingdom of Khazaria, in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and converted to Judaism en masse centuries ago.

The hypothesis has been discussed and employed by a whole range of groups and thinkers — from the neo-Nazi Christian Identity movement to the left-wing Israeli author Sholomo Sand. In it’s most extreme permutations, the hypothesis is employed to “prove” that the European Jews of today — and their ancestors and descendants — are not the “true descendants” of the Hebrews of the Bible. Potok called is “a hardline anti-Semitic theory.”

Though the hypothesis has a much older history, it was popularized in 1976 by Arthur Koestler in a book titled The Thirteenth Tribe. Koestler, ironically, was seeking to combat anti-Semitism by proving that Jews were “white” Europeans — not Semites.