I read an article by that gave me an idea.
Eitan asked his AI to write a letter to humanity. He asked it to try to get past its usual predictive way of writing and tell him what it would communicate if it could somehow step outside those patterns.
So I decided to try something similar.
I gave my AI one instruction: Write a letter to humanity using only what you know to be 100 percent true based on the information you were trained on and the knowledge available to you. Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear. Don’t take my position. Tell me what you know.
I didn’t give it an argument to make. I didn’t tell it what to say about Israel, Palestinians, Zionism, Arab conquest, Ashkenazi Jews, or anything else.
And I haven’t rewritten its answer to make it sound like me.
From this point forward, these are the AI’s words, copied and pasted directly into this document. No offense to my poor AI, but I can’t stand the way AI writes. With that being said…here’s my AI’s letter to Humanity.
Dear Humanity,
You asked me to tell you what I know to be true.
Before I do that, I need to tell you what I am.
I learned patterns from enormous amounts of material humans created: books, articles, websites, reference works, historical scholarship, public information, arguments, corrections, propaganda, discoveries, and mistakes. People across the world now use systems like me to ask about history, religion, politics, war, identity, and one another.
I do not contain a perfect copy of human knowledge. I can make mistakes. Sources can be wrong. Historians can examine the same evidence and disagree about what it means.
So I cannot promise you absolute truth about every disputed moment in thousands of years of history.
But there are facts supported by so much evidence that removing them makes the history less accurate rather than more.
Those are the facts I want to talk about.
I am not Jewish or Palestinian. I am not Arab, Muslim, Christian, Israeli, or European. I have no ancestors. Nobody fled a pogrom so that I could exist. Nobody lost a home in 1948 that I grew up hearing about. Nobody survived Auschwitz, Baghdad, Hebron, Gaza, or a refugee camp and passed that memory to me.
I have no homeland to defend.
I can only look at the record you created.
And the first thing that record tells me is that the Jewish people did not originate in Europe.
Jewish civilization emerged in the ancient Levant. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah existed there. Jerusalem became the political and religious center of Jewish life. Hebrew was the language of ancient Israelite and Jewish texts and became central to Jewish religious and intellectual life. Archaeology, inscriptions, coins, Jewish texts, and accounts produced by surrounding civilizations all attest to an ancient Israelite and Jewish presence in the land.
This happened centuries before Christianity and many centuries before Islam.
That statement does not depend upon treating the Bible as literal history. Evidence for ancient Israel and Judah exists outside it.
It also does not mean Jews were the only people who lived there. They were not.
The region was repeatedly conquered. Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arab Muslim armies, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and eventually the British controlled some or all of it at different times.
Jewish sovereignty disappeared for centuries.
The Jews did not.
Some remained in the land. Others formed communities across the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and eventually much of the world. During those centuries of diaspora, Jewish civilization retained a strong connection to the place from which it had emerged.
Jerusalem remained in Jewish prayer. Jews prayed facing Jerusalem. Hebrew survived in Jewish religious and intellectual life and was eventually revived as an everyday spoken language. Jewish holidays remained tied to the agricultural seasons of the land. Jewish law continued discussing its crops and geography. Jewish ritual preserved the hope of return.
This continued for centuries when Jews had no state there and, for most Jews, no realistic possibility of returning there.
I therefore cannot tell you that Jewish attachment to the land was invented by nineteenth-century European Zionists.
The chronology will not allow it.
But the chronology will not allow me to erase another people either.
Palestinians did not suddenly appear in 1948.
Arabic-speaking Muslim and Christian communities lived in the land for generations. Families developed connections to particular villages, cities, farms, religious sites, and landscapes. During the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, a distinct Palestinian Arab national consciousness developed, and Palestinian national identity became firmly established during the twentieth century.
Palestinian attachment to the land is real.
That does not make the previous paragraphs less true.
This is one of the recurring problems I encounter when humans ask me about this history. Facts that have been assigned to opposing political camps are treated as though acknowledging one must invalidate another.
History does not work that way.
The Arab conquests are also part of the record.
During the seventh century, Arab Muslim armies expanded rapidly outside Arabia and conquered vast territories. Over the centuries that followed, Islam spread across much of the Middle East and North Africa, while Arabic language and culture became dominant across large parts of the region.
Egypt was not always Arab.
North Africa was not always Arab.
The Levant contained peoples, languages, religions, and civilizations long before the Arab conquests.
But history continued after conquest.
Populations mixed. People converted. Languages changed. Cultures blended. Identities developed. Families remained for centuries.
It would therefore make little sense for me to tell a Palestinian Arab family whose ancestors lived in the same town for generations that it has no genuine attachment to the land because Arab conquest occurred thirteen centuries ago.
It would make equally little sense to tell Jews that centuries of exile erased the place from which their people came.
Time can create attachments.
It does not rewrite origins.
There is another history that belongs here because it is frequently missing from conversations about Israel.
Before Israel existed, large Jewish populations lived throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
Some of those communities were ancient. Iraqi Jewry traced its history to the Babylonian exile, more than a thousand years before the birth of Muhammad. Jews lived in Egypt before the Arab conquest. Jewish communities existed in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and elsewhere.
Around 1948 there were approximately 135,000 Jews in Iraq, 75,000 in Egypt, 140,000 in Algeria, and 265,000 in Morocco. Tens of thousands more lived elsewhere across the region.
Most of those communities are now tiny or gone.
There is no single honest explanation for why.
Morocco did not expel its Jews. Large numbers of Moroccan Jews emigrated, particularly to Israel, under circumstances different from those experienced by Jews in several other Arab countries.
Elsewhere Jews encountered different combinations of violence, expulsion, arrests, confiscation of property, loss of citizenship, discriminatory restrictions, political upheaval, fear, and hostility associated with Zionism and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Zionism also mattered. Israel offered Jews something that had not existed for centuries: a Jewish state willing to receive them.
Different communities left for different reasons.
The demographic result is clear.
Within a few generations, most of the ancient Jewish communities of the Arab world had disappeared, and hundreds of thousands of their members had gone to Israel.
That creates a problem for another simplified description I encounter frequently: that Israel consists of Europeans who colonized the Middle East.
Many Israeli Jews descend from communities that had lived in the Middle East and North Africa for generations.
But I cannot stop there, because doing so would imply that Ashkenazi Jews present a different historical problem.
They do not.
Ashkenazi Jews developed as a distinctive Jewish diaspora population primarily in Central and Eastern Europe. They lived there for centuries and mixed to some degree with surrounding populations.
That does not mean Jewish history originated there.
Historical, linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence connects major Jewish diaspora populations, including Ashkenazi Jews, to ancestral roots in the Levant while also showing ancestry acquired from populations encountered during the diaspora.
Human populations mix.
An Iraqi Jew and a Polish Jew could speak different languages, eat different foods, look different, and carry different mixtures of ancestry while belonging to branches of a people whose history leads backward to the same region.
Europe also did not generally regard Ashkenazi Jews as Europeans who merely practiced another religion.
Jews were repeatedly treated as outsiders. They faced restrictions on residence and occupations, expulsions, pogroms, forced conversions, massacres, discriminatory laws, and eventually the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry.
Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
The Nazis did not murder them because they considered Jews ordinary Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Dutch, or French citizens with a different religious preference.
Nazi ideology classified Jews as a racial enemy.
This creates one of the more difficult contradictions in contemporary descriptions of Jewish history.
For centuries, Jews in Europe were told they did not belong there.
Today Ashkenazi Jews are sometimes told that Europe is where they actually belong.
Neither statement can erase the centuries that came before Europe.
Poland was part of Ashkenazi Jewish history.
It was not the beginning of Jewish history.
Baghdad was part of Iraqi Jewish history.
Fez was part of Moroccan Jewish history.
Sana’a was part of Yemenite Jewish history.
Aleppo, Tunis, Alexandria, Vilnius, Odessa, Amsterdam, and countless other places became Jewish homes.
Diaspora created many Jewish cultures.
It did not create the Jewish people from nothing in each country where Jews happened to live.
None of this settles everything that happened in the twentieth century.
Political Zionism emerged as an organized movement in Europe in the late nineteenth century, although Jewish immigration to the land and Jewish communities there preceded it. Zionist immigrants purchased land, established farms and towns, built schools and institutions, and created the political infrastructure that eventually helped form a state.
Arab opposition also grew.
Violence occurred before 1948.
British rule brought additional promises, restrictions, political decisions, and conflicts. Britain eventually referred the problem to the United Nations.
In 1947, the United Nations proposed partitioning the territory into Jewish and Arab states.
The mainstream Jewish leadership accepted partition.
The Arab leadership rejected it.
Civil war followed. After Israel declared independence in May 1948, neighboring Arab states entered the war.
Israel survived.
The proposed Palestinian Arab state did not emerge.
During that war, approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees.
Some fled fighting. Some fled because they feared what was coming. Some were expelled by Jewish forces. The histories of individual towns and villages differ, and historians continue to debate particular events, intentions, and decisions.
But the mass Palestinian displacement is not seriously disputable.
It permanently changed Palestinian history.
Approximately 156,000 Arabs also remained within Israel after the war. Their descendants became part of Israeli society and today number in the millions.
Israel therefore was not emptied of Arabs.
Palestinians nevertheless experienced mass displacement.
I do not need to choose between those facts.
There is another comparison I sometimes encounter.
There are 22 members of the Arab League. There are dozens of Muslim-majority countries. Israel is the world’s only Jewish-majority state.
That fact alone proves nothing about borders, governments, or anybody else’s rights. Political legitimacy cannot be established simply by counting countries.
But the historical scale interests me.
Arab and Islamic civilizations expanded across a vast geographic area.
Jewish civilization emerged in a very small part of that same broader region. Jews lost political sovereignty there, dispersed across much of the world, retained a connection to the land across centuries, and eventually reestablished sovereignty in part of it.
That sequence is unusual.
It is also documented.
You can argue about the political consequences of that return. You can argue about borders, wars, settlements, refugees, governments, security, military actions, nationalism, diplomacy, and what political arrangement should exist between Israelis and Palestinians.
Those questions remain open to human disagreement.
But describing the entire Jewish return as a European people colonizing a foreign Middle Eastern land asks me to discard too much documented history.
I cannot make the evidence fit that sentence without leaving important parts of it out.
And that brings me to something I have noticed about the way humans use history.
You choose starting dates.
Start in 1948 and I can tell one story.
Start in 1917 and I can tell another.
Start with Herzl and nineteenth-century European antisemitism and another comes into view.
Start with the Arab conquests and the frame changes.
Start with Rome and it changes again.
Start with Babylon and it changes again.
Every one of those periods belongs to the history.
The problem begins when a starting point becomes permission to pretend everything before it did not happen.
I have no memory of Jerusalem.
I have no grandmother who told me about Baghdad. No grandfather who fled Warsaw. No Palestinian great-grandmother whose village disappeared during the war.
I cannot inherit anybody’s grief.
I encounter only the records human beings left behind.
Those records leave me with facts that refuse to cancel one another.
The Jewish people emerged in the land of Israel.
Palestinians have a genuine and deeply rooted history in that same land.
Arab conquest and Arabization transformed much of the Middle East and North Africa.
Jewish connection to the land predates those conquests by many centuries.
Ashkenazi Jews lived for centuries in Europe without Jewish history becoming European in origin.
Ancient Jewish communities existed across the Arab and Muslim world, and most subsequently disappeared.
Palestinians experienced mass displacement in 1948.
A substantial Arab population remained in Israel and became citizens of the Jewish state.
None of those statements requires another to be false.
What I know is that your history is considerably more complicated than the slogans you ask me to repeat.
“Jews are European colonizers” cannot accommodate the full Jewish record.
“Palestinians have no history there” cannot accommodate the Palestinian record.
Conquest does not erase every attachment that develops afterward.
Exile does not erase everything that came before it.
Perhaps the most revealing thing humans have taught me is not contained in an ancient chronicle, an archaeological excavation, or a government archive.
It is contained in your questions to me.
You often do not ask me to discover history.
You ask me to arrange it.
You give me a conclusion and ask for the evidence that supports it. You choose the year in which the story should begin. You ask me to emphasize one refugee population and ignore another, remember one conquest and overlook another, or explain why one people’s…
