Gaza started shooting rockets on Israel cities again

Of course they are, given that we only hear about these stories once every several months (sometimes even more).

Who said anything about constantly? Rockets from Gaza are not being constantly fires into Israel. Perhaps you also don't hear about the almost daily Israeli incursions into Lebanese airspace, but does happen.

That would depend on what you mean by an 'excellent job.' If by excellent job you mean Hamas thwarting every single rocket attack, than that's just wishful thinking.

Well you should. Your government is working tirelessly to mediate between the two sides, and to have the Israeli defence minister say those things about your Secretary of State and the peace process...well, the level of partisanship in the US has really reached an all-time high.

Of course it does. ICBMs can wipe out a whole population; the rockets from Gaza- if they even manage to evade the Iron Dome- are pretty much harmless unless they hit you square in the face.

And like Face Your said, every Israeli household within rocket range has a bomb shelter as per law. So when putting this all into context, we can conclude that these rockets attacks are inconsequential when compared to Israeli's policies of land theft or the price-tag attacks that really do seem to constantly occur. Why, another one happened just yesterday! Did you hear about that?


http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/15/world/meast/west-bank-mosque-vandalism/

Yeah, they'll be plenty of dancing going around when Israel decides to cease its settlement projects, as opposed to expanding them.

 

In other words you expect them to be perfect.

 

Specificity, please. Anyway, the recent rocket attack was not done by Hamas, and even Israel knows that.

Then you're clearly very ignorant about the Lebanese political scene. The LAF is always finding and defusing rockets aimed towards Israel.

Even Israel knows that Hezbollah are not the ones firing the rockets so, like usual, you are talking out of your ass.

 

They are converts to Judaism and form a very small % of the Jewish community, that in no way changes the undeniable fact that the majority of modern day Jews can trace their lineage directly to the neolithic Levant, but it is nice to see your overt racism on full display for all to see, just what exactly makes these people jungle dwelling savages? They neither live in the jungle or are savage.

 

So who was it done by? Hamas is in the business of just leaving their rockets just lying around the streets for any Mohammad, Abu, or Ali to pick up and fire into Israel?

OMFG your assertion that is not Hezbollah who has been firing the rockets from Lebanon into Israel is the most laughable thing I've ever heard on this forum.

 

After 2000 years its doubtful most Jews who lived across the world can trace their lineage to the levant. Not that it matters, we can all trace our lineage to Africa, doesnt mean we have any claim there.

 

genetic research proves otherwise.

Ashkenazi and Sephardic male DNA is mostly from the Middle East, while our female DNA is mostly from southern-eastern Europe

 

Indeed. But you'll rarely, if ever, get a balanced perspective in the corporate mainstream media where, in terms of atrocities committed by the Israeli's, the concept 'censorship by omission' is normally preferred:

http://www.glasgowmediagroup.org/content/view/4

Let's look at the example of the Israeli genocide of Cast Lead in 2008/09. In the mainstream media, Israel's massacre was presented as a "war", as a "Gaza conflict" between two sides engaged in "fighting". This is the standard fiction, as Tim Llewellyn, the BBC's former Middle East Correspondent, noted:

"In the news reporting of the domestic BBC TV bulletins, 'balance', the BBC's crudely applied device for avoiding trouble, means that Israel's lethal modern army is one force, the Palestinians, with their rifles and home-made bombs, the other 'force': two sides equally strong and culpable in a difficult dispute, it is implied, that could easily be sorted out if extremists on both sides would see reason and the leaders do as instructed by Washington..." (Llewellyn, 'Why the BBC Ducks the Palestinian Story - Part 1', Media Lens, January 15, 2004)

Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, one of two foreign doctors working at Gaza's biggest hospital, al-Shifa, told CBS News:

"I've seen one military person among the hundreds that we have seen and treated. So anyone who tries to portray this as sort of a clean war against another army are lying. This is an all-out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza and we can prove that with the numbers." (CBS News, January 5, 2009; http://uk.youtube.com /watch?v=Ev6ojm62qwA)

Even the death toll cited above does little to communicate the true one-sidedness of the wider violence, injustice and cruelty. One hardly knows where to begin. For example, largely unmentioned by the media, prior to the invasion, 14 Israelis had been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from Gaza over the preceding seven years as against 5,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks. (Seumas Milne, 'Israel's onslaught on Gaza is a crime that cannot succeed,' The Guardian, December 30, 2008; www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/dec/30/israel-and-the-palestinians-middle-east)

As ever, Israeli politicians claimed to have been heroically restraining themselves and their capacity for violence (a manifest source of pride) in the face of endless provocation. And yet,in February-March 2008, 110 Palestinian civilians were killed during 'Operation Winter Heat'.

During the ceasefire, Israel placed severe restrictions on the number of trucks allowed to bring food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. Israeli historian, Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, wrote in the Guardian:

"It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law." (Shlaim, 'How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe,' The Guardian, January 7, 2009; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine)

He added:

"The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash."

It is the sheer cruelty of Israeli oppression that captures the world's imagination. Or, more accurately, defies it.

The corporate media is always happy to echo claims that Israel is "targeting Hamas" rather than the Palestinian people. State of the art, US-supplied missiles, bombs and artillery shells are rarely aimed at the regular army targets for which they were designed: tanks, command posts, trenches and bunkers. More often than not they are fired into residential areas in one of the world's most densely-populated strips of land. Cast Lead was no exception.

The white phosphorus (WP) shells used against Palestinian civilians were incendiary airburst weapons designed to incinerate a wide target area. The weapon has been used by US forces in their infamous "shake 'n' bake" attacks on Iraqi insurgents in cities such as Fallujah.

Israel consistently claimed that 80 per cent of those killed in the 2008/09 Israeli assault on Gaza were Hamas "militants". Al Haq, a Palestinian legal rights group, reports that in fact 80 per cent of Palestinian fatalities were civilians. According to figures cited by the World Health Organisation, at least 40 per cent were children. (Jonathan Cook, 'Civilian death toll spurs legal action,' The National, January 9, 2009; http://www.thenational.ae/article/ 20090109/FOREIGN/417838381/1002)

Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF) characterised the death toll as reaching "alarming proportions" and indicative of "extreme violence indiscriminately affecting civilians." (http://reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/ TUJA-7N55DU?OpenDocument&rc=3&cc=ps e)

Claims of careful targeting are hardly credible given that Israeli artillery shells hit three United Nations-run schools being used as refugee centres, killing more than 50 people. The UN had informed the Israeli military that the schools were refugee centres - GPS coordinates were provided. Israeli forces knew what they were attacking and they knew the centres were packed with the same families they had previously told to leave their homes to avoid attack.

Israel explained that Hamas fighters had been firing from within one of the schools. When the claim became indefensible, it was quietly withdrawn in "private" briefings to Westerners - a retraction barely reported anywhere. (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=s0BRJS6WnMs)

Ben Brown of BBC World News, January 11, claimed that the UN-run school was hit by a stray mortar round. But just prior to the launch of the ground offensive, Israel shelled Palestine Square, Gaza City's main shopping area, killing five Palestinians. They destroyed the American International School. They also destroyed a mosque in Beit Hanoun during evening prayers killing a dozen people. At least thirty civilians were killed in Zeitoun when a house was shelled the day after Israeli forces ordered 100 Palestinians to shelter there (Mel Frykberg, 'Israel Fighting Also The UN,' January 10, 2009; http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45364). Were these all accidents?

Haaretz reported that, in approving the ground invasion, the Israeli government had taken into account the likely high number of Palestinian civilian casualties. On January 9, 2009 the paper reported that Lt. Colonel Amir, commander of a combat engineers unit, had told Israeli TV:

"We are very violent. We are not shying away from any method of preventing casualties among our troops." (Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, 'Israel's three alternatives for the future of the Gaza war,' Haaretz, January 9, 2009; http://www.haaretz.com/hasen /spages/1053590.html)

Israeli media reported that their commanders are unsurprised by the heavy civilian toll - the priority was indeed the protection of IDF soldiers:

"For us, being cautious means being aggressive," one told Israel's Haaretz newspaper. "From the minute we entered, we've acted like we're at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground. I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in which we are operating will describe the shock. Maybe someone there will sober up before it continues." (Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, 'Using aggressive tactics in Gaza to save soldiers' lives,' Haaretz, January 7, 2009; http://www.haaretz.com/ hasen/spages/1053401.html)

These are comments which define the methods and aims indicated by the term 'terrorism'.

On January 6, 2009 Israeli internal security minister Meir (*)(*)(*)(*)reet responded to the massive civilian casualties on BBC's Newsnight:

"The French say, 'La guerre comme la guerre'." (January 6, 2009; http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/ b00gnjlm/Newsnight_06_01_2009/)

War is indeed war, but the civilian population of Gaza is not at war - the Geneva Conventions protecting civilian life apply.

In 2008, (*)(*)(*)(*)reet suggested that residential Gaza neighbourhoods from which Hassam rockets were fired should be obliterated: "any other country would have already gone in and level [sic] the area, which is exactly what I think the IDF should do - decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it." (Attila Somfalvi, 'Sheetrit: We should level Gaza neighbourhoods,' Ynet, February 10, 2008; http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articl...504922,00.html)

He added: "We should let them know 'you have to leave, this area will be taken down tomorrow' and just take it down - that will show them we mean business."

Using violence to show a civilian population "we mean business" is, again, terrorism. Needless to say, (*)(*)(*)(*)reet was advocating major war crimes.

The then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared that Gazan civilians should not be allowed "to live normal lives"; and internal security minister Avi Dichter had previously demanded that Israel take action "irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians". (Jonathan Cook, 'Disappearing Palestine,' Zed Books, London, 2008, p.132).

Well in advance of the invasion, Israel developed plans to counter the inevitable images of bloodied children and tiny, dismembered bodies. Avi Pazner, Israel's former ambassador to Italy and France, drafted in to support the propaganda component of the offensive, commented:

"Whenever Israel is bombing, it is hard to explain our position to the world. But at least this time everything was ready and in place." (Anshel Pfeffer, 'Israel claims success in the PR war,' Jewish Chronicle, December 31, 2008; http://www.thejc.com/articles/ israel-claims-success-pr-war)

In 2008, the perfectly named National Information Directorate was formed within the Israeli Prime Minister's Office. This is now coordinating media operations across the various government departments. The Directorate began preparing for a Gaza offensive some six before it actually happened. Yarden Vatikay, director of the National Information Directorate, told reporters:

"One of our lessons from the Lebanon War [2006] was that there were too many uniforms in the coverage, and that doesn't come over very positively."

As a result, there are now: "Fewer military officers; more women; tightly controlled messages; and ministers kept on a short leash." (Ibid.)

A press centre was set up in the Israeli town of Sderot, near the border with Gaza, so that foreign reporters would spend as much time as possible in the main civilian area affected by Hamas rockets.

Israeli ministers were also ordered not to give unauthorised interviews to avoid a repeat of the previous year's PR disaster when Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened the Palestinians with a "holocaust".

"The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah (the Hebrew word normally used to refer to the Jewish Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis), because we will use all our might to defend ourselves." ('Israeli minister warns of Palestinian "holocaust",' The Guardian, February 29, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2008/feb/29/israelandthepalestinians1)

A key deception promoted by the National Information Directorate involves the claim that the cycle of violence began when Hamas broke a four-month ceasefire agreed in June 2008. In fact, Israel broke the ceasefire when it launched a raid into Gaza on November 4, killing six people. On November 5, the Guardian reported:

"A four-month ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza was in jeopardy today after Israeli troops killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid into the territory.

"Hamas responded by firing a wave of rockets into southern Israel, although no one was injured. The violence represented the most serious break in a ceasefire agreed in mid-June, yet both sides suggested they wanted to return to atmosphere of calm." (Rory McCarthy, 'Gaza truce broken as Israeli raid kills six Hamas gunmen,' The Guardian, November 5, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008 /nov/05/israelandthepalestinians)

 

You tell me. Israel agrees with me in that it wasn't Hamas.

And are those pictures supposed to prove that Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel?

 

Male DNA from the ME, but female DNA from south eastern europe, how does that help your case? Dont you want to say that jewish DNA of both genders is directly from the levant?

By the way, why dont I have a claim on Africa?

 

Just because you don't have a clue what you're talking about half the time does not mean that I'm making things up it just means that you are completely ignorant about the subject at hand. The Arab plan called for the refugee problem to be settled along the guidelines of UNGA Resolution 194 which calls for the right of return, the problem is that this resolution was from 1948 and the Arab League and PA consider all the descendants of the actual refugees to be refugees themselves and entitled to that right of return or in other words the destruction of Israel through a demographic shift.

You've got it backwards, Oslo was not completed because they launched the 2nd Intifada which was organized by Arafat and launched when Sharon proved that PA security guarantees were worthless when he visited the Temple Mount.

LOL what goodwill would that be? The election of Hamas which calls for the destruction of Israel and the extermination of world Jewry right in their charter?

 

If not Hamas then who?

Again is Hezbollah just leaving their Katusha's lying around in the streets for anyone to find and fire into Israel?

 

Yes we know rockets packed with high explosives are perfectly acceptable and no country in the world save for the blood thirsty Israelis would respond militarily to hundreds of rockets being fired across their borders.

Once again the reason why there are not more casualties is because all Israelis within rocket range are mandated by law to have at least one bomb resistant room. Perhaps you and your sources would prefer that Israel respond in kind by firing unguided rockets into Gaza where no such legal requirements exist. I guarantee you that Palestinian civilian casualties would increase exponentially if that was the Israelis response.

And I don't recall anyone ever claiming that Hamas was a standard military, they are in fact war criminals and terrorists who do not dawn uniforms and hide amongst the civilian population.

 

Jews used to do a great deal of proselytizing

http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1850

This went on until it was banned in the 4th C.

Come to think of it, we should be watching out ourselves. I have been watching The Orphans of the Sahara and the Tuareg are desperate for a home. Look no further

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-17740638

 

This post illustrates perfectly your uncritical interpretation of the distorted pro-Israeli media narrative as outlined in my post. As usual, you disingenuously extrapolate these distortions by presenting them as if they were truths.

 

Extrapolate the truth in addition to a visual clip---------->the truth from the mouth of PLO leaders. Here it is...

Palestinian Authority Calls For ‘Jihad in Jerusalem’

https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1389967257-670fc88f772990c617b642df32e4e76b-0a91417?pa=19819182623


Click here to watch: Palestinian Authority Calls For ‘Jihad in Jerusalem’

Palestinian Authority (PA) Minister of Religious Affairs Mahmoud Al-Habash claimed Monday that Jihad fighters should not flock to Syria, but to Jerusalem - and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas applauded, according to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). "Whoever wants resistance, whoever wants Jihad, the direction for Jihad is well-known and clear," Al-Habash claimed to a crowd at a PA-sponsored event. "Those who send young people to Syria or elsewhere to die for a misdirected cause must stop and understand that Jerusalem is still waiting. Jerusalem is the direction, Jerusalem is the address." "There is a message we must convey to those who kidnapped the Yarmouk [Palestinian] refugee camp [in Syria] with baseless false slogans, pretexts, and excuses," he continued. "We say to them: 'The [place for] resistance and Jihad is not the Yarmouk refugee camp. Whoever wants resistance, whoever wants Jihad, the direction for Jihad is well-known and clear. Everyone knows it. I don't think that there is anyone who doesn't know where Jihad is supposed to take place." "I don't think that there is anyone who doesn't know to where we should direct efforts or where to concentrate the masses. I don't think there is anyone who doesn't know this. Those who send young people to Syria or elsewhere to die for a misdirected cause must stop and understand that Jerusalem is still waiting. Jerusalem is the direction, Jerusalem is the address."

PMW notes that Abbas applauded to the speech, which came just hours after PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki claimed to Maariv that “the Arab states will never recognize a Jewish state.” On Saturday, Abbas told a visiting delegation that there will be "no peace between us and Israel" without eastern Jerusalem as the capital of the future Palestinian state.


Watch here
http://bit.ly/Ka3MU1

 

[video=youtube;vXePDd9WRz0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXePDd9WRz0[/video]

What a beautiful, precise job... a pleasure to watch.

 

Your sources are overtly partisan propaganda sites at best and Muslim-hate sites such as Palwatch at worse. I cannot take your brand of Jewish extremism seriously, sorry.

 

Indeed, that would explain the other posters claim about DNA, ample proof that in fact most jews cannot trace their lineage to the levant.

 

No group has claimed responsibility. Although I did find this:

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2014/01/yahya_ayyash_brigade.php

No. Hezbollah are not the only group in Lebanon that possesses rockets.

 

The only distortion here is your attempts to re-define high explosive packed rockets being indiscriminately into Israel as somehow no more of a threat than fireworks. These rocket attacks are war crimes and are what prompted an Israeli military response, they are what prompted the blockade, and they are what prompted the closure of the border crossings, and any assertion to the contrary is a blatant lie. You don't even try to address these points because you can't, you simply ignore the fact that it was Hamas who were and are the aggressors and try to dismiss the rocket attacks as somehow not real attacks, that is what is disingenuous and distorted.

 

lol so a group named after Hamas's top bomb maker, and we're supposed to believe that this is not a Hamas front group? Spare me.

Really then where are they getting them from exactly? Hezbollah is getting them from Iran, so how are these other groups getting their hands on these rockets if not from Hezbollah or their pay masters in Tehran?

- - - Updated - - -

Israeli military incursions into Gaza and Lebanon were precipitated by hundreds of Hamas and Hezbollah rocket attacks, end of story, nothing you say or no matter how many times you ignore it will change these unequivocal facts.

 

The numerous peer reviewed studies which prove conclusively that the majority of modern Jews can trace their lineage directly to the neolithic Levant have been posted here too many times to count.

The Jews and their ancestors have had an unbroken presence in the Levant for 10 thousand years, at the time of partition they held a majority in the lands which were ceded to the Jewish state, if the Jews do not have a claim to their ancestral homelands than the Arabs have a far less valid claim to a Palestinian state within the occupied territories.

 

"Gaza" isn't a government. Terrorists shot 5 rockets and Israel will use it as an excuse to kill innocent people yet again. I don't think that it is civilians on Gaza who are upset that the world isn't paying attention to them......

 

Haplotypes constructed from Y-chromosome markers were used to trace the paternal origins of the Jewish Diaspora. A set of 18 biallelic polymorphisms was genotyped in 1,371 males from 29 populations, including 7 Jewish (Ashkenazi, Roman, North African, Kurdish, Near Eastern, Yemenite, and Ethiopian) and 16 non-Jewish groups from similar geographic locations. The Jewish populations were characterized by a diverse set of 13 haplotypes that were also present in non-Jewish populations from Africa, Asia, and Europe. A series of analyses was performed to address whether modern Jewish Y-chromosome diversity derives mainly from a common Middle Eastern source population or from admixture with neighboring non-Jewish populations during and after the Diaspora. Despite their long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level. Admixture estimates suggested low levels of European Y-chromosome gene flow into Ashkenazi and Roman Jewish communities. A multidimensional scaling plot placed six of the seven Jewish populations in a relatively tight cluster that was interspersed with Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations, including Palestinians and Syrians. Pairwise differentiation tests further indicated that these Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations were not statistically different. The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora.


Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes


...the Y chromosomes in Palestinian Arabs and Bedouin represent, to a large extent, early lineages derived from the Neolithic inhabitants of the area and additional lineages from more-recent population movements. The early lineages are part of the common chromosome pool shared with Jews. According to our working model, the more-recent migrations were mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, as is seen in the Arab-specific Eu 10 chromosomes that include the modal haplotypes observed inPalestinians and Bedouin... The study demonstrates that the Y chromosome pool of Jews is an integral part of the genetic landscape of the region and, in particular, that Jews exhibit a high degree of genetic affinity to populations living in the north of the Fertile Crescent.


The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East


Both the extent and location of the maternal ancestral deme from which the Ashkenazi Jewry arose remain obscure. Here, using complete sequences of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), we show that close to one-half of Ashkenazi Jews, estimated at 8,000,000 people, can be traced back to only 4 women carrying distinct mtDNAs that are virtually absent in other populations, with the important exception of low frequencies among non-Ashkenazi Jews. We conclude that four founding mtDNAs, likely of Near Eastern ancestry, underwent major expansion(s) in Europe within the past millennium.


The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder
Event


DNA Evidence

Modern DNA studies on the Y chromosome of Jews worldwide have largely disproven the Khazar origin theory for the vast majority of Jews, including the Ashkenazi.

A 1999 study by Hammer et al., published in the Proceedings of the United States National Academy of Sciences compared the Y chromosomes of Ashkenazi, Roman, North African, Kurdish, Near Eastern, Yemenite, and Ethiopian Jews with 16 non-Jewish groups from similar geographic locations. It found that "Despite their long-term residence in different countries and isolation from one another, most Jewish populations were not significantly different from one another at the genetic level... The results support the hypothesis that the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population, and suggest that most Jewish communities have remained relatively isolated from neighboring non-Jewish communities during and after the Diaspora."[50] According to Nicholas Wade "The results accord with Jewish history and tradition and refute theories like those holding that Jewish communities consist mostly of converts from other faiths, or that they are descended from the Khazars, a medieval Turkish tribe that adopted Judaism."[51]

A 2001 study by Nebel et al. found Haplogroup R1a chromosomes (called Eu 19 in the paper), which are very frequent in Eastern European populations (54%-60%), at elevated frequency (12.7%) in Ashkenazi Jews. The authors hypothesized that these chromosomes could reflect low-level gene flow into Ashkenazi populations from surrounding Eastern European populations, or, alternatively, that both the Ashkenazi Jews in Haplogroup R1a, and to a greater extent all Eastern European populations in general, might have some partial Khazar ancestry.[52]

A 2003 study of the Y-chromosome by Behar et al. found that among Ashkenazi Levites, who comprise approximately 4% of Ashkenazi Jews, the prevalence of Haplogroup R1a1 was over 50%. This haplogroup is uncommon in other Jewish groups, but found in high frequencies in eastern European populations. They argued that "it is likely that the event leading to a high frequency of R1a1 NRYs within the Ashkenazi Levites involved very few, and possibly only one, founding father." They postulated that one likely source of the gene was a "a founder(s) of non-Jewish European ancestry, whose descendents were able to assume Levite status", and that an alternate "attractive source would be the Khazarian Kingdom, whose ruling class is thought to have converted to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century." They concluded that "Although neither the NRY haplogroup composition of the majority of Ashkenazi Jews nor the microsatellite haplotype composition of the R1a1 haplogroup within Ashkenazi Levites is consistent with a major Khazar or other European origin, as has been speculated by some authors (Baron 1957; Dunlop 1967; Ben-Sasson 1976; Keys 1999), one cannot rule out the important contribution of a single or a few founders among contemporary Ashkenazi Levites."[53]

A 2005 study by Nebel et al., based on Y chromosome polymorphic markers, showed that Ashkenazi Jews are more closely related to other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than to their local neighbouring populations in Europe. However, 11.5% of male Ashkenazim were found to belong to Haplogroup R1a1 (R-M17), the dominant Y chromosome haplogroup in Eastern Europeans, suggesting possible gene flow between the two groups. The authors hypothesized that "R-M17 chromosomes in Ashkenazim may represent vestiges of the mysterious Khazars". They concluded "However, if the R-M17 chromosomes in Ashkenazi Jews do indeed represent the vestiges of the mysterious Khazars then, according to our data, this contribution was limited to either a single founder or a few closely related men, and does not exceed ~ 12% of the present-day Ashkenazim.[54]

A 2010 study on Jewish ancestry by Atzmon et al. says "Two major groups were identified by principal component, phylogenetic, and identity by descent (IBD) analysis: Middle Eastern Jews and European/Syrian Jews. The IBD segment sharing and the proximity of European Jews to each other and to southern European populations suggested similar origins for European Jewry and refuted large-scale genetic contributions of Central and Eastern European and Slavic populations to the formation of Ashkenazi Jewry."[55]


Genetic studies on Ashkenazi Jewery