The claim that today’s Jews are not the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but rather the offspring of pagan tribes who long ago converted to Judaism is today heard again and again in the relentless efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state.

And this while the Palestinians make wild claims of bloodline ties to the Jebusites and Canaanites, or even, as in the case of some Palestinian Christians, to the original (Jewish) Christians. None of this is scientific, nor is it historical. It is an adaptation of the 19th century “ideology of races” and its twisted offshoot, eugenics, a science aimed at improving the human race by, among other things, eliminating those deemed inferior.

In the 19th century, however, before racism became forever linked with the Nazis, people had no problem talking about race, and the Jews were widely identified as a race. It was this perspective that was used by both philo-Semites and anti-Semites to argue for the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of their ancestors.

Sadly, the Palestinians’ mythical link to the pre-Jewish inhabitants...