Powers of 2. Photo: Cmglee - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86587380
By Justin Podur – Oct 14, 2025
Zionism is a mix of corrupted biology and mythic stories
As a holdover of 19th-century colonialism, Zionism is infused with that eraâs mix of scientific formulae and classical mythology. Science has moved on from these outdated formulae; history has moved on from the literal interpretation of myth.
The outdated scientific argument underlying Zionism is that todayâs Jewish Israeli colonists are the descendants of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel described in biblical texts.
The notion that such descent could confer upon these colonists a right to steal othersâ land today is a preposterous notion, but it has nothing to do with science, so science isnât required to refute it – logic and ethical reasoning are sufficient.
To the scientific question: are todayâs Jewish Israeli colonizers the descendents of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel described in biblical texts? Does their claim to the land go back 3000 years?
Look at this claim in the light of combinatoric mathematics (specifically, powers-of-2).
Consider a Jewish colonizer living in a West Bank settlement. Can you visualize him assaulting his Palestinian neighbours, burning houses, stealing belongings, etc., as they do with impunity? This settler has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, with the numbers of ancestors growing exponentially with each generation.
Going back 12 generations (less than 300 years ago), there were some 4096 people walking around (mostly) Europe, Africa, the Americas, perhaps even the Ottoman Empire, who each contributed 1/4096 (0.002%) to this manâs DNA.
Try it. Going back by powers of two, you fairly quickly reach a number of ancestors that exceeds the total population of planet earth at that time.
Going back 1000 years, we reach – for Europe – whatâs called the genetic isopoint: the point when all people alive in that part of the world are related to all people alive from that region in the world today, contributing a tiny portion to each contemporary person from Europeâs DNA. Because todayâs Israelis are basically Europeans, they fall into this genetic isopoint.
But suppose you disagree that Israelis are basically Europeans, even though theyâre in Eurovision and claim to be a bastion of Western civilization. Suppose you instead believe the contradictory claim that their ancestry in Palestine goes back 3000 years. The global genetic isopoint was around 3400 years ago: if you look at the people today and the people 3400 years ago, every one of us is related to every one of them, with each of them contributing a tiny fraction of each of our DNA.
Leave aside the illogic of a claim that descent should confer a right to steal someone elseâs land or commit genocide. The ancient Hebrews were no more related to todayâs genocidal Israelis than they were to anyone else on planet earth.
This wasnât easy for me to understand the first time I read it, so allow me to let Jonathan Marks, author of the book Is Science Racist?, explain it again:
âLet us say, for the sake of argument, that you claimed to be a direct descendant of George Washington, say ten generations ago. The biological question is, âHow much of your DNA did you inherit from him?â That question can be answered by knowing how many other lineal ancestors you have ten generations ago. One generation ago, you had two parents, each of whom had two parents, and so on. Ten generations ago, you had 210 ancestors, or more than 1,000 lineal progenitors. While that number is an upper limit, assuming you are perfectly outbred, it nevertheless indicates that whatever DNA you may have inherited from George Washington is at best a minuscule proportion of your genome. Moreover, it is also a miniscule proportion of George Washingtonâs genome, and consequently the chance that what you happened to inherit actually represents George Washingtonâs best DNA is quite small. Clearly, then, being George Washingtonâs lineal descendant is biologically meaningless.â
Marks addresses Zionist claims to ancient rights to the Holy Land fairly explicitly, though he does so by discussing the Da Vinci Code (my emphases added):
âConsider the premise of The Da Vinci Code, that there might be people alive today who are descendants of Jesus. But biologically speaking, how many other people would they also be the descendants of? If we assume 25 years per generation, Jesus would have lived about 80 generations ago. And 280 ancestors in 30 ad works out to about a septillion (a number with 24 zeroes behind it) ancestors in that generation along with Jesus.
âBut what a strange calculation â that anyone would have more ancestors than people alive at the time â in this case, by many orders of magnitude. This paradox is known as pedigree collapse, and it reveals the bio-cultural aspect of ancestry, retaining symbolic meaning in the face of effectively infinite genetic dilution, much as devotees of homeopathic medicines believe about their elixirs.
âOf course, you could have received a tiny chunk of DNA from that first-century ancestor, because that is what ancestry is, biologically â the transmission of DNA. But here is the kicker: any ancestor in your bloodline that far back is probably also in mine. Think about it. There are a septillion slots to fill in your first-century pedigree, and perhaps a few tens of millions of people alive back then to fill them. Anyone alive back then, who has anything represented in todayâs human gene pool, is as likely to be among my septillion ancestors as to be among your septillion ancestors. There may be quantitative variation in our pedigrees â he may recur more times in my pedigree than in yours â but there isnât mathematical room for there to be qualitative variation.â
What Marks is saying about pedigrees means that not even huge amounts of inbreeding can defeat this exponential growth. Even if you believe that Jewish Europeans are extremely inbred (theyâre not), pedigree collapse still happens after a surprisingly small number of generations:
âThere simply werenât enough people alive, and everybodyâs got to have two parents. We are all biological relatives, we are all inbred, and the farther back we go, the less meaning biological differences have, because for every generation that we retreat, the number of our ancestors doubles, yet the size of the human species diminishes. Each of us has a septillion ancestors being drawn from a much smaller pool of people who lived 80 generations ago.â
The biological claims collapse easily.
The archaeological claims are even worse.
Biblical archeology is basically a centuries-long project of Zionists to dig below the lands they occupy to find (or make) evidence to verify the mythic stories of their religious texts. Any dig that took place after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when the British Empire awarded Palestine to the world Zionist movement, can be assumed to have been corrupted and to have found what imperialist and Zionist scholars were looking for to justify their conquests. A 2001 book like The Bible Unearthed doesnât even begin to fulfill its promise of âsetting apart facts and legendâ. For the past century biblical archaeologists have gone and dug around in Occupied Palestine looking for proof of conclusions they had already decided based on their religious texts and their colonial plans. Thereâs nothing more to this field than the brandishing of ancient objects to fulfill insidious agendas.
With biology and archeology refuted, whatâs left is trying to make a claim based on the texts themselves. The logic there is both simple and repugnant: ancient myths state that todayâs colonists had ancestors who committed genocide to take that land from its inhabitants thousands of years ago, and todayâs Israelis have to re-enact those genocides today. Thatâs not history, and itâs not science. Itâs an evil to be stopped.
(Substack)
Justin Podur
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and a writing fellow at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. You can find him on his website at podur.org and on Twitter @justinpodur. He teaches at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies.
