if i may...

if you go far enough back - so, the period of david & solomon that chomsky briefly mentioned, or even further back to moses - what the archaeology states is that the region was a kind of backwater, to the point that real world archaeologists largely write off anything before the captivity - or a few generations before it. it's then widely understood that the area changed dramatically under the persians...

so, i thought chomsky was actually referencing the kurdish theory, and that's what the dna actually says - that the bulk of world jews today (outside of the few that stayed in israel) are genetically closer to kurds than they are to palestinians, a truth that seems to have more to do with the persian colonization, which is the event that truly changed the region. before persia, the region seems to have been ethnically and culturally phoenecian, rather than arab or jewish. what you call judaism then develops under very, very heavy iranian influence. it was under this period that the population adopted the language of aramaic. so, the language you speak of was not there, except in the temples.

there was then a period of greek hegemony, where the population absorbed grecian moral ideas, which were foundational to the construction of rabbinic judaism. the romans absorbed this, and then destroyed it. there was some jewish migration out of the region both before and after these events, and how much of it has to do with it isn't really clear. chomsky's family history is probably not entirely bunk - he's probably got some rabbinic ancestry somewhere along the way, but it would have intermarried with the local turkic and slavic groups. and, then we have yiddish. and there was spain...where neo-carthaginian patterns of migration were established, and they came full circle. everywhere they went, jews intermarried and absorbed the local gene pool.

but, most of the jews stayed put - and converted to islam. for that reason, chomsky is right: the real descendants of the historical hebrews are actually the palestinians, who adopted the identity of a greek tribe named the philistines under romanization, and then arabization. looking for jews scattered across the earth is as useful as looking for carthaginians - they're largely gone.

so, to address this guy's point about the jews being indigenous, it's not that he's wrong so much as he's confused - if you do the archaeology, what you see is how israel became arabized. that's the lesson to learn from that task - that one layer begets another. and, that the past is right in front of you.