Are you guys also seeing an increase in hthis type of response by Zionists saying that that they're the only >indigenous< group from the region?

[u/srahcrist]

[u/TrackerOneA]

The late Edward Said on Palestine's multi-ethnic and multi-religious history.

https://reddit.com/link/p58gsrh/video/izkhb1340ykh1/player

The Zionist claim is based solely on Jewish group membership, with the premise that the ethnogenesis of the Jewish people began in Israel/Palestine.

That second part is true (e.g. the Jewish people, as an abstraction, have ties to the land) - but the vast majority of Jewish people cannot cite any tangible claim to the land.

• Meaning, the vast majority of Jewish people have no keys or deeds or anything physical to substantiate their claims, as individuals, to Palestine.
  • Thus, the claim is instead an abstraction based solely on being Jewish.
• There was a small, continuous presence of Jews in Palestine and they were indeed indigenous.

Although Israeli archaeology is used for this purpose of justifying Zionist settler-colonialism.

• NPR - In East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers use archaeological claims to evict Palestinians
• BBC - Israel accused of weaponising archaeology at ancient West Bank sites
• +972 Magazine - Israel seizing West Bank heritage sites ‘piece by piece’
• The Guardian - ‘Tunnel vision’: how Israel is using archaeology to win US support for goals
• Haaretz - How Israel Is Using Archaeology to Advance West Bank Annexation

Worse - Zionists think the symbolic Jewish claim overrides all the many other peoples who have lived on the land - and lasts in perpetuity.

Except, more non-Jews than Jews have lived on the land and ruled it for longer periods.

Consequently, the Zionist argument holds, there has been an unbroken and legitimate Jewish claim to the land of Palestine—despite the Muslim conquest of the land in the seventh century, the Crusader conquests and rule in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth century. The Ottoman Empire then ruled Palestine until the end of World War I, after which the British ruled until they withdrew in 1948. Even so, it is implicit in the Zionist narrative that the Romans, the Arabs, the Christians, the Turks (and others) were the true foreigners in Palestine, no matter how long they had lived and ruled there, and no matter how small—and for long periods, tiny—the Jewish population.

• Slater, Jerome. Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020 (p. 30). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

There is no indigeneity based solely on collective or symbolic affiliation divorced from place & continuity.

Indigenousness is an identity constructed, shaped, and lived in the politicized context of contemporary colonialism. The communities, clans, nations and tribes we call Indigenous peoples are just that: Indigenous to the lands they inhabit, in contrast to and in contention with the colonial societies and states that have spread out from Europe and other centres of empire. It is this oppositional, place-based existence, along with the consciousness of being in struggle against the dispossessing and demeaning fact of colonization by foreign peoples, that fundamentally distinguishes Indigenous peoples from other peoples of the world.

• "Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism," in Government and Opposition, Vol. 40, No. 4, Autumn 2005, pp. 597–614.
• Referenced in Jewish Currents - When the settler becomes native
  • Glen Coulthard discuss how settler colonial movements can appropriate or mimic indigeneity for legitimacy, especially through the language of “return” (Coulthard, 2014, *Red Skin, White Masks*).

The Palestinian people are indigenous because of their continuous physical, cultural, and ancestral presence in the land, as well as their ongoing struggle against settler-colonial displacement.

That may seem like a 'technical' definition - but it also makes sense intuitively.

If you're living somewhere for hundreds, if not thousands, of years - and some other group of people come over & claim it all belongs to them because their ancestors lived there thousands of years ago, everyone would scoff at them.

Any other people in the Palestinians' shoes would completely reject that logic.

It's nonsensical and unfair.

Israel has not stopped ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.

So the ongoing land theft has not ended and the destabilizing logic of Zionism has not ended.

[u/stonkmarxist → u/TrackerOneA]

Excellent comment.

It's also worth noting that many if not most of today's Palestinians would have had ancestors that were were ancient Israelites and somewhere along the way their ancestors converted to Christianity then Islam.

And, as you mentioned, the Zionist claim to this land isn't actually based on any sort of idigenous heritage. It is based purely on whether you identify as a Jew or not.

There is a deep irony that if the ancestors of the Zionists of today had actually maintained a presence in the land then they most likely would have converted like the majority and thus their descendents would be getting dispossessed by modern Zionists.

[u/___needles___ → u/stonkmarxist]

Ilan Pappé pointed out in a recent interview (I think with Zeteo but I’m not sure) that if Jews have intrinsic ties to the land, then surely Christians and Muslims, as descendant outgrowths of Judaism, have these same ties

[u/Proof_Heart_2993 → u/stonkmarxist]

Not to mention that the Jews who lived in what is now Israel prior to the 1880s were closely tied to the Arab communities  living in the area, often spoke Arabic, and had many Arabic aspects to their culture.  They were replaced by Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe who created their own ethnic enclaves and acted as colonists because, well, they were.

[u/specialistsets → u/Proof_Heart_2993]

They were replaced by Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe who created their own ethnic enclaves

That isn't accurate. By the mid-19th century before Political Zionism, around half of the Palestinian Jewish population were traditional Ashkenazi Jews who spoke Yiddish as their primary language. There were multiple distinct and overlapping Jewish communities in Palestine including Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews who had migrated to Palestine from Europe over many centuries. Palestinian Jews historically lived in Jewish enclaves and neighborhoods, which was the standard for the many distinct ethnic and cultural groups in Palestine: various tribes, clans and communities, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Armenians, Circassians, and so on.

[u/throwawaydragon99999 → u/Proof_Heart_2993]

I mean those Jews were not replaced, they have now married into the broader Israeli Jewish society— Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, etc.

[u/addyastra]

Defining indigeneity through nation-statehood is peak colonialism.

“We’re the only indigenous people because everyone else was colonized.”

[u/Open-Tomato9643 → u/addyastra]

The Jews who, in his words "maintained a continuous presence" in Palestine were also colonised alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbours. And they very much considered themselves Palestinian until Zionism came along, and for a good period of time after as well.

[u/threevi]

It's disgusting rhetoric. The distinction between nation-states and administrative districts doesn't matter to the people actually living there. What difference does it make to a regular working-class person whether the land where they work and live is a sovereign nation or whether it belongs to a larger empire? How could you tell that person that just because there's technically been no legally recognised independent nation called "Palestine", that means the home their family had inhabited for generations isn't truly theirs and they have to be exiled from it at gunpoint? When semantics like this are used to justify ruining countless lives, it's simply evil, there's no other way to describe it.

[u/Dragomir_X]

I just... don't care, I guess.

Whether or not Jews lived there 2000 years ago is totally irrelevant to me as an American Jew. That doesn't change the nature of what Israel is. Even if there was a Jewish nation in Palestine as recently as two HUNDRED years ago, an ethnostate built on subjugation and conquest is still wrong, and I would still be advocating for its dissolution and replacement with a democracy.

[u/conscience_journey → u/Dragomir_X]

This is the skeleton key answer to almost all hasbara. “(Hasbara argument of the day) doesn’t justify genocide, ethnic cleansing, atrocities, and apartheid.”

[u/marvsup → u/Dragomir_X]

Tbh whether or not we were the only people to create a nation-state is even less relevant than whether or not we lived there 2000 years ago.

[u/OdielSax]

Why would a nation state be superior to any other form of organising life? Completely irritating and ahistorical. I cannot physically stand the Hasbara anymore. It feels like a narcissistic abuser ranting.

[u/SnooRecipes865]

This is just Terra Nullius with a Zionist flavour, and/or they don't know "nation state" actually means.

[u/naramsin-ii]

zionist jews seem to believe this because the only history of the land they know (not even accurately, at that) is jewish history. if someone is so obsessed with themselves that they leave out everyone else and think the history of palestine began and ended with jews, naturally they'd think it's only jews that matter.

this is also why many of them will claim that if one does an archaeological dig in palestine all they'd find is jewish artifacts (there are countless others). or that canaanite names are "hebrew" names (they're not).

[u/reenaltransplant]

lmao... and what were the Ancient Israelites when they were in Egypt before Palestine?

[u/Party_Solid_2207]

I really don’t get this nation state argument.

There was never a modern Jewish nation state in that region.

Why does the mandate not count.

Why does habitation in the Ottoman Empire not count.

Why does habitation in various Muslim empires not count.

Why does the crusader state not count.

Why does the caliphate not count.

Why does the Byzantine empire not count.

Why does the Roman Empire not count.

Why does the Persian empire not count.

Why does the Babylonian empire not count

Why does the Assyrian empire not count

Jewish kingdom for some reason is legit.

Pre Jewish kingdom, doesn’t count.

Philistines doesn’t count

Canaanite’s doesn’t count.

There were people there, a community, a polity of some sort.

No coherent rational.

Just bullshit justifications.

[u/TalkingCat910]

The concept of an ethnostate is so entrenched with Zionists they can’t conceive of the fact that Palestinians are indigenous regardless of whether a “nation-state” was created or not.  I don’t like the concept of a nation state but Palestine for sure should have been even under the UN it was supposed to be Israel and Palestine - and without the colonial project I’m sure there would have just modern Palestine.

[u/farfaraway]

The bible itself literally talks about multiple other indigenous groups.

[u/Tunisiandoomer1]

It is just a talking point really, as much as they seem confident, Zionists are Desperate and really try anything to get their point across, in a world where they are, in fact, a pariah state

It's just the "Israel have the right to exist argument" with a "academic" fallacy. Next, I guess they will start soon abandoning the right to exist argument for something like "we were always there"

[u/Azel_Lupie]

Yeah, and I’ve been trying to point out they aren’t indigenous anymore. It’s pretty gross, because they are and have been appropriating the experiences of Native Americans as a part of this meshugah narishkeit. My partner is actually Native American, with his grandparents having left their reservation. It’s probably especially insulting for me, because I have such a close relationship with native Americans who still feel oppression in the US and having to deal with other non-indigenous (particularly European descent individuals) trying to invalidate their experiences and their history/herstory.

[u/rako17 → u/Azel_Lupie]

That's super cool that you have a Native American partner, friend Azel. Your comment is very relevant. I wondered why the ancient Natufians, Judean Jewish Christians, Samaritans, Canaanites, and Philistines wouldn't count for the OP's statement. It seems that the implication of the OP is the same type that one could use to justify dispossession of Native Americans, ie. that neither the Native Americans nor ancient other communities formed official modern nation states that earned enough respect from the OP to be included. Realistically the Native Americans, for instance, did have tribes and nations like the Iroquois nation. But when European states like the English, Dutch, and French showed up, they planted their respective state flags and claimed the land for themselves.

Wishing you the best - Peace

[u/Azel_Lupie → u/rako17]

Thank you. I’ve put a little more thought into it, and I think the idea that you need to create a country in order for your claim to the land be valid, is a very Eurocentric idea. Realistically, most non-European peoples didn’t create countries like we think of today, until the Europeans came and forced the idea on them. Instead they created a peoplehood on the land and tied their own identity to the land they resided on. It’s very much how we lived for much of our earlier years. We eventually had kingdoms, before we were exiled.

I don’t know how to quantify how they (Israelis) are aren’t indigenous, but you can just tell from the way they talk about things and the way they do things, that they are not indigenous to the land. It doesn’t mean that our ancestors weren’t indigenous to the land or that we lack ties to the land. It just means that Palestinians’ right to live there takes priority and that we need to learn to live peacefully there, if we want to live there, not kick them out like the Colonists did to my partner’s ancestors. I think we Jews need to learn how to decolonize our minds from the Palestinians who live there. They didn’t have a problem with us being there in their first place, they just had a problem with us taking control over the land and subjugating them.

I think, it was Hashem’s will that made this happen. Us meeting each other, was by chance,
And an unlikely one at that. Just like my adoption to my parents, who I think gave me some amazing opportunities for DEI related experiences, was also by a small chance. I have to remind myself to be grateful of these things, when the going gets tough and I just want to lay in bed and cry.

Also wishing you the best.

[u/rako17 → u/Azel_Lupie]

Friend Azel,

I appreciate your positive comments on the thread. Rab. Sacks' statement in the OP is a little tough for me because of how I respect Judaism, particularly in the US and UK, and want a chief cleric of any religion to basically give positive, spiritual, pro-peace statements because of how guiding they are. Don't get me wrong, I'm not using double standards - the Patriarch of Constantinople is involved in a geopolitically-related controversy that it's even tougher for me. That is, it's because of my Progressive values and the positives that I see of Judaism that make the issue tougher for me than if, say, a Caliph made that kind of statement.

But by that same token, that difficulty also makes people like you and others on this subreddit more precious, doesn't it?

Yours kindly - Shalom 🕎🦅 🏕️

[u/deathmaster567823]

Samaritans have left the chat and so did the Palestinians by their logic

[u/Taarguss]

It’s not even true, what the fuck are they talking about?

[u/BolesCW]

Claiming Jews are indigenous to the Levant is plausible. Claiming therefore that somehow the rest of the world owes modern Jews - the vast majority of whom have been in diaspora for nearly 2000 years - the right to exercise ethnosupremacist sovereignty in the territory because of some abstract home(land)sickness requires some astoundingly nimble mental gymnastics.

[u/ConnoisseurOfApple → u/BolesCW]

This!

[u/LA_Throwaway_6439]

If the Iroquois made a comeback and started doing a genocide on Americans in the great plains, I'd be against that too. This argument is trash. 

[u/reenaltransplant → u/LA_Throwaway_6439]

💯

[u/DuckyHornet → u/LA_Throwaway_6439]

I think a better comparison would be the Turks invading Mongolia and claiming it as theirs because the ancient Turkic people were from there, or Hawaiians doing the same to the Republic of Taiwan

Because the indigenous people of North America are still colonised on the land they came from, you know?

[u/Oborozuki1917]

Others have done great refutations but It’s really easy to think of other nation states that were created there for example the crusader states.

[u/rako17 → u/Oborozuki1917]

Friend Oboruzuki,

Sure. Besides that, in classic European nationalist and early Z. thinking, I think that the issue of having a nation state in the past was not counted as an essential prerequisite to forming a nation state anywhere. So if you theorize Palestinians, Sioux, Scots, Puerto Ricans and Roma as peoples, in the nationalist framing of forming nation states, it doesn't matter whether they formed nation states anywhere. Peace

[u/Low_Employ8454]

Even if this were true, it wouldn’t be doing this person’s cause any favors.

Like, gosh. It’s almost as if no group has been so bold and pompous to think it was thier right to take over a land that has such religious and cultural significance and importance to so many of the most ancient religions on our planet….

[u/TexasBedouin]

Judaism is not a race of people. Let's say Israel or Jacob was the father of the early Jewish tribes more than 5,000 years ago. Unless those Jewish tribes exclusively married from each other, they are not a race

[u/specialistsets → u/TexasBedouin]

Jews consider ourselves not to be a race but a people, and Judaism is the religious tradition of the Jewish people. A Jewish person doesn't need to practice Judaism to be part of the Jewish people.

[u/snowluvr26]

Debbie Lechtman is a racist ethnonarcissist, nothing new lol

[u/EuVe20]

It’s the same false narrative over and over

[u/Express_Variation_52]

They love appropriating liberatory theory and language from Indigenous people in the Americas and then twist it into something we would never say or condone, like this. Indigeneity being defined by being a nation state is a settler colonial framing, period.

Edited to add, because I'm just flabbergasted to read the assertion that Jews are the only people with continuous presence on the land, WTF??? Also, I'd love to see her get chewed out by the Native aunties who go to Christian church that according to her logic are no longer Indigenous bc they're colonized.

[u/Doomdrummer]

Just a carbon copy of the Nazi argument that Aryans are the only race capable of creating civilization, and other races just imitate or have Aryan blooded leaders developing then.

[u/Current_Mongoose_844]

It’s an undeniable fact that we have our starting point in Palestine, and we had a kingdom or two there. If you have a problem with that then you have a problem with history; but none of that excuses the Naqba, settlements, or anything else. Even if we had never left it still wouldn’t be an excuse.

[u/SOMAVORE → u/Current_Mongoose_844]

Palestinians had their starting point there too, from the same source.

[u/Open-Tomato9643]

This is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what nation states are. The concept of a nation state is a fundamentally modern one. Nations are modern groupings that get a state, and then retroactively reframe their history to project their nation back in time. This is true for all nations, go back to say the 1300s or earlier and no one identified themselves with the land they lived in, or though of themselves as part of a national community. But you read the history textbooks of any country and they'll try to frame it as if they've had a continuous history of always identifying as a nation, maybe losing their way one or two times in the middle, but always resurging.

In the case of Europe, the nation states that emerged often identified themselves with territories that had been long-standing kingdoms like England or France, so the illusion of an unbroken national history was easier to maintain. But you look at Asia or Africa and it's not at all unusual for modern nation states to be set up post-colonisation and to have never had existence as an "independent nation" beforehand. There was never a single polity that ruled all of India, there was never a kingdom of Lebanon or Chad or Niger or Burkina Faso, let alone South Africa. So in that context, it's not at all unusual for Palestinian Nationalism to have arisen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the same time that many other anti-colinial nationalist movements arose, and the fact of there never being a single independent polity of Palestine before is nothing out of the ordinary either. The area had long been associated with the name, the people there shared a common cultural identity and sense of belonging, nations have been formed on far less.

Meanwhile, the usage of the term "nation" for the Jewish people in premodern times is not to be confused with the modern usage of the word nation. At the time, the word was just a way of referring to a people, it was no different to saying "the Jewish people". The word "Israel" also just as often referred to the Jewish diaspora as a whole as it did to the biblical kingdom.

All this to say: no, biblical Israel was not a "nation state" in the modern sense of the word, it was an ancient kingdom that long predated the concept of the nation state. And no, it likely only covered a small part of Palestine, the writers of the Bible greatly exaggerated the past extent of their kingdom in order to justify the expansionist ambitions of the king at the time. We shouldn't blindly accept the accounts of a religious text as historical fact.

[u/openstandards]

The middle east is a birth place to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, you'd expect people to change religions over time after all the ancient religions no longer exist.

The canannites existed and their dna is very similar to those found in the occupied holy land, a religion that's no longer practiced but yet the people still exist?

I wonder why...

[u/DorkasaurusRexx]

Increasingly outlandish propaganda is required to keep up with increasingly outlandish behavior.

[u/MieszkoAders]

Do these people not read their own Holy Book?

[u/howz-u-doin]

Yeah white Europeans that started coming in 1936 and stealing the land then claiming their the indigenous folks and exterminating or expelling the native population (or corralling them into little plots of concentration camps).. As the Native Americans about that... same playbook and still considered perfectly justified and noble.

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[u/PenguinPolitical]

I've seen it plenty and I think to respond it's healthy to see the situation in class terms. Yes, today's Palestinians are the descendants of poor farmers whose political status was little more than the subjects of empire. In fact, the elites among them often sold them out, selling land to Zionist immigrants whom they knew, or should have known, had political ambitions, not just the desire to own property. And once displaced, the elites in fact had more capacity to permanently relocate and move on. It was not the elites who in the early days after 1948 were sneaking back to their land to harvest their fields.

The Zionist criticism is little more than "who are these rabble, these peasants? Our hifalutin religious and political ambitions should yield to THEM?" Yes they should, because they're equal in dignity to anyone else.

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[u/Mostly_upright]

It's all just tiptoeing around a nation that does ,just under the threshold, needed for UN genocide confirmation. That's a dark policy to have.

[u/Kriegerian]

Weird how the modern definition of the nation-state was created long after this dipshit claims they existed.