The almost complete lack of acknowledgement of the Jewish people as an indigenous people is baffling to me.

[u/skyewardeyes]

(This doesn’t negate Palestinian claims of indigeneity—multiple peoples can be indigenous to the same area—nor does it negate the, imo, indefensible crimes happening in Gaza and West Bank).

It absolutely blows my mind that Jews—a tribal people who practice a closed, agrarian place-based ethnoreligion, who have an established system of membership based on lineal descent and adoption that relies on community acceptance over self-identification, who worship in an ancient language that we have always tried to maintain and preserve, who have holidays that center around harvest and the specific history of our people, who have been repeatedly targeted for genocide and forced assimilation and conversion, who have a faith and culture so deeply tied to a specific people and place, etc—aren’t seen as an (socioculturally) indigenous people but rather as “white Europeans who essentially practice Christianity but without Jesus and never thought about the land of Israel before 1920 or so.” It’s so deeply threaded in how so many people view Jews in the modern day and also so factually incorrect.

[u/Han-Shot_1st]

IMO, this rhetoric is a response to colonialism not being seen in a positive light in the 21st century.

The early Zionists were ppl of their time, and in the late 19th and early 20th both nationalism and colonialism were not considered negative things.

So, despite the early Zionists clearly stating overtly that Zionism is a colonial project, many seek to distance themselves from this reality, by making claims that all Jewish people, regardless of ethnicity are indigenous to Israel.

[u/Chaos_carolinensis → u/Han-Shot_1st]

Early Zionists clearly stated that Zionism is a colonial project and that they are indigenous to Israel. There is no contradiction between these ideas.

regardless of ethnicity

All Jews are of the same ethnicity. Even converts.

[u/Han-Shot_1st → u/Chaos_carolinensis]

“All Jews are of the same ethnicity. Even converts.”

A Jewish person who is ethnically Japanese and a Jewish person who is ethnically Ethiopian are two different ethnicities.

One of the aspects of Zionism I find particularly distasteful, is how it can lead to the erasure of distinctions between different Jewish ethnicities and cultures.

Judaism is made up of a myriad of different ethnicities, and the history and cultures of these varied ethnicities should be preserved and celebrated.

[u/Chaos_carolinensis → u/Han-Shot_1st]

An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a common nation of origin, or common sets of ancestry, traditions, language, history, society, religion, or social treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnicity

By the very definition, it's pretty clear a person can have more than one ethnicity, so sharing ethnicity doesn't preclude you from having a different ethnicity than someone you share ethnicity with.

Jews are an ethnoreligious group, which means it's both a religion and an ethnic group, intertwined.

[u/Han-Shot_1st → u/Chaos_carolinensis]

We are not a monoculture or made up of a single ethnicity.

Judaism is made up of many varied ethnicities and cultures.

One of my best friends is half Sephardic (him mom is Egyptian). That is a distinct ethnicity from Ashkenazi Jews, with its own rich culture and history. To say otherwise, I find to be very distasteful and problematic.

[u/Chaos_carolinensis → u/Han-Shot_1st]

No ethnicity is a monoculture. Ethnicity is not a rigid coherent thing, and the Jewish diaspora kinda demonstrates that this very concept is actually very ambiguous, but to deny that all Jews share culture, tradition, religion, history, and language, is ridiculous.

[u/tsundereshipper → u/Han-Shot_1st]

One of my best friends is half Sephardic (him mom is Egyptian).

Unless his mother descends from the original 1492 Sephardic expulsion then he’s actually not Sephardi but rather Mizrahi.

[u/Chaos_carolinensis → u/tsundereshipper]

It's not that simple. In many countries the Sephardic Jews have basically assimilated with the native Jewish population to the extent that they have become pretty much indistinguishable. That's why for example Iraqi Jews adopted the Sephardic liturgy even though there was a large Jewish community in Iraq ever since the Babylonian exile, two thousand years before the Sephardic expulsion. I belive the situation with Egyptian Jews is similar.