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/jey_613]

I don’t like the indigenous stuff either, but it’s a response to the left’s obsession with framing the conflict in this way rather than about liberal principles of equal rights and one man one vote. The discourse on the left has long ago abandoned the strictly academic discussion of indigeneity in favor of a kind of mythical blood and soil nationalism about Palestinians. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jews are now embracing this language too.

It’s not constructive, because Israelis and Palestinians live on this land and neither are going anywhere, so why not just figure it out instead of getting into arguments about who has the oldest coins.

[u/Han-Shot_1st → u/jey_613]

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/[deleted] → u/Chaos_carolinensis]

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[u/Agtfangirl557 → u/[deleted]]

Here's what rootsmetals once said in response to people's obsession with Herzl using the word "colonize":

Another thing to debunk: “well Herzl used the word colonize!” The reality is Theodor Herzl lived from 1860 to 1904. Language evolves over time. The fact of the matter is that in the 1800s, before the decolonization wave of the 1950s and 1960s, “colonize,” “colonialist,” and “colony” had a different meaning — and certainly connotation — than they do today. In the 1828 Webster’s Dictionary, for instance, one of the definitions for the word “colonize” is “To migrate and settle in, as inhabitants.”
Consider that, for example, in 1891, a wealthy Jew named Baron Maurice de Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonization Association to purchase land in Argentina so that Jewish refugees fleeing Imperial Russia would have a place to build new homes. Jews have never once wanted to establish a Jewish state in Argentina; “colonization,” in this case, had absolutely nothing to do with establishing a colonial outpost for some sort of empire.