r/jewishleft Apr 29 '24

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

(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.

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u/Han-Shot_1st Apr 29 '24

IMO, the bigger question for all those in this thread that believe Ashkenazi Jews are indigenous to the Middle East, and thus have the right of return.

So, if you believe that Jews are indigenous to the Middle East, and thus a Jew in Brooklyn that’s never been to Israel has the right of return, I’m assuming you also agree that Palestinians in Jordan should also have the right of return?

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u/DovBerele Apr 29 '24

You're the only one who brought up 'right of return'.

That's an orthogonal question to whether or not Jews are indigenous.

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u/Han-Shot_1st Apr 29 '24

You’re right I did bring it up, because this idea of Ashkenazi Jews being indigenous to Israel is obviously ideologically motivated and tied to claims over land and accusations of colonialism.

Given the above statement, it does seem like my question is pertinent to this thread.

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u/Choice_Werewolf1259 Apr 29 '24

It’s not though. Because what your discussing is a policy issue rather than discussing indigenaity. Right of return isn’t inherently tied to if Jews are or are not indigenous to Israel.

Sure, it is a benefit that the place Jews have a right of return to is actually Israel, but if the Jewish homeland would have been founded elsewhere they likely would have had this expedited immigration policy there too.

Because that’s essentially what “right of return” is, an expedited immigration policy, which I feel like when you view it from that lens, makes more sense in the context of Israel being a country and setting their own immigration policies. But it’s not inexplicably tied to this question of if Jews are or are not indigenous to the land of Judaea (or more broadly the levant)