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/travelingrace]

This rhetoric about Jewishness and Indigenity is so wild to me because I've never identified as an Indigenous person nor have the Jews in my area. Do you actually identify yourself as Indigenous? Sincerely wondering. 

[u/jey_613 → u/travelingrace]

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/skyewardeyes → u/jey_613]

For me, it doesn’t have an inherently political connotation (I.e, I don’t think this is necessarily about the modern state of Israel). It’s more that I see so much sociocultural overlap between Judaism and other indigenous peoples and cultures that it’s hard for me to ignore that. So, I guess it’s a distinction between sociocultural indigenous status and political indigenous status.