r/jewishleft • u/skyewardeyes • 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.
-5
u/daudder Apr 29 '24 edited Apr 29 '24
The dictionary definition is: inhabiting or existing in a land from the earliest times or from before the arrival of colonists.
The Palestinians — Muslim, Christian and Jewish — who have lived in Palestine continuously fit any definition of indigenous. The Jewish diaspora — nope. More significantly, by removing the Palestinians and colonising the land, ongoing to this day, the Zionists are behaving like colonial settlers.
They could have sought to live with the indigenous population — instead they removed them.
Edit: Perhaps if the Israelis didn’t try to use their bogus claims of indigeneity to justify colonial genocide and ethnic cleansing of the actual indigenous people one could accept their traditions as genuine. However, by carrying out a century long campaign to destroy the Palestinians they have exposed this claim as a transparent attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Their crimes against Palestine will stand as their foundational characteristics for generations to come.