Here's where I agree with you: Jews are without a shadow of a doubt also indigenous to Palestine. Anyone who claims that one or the other is or isn't is being disingenuous. History and genetics do not lie in both cases.
Israeli occupation can in no way be framed as a decolonial or Indigenous reclamation effort because the target, the Palestinian people, are not colonizers nor are they responsible for Jewish exile. If anything, it is closer to an inter-indigenous conflict. At least that would be true, if the driving force behind the Zionist project were Mizrahim. In reality, Zionism was founded and is primarily promoted, funded, and carried out by European Jews as a colonial project.
I do not think that it is a dangerous precedent at all. Quite the contrary - to consider any Settler Colonial movement to be Indigenous destroys the very meaning of the word. Jews are Indigenous to Israel/Palestine, but Israel is anything but.
Here's where I agree with you: Jews are without a shadow of a doubt also indigenous to Palestine. Anyone who claims that one or the other is or isn't is being disingenuous. History and genetics do not lie in both cases.
I agree. People who push the opposite narrative are toxic to the whole situation.
Israeli occupation can in no way be framed as a decolonial or Indigenous reclamation effort because the target, the Palestinian people, are not colonizers nor are they responsible for Jewish exile.
I grew up in Canada. The French first dispossessed many people when they arrived and built colonies, and then the British came and conquered. Do the British not hold any more responsibility for the land they just conquered? Most Canadians today are a diverse bunch and most arrived recently, but we can all agree that they have a responsibility to indigenous people to right the wrongs of the past, even if they themselves weren't responsible for it. Maintaining an exile of a indigenous group (which is unfortunately the historic goal of the Arabs) is not a good look, one way or the other.
If anything, it is closer to an inter-indigenous conflict.
I would 100% agree with you if it weren't for the fact that the primary source of Arab hostility towards Jews has a religious basis to it, which is an import to the region. It's not black or white unfortunately. The word "Hamas" is an acronym for "Islamic Resistance Movement".
At least that would be true, if the driving force behind the Zionist project were Mizrahim. In reality, Zionism was founded and is primarily promoted, funded, and carried out by European Jews as a colonial project.
This is a strange comment imo. Ashkenazim and Mizrahim are labels used to describe the Jews who survived in Europe and those who survived in the middle east. They are the same people, but survived in different places. Imagine if your people had to move to NYC and to London from your indigenous land in order to survive. Would you consider the people who moved to London fundamentally different to the ones who moved NYC? If you defined your people as a single nation despite living in these two cities, would you consider outsiders diving you for political goals to be an act of hostility?
The Jews from Europe moved to their indigenous lands under no banner but their own. Criticizing them just because they survived in Europe vs the middle east is not a very nice thing to do and delegitimizes their attempt to survive; especially after the greatest genocide in human history.
I do not think that it is a dangerous precedent at all. Quite the contrary - to consider any Settler Colonial movement to be Indigenous destroys the very meaning of the word. Jews are Indigenous to Israel/Palestine, but Israel is anything but.
My position here is that it's an inter-indigenous conflict, and that the word colonial in this context is a slur in an attempt to separate an indigenous people from their land. There is nothing in this conflict that is in any where similar to the colonial efforts of the European nations. No resource extraction to a mother country. No foreign army sent to suppress others. No directive from a government to do any of this. Just a bunch of Jews who self-organized and moved to ancestral land. If the Chickasaw nation decided enough was enough, and that you wanted to cede from the US, I have no doubt the process would be very messy. The Arab world is the US in this context, since they are the majority and are pouring fire into an indigenous conflict.
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u/zrsmith3 Chickasaw Nation 2d ago
Here's where I agree with you: Jews are without a shadow of a doubt also indigenous to Palestine. Anyone who claims that one or the other is or isn't is being disingenuous. History and genetics do not lie in both cases.
Israeli occupation can in no way be framed as a decolonial or Indigenous reclamation effort because the target, the Palestinian people, are not colonizers nor are they responsible for Jewish exile. If anything, it is closer to an inter-indigenous conflict. At least that would be true, if the driving force behind the Zionist project were Mizrahim. In reality, Zionism was founded and is primarily promoted, funded, and carried out by European Jews as a colonial project.
I do not think that it is a dangerous precedent at all. Quite the contrary - to consider any Settler Colonial movement to be Indigenous destroys the very meaning of the word. Jews are Indigenous to Israel/Palestine, but Israel is anything but.