Before the recent surge of international support at the UN for Palestinian statehood, including from US allies, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated a promise to Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank: “There will be no Palestinian state,” he said. “This place belongs to us.”
Netanyahu has long argued that Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, and he’s right. Judaism emerged from this land. Jewish Kingdoms existed here. There has been a continuous Jewish presence ever since.
But in recent years, Israel and some supporters – the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and others – have made a more assertive claim, that the Jewish people are indigenous to the land.
Dean Acheson would have called this “clearer than truth.”
“Indigenous” refers to people who have maintained continuous residence in a place since before conquest, colonization, or the formation of the modern state. This definition is sometimes extended to mean peoples distinct from the dominant societies in which they live.
Native Americans are indigenous to the United States, like Mayans are to southern Mexico and Central America. Aboriginal peoples are indigenous to Australia, like the Māori are to New Zealand.
The modern state of Israel was founded by Europeans. Herzl, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, and Jabotinsky were from (modern-day) Hungary, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine. The communities from which they emerged had been European for centuries, often more than a thousand years.
These men sought to create a Jewish state in Palestine, a place that was overwhelmingly not Jewish. To meet that goal, demography had to change. Even language needed to be reclaimed.
In 1882, roughly 24,000 Jews lived in Palestine, about 5% of the population. An estimated 99.7% of the global Jewish community lived elsewhere.
The land was primarily home to Arabic-speaking Muslims, who lived alongside smaller communities of Arabic-speaking Christians, Druze, and other minorities. All lived under Ottoman rule.
Zionist leaders encouraged waves of immigration, which they characterized as colonial. The Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) formed in London in 1891. By 1896, it was offering support for Jewish farmers to settle in Palestine.
In 1899, the New York Times ran a headline: “CONFERENCE OF ZIONISTS; Elect Delegates at Their Meeting in Baltimore. WILL COLONIZE PALESTINE.”
Herzl called Zionism “something colonial” in a letter to Cecil Rhodes in 1902. In his 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall,” Jabotinsky wrote that “Zionist colonization must either stop, or proceed regardless of the native population.”
Early on, intellectuals and settlers advocated the revival of Hebrew, which hadn’t existed as a native language anywhere since late antiquity. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of Modern Hebrew, began speaking the language at home after moving to Palestine in 1881.
Surnames changed. David Grün became David Ben-Gurion, and Golda Meyerson (née Mabovitch) became Golda Meir. Szymon Perski became Shimon Peres. Ariel Scheinerman became Ariel Sharon.
Nathan Mileikowsky, originally from Kreva (now in Belarus), began using the name Netanyahu after emigrating from Poland in 1920.
The Europeans who settled Palestine were Ashkenazi Jews, a diaspora people with ancestral roots in ancient Israel/Judea. They were “returnees” in a cultural and religious sense, but not indigenous.
The same is true for other communities that immigrated to Israel, mostly after 1948: Sephardi Jews (descendants of those expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century), Mizrahi Jews (from various parts of the Middle East and North Africa), and smaller groups like Beta Israel (from Ethiopia).
Today, nearly all Jewish Israelis are Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, or some combination of these. Jews who lived on the land before Zionist immigration began, known as the Old Yishuv, no longer exist as a distinct group.
Why does this matter?
Understanding whether different populations in Israel and Palestine are indigenous is not about relitigating the creation of modern Israel. The circumstances that gave rise to the state are clear and involved tragedies for both Jews and Palestinians.
But it speaks directly to Israel’s claim that Jews have an exclusive right to national self-determination based on ancestry, heritage, and, increasingly, indigeneity.
If these markers are the basis for legitimacy and statehood, Palestinians deserve self-determination at least as much as Jews.
Instead, Israeli leaders have denied Palestinian rights and even Palestinian identity. Prime Minister Golda Meir did this more than half a century ago in 1969. Extremist ministers, sometimes with US support, continue to do it today.
In fact, while Palestinian national identity is young, having emerged alongside and partially in response to Zionism, the people known as Palestinians have lived continuously on the land for well over a thousand years.
Their roots, like those of Jews, Samaritans, Druze, Bedouins, and the earliest Christians, reach back to the ancient inhabitants of the land. This is why Jews and Palestinians share common DNA.
Early Zionists never said they were indigenous to Palestine. They claimed they would colonize it and understood what that meant for the population they called “native.”
Today, discussion of indigeneity and colonization has been turned on its head. Because Jews are indigenous to the land, they cannot have colonized it. Because Palestinians have never had a state, they have no right to one.
History hasn’t changed. The story is changing.
Seth Cantey is the Lewis G. John Term Associate Professor of Politics and Head of Middle East and South Asia Studies at Washington and Lee University.
