Indigineity Doesn’t Matter
Indigeneity has become a hot topic as of late, with each side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claiming that status for themselves. It seems that every commentator on the internet is suddenly an expert in cultural anthropology. But what is lacking in this heated debate is an attempt to clarify the terms being used. The people who believe in the significance of indigeneity with the most fervor never seem to have a clear definition of it.
The concept of indigeneity is as vague as it is fraught. Strictly speaking, we are all “colonizers”, to use progressive parlance. On a long enough timeline, we are all indigenous to Africa, and we are all “colonizers” of every other region.
Merriam-Webster refers to “the earliest known inhabitants of a place,” which captures much of common usage. ‘Indigenous’, then, refers to the people who lived in a place as far back as history records. Under this definition, more than one people can theoretically be indigenous to a region. Two separate people, Jews and Arabs, for example, might be indigenous to the same place. But what does it mean to say that a people is the same from one eon to another? When is a group of people continuous with the people who lived in a region thousands of years ago?
Let's imagine that a region has two groups of people in it. One group is genetically related to the group that lived in the region millenia ago, but does not share a common culture with them, and the other is also genetically related to the people who lived there, but they speak the same language and practice the same customs as the people who lived there thousands of years ago. Which of the two is indigenous? It may make more sense to ask which is more indigenous.
Each side in the Jewish/Palestinian conflict tends to deny the indigeneity of the other. Yasser Arafat infamously doubted whether there ever was a Jewish Temple beneath the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. But there is no question that both Jews and Arabs have lived there for more than 1000 years. Supporters of Palestinian indigeneity want to draw a line there, and suggest that looking back any further is silly. However, when they do so they are arbitrarily choosing a point in history in order to support their conclusion that Palestinians have the most pressing claim to that land. They are manufacturing indigeneity.
If we can draw the line whenever we want, then why not draw the line at 75 years? Jews have had a state in that location for generations now. The point is that drawing a line in time for the purposes of indigeneity will always be arbitrary, and those who refuse to acknowledge ancient Jewish history in Israel should not be taken seriously.
Returning to the dictionary definition above, what matters in contests over indigeneity is which people, if any, were there first. Looking at ancient Israel, there were many groups living in the region. Only one of those people remains. Palestinians are Arabs, whose language and culture originate in the Arabian Peninsula and first arrived in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in the Seventh Century CE. On the other hand, the earliest written examples of Hebrew date to the Tenth Century BCE. References to the People of Israel were made in Egyptian artifacts as far back as 1200 BCE. It’s safe to say that Judaism was practiced in that land over 1500 years before Arabic language and culture came to the region with the Muslim conquest.
None of the cultural practices of or languages spoken by the people who lived on that land exist today, except for Judaism and Hebrew. All of the cultures that existed in ancient Israel went extinct except for Judaism. If we rely on the dictionary definition of indigeneity, Jews meet that definition and Arabs do not.
All of this is not to say that Arabs do not have a legitimate claim to the contested land. Arabs and Jews have been living there for over 1000 years. But It is to say that Arabs are not indigenous. If we are going to divide humanity with these artificial constructs such as indigenous and colonizer, then we should do so consistently. Those among us who favor these rigid moral binaries don’t apply them with any anthropological consistency when it comes to Israel. Perhaps it's time to deemphasize indigeneity altogether.
Both Jews and Arabs have legitimate claims to land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Should a contest over indigeneity determine who wins in that contest, as progressive ideology suggests? No, indigeneity is not the most important factor in assessing competing claims to land. If that were the case, the US would be required to return its territory to the Native American community. Jews don’t have a legitimate claim to Israel merely because they lived there before any other community that still exists today.
Israel has been the only democratic state in the Middle East for the past 75 years. That, on its own, justifies its continued existence, just as the centuries old democracy of the United States justifies its continued existence in North America. It’s time that progressives stop obsessing over indigeneity because it just isn’t the most important factor to consider when evaluating competing claims over land in the 21st Century. Indigeneity is a red herring, and it's time we put this silly debate to rest.
