I am thrilled to share that the incredible @ddelgadovive.bsky.social has written an extraordinary guest post over at Life is a Sacred Text on the claim we hear sometimes about Jews being Indigenous.
It’s one of the most thoughtful things I’ve read in a while—and so worth your time.
It’s one of the most thoughtful things I’ve read in a while—and so worth your time.
Comments
That concept makes no sense to me in relationship to what I was taught about the region throughout my life.
Folks who actually went to Hebrew school , jump in?
The only thing I have a vague memory of is learning some basics about the independence war, and the concept seemed to be "the British were over it and the Arabs were not people who wanted us there."
If anything it was "a land with too many people"!
Again, a problem, but just clarifying the narrative I'm used to.
This is a thoughtful consideration that leaves out some key pieces of the Jewish relationship with Israel. It seems, though, that Jews moving to Israel in the 1880s, were neither practicing settler colonialism nor indigenous. They were doing something else: we need a different word.
I am nonetheless a settler viz a viz power relationships here. I live on land stolen from the Potowami peoples.
What happened to the Algerian Jews when France left?
Omitting that changes the narrative in a significant way
Some good points, though. Good look into other PoVs. 2/2
Of course, people like Haunani-Kay Trask haven’t thought everyone of European or Asian ancestry leaving the New World was off the table, so… ?
2) however i wish it reckoned with what i think is the emotional drive behind the claim of Jewish indigeneity - Bar Kokhba and the ensuing great diaspora, and the longing to return.
There is a political question about "what does it mean to claim Indigenaity" and that is not the same question.
Everyone is "indigenous to" somewhere +
https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/conquest/
I'm always glad to see voices from Latin America and the Global South raising points like this one - and being heard, for a change.
Not interested in discussing it any further.
What he did say is that the concept of indigenaity
centers around European colonialism—not our hurbon. Not the Roman conquest of the Celts. If you want to learn more about that, I bet reading some of his bibliography +
Don't reject definitions (the concept!) as a colonial imposition. Embrace having multiple overlapping definitions when needed. Complexity is very Jewish.
Or “antisemitism” not meaning “hatred of all speakers of Semitic languages.”
there are Native tribes in the US who currently hold none of their ancestral lands. their claims are still valid.
in many ways, jews have had a similar, yet more geographically and temporally fractured experience as indigenous victims of colonialism.
but, sorting the similarities and differences seems more complicated, no?
"Military representations..endeavor to impose collectivity on a complex social reality"
Applies to all the colonial conflicts I am familiar with, and of a piece with Ferguson and Whitehead's War in the Tribal Zone and general take on ethnogenesis through colonial conflict