Sure, I know all of that. My question goes back to the statement that Jews are indigenous to Israel. Since one can become Jewish, does conversion to the religion also include indigenous status in Israel? (Act now, operators are standing by!) Which gets into several questions, including ethnicity vs religion, except when the religion is an ethnic group, except for converts, maybe, and the difference between having a homeland and an individual being indigenous to that homeland no matter where they are actually born. And the fact that different cultures can have perfectly valid to them dissenting opinions on all of the above.
Which is interesting; but I’m starting to wonder what it has to do with the topic of this thread.
And I’m still wondering why it was placed in the Pit, unless that was deliberately done to allow for the usually eristics since 10/7
A couple of reasons. It had to be MPSIMS or the pit, and i didn’t want to have to moderate the thread when people got cranky, nor create work for my fellow mods. But also, i like the freedom to explore tangents that is allowed in the pit. So yeah, largely
It at least, i didn’t want anyone to get in trouble if that happened. But i also thought it might lead to a more interesting discussion.
So please, carry on with
To the extent y’all are interested.
Note that the belief that the Native Americans were the literal descendants of the Lamanites, and thus people who came from ancient Israel hasn’t held up well with DNA and other modern science.
Some people still believe that, but it’s not taught as strongly as when I was a child.
There is absolutely no reason to be that level of insulting.
And there wasn’t a “United States” or what we’d now call “American identity” in 1770 in North America, either, but in 1780 there was. Prior to that (and to some extent afterward) people identified with thier colony, not with the union of colonies. It’s not entirely analogous to the Middle East, but the fact that people now called “Palestinians” did not have a sovereign nation or a unified identity before the end of the Ottoman Empire or British mandate does not make them less deserving of a homeland of their own.
I am aware of that - my grandparents did tell me about how amazed they were when they came to the US they could live most places, buy real estate in both city and country, pursue any profession they wanted, and could acquire a surname just like the boyar.
Of course, it wasn’t quite that rosy - in my father’s generation which college he attended was strongly affected by which colleges would even admit a Jew, convents preventing sale of homes to Jews continued to exist into the 1960’s, and so forth. Although we weren’t nearly as opposed as the Black Americans of the time.
Even so - the US was a LOT better than anywhere else my father’s family had lived for centuries.
SOME Israelis do that. Unfortunately, Israel at present has government ministers who make no secret of their lust for genocide.
Admittedly, that problem isn’t limited to Israel, but it’s Israel we’re talking about here, not the rest of the world.
At present neither side is offering that, or hadn’t you noticed Netanyahu has taken that off the table?
You, individually, and I would both like to see a two-state solution but that sentiment is far from universal on either side of this conflict. There are people on both sides who want the whole pie for just themselves. The scary thing is that the ones on the Israeli side might actually pull that off - the capability is there, if they can bring it to bear long enough.
If Zionism never happened and after WWII Britain granted the state of Transjordan independence, and this state included all of our world’s Jordan, Israel, West Bank, and Gaza - would you say that there was some horrible injustice done and that the Palestinians must be freed?
^ QFT.
Americans have a very distorted view of war, warped by both fiction and our laughably inadequate teaching of history to our young. And it’s only getting worse with time IMO.
Converts are supposed to be treated and considered just as Jewish as people born as Jews. Often they are, but not always. There are also issues around what sort of conversion a person has undergone. These issues can impact subsequent generations. Without totally derailing this discussion - it is possible for someone to be considered by other Jews to be entirely and completely Jewish but also without being a descendant of other Jews. It is also possible to be a descendant of Jews on your father’s side, that is, ethnically Jewish as most gentiles define it, but regarded and not at all Jewish by other Jews.
In other words, it can be complicated.
In practice, as someone personally affected by some of the above - 99% of the time no, it’s not an issue but 1% of the time someone decides to be an asshole. Like my cousin Marsha who turned into a screeching harpy at Grandma’s funeral and demanded that my siblings and I be thrown out of the graveside rites. At which point the rabbi said “Marsha, either shut the hell up or leave.” and number of other people scolded her for being rude and out of line.
So, sure, most Israelis would consider me to have just as much right to Israel as any other Jew… but a few wouldn’t. Up to this point in my life the good and decent people have far outweighed the assholes.
That would all depend on how the Palestinians, or any other subgroup, are treated within that state. If history had played out that way who knows what group would have been on top and how they would have treated everyone else?
If “Palestinians” seem united at present that’s largely because they think they have a common enemy, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority were assassinating each other as well as targeting Israel over the past few decades. If somehow Israel did vanish they’d fall to arguing amongst themselves and I expect the Mid-East violence would continue.
Thanks for the reply; it reminded me that I met with the reps from my local tribes the other day and asked them about what their definition of indigenous is. For background, the people I spoke with are from the Wampanoag tribe from Southeastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, and the Islands.
Their genesis story is that the Wampanoag were created from their land, and thus by their tradition they have a direct, physical connection to their homeland. The one historian even said (unprompted) that the DNA of her ancestors in is the soil of Martha’s Vineyard. And she didn’t mean just from the gravesites, but that literally the people and the land are one in their tradition.
I mentioned the discussion here, and she agreed it was a great question. Her take was that the don’t have people “converting” to the tribe obviously, but people to marry in and while they may be viewed as members of the greater tribal family, she wouldn’t consider them as indigenous to the tribal lands.
YMMV, but interesting to compare how two cultures who have very deep connections to their homelands view how those connections are formed.
What makes you think that under those circumstances “Palestinians” would represent an identifiable subgroup that would be getting treated differently from other Levantine Arabic speakers within Transjordan? They never were under Ottoman rule; the Palestinian identity, just like the Israeli identity, postdates that time period.
What does that have to do with the discussion? Hamas and the PA are two different political organizations within the polity of the Palestinian people. They aren’t two distinct cultures.
I’m sure that in this alternative history, there would be all kinds of political groups within Transjordan, and some of those groups may very well violently oppose one another. And Levantine Arabs wouldn’t be the only ethnic group in Transjordan; there’d be Bedouin, Druze, etc.
But the people who in our world are Palestinians wouldn’t be considered an ethnic minority; they’d be considered part of the same population of Levantine Arabs as the people who in our world are Jordanians.
Everyone has stories. Ours says that everyone in the world descends from Adam, who was created from the soil of the Garden of Eden, so I guess we’d all (including the Wampanoag) be indigenous to there, by that logic. Our story also says that God told us the land is ours, so there!
Meanwhile, the Muslims have their own story, where God realized he didn’t like the deal he made with us, so he sent Jesus to negotiate new terms; and then those didn’t work, so he sent Muhammad down for the pinkie-promise-this-is-the-last time. And Muhammad said the land was his, so there.
I think it makes more sense to look at objective reality, not mythology. And in reality, the Wampanoag people appear to have been living in the New England area for a long time. I know that they claim 12,000 years, and that does appear to be the time at which humans first arrived in the area after the glaciers retreated, but there is nothing connecting the material cultures of the Archaic Period with the modern Wampanoag.
The region went through wildly different climates, from tundra to plains to different sorts of woodland. Human presence grew and shrank during different periods.
The sort of semi sedentary lifestyle that the Wampanoag culture embodied at the time of contact with Europe was about 5,000 years old, and the sort of higher yield, frost resistant corn they grew entered the region 1,000 years ago. Those events are a better proxy for the age of Wampanoag culture than the very presence of human, IMHO.
So I don’t think that the Wampanoag people are indigenous because they literally sprang out of the land, nor do I find the idea that their culture is 12,000 years old and represents the first and only human presence in New England until Europeans showed up to be quite far fetched. If these things must be true for the Wampanoag to be indigenous, then they are not indigenous, and almost no culture on the planet is. Maybe the Hawaiians.
That said, there’s no question that the Wampanoag culture arose in the New England region, out of the conditions that the region provided, nor that they have a deep cultural connection to that land. Since I base my view of indigenousness on real things that happened in history, that framework allows me to recognize the Wampanoag, and many other cultures, as indigenous to their land.
Hawai’ian mythology tells all about how they came to settle those islands from elsewhere (Tahiti, etc.)
Of course they came from elsewhere; Hawaiians didn’t evolve on their island separate from the rest of us. When they got to Hawaii, they weren’t Hawaiian yet, though.
But once they arrived, their culture diverged, becoming a unique expression of their history and environment.
And that divergent culture, which we call Hawaiian, is indigenous to the archipelago of Hawaii.
This process happened for the Hawaiians relatively recently, and because they’re on a tiny island in the most remote corner of the largest ocean on the planet, it’s very clean and easy to see. But that same process is identical to the one undertaken by every indigenous culture on the planet, all of whom arrived somewhere as members of Culture A (and that land typically already had people living there, except for in remarkable cases like Hawaii) and then diverged into a new Culture B, which is indigenous to the place where it diverged.
I’m not sure where you got the impression that the Wampanoag think they are the only people in New England until the Europeans showed up. They don’t, and I never said that.
Otherwise, I stand behind the conclusion of my last post: YMMV, but interesting to compare how two cultures who have very deep connections to their homelands view how those connections are formed.
Lol, I’m glad you focused on one word and missed my entire point.
The point is that the Wampanoag people didn’t spring from the very earth, they wandered in just like every other group of humans in every other place, killed, displaced, or interbred with the locals, and eventually diverged from their parent culture(s) sufficiently that they were now a new culture, the Wampanoag.
That this process happened in a particular location is what makes them indigenous to that location.
I can’t think of any other internally consistent definition for the word “indigenous” that isn’t extremely artificially constructed with an end goal in mind.
It seems that sometimes what we mean is “the group of people who happened to live in a place at the moment in time when colonialist white people showed up between the 15th and 20th centuries”. If that’s the case, we should be honest about that, and recognize that the term simply does not apply to any discussion about Europe, North Africa, the Near East, India, or any other place that was part of the European “known world” before the 15th century. In that case, the Indigenous Status of both Jews and Arabs is “Not Applicable”.
You seem to think you are arguing a point with me. None of what I posted is either my work or my belief. I raised a question earlier in the thread, had the opportunity to speak with someone who could provide their insight on the question, and thought it would be polite to report back here what I learned.
If you want to take this up with the originator of the statement, feel free to call the number listed at the website below and ask to speak to Linda.
Not to sidetrack this discussion by referring back to the OP, but if my rabbi tried to make me sing any country’s national anthem as part of a religious observance, I would be out of there like my yarmulke was on fire.
Yeah, well, i was pretty shocked. Thus the post.