Anecdote isn’t data, of course, but I think you might be overly optimistic. I have both Scottish and Irish ancestry, and bear a surname that is among the top 20 most common in Scotland. I’ve visited both countries, and while I was made welcome, I was never treated as anything but a foreign tourist. They made no distinction between Americans named Macdonald and Americans named Levine.
In any case, there’s a big difference between “I’m interested in my ancestors’ home and would like to learn more about its language and culture” and “I’m claiming part of this county as my property because my great-great-great-great grandparents were born here”.
There are two related, but different, land rights. The right to use the land yourself and the right to exclude others from the land. “Ownership” of land bundles the two together, but that doesn’t need to be the case.
Yes, you need some mechanism to adjudicate whether i can build a wall there, knock down the wall there, or take some number of salmon from the river at this time of year. And who gets how much of the grain that grew in the land. But “one guy gets absolute sovereign rights from here to there” isn’t the only solution. (And yes, that’s an exaggeration of US property rights, but not a huge one.)
The biblical injunction to not harvest the corners of your field, so the poor could glean the grain you missed, suggests that in biblical times farmers did not have the right to exclude others from the land they sowed and harvested. Today they mostly do.
I don’t see the Israelis and Palestinians peacefully coexisting on the same plots of land for the foreseeable future, however.
US-style ownership of land bundles a whole lot of things together that can be, and by some societies are, separated. And the old rules of the Bible, in addition to things like gleaning rights, said that land had to be given back every 50 years.
However, as you say, the real problem is that there isn’t enough will to peacefully intermingle; and even those who otherwise would are unlikely to agree if they expect that some significant percentage of their neighbors might decide to murder them any minute.
I believe that someone can have a homeland that they personally are not indigenous to. I appreciate that it isn’t how you view things, but I certainly don’t feel indigenous to any of the nations my ancestors came from. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel certain cultural ties to those places, but indigenous feels like a way stronger connection than that to me.
I’m not going to tell you that you are wrong to feel that all Jews are indigenous to Israel, but I will say that your definition is not the most common one.
Slight sidetrack, but just yesterday I was involved in a training/discussion with a local indigenous person from the Wampanoag tribe. Their language has a critical word that means my land and me are one. And their formal names go into great detail about exactly where they are from. Also, they have oral history tradition about their feet always being in direction connection with the ground of their homeland, and how when they lose their land, they are literally knocked off their feet. Which is all very cool, but in no way how I feel about any of the countries of my ancestors.
I don’t consider the Zulu to be an indigenous people of South Africa, is how I would phrase it.
Applied. Neither the Zulu nor the Jews are non-dominant groups in their current societies.
The PDf isn’t using your overly broad sense of “pre-colonial and/or pre-settler societies”. It’s referring to currently in-place dominant/marginalized relationships, and the colonialists/settlers of those societies.
Eh? They completely meet my definition - how are they not
?
“They” in that sentence was referring to Palestinians. Which you should be able to tell given the first of my sentences you quoted.
Group connections go deep. Personal connections are more variable and so, not innate. Usufruct is as common as real property in our past.
Now this really confuses me. Are you saying you cannot be Indigenous without there being a dominant group that comes in and takes over your land?
Surely if there was some inhabited Pacific island that hadn’t been discovered until we invented satellite photography, and afterwards we all collectively agreed to leave those people be without interference, they would still count as “indigenous”?
I suppose I misinterpreted your definition because the examples you gave were all of people living in places remote enough that they very well may have been the first (except the Sami, who I believe are known to have displaced earlier groups). Never mind, then.
I’ll just quickly note that “they” in the post you were responding to wasn’t referring to Palestinians, either. I was referring to the various people who conquered the region over the years.
If my post was referencing any one group in particular, then there is no question that it would be the Crusaders.
The people who did by far the most to destroy the Jewish population of the Levant (not the Jewish polities, mind you, but the actual Jewish individuals living under foreign rule) were the Crusaders. The Greeks destroyed Judah and Israel; the Romans destoyed Judea; they exiled many people, killed many others, and forced many others to convert.
But despite all this, for most of the period of Roman rule, there were still plenty of Jews in the area (although Roman attacks and reprisals for rebellions eventually meant that the main Jewish cultural centers moved to the Galilee). Even as Christianity gained steam, the area was majority Jewish for much of the period of Roman rule, and even afterwards Jews remained a sizable minority.
The Arab conquests brought more conversions and more persecution, depending on who the Caliph was at the time and how he felt about Jews. But for the most parts, the Jews did alright, and even fought alongside the Muslims in cities like Haifa when the Crusaders came.
The Crusaders, though… they were different. They often had no intention of ruling over any conquered Jews, offering them the choice between conversion or the sword. (A practice they brought over from Europe, and one they would also carry out for sport or to loot supplies on their way to the Holy Land).
The Jewish people of the Levant were a subjugated minority under both the Romans and the Arabs, with all the suffering and violence that entailed; but what took them from a sizable minority to a tiny relict population was the intentional actions of the Crusaders.
Eta: you can round out the list with the Ayyubids, Mamluks, and Ottomans. Ayyubids wrre alright, Mamluks were shitty but no Crusaders, and the Ottomans were a mixed bag. And finally the British.
Below is what I was responding to. “They” in what sentence?
Are you saying that the IDF has killed more Palestinians than Hamas has managed to kill Jews? And i so, what does the quote from Babale have to do with it? Because you were replying to that quote, I took you to mean that the IDF had done a more thorough job of genociding the Palestinians than the European invasion had done of genociding Native Americans.
The connections I’m talking about are often, though not always, group connections. Innate things are very often variable among members of the same species. And usufruct hasn’t got much to do with it. Not being bothered by having others share the property is a different thing than not being bothered by not being allowed to live there.
I am also confused by “not innate”. People have all sorts of innate feelings that vary a great deal from person to person. Interest in sex, spirituality, and the tendency to form an emotional connection to a place are all, imho, innate qualities of human beings that some people exhibit to a far greater degree than others.
Interesting. Does that apply in the context of flora and fauna? For example would you consider Oryza sativa (Asian rice) indigenous to India? They’ve been growing rice in India for a long time. It doesn’t feel right saying an indigenous species was introduced.
Regarding people, I wouldn’t consider any of the people who relocated to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s indigenous. They would be first generation immigrants and not indigenous, by definition. I.e. the Jews cast out of Egypt, Jordan, &etc. I don’t consider all Jews indigenous to Israel because in my mind the word Israel, in this context, refers to the nation-state founded last century as distinguished from Israel the Jewish nation mentioned in the Torah. One Israel did not exist at all until last century. The other has existed for centuries without being a state, and is/claims to be the diaspora of the United Kingdom (of Israel/Judea). Only the former are referred to as Israeli; the latter are Jews or rarely Israelites. Both claim the land of Israel as a cultural homeland. I assume most Israeli by now were born in Israel, as second or third generation immigrants. I would consider this majority indigenous and I would assume an Israeli considers Israel his homeland, unless he tells me otherwise. The notion that any Jew alive today, by virtue of being a Jew, is indigenous to any particular land… I find ridiculous. That’s just not part of my identity.
I think it’s important to make some distinction based on the reasons people love one patch of dirt. Like my ancestors lived in many places some of which it would probably be a massive surprise to me to learn, but it just happens that they wrote a book about when they lived in Canaan that has been extremely widely disseminated and has had a ton of importance placed on it.
I don’t really think there’s a hard line that can be drawn to say some group is indigenous or not, but Palestinians whose parents, grandparents or great grandparents were ethnically cleansed still have a significant amount of living memory of the places they were removed from in a way that the Jewish diaspora doesn’t. Now of course there is a massive ideological component for many Palestinians as well but it seems tough to argue that the ideological component makes up the same proportion vs. living memory of previous times where they lived somewhere.
I’m not sure I agree. The only objective reality of their claim is their emotion, and the strength of it. Nobody’s a dryad who will die if separated from their forest. The reason for their emotion, and for the strength of it, isn’t particularly relevant to me: only the sincerity of it.
That said, part of being human is feeling a tremendous longing for things that won’t happen. Someone’s longing for living on a piece of land doesn’t necessarily mean we should move heaven and earth to enable that.
Throughout the 1800’s, the US settled and conquered parts of Mexico. In the 1930’s in the US, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were expelled, many of whom were American born citizens living in lands that had been conquered by the US not all that long ago.
I honestly don’t think it’s even remotely credible to say that the Americans who settled those lands in the 1800s, some of them truly believing in all the manifest destiny, white man’s burden etc. bs had as much claim to the land as the Mexicans who in very recent history lived there as long as those beliefs were equally fervent to the beliefs of people who had actually been living there up till very recently.
I’m not saying that. I’m saying that the folks who had lived there have much stronger emotional attachments to the land. Objectively speaking, if you say, “I love this land because White Man’s Burden,” and I say, “I love this land because I grew up here and have ten thousand memories associated with it,” my emotional response is gonna be stronger.
In fact, I think that might be generalizable. There’s a category of “I love this land” responses that are ideologically based, and another category based on personal experiences and memories. In every case I can think of, I find the personal experience category to be more persuasive (in terms of sincerity and strength) than the ideological category.
Edit: this may lead to odd results. If, in 1870, you asked me who had a stronger claim to the land, I’d say it’s the indigenous Mexican. If, in 1930, you asked me the same question, I’d say it’s the grandchild of the White settler who grew up on the land. In both cases, it’s the person with the personal experience of the land that I’d prioritize.
Did those Americans descend from people who did come from that land im California etc before being exiled, against their will, to other countries where they were heavily discriminated against?
Did they have another place to live, or did the society they were supposedly a part of consider them stateless leeches and embarked on repeated campaigns to kill them and destroy their culture?
I don’t really think it’s a very comparable situation.
Maybe if the Americans killed or assimilated nearly all of Mexico, but some Mexicans escaped to Brazil, where they are not considered citizens, and then later the US fell apart and some Mexicans used the opportunity to come back from Brazil and take some of the land before declaring independence - that would be a better comparison.
Yeah I agree, maybe we’re talking past each other? The first category is much more persuasive to me than the second, when looking at it as a disintrested party. I think it’s possible for people in the second category sometimes do very fervently believe in their ideologies, even in cases where they were pretty obviously ridiculous to anyone else - I mean people have died for manifest destiny.
Also agree with this and it’s a much stronger claim for Israelis to have a connection to Israel in modern times than anything else. It doesn’t now matter why millions of both Israelis and Palestinians alive today were born on that patch of land; they were and they both have a right and an obligation to coexist on that land without either being kicked off, murdered, intimidated, oppressed etc.
I’m using that example to illustrate that there clearly are ideological reasons to claim the right to a patch of dirt that are more valid than others, to refute the idea that any fervently held claim to land is valid on the same level as another. I was using it as an IMO more extreme example of this.
With the comparison of an Israeli descendant of Jews who lived there thousands of years ago and settled in the past century vs. a Palestinian descendant of people who were displaced from their homes in what is now Israel and live in either the West Bank or Gaza, both are somewhere on the spectrum from someone who is completely a settler to someone whose ancestors have always been indigenous. Neither is entirely on one end. However I would say that the Palestinian in that scenario has a closer claim to be indigenous and it is significant that the Israeli has ancestors from all sorts of places since, but that there is an ideological reason that that particular place is elevated in importance.
Sure, but not all ideological reasons are created equal. There is a vast gulf between “this land is meant for white people to civilize” (Manifest Destiny) and “we have no place to go without being killed, so we must forge our own home” (Zionism); and there’s a vast gulf between that second one, and “Let’s look in the Bible for a list of places that we are divinely intended to conquer” (the cancerous mutation that is Religious Zionism).