Blood Is Not Belonging: On the Theft and Reinvention of Identity

In every great historical dispute, there comes a moment when language fails—not from lack of vocabulary, but from excess. Words like “native,” “settler,” “colonizer,” and “indigenous” are flung about like accusations, as if etymology alone could decide who belongs and who doesn’t. And yet beneath these labels lies a deeper philosophical question: What makes someone of a place?

Is it ancestry? Blood? Ritual? Language? Or loyalty to a memory that survives the centuries?

We live in an age obsessed with proving origin through DNA tests, genealogy charts, and surnames. Identity has become forensic — as if a 23andMe report could settle ancient territorial or spiritual questions. As if a name on a family tree could confer legitimacy on a political claim. This biological fetishism masquerades as indigeneity but reduces identity to a sterile laboratory result: blood without memory, culture without continuity. What’s next — measuring skulls like the Nazis did?

What matters isn’t the biological shell, but the content: thoughts, feelings, ideas. And those have nothing to do with DNA — just as they have nothing to do with skull measurements.

True belonging is not inherited. It is cultivated.

It is spoken in the language of the land. It is passed through stories, rituals, sacred obligations, and love. It is remembered not only in books, but in the way one walks through a landscape, names its trees, marks its graves, and knows when to mourn and when to plant.

A man can claim to have “Israelite” DNA and yet be alien to Israel. A woman can have no genetic tie to a land but be its most faithful steward. The blood argument is tempting because it is easy. But identity has never been that simple. The ancient Israelites were not a race, but a people defined by covenant, law, and memory. The Jews survived not because of genetics, but because they remembered who they were.

And memory is an act of loyalty.

That’s why so many who claim descent from this or that ancient people remain disconnected from the culture they claim. They may believe their bloodline runs deep, but their roots are shallow. They know the language of grievance, but not the prayers that made this land holy.

It is no accident that those most hostile to Israel often claim to be its true descendants. They use the name “Palestine” not to build a home, but to deny one. Their identity is formed in opposition — to erase, not to inherit. In doing so, they sever themselves from the very past they claim to represent.

Palestine, like Zion, is a name soaked in Jewish memory. It was the name others gave to Judea, and the name Jews never stopped using — even in exile. Those who today call themselves “Palestinians” without that continuity are borrowing a word, not inheriting a story. They may wear the name, but they are not its heirs.

To be indigenous to a place is not to have conquered it first, or even to have descended from its earliest dwellers. It is to have become native through love, through ritual, through the refusal to forget. It is to see a land not as a possession, but as a responsibility.

That is why Zionism is not colonialism, but return. Not conquest, but reunion. And that is why its fiercest critics — those who call its children squatters and thieves — so often rely on blood myths and invented genealogies. Their argument is a mirror turned inward, reflecting a longing they cannot admit: the desire to belong to something they abandoned long ago.

In the end, the test of identity is not what your ancestors did, but what you do with their memory.

Ziophobes mock my pale skin, facial features, and even my surname: “No Middle Easterner was ever called Bassov!” A bold but irrelevant claim — and a false one, at that.

Let’s introduce them to Haim Bassov, a Sephardic Jew who died in 1910 and is buried in the Jewish cemetery of Beirut. His name is recorded in the official SephardicGen database:

Haim Bassov Burial Record – Beirut Jewish Cemetery
View original query results | View archived copy

But now the attacks go further: I’m told I must submit my DNA for peer review — as if my right to memory, history, and home depends on laboratory approval. As if identity were a blood test. The same logic once used to measure Jewish skulls in Europe is now being repackaged to scan Israeli genomes in the Middle East.

And ironically, the actual genetic studies — the ones not cherry-picked by ideologues — consistently show that Jews, even Ashkenazi ones, have deep Levantine roots. But that’s beside the point. Belonging isn’t a molecule. It’s not earned by ancestry, but by loyalty, memory, and participation in a living culture.

So here is my answer:

I do not need to “prove” that I belong to the Land of Israel with a DNA test.

And I certainly don’t need the approval of self-appointed gatekeepers of “Canaanite,” “Israelite,” or “Philistia” blood.

You want to replace archaeology, history, and language with a racial purity test? That’s not decolonization. That’s just recycled fascism — dressed up in academic jargon.

Some critics try to dismiss Zionism as a racial project by pointing to Israel’s Law of Return. But the Law of Return is not about “blood purity” — it is about belonging to a people bound by shared memory, not shared chromosomes. Converts to Judaism, who have zero “Jewish DNA,” are fully included. The law includes children and grandchildren of Jews not to enforce biological continuity, but to offer refuge to those whom history has targeted as Jews — just as the Nazis did. It’s not about genetics. It’s about solidarity, responsibility, and survival.

I am a Palestinian — not to provoke, but to reclaim the name that always meant my homeland. Because Palestine is Israel — and Palestinians are Israelis.

And I do not need anyone’s permission to say so.

Read the Manifesto: The Palestinian Identity Manifesto

Learn More: Palestine is Israel: The Truth They Tried to Erase