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Happy Indigenous People’s Day to the Jewish Nation
Given that today is Indigenous People’s Day, it seems appropriate to discuss one aspect of this conflict that is minimized, if not completely overlooked – the Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. They are the only indigenous people in the world to have maintained their identity, their culture, their religion, and their language for over four thousand years while – and this is the most amazing part; just ask a member of the Sioux Nation – actually reclaiming the sovereignty over their homeland.
Most people, including many Jews, believe Jews are just members of a religious faith. Judaism is lined up alongside Christianity, Islam, Baha’ism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. Religious faiths often are comprised of many different ethnic groups. You can be Han, Mestizos, or Igbo and you’re just as Christian as someone from Germany. The same could be said for any other religion, except for the Jews.
Jews have a unique set of religious beliefs, but it is also true that many Jews don’t believe in God and those Jews who don’t follow any of the religious precepts are as Jewish as the most religious scholar because being Jewish just requires that you be a member of the tribe. You are born Jewish because your ancestors are Jewish. It’s in the DNA. It has nothing to do with what you believe. The common genetic bonds and collective memory of our history has kept us together as a people for four thousand years and proves that Jews around the world are at home in Israel. We are a tribe. We are a race. We are like the Sioux Nation, the Kamilaroi of Australia, and the Karib of Brazil.
It’s not a surprise that so many people, including many Jews, don’t know that. Wherever Jews live, they think of themselves, and for the most part are seen as a member of, or at least member-adjacent to, whatever ethnicity is dominant in that country. That’s how Jews have survived as a minority in host countries for thousands of years. Jews are like method actors that fully embody their character even when they are off the set so that they will be more authentic when they play their character for the audience.
For Jews, the audience is the dominant group of their host country. Many Jews want that dominant group to see Jews as being an integral part of that dominant culture. The hope is that if the Jews are seen to be an integral part of the dominant culture, the dominant group will be less likely to slaughter us. And to achieve that acceptance, like good method actors, Jews act as if it’s true all the time to the point where many Jews believe it themselves. Unfortunately, history shows that this doesn’t actually always work. Egypt still enslaved us. The Spanish Inquisition still occurred. Germany committed genocide at a scale no one had even considered before. And today any Jew walking the streets of Europe with any clothes or jewelry that identify them as Jews must fear rape or murder and expect a beating. Thankfully, in too many parts of America, Jews only have to worry about a beating.
The story of the Jewish people can be summed up in a single sentence – the Jewish people return home to Israel and build a thriving homeland again and again. Abraham brought us there and we made a home in Israel 4,000 years ago. The Jews returned to that home after over a hundred years of enslavement in Egypt. The Jews returned home to Israel after the Assyrian expulsion. The Jews returned home to Israel after the Babylonian expulsion. Hannukah is celebrated as the one time the Jews fought off colonizers and were not forced to leave Israel. And then the Roman expulsion occurred about 2,000 years ago. That was the big one. As always, thousands of Jews remained in Israel, but most Jews were sent as slaves to the furthest reaches of the known world. And for the next two thousand years, while our homeland remained in control of empires who were antithetical to the idea of Jews returning home in large numbers, the Jewish people continued to do what we have done during every prior expulsion, we pray toward Israel, incorporate the idea of returning home to Israel as part of all our major prayers and holidays, and make the return to Israel a central part of our people’s history and hope for the future. Jews have never stopped wanting to go home to Israel. Even today, when Israel is at war on almost every front, over 30,000 new immigrants came to Israel to return home.
As individuals and as a community, the Jewish people have been defenseless and at the mercy of the dominant group running each country hosting them. For the most part, countries have been benevolent havens for a time before ultimately turning on their Jewish citizens. When this happens, the Jews migrate to another place that is deemed more hospitable – at least temporarily. And again, as a people who have been forced to move from place to place over millennia – the one idea that was held out as a distant hope was that one day the Jewish people could return home to Israel once again. In Israel, the Jewish people would be safe and free because it is our actual homeland and there we would have the opportunity to experience genuine self-determination for the first time in two thousand years.
And that’s all Zionism is – Jews deciding that they will return home after two thousand years. It became possible because two host countries – Russia and Yemen – supported it and because the Ottoman Empire agreed to accept limited Jewish immigration. Thousands of Jews already lived in what had been called Ottoman Syria for hundreds of years, but starting in 1881, another 25,000 Jews immigrated to Ottoman Syria.
Between 1881-1941, a lot happened. World War I occurred. The Ottoman Empire lost control over much of its territory in the Middle East. The British were now in charge. World War II had begun with the entry of the US. But fundamentally little changed when it came to the Jews in the Middle East. Jews from around the world continued to trickle in and build communities in their homeland.
The Jews did not steal land. The land was purchased outright, fairly, on the open market just as if someone reading this was to move to Canada and buy a home or a plot of land in Saskatchewan. The purchase of the land in Ottoman Syria was made possible by a small number of very wealthy Jews, including the Rothschilds, but also with millions of nickels and dimes placed in small, blue, Jewish National Fund (JNF) boxes that could be found at many Jewish homes around the world. Those nickels and dimes added up to create enough funds to buy land – purchases that were duly recorded by the Ottoman magistrates and later by the British.
During this period before World War II, the Jews in their homeland were called Pioneers. They built communities, cities, and whole new industries from scratch. For the Jews of the world, a seemingly impossible dream of returning home became an actual possibility. It was a source of pride.
And unlike American, Australian, Brazilian, British, Canadian, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish settlers, the Jews didn’t commit acts of genocide against the local population. The Jews were not a strong nation preying on the relatively weak, where the local population is greatly reduced, and slips into poverty as compared to the settlers who take ownership over all the land through force of arms. The Jews returning home had next to nothing in terms of economic or military strength. The Jews, like their Arab neighbors, were just trying to build communities and help their families be better off than they were before.
There was no colonialization by the Jewish people. The Jews didn’t sweep into established cities like Jaffe, kill the inhabitants and take their homes. The Jews were not Conquistadors. They were not Americans fulfilling a Manifest Destiny that led to the destruction of Native American tribes. The Jews didn’t have any problem living side by side with the Arabs – in Jaffe, Haifa, or Beersheba. The Jews didn’t believe that returning to Israel meant that those people already living there had to leave. The Jews believed that co-existence between Jews and the other ethnic groups living in Israel wasn’t just possible, it was preferable. Some of those ethnic groups, like the Druze, embraced the value of co-existence early on.
Keep in mind that in 1890 Jewish immigrants to Ottoman Syria comprised only 8% of the total population. Thirty years later, when there were a number of mass riots by Arab groups that didn’t like the idea of living as neighbors with Jews and held deeply felt racist views regarding Jews, the Jews were still just 11% of the total population. A tiny minority whose homes and businesses were destroyed on a whim by racist leaders who incited their people to kill Jews.
But Jews are used to people trying to destroy what they build and are used to members of the dominant culture trying to take Jewish lives. They have been coping with that for thousands of years.
The very small community of Jews living in Ottoman Syria and what would become the British Mandate figured out how to protect their farms and to keep community members safe. In many cases, they initially hired Arab neighbors to guard their land. Sometimes it worked. When it didn’t, the Jews started to guard their communities themselves. It seems like a small thing, but this is something Jews hadn’t been allowed to do anywhere in the world since the Roman expulsion two thousand years ago.
Even later in 1947, when a large number of Jews from around the world came to find safety in this emerging Jewish homeland, the Jews were still just 32% of the entire population.
Those protesting today against Israel equate Zionism with Colonialism. As with most everything shouted by protesters these days, the opposite is actually true. The Ottoman Empire and the British were the actual colonialists. The Jews were immigrants welcomed by the ruling governments. The Jews purchased and worked the land legally, just like the other inhabitants – including other Jews who had lived there for generations.
Does anyone question the importance of Mecca to the Muslims? Does anyone suggest that concerns about cultural contamination in Rainbow Valley in Australia is overblown? In America, there should be much deeper regret for what we’ve done to the Black Mountains that are sacred to the Sioux. The homeland and sacred places of every other indigenous people are now better understood and respected – except when it comes to the Jewish people.
There is more archeological proof of continuous Jewish life in Israel for the last four thousand years than there is for most any other people in the world. There is no logical, practical, provable, claim that can be made to contest that Israel is the Jewish homeland. And the Jewish people have demonstrated in word, in deed, and in faith that Israel is the central sacred place of our people – but without any actual evidence or argument that can stand up to scrutiny, so-called academics, politicians, and activists that are motivated essentially by the same racism that has led to The Inquisition, Pogroms, The Holocaust, and almost 150 years of terrorism against the Jews living in Israel, loudly and arrogantly proclaim that we don’t belong in Jerusalem. We don’t belong in Tel Aviv.
For some, it is possible to say such things and believe that Jews don’t belong in Jerusalem because they really don’t realize that the Jewish people are one of the most ancient indigenous people in the world and Israel is our sacred homeland. Others will never acknowledge Jewish right to self-determination in Israel even though they would wholeheartedly defend the rights of the Sioux and the Karibe.
The simple truth is this – ever since the Jews started to come home, they have done everything possible to build a multicultural community, where people of all faiths, ethnicities, and diverse approaches to living life can be at peace with each other. There are millions of non-Jews living in Israel today that are proof of that, although all you have to do is read Israeli poetry, listen to Israeli music, watch Israeli movies to know that for over 150 years all we have wanted is to live in peace with our neighbors. Unfortunately, that outstretched hand has been rejected every time by Palestinian leaders. Still, it doesn’t matter how many terror attacks and it doesn’t matter how many wars, the Jewish people, the Zionist nation still hope for peace.
Over the last year, Palestinians in Gaza, Shiite members of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and many other puppets of Iran across the world have been trying to destroy Jewish communities in Israel, dissuade Jews from living in Israel, and intimidate Jews living in the US and Europe in the hope that it would diminish Jewish support for Israel.
What these puppets of Iran and supporters of terrorism don’t understand is that the Jews have been coping with this tactic for millennia. It fails every time precisely because Israelis are not colonialists from some far away place who have come like locusts to lay waste to the land. Israelis aren’t colonialist, they are protecting their homes, their communities, and their families in their homeland.
Even though they should know better and many of them do, Palestinians, Iranians, and their supporters choose to see Israelis as colonialists despite all the evidence to the contrary. They think that if they hit Israelis hard enough, kill a large enough number of Jews, destroy a large city, rape enough women, murder enough children, the Jews will see that living in Israel is lifetimes of pain and suffering – and then the Jews will leave Israel. They will leave Israel the way the British left India and the French left Vietnam. This is why they shout and write on placards “Go Back To Europe.” But since Israel is actually the Jewish homeland, the Jews aren’t going anywhere – ever. The term “Never Again,” doesn’t mean that never again will Jews be slaughtered. Israelis certainly know that isn’t the case. Thousands of us have been killed by unnecessary war and terror for decades.
What it does mean though is that never again, especially during a time of unrelenting antisemitism in the world, never again will someone who is Jewish feel alone. Since its inception, Jews now feel the full weight of an entire country that is dedicated to protecting and supporting them. We will never leave our homeland. In fact, our homeland, even with all these physical attacks in Israel, the physical attacks outside of Israel, and all the verbal incitement, is stronger than ever before, still remains a tremendous source of pride, and still remains the central focus of Jewish hopes.
The Jewish people on this Indigenous People’s day continue to mourn the loss of innocent life and fight like Maccabees to protect their homeland. You may rebuke them for protecting their homeland with ferocity and for the relentless pursuit of those who have raped, murdered, and fired thousands of rockets at civilians. But unless you are a member of an indigenous community that has spent thousands of years in exile, faced genuine genocide multiple times across the millennia, you don’t fully understand the importance, value, and meaning of homeland to a tribe like ours. In fact, most people reading this right now are sitting or standing on a homeland stolen from an indigenous people that has either disappeared completely or been greatly reduced. The Jewish people will not let that happen to them.
The Jewish people will do whatever it takes to defend their homeland and its people.
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