Let’s Talk Seriously About Jewish Indigeneity in Palestine

In a recent post, I argued that Israel’s legitimacy rests primarily on what it built, not on ancient claims to the land. Israel has every right to exist and to continue to exist because it transformed a neglected, underdeveloped Ottoman backwater into a highly developed country—a leader in agriculture, water management, medicine, science, and more recently, a high-tech marvel of the world. All this was achieved through hard labor, shrewd political decisions, and ingenuity—not by plundering or displacing a thriving native population. In other words, Israel earned its legitimacy through its ongoing and unparalleled contribution to the world.

At the same time, I tended to avoid the indigeneity argument altogether, believing that Jews could never win that debate. After all, Jews were dispersed across the world for 2,000 years; the Zionist movement began in Europe, its cultural baggage was European, and the early settlers came mostly from Russia and Poland.

Over time, however, I realized that conceding the indigeneity issue was a mistake. My reluctance stemmed largely from dissatisfaction with the arguments typically offered by Israel’s defenders—arguments that often relied on biblical citations and archaeological findings establishing a Jewish presence 2,000 years ago. These were easily dismissed by anti-Zionists as either fantasies or as claims invalidated by some imaginary “statute of limitations” that must surely be shorter than two millennia.

In my view, pro-Zionist arguments lacked an analytical approach and treated indigeneity as a simple, one-layered idea. But anthropologists do not see it this way. While I am not an anthropologist, and risk stepping on a few toes, I want to offer a more structured approach. Ultimately, I hope to show that not only is Jewish indigeneity real—it is stronger than that of any other group living in this land, including Arabized Palestinians. (I consciously use the cumbersome term “Arabized Palestinians,” rather than the misleading shorthand “Arabs,” for reasons explained below.)

People tend to speak of indigeneity as a binary: either you are indigenous or you are not. In reality, anthropologists treat it as a multicomponent concept with at least three components: 1. Genetic ancestry, 2. Cultural continuity, 3. Continuity of presence in the ancestral land. Once you start examining these components separately, the Israel/Palestine story does not look anymore as simple as the narrative of European settlers in North America or South Africa. It becomes a regional story of deep, intertwined roots rather than a colonial morality play.

1. Genetic Ancestry: Two Branches of the Same Ancient Population

Over the past two decades, large-scale genomic research has made one point blindingly clear: Jews and Arabized Palestinians both descend, in substantial measure, from the Bronze Age peoples of the Levant. Genome-wide analyses beginning with Michael Hammer’s landmark Y-chromosome work in the early 2000s and continuing through major studies by Doron Behar, Harry Ostrer, Karl Skorecki, and more recently ancient-DNA teams in Leipzig and Jerusalem consistently trace Jewish ancestry back to the ancient Near Eastern populations that shaped Canaan, Israel, and Judah.

This body of research has completely demolished the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are of Khazar origin and have no ancestral connection to Middle East. When geneticists compared Jewish diasporas to Turkic and Central Asian populations, precisely where a Khazar signal should appear if the theory had even a molecule of truth behind it, nothing showed up. Studies from Hammer’s lab, followed by Behar’s genome-wide analyses and Ostrer’s independent work at NYU, all converge on the same point: Ashkenazi Jews cluster tightly with other Jewish communities and with Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern populations. Turkic groups, by contrast, form an entirely separate genetic profile. The data are not ambiguous; they are not “open to interpretation.” They simply do not support even the faintest hint of Khazar ancestry. The Khazar hypothesis is scientifically speaking is a Zombie theory: dead for years, yet kept shambling around by people who desperately need it for ideological reasons.

The conclusions reached by every serious researcher in the field align on this point: Jews, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi alike retain deep Levantine genetic roots. They are indigenous to the land not metaphorically or sentimentally, but biologically and historically. Palestinians, of course, share part of that ancient ancestry as well, but the anti-Zionist fantasy that Jews are foreign interlopers or descendants of medieval steppe nomads belongs in the same category as flat-earth cosmology.

2. Cultural Continuity

If genetics tells us where people come from, culture tells us what they kept. And here the Jews have no rivals. Judaism is the only living cultural tradition that originates in ancient Israel and continues unbroken from antiquity. No other contemporary group maintains such direct continuity with the cultures of ancient Israel and Judea. Jews are the only people with ancestors in this region who speak the same language, pray to the same God and follow the same cultural traditions in all areas of life: the Jewish calendar tied to the seasons of the land, festivals mark ancient agricultural cycles, religious rituals remain tied to Jerusalem, the legal traditions, Halakha, remains exactly the same as the one developed thousands years ago in Judea and Galilee. Finally, Jews whenever they ended up settling continuously self-identified as a people exiled from their homeland. No other contemporary group maintains such direct continuity with the cultures of ancient Israel and Judea.

The ancestors of today’s Palestinians, meanwhile, underwent Arabization and Islamization after the 7th century—processes that reshaped language, religion, and identity. Their modern culture is authentic and longstanding, but its linguistic and religious foundations are part of the broader Arab-Islamic world, not the Bronze or Iron Age Levant. Culturally they are no more indigenous to this land then Arabs from Arabic Peninsula.

In the cultural dimension, only the Jews are truly indigenous to this land. Noa Tishby made this point particularly clear in her book “A simple guide to the most Misunderstood Country”, which despite its “simplicity” crystallized this point for me.

3. Presence in the Land: Interrupted for Jews, but Never Broken

The third dimension, physical presence, is usually the hardest for pro-Israel arguments. Nevertheless, the claim that “Jews were gone for 2,000 years” is simply false. Throughout Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader, and Ottoman periods, Jewish communities endured in Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed, Hebron, and villages around the Galilee. These communities were often small, sometimes persecuted, but never disappeared.

And the Palestinian presence is not a straight line either. Yes, many Palestinians descend from ancient Levantines. But populations also absorbed Arabs after the Islamic conquest, as well as migrants from Egypt, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula. The fact that these people were not exiled and dispersed is not an evidence of their more profound connection to the land, but rather of their conformism and more tenuous attachment to their own culture. Unlike Jews who refused to assimilate, these people gave up their cultural identity and accepted new identity imposed on them by Arab conquerors. This is why I called Palestinians Arabized rather than Arab – this is more accurate while cumbersome and heavy on the tongue.

Once the components of indigeneity are separated, the narrative changes fundamentally: both peoples have historical presence in the land: one is continuous but culturally transformed, the other culturally continuous but numerically reduced. This is not a colonial situation, settler-colonial or otherwise. No European empire sent Jews to colonize Palestine, no metropole directed or funded a Jewish takeover. Zionism was a classic example of return migration. And while a few Jewish European philanthropists supported Yishuv financially, they never represented any European government. The Balfour Declaration should be understood not as a statement of British colonial ambition, but as a recognition of Jewish indigeneity and a commitment to decolonize the land in favor of its original people.

In my earlier thinking, I emphasized Israel’s achievements rather than ancient identity. That argument still stands. But the indigeneity argument deserves rehabilitation. It is grounded in archaeology, genetics, linguistics, textual history, and the lived experience of a people who kept faith with their homeland across millennia.

The facts tell a simple story: the Jews are not settlers in Israel. They are connected to the land by deep ancestral lineage genetically, culturally, and historically.