Unwinding "indigenous"

When the argument over "indigeneity" is disingenuous

(Jusmine/Wikimedia Commons)

Who are indigenous to a land and who are not? The latter question — the one that effectively excludes people from a claim — has since before Israel’s inception dogged the conflict.

People who have lived in or identified with a place for a long time legitimately stake claims to it. What's unsettling is when more recent arrivals are called interlopers, especially when the charge lasts into the second generation.

That’s when a romantic claim that has in recent decades been embraced by the left veers into uncomfortably racist territory. Saddling generations of Jews in the Middle East with the label of invaders doesn’t sound much different than the racist attacks Latino folks suffer this side of the Atlantic. And the same goes for Israeli hypernationalists who seek to brand Palestinians as interlopers.

There have been attempts to explain the difference, to uphold exclusionary policies deemed protective of the “indigenous” as worthy and not comparable to, well, racism. They are often convoluted and not persuasive, and inevitably slide into the dark waters of separating the “authentic” from the “inauthentic.”

A tweet by the influential journalist Mehdi Hasan, mocking new arrivals in Israel from the India Burma border as not indigenous, led me to write to an op-ed this week in Haaretz,

Here’s a sample:

Once you bring up DNA, you slide down a twisted helix toward race theory, doing no one any favors, especially during a Trump administration that is, in ways subtle and blatant, promoting white supremacy and identity – a trend that spells trouble for Jews and Palestinians alike. One can easily imagine a future MAGA president wondering aloud: If both Jews and Palestinians are indigenous to this strip of land, maybe they should both go live there and duke out who controls it.

Here’s the article (and likely a paywall).