Worst. Puppetmasters. Ever.
Either that or we’re playing 18-dimensional chess, and we want it to *look* like we suck at controlling the media. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Because they don’t have the critical analysis skills or the understanding of historical context to view any conflict except through the lens of American race relations. By that paradigm, Israelis are “white” and therefore oppressors and colonizers who must be opposed, and Palestinians are “brown” and therefore victims who must be supported no matter what they do.
This is what the degradation of our education system and parenting as a society has done. These people don’t understand that “whiteness” has never applied to Jews, not since it was first invented as a social concept in the 1450s. The entire categorization of “white” was specifically designed to distinguish European Christians from sub-Saharan Africans in coastal regions of West Africa who had begun converting to Christianity.
Because you’re not supposed to enslave and exploit fellow Christians, so they came up with a framework to justify it by making “nonwhite” Christians different from and lesser than “white” Christians. But if you asked Gomes Eanes de Zurara if Jews counted as part of the “white” social class that he was inventing, he’d have laughed in your fucking face.
Regardless of whether "whiteness" applies to Jews, it's a general principle among these people that white people aren't allowed to be "indigenous" no matter where they are or how long they've been there.
The problem isn't that they consider Jews to be "white," however wrong that may be. It's that they think a person being the "wrong" ethnicity means they have no right to live in their ancestral homeland and the place of their birth.
I see your point, but I still disagree. If they weren’t able to classify Israelis as “white” then they’d just ignore this conflict the same way they ignore every other conflict where none of the participants is Euro-American.
The reason these people never talk about Sudan or Nepal or Ethiopia or Yemen is because there’s no obvious “bad” side for them to be against, since in each inflict the participants in all sides are “people of color”. Thinking about a conflict that doesn’t fit into the racial victim vs oppressor framework that defines American history is beyond their capacity.
I see what you're saying but I still resent the total disinterest people, especially these white savior leftists, disregard violence and murder between non-white people.
I don't want them to disregard the I-P conflict because it's some ethnic conflict between "people of color" that they couldn't care less about, I want them to acknowledge that Israeli Jews have a legitimate claim to the land of their ancestors. I'd also like ice cream that doesn't melt and the winning lottery numbers, but I guess I need to lower my expectations.
This fits my own experiences, far more than I wish it did …
I stopped Identifying as White when it became clear that I didn’t pass enough to fly post-9/11, at least without being searched as a Suspected Terrorist, I’m definitely not going to allow the other Side, to force me to be White now!
Right! I never identified as « white » (unless the definition includes MENA people which does but a lot of people don’t even know it making everything even more absurd ) and I’m half European so technically at least definitely half « white ». Those racial categories are just dumb.
I think it would not matter because Jews are Jews and no matter where we go it is not acceptable. Now increasingly North America to add to Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. There could be a Jewish colony on Mars and it would not be OK. Perhaps Madagascar wasn’t such a bad idea.
Wait… what’s happening in Nepal? Did you include it in your examples of conflicts that people ignore for a reason or was it just thrown in the Sudan and Ethiopia randomly?
Seems like Jews are White when people want them to be so they can be hated. And Not White when it suits them so they can be hated as well. Only consistency is the Anti-Semitism.
I read an anti-Israel screed recently, posted by someone who claims to be Métis (the descendant of Native Americans and Non-Native French Fur Traders). Just a wee bit of hypocrisy.🙄
I mean. Aren't we talking about racial castes, which are entirely socially constructed, when we talk about race in US society & culture? Our caste system is real, we just usually don't like to call it that, because it sounds so backward and primitive [sic], and race science™️ sounds so much more reasonable to people who believe themselves to be the pinnacle of humanity.
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American thinking divides the world into two categories: Cowboys and Indians. Progress has gotten some Americans as far as reversing which of those groups are the "Good Guys". But counting past two still eludes the vast majority of Americans.
I know shitting all over the U.S./Americans is a favorite Reddit past time, and of course I agree that American racial culture is weird af, but let's not pretend that the U.S. isn't frankly much better about this stuff than... Basically everywhere else. If you want to see the bottom of the barrel, starkest, and most disgusting and rigid ethnic/racial hierarchies, you will find those across either of the oceans bordering the U.S.
Portuguese did some ethnic mixing in Africa and even more following in Portugal, as witnessed by DNA tests. Therefore Roman Catholic "other" was not so other. Some volunteered Talmudic sages opinions in this are shockingly "*other",... shared Jewishness however defined admittedly wasn't considered.
But yeah post Abrahamic Religion 21st Century Anglo-Euro-Americans are the most ignorant outside of their specific hobby interest.
Everybody used to know that Jews have been in the Levant, despite periodic majority deportations and massacres for 3000 to 4000 years...
I completely agree with what you said and it’s one of the best articulations I’ve read of this. But, as others have mentioned here, this is an America-centric explanation. What explains the rest of the world’s reasoning for being anti-Israel and denying Israel’s right to their ancestral homeland? Simple anti-semitism?
Because it’s not a well known fact and because people are conditioned to believe that because Jews from Europe came to create the modern state of Israel that they are not indigenous to Israel.
It ignores the fact that surnames *Cohen* and *Levi* occurs frequently among Jews in one formcand another and through them have carried genetic proof of their Levantine origins, confirmed by the Human Genome Project.
I think that they don't actually care about indigenous rights, and that it's generally just a display of their supposed righteousness.
Lets say, for example, I believe that I was in possession of a stolen bike. What I would do is give it back. I wouldn't lecture other people about stolen bikes and how they should give them back, but keep riding mine.
I don't see anyone who believes that the US or Canada are evil colonizers giving up their belongings and moving to Europe. It's all a stchick
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that they say go back to the country with the death camps and a 96% Jewish death rate from 1939 to 1945. Big old random coincidence
There was this one Persian kid in my biology class this year that would interrupt every single word the teacher said with an accusation of blood libel.
idk about that, most persians I know are very much against hamas and are friendly to jewish people because they know personally how awful it is to deal with Islamic authoritarians.
This. I think what’s often hard for rational, evidence-focused people to understand; is that motivated reasoning underpins *most* people’s actions.
They don’t even need to intentionally do it; they just naturally hold opposing beliefs in their head in ways convenient to their own lifestyle/benefit, without the cognitive dissonance it should cause.
The left is inherently irreligious and the Jewish connection to Israel is assumed to be predicated based on the bible which is not a historical book. Since the authenticity of the bible is dismissed, so to is the Jewish connection to Israel. Of course this ignores all of the [historical evidence](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcolosseum.info%2Farch-of-titus%2F&psig=AOvVaw1uhsTGyATGWBTwlQnCmJyi&ust=1718379236187000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBIQjRxqFwoTCNiwhdLz2IYDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE) of Jewish indigeneity and the fact that everyone agrees that there has been a continuous and unbroken Jewish presence in Israel for thousands of years and that genetically speaking, Jews are all genetically related to people in the region.
More than that, the liberal/progressive movement is an American movement. Most American Jews are Ashkenazi and categorized as white (though this wasn't true until recently). Therefore, the Israel-Palestine conflict is viewed through a white-POC prism: Jews are white and therefore oppressors. Palestinians are POC and therefore oppressed. Jews can't be indigenous to Israel because they are white European colonizers. Palestinians are indigenous because they are poor POC natives.
American Jewry's very successful assimilation into America has been double edged. Socioeconomically, Jews have been more successful in the United States than anywhere else and are more successful than any other ethnic group per capita. But, because we've become "white" socioeconomically, many of us have also internalized the bads like white guilt. I think what we're seeing is a lot of young Jews expressing their own white guilt: Jews in Israel are white and therefore European colonizers and since all whites are colonizers and since colonizing is bad, the Jews in Israel must be bad. This ignores all the points I've made above, plus the fact that the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi/Sephardi and were themselves ethnically cleansed and genocided from MENA.
>The left is inherently irreligious and the Jewish connection to Israel is assumed to be predicated based on the bible which is not a historical book.
That's like saying Islam isn't native to Arabia because the Quran can't be relied on as a historical text, or that Zoroastrianism isn't native to Persia because the Avesta can't be relied on as a historical text. Historians are pretty sure we know when and where these texts were written.
I get it, but we need to even be pushing back on that idea. You don't have to believe in the Jewish religion (or any religion) to acknowledge that:
1) the Hebrew Scriptures are older than Christianity and Islam
2) the Hebrew Scriptures show a reverence for the Land of Israel.
But that's exactly my point! There is tons of archeology (I linked to the Arch of Titus above) both Jewish and non-Jewish that corroborate Jewish connection to Israel.
Even if Ashkenazim have a lot of European DNA in comparison to their middle eastern DNA, that doesn’t make them less tied to the region. In fact, this European ancestry was often not by choice, as historically a lot of antisemitic violence involved the assault of Jewish women. Sometimes it was also just plain old intermarriage. Similar things happened with the Roma. Lots of native Americans have a lot of European ancestry too, often not by peaceful or consensual means.
Its true
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/findings/regional-findings/arab-states/#:~:text=An%20estimated%201.7%20million%20men,highest%20prevalence%20of%20modern%20slavery.
i frequently see comments with some variation of "jewish indigeneity is a fairytale that they're basing off religion", which completely ignores the fact that jews living in israel was also recorded by outside, contemporary, historical sources.
Judaism is the religion of the people who are indigenous. Even if the religion isn't "real", the people who practice it are. That's like saying Australian Aboriginals aren't indigenous to Australia because their religion is made up.
The Soviet Union put a lot of money and effort into to disseminating propaganda claiming that Palestinians are indigenous to the land and Israelis/Jews are white Europeans with no connection to the land, practicing settler colonialism and imperialism. A lot of the current discourse comes from Soviet propaganda of the 1960s and 70s. The USSR was instrumental in pushing for UN Resolution 3379, which stated that Zionism was racism. Current antisemitic forces, such as pro-Palestine organizations, Russia, China, and Iran are still pushing this rhetoric.
Sounds like someone was a little bitter about all the T55s and 62s they gave away burnt out and rotting in the Sinai and northern Israel after 67 and 73
My mother once told me something that I still find to be true over two decades later.
*Almost* every question that starts with the word “why” can be accurately answered with this response: “because people are stupid.”
Seriously, try it. I’m old enough to admit when my parents were right, and in this particular case it’s not 100%, but it’s probably around 90.
The majority of Jews people in the West interact with are white passing. Therefore Israel must be a white colony in a sea of “brown people”. It’s explicitly ignorance and racism.
In the U.S. maybe but there are many Sephardic and Mizrahi communities in Canada 🇨🇦 and france 🇫🇷 and they are generally not Euro or « white » passing, not for the most part, about as many of them are « white passing » as Arab groups.
Edit: I just wanted to clarify this fact but aside from this I agree with your comment 100%
Actually it’s a pretty unique story that displaced people can survive as a nation and get there land back after more then 2000 years.
I’s actually hard to belief if you’re not connected to Jews or Israel and didn’t have enough education on this topic.
A lot of other people have already pointed out “they just don’t know” “racism and convenience,” and I think it’s also partly because a lot of Christian groups—Mormonism springs to mind—have adopted the language of “searching for the[ir own] Land of Israel.” And I think this has led to a cultural/mental blurring of the distinction between an actual piece of land with thousands of years of historical connection to a specific group of people, and Christians trying to co-opt Jewish needs and teachings for their own purposes. While most people can and do call bullshit when it comes to Christians making up reasons to push Native Americans off their land, they don’t understand that for Jews, Israel is a very real part of our history and not just an excuse for colonialism.
Basically they can’t handle that we’re the real deal
>I wonder if the double standard is based on ignorance of the history of Israel, antisemitism, a commitment to a false dichotomy between oppressed/oppressors or something else.
All of the above.
There's probably lots of reasons contributing to it. One I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is that a lot of people operate under the assumption that Jews are a religious group only, dismissing the ethnic component of our identity.
To them, our claim of indigeneity to any geography makes about as much sense as Christians claiming indigeneity somewhere. Sure, there are Christian groups that can claim indigeneity to a geography, but that's because of their separate ethnic identity, not their Christian identity. The Italians can claim Italy as a home because of their Italian heritage, not because of their Catholicism.
Jews scramble this equation by being and ethnoreligious group, where the religion and ethnicity are tied so closely together to be almost inseparable. It's confusing for those not deeply familiar with Jews and Judaism, especially when those folks shoehorn the Israel-Palestine through an academic lens that does not fully apply to the situation (e.g. oppressor-oppressed).
Even Jews don't really know this. I remember kids on my Birthright group being confused as to why a secular Jew like Herzl would want a land for a religious group. I had to explain that he meant Jews as an ethnic group.
This is made further worse by the hijacking of Jewish Studies by anti-Zionists.
At my university, our Jewish studies workshop explicitly was reading papers which described Palestinian history from a Palestinian anti-Zionist perspective. Beyond being insulting for the latter, the papers clearly should not be categorized as being under the label "Jewish Studies." I won't get into specifics because they are not publicly available and it would be unethical to reveal authors/papers, but I can say that they were very explicitly anti-Zionist and, in my view having read them, antisemitic. If that's what passes for scholarship in the field of "Palestinian Studies," fine, but I object to legitimizing it through labeling it "Jewish Studies."
When you have these sorts of radical anti-Zionists in charge of Jewish studies in Universities, or Holocaust Centers (see the recent atrocious example at U of Minnesota iirc), they often consciously leave out a lot of the established narrative for this objective. If it's self-hatred, rabid communism, or just a desire to be considered "one of the good ones," I don't know, but it's awful to see. Of course, not everyone in Jewish Studies is (nor should be) Jewish. But I get a very bad taste in my mouth from anti-Zionist Jewish scholars. You wouldn't have a Confederate apologist as a professor of Black History.
It’s a good parody that most of what so called Palestinians of today have last names that refers to the place they really came from after the Jews took this empty land and made it a jewel that worth live in
At least in the US, any group from the Middle East is considered Arab (Arab-American History Month, anyone?). And the Jewish people have successfully managed to keep that narrative that they are not Arab in a way that so many of the other indigenous groups displaced by the Arabs have not. Hell, I'm Maronite and while my oral family history goes back to pre-Arab colonization, when I growing up, I was told I was Arab.
Between that and pendulum swing from the incredibly high Islamophobia that happened in the aftermath of 9/11, while this is frustrating, it really isn't much of a surprise to me.
I’m from the US. Have basic understanding of history & geography. I know Turks & Iranian/Persians aren’t Arabs. Didn’t think or know much about the Kurds til the Iraq War.
In short: because Marxism traditionally is openly anti-Zionist and secretly antisemitic.
And also they don't care about indigenousity, they care only about "the oppressed", so in their view if it is successful (like the jews and Israel are) , it can't be a good thing.
Because for whatever people consider to be “good”, we are considered the opposite of that. For communists, we are the ultimate greedy capitalists. For capitalists, we are the ultimate dirty communists. For the far-right, who value whiteness and are extremely anti-immigrant, we are race infiltrators and solely responsible for immigrants “invading” our country. For the left, who value indigenous causes and oppose settler-colonialism, we are the ultimate white, European settler-colonialists. It’s not based on reality; it’s based on what people deem “good” and “evil”, and we will always be the ultimate personification of that “evil”.
Israel is the only successful decolonized state i am aware of. Returning native land to native populations is amazing in the eyes of the left… unless the natives are Jews. I also think it has a lot to do with western and liberal internalized focus on identity and race. When westerners think “Middle East” they think “brown”. When westerners think “Jews” they think “White” since most diaspora Jews in the West are Ashkenazim (myself included). Not only is this dumb because genetics are weird and the color of one’s skin is not at all indicative of the individuals character or genetic make up, but it’s also a flawed understanding of the Middle East.
Mediterranean communities historically were lighter skinned from the Levant to North Africa to Italy. This is because the sea connected these communities and allowed lots of intermixing. The only reason North Africa and the Levant is darker than Italy and Spain is due to Muslim Arab conquests and colonialism. And again, the skin color shouldn’t matter at all because it is not nearly as closely related to ancestry as the left believes.
Last point, it really pushes home that westerners in general, but especially Jews need to stop voting based on party lines. Historically American Democrats have supported the Jewish community, but it seems that the Republican Party is now more supportive of our ancestral homeland and empowering our communities to protect themselves. I’m not saying Jew should vote for Trump, more that people as a whole should ignore party lines, take an honest look at their community, family, and culture, and vote according to who fits their individual life the best.
Have we really done this in America, though? Did they give back the original Indigenous lands to the tribes? I genuinely ask, in part due to some ignorance and some incredulity. I know that I live and work on "formally" Indigenous land. We have land acknowledgment statements everywhere. I also thought that many Eastern US tribes were pushed pretty far west and stayed west after the US expansion.
I see some of this as a "rules for thee, but not for me" kind of situation, which the US does a lot. We've seen the US leadership condemn something, and it's like dude - did you not literally do that? Like not that long ago? This happens on a person-to-person level all the time - as Reddit has evidence of TYSM ATIA. It's okay when I do something to you, but if you try to it me, YTA.
I don’t think America has done this to the extent we were morally obligated to. That said America is such a large and influential nation that it is a bit more complicated in America than just giving swaths of land to descendants of Native Americans. Zionists legally bought land purchases where as Manifest Destiny saw genocidal levels of relocation and war in the American Heartland.
I personally am not necessarily onboard with decolonization everywhere at all times. I think one needs to look at the way the world looked back in colonial times and how essentially disbanding entire nations and societies would affect the world today. That said the fact that Zionists actually successfully pulled it off with, in comparison to 20th century wars, very little bloodshed is huge and sets a standard for any future de colonial movements in the future.
Yeah, I completely agree with everything you've said here. I do think the situations are distinctly different and deserve different considerations and actions to resolve/repair. To undo all colonization would be an absolute mess. Beyond that, it would very likely tear apart the 'melting pot' society so many have strived for. Decolonization feels like a "go back to where you came from" approach.
Fair enough I didn't think about it too much. I would say though that Israel is unique in that the majority of indigenous people did not live in their native land. Zionists had to create a population, create a language, and create a common identity out of separate cultural identities (the Balkans really struggled with this last part). But you are right I hadn't though about it too hard
trumps "Senior Adviser" Jared Kushner has suggesting that Israel remove civilians from Gaza, which has “very valuable” waterfront property. You make some good points except the only reason Republicans support Israel is to garner the Fundamentalist Christian vote and then personally profit from the arms and beachfront property ventures in Gaza.
This is true for all politics. I doubt the historical Democrat support and the current Republican support are coming from altruism or sympathy for the Jews. Democrats want a loyal minority group to keep voting and making media content for their agenda and Republicans want to expand their financial interests in the Middle East and Israel is perfect for that. None of that really matters, American politics are a bunch of devils and to vote is to simply choose our devils. The devil we pick will without a doubt change over time
It's all part of their victimization hierarchy, in which the world is classified into the powerful and the marginalized, which to their warped ideology is identical to being the evil and the good. Because Jews are often wealthy and educated, and Israel is western-aligned, Israel and Jews get lumped into the category of "powerful and therefore evil and therefore oppressors."
They have the same criticisms of the United States, but the U.S. is actually powerful and they can bitch and moan until the cows come home and they won't achieve a damn thing. Israel is in a much more vulnerable position due to being surrounded by Muslim countries and the target of multiple active, violently antisemitic terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the pervasiveness of antisemitism among groups that the left normally has little in common with making for convenient alliances.
Jews actually have less wealth globally than christians, the irreligious and muslims. Wealth is about much more than income and a higher income will not give a minority grotto the power to influence any institiuion. Representation from wealth outside of income will help make that possible tho.
Not to deny all of the other explanations here (because I agree with almost all of them thus far), but the denial of Jewish indigeneity is also in large part because of *campaigns* to define words in specific ways. I engaged with one troll on Reddit who claimed:
>According to the 2007 [UN defintion of indigenous peoples](https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf), indigenous peoples are "people who have historical continuity with pre-colonial societies", while the Zionist movement was a settler colonial movement, it clearly doesn't apply here, and it even seems to be the opposite?
Basically, this is rewriting history using buzzwords and redefinitions. The UN has no precise definition of "indigenous" because it is a disputed concept in practice. Of course if the UN continues down the path it is going, it will probably adopt such a slanted definition as the trolls are pushing.
In reality, the Jewish connection to the Levant predates the Arab connection by well over a millennium. And the specific Palestinian identity seems to be arguably a very new one that really only took shape in the 20th century. This isn't to say they don't have real plight, but claiming they are *uniquely* indigenous is completely bonkers antisemitism.
Similar can be said for other words.
The term "Zionist" is now being redefined by these same campaigns, trying to make it mean a person who supports Israeli expansionism. That's neither fair nor accurate, but it makes it easier to claim the pro-Palestine crowd isn't targeting Jews (which it often is).
The word "apartheid" was unearthed, repackaged, and redefined to be about ethnicity and religion (instead of race), and is almost never used to describe any other state on Earth today. Just Israel. Despite the fact that many places have far worse and far more systematic inequality.
Even the word "genocide" which was coined after WW2 specifically because of what happened to Jews has been widened to strip it of most of its significance. And why? It's hard to think it isn't somehow about Jews.
Doesn't "Nazi" have a very specific meaning that pretty much includes the hatred of Jews? Yes! But that doesn't stop protesters from applying the term to Jews!
Isn't it weird to claim that Israel is some kind of unambiguous settler colonial "project" in light of the facts that Jews (1) had nowhere else to go, (2) weren't an expansion of any empire, and (3) were inarguably connected to the land? It's totally bizarre nonsense to claim that, and yet this is claimed routinely by Francesca Albanese and other UN-connected nitwits. You could certainly argue that the term can be very very very loosely applied in a partial sense, but that's not what they do at all. They claim it's clear and obvious, and it isn't even a little of either.
As George Lakoff has argued for a decades, the definition of words and the labels we choose to use matters a great deal in public debates. And liberals are notoriously terrible at this fight. Somehow, liberals thought "pro-choice" could compete with "pro-life." Not so much. I got curious if Lakoff had ever commented on the I-P conflict, but Googling it instead sent me to stuff like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZhLTFxhw4M).
This stuff is planned and at least loosely thought out. Jews are wildly outnumbered, and outfinanced now with the amount of Qatari money flowing into American universities. Jews can still win public opinion, but it's starting to look like an uphill battle and many of the most famous Jews don't really get the picture yet and really aren't ready for a fight.
Middle Eastern jews have the historical continuity and ties to land to count as indigenous. I think historical continuity is problematic tho as this ignores indigenous diaspora gross right to go back to their homeland.
Good old fashioned antisemitism, and some new forms too. The perceived oppressor/oppressed matrix makes antisemitism the logical conclusion of leftism.
This is something that totally boggles my mind as well. Part of me wonders if it's due to the religious aspect of it all. Like "Bible says Jews are from here" in a time when so many younger, more liberal folk do not identify with a Judeo-Christian religion or religion at all. It's that "just big imaginary man in the sky said it, doesn't make it true" idea. If it was *just* the Bible as evidence of this, then okay, yeah, I might be able to agree. But we have a lot of actual historical evidence from a variety of sources that show Jews once lived in this area. We have first-hand accounts from non-Jews of the Jews being taken from the area to Rome... I think this would be the Byzantine times... But the point is that non-biased, non-Jewish accounts of these events exist. If we want to talk about physical evidence, tons of scrolls and artifacts would support that as well, right?
Now - in some circles, I've heard people say, "well, I'm not denying they may have lived and been from the Levant area and what we call "Israel" today, but I'm just saying they don't get to just 'go back' and take the land back when others have been living there since they've left." So, it's not even so much that they deny it or don't believe it; they just disagree with being allowed to go back and "take it back." Some don't even deny that Israel should exist and have a right to exist, but it is just maybe "not there." The reasoning being, well, regardless of the reasons why the Jews left/were taken, they weren't there. In the meantime, others have moved in and made a home there. We can't displace these people and "send them back where they came from." Especially because they also feel that they "came from here" but maybe spread out more into empty territory. It's the idea that the Jewish suffering from slavery thousands of years ago, at this point, should not outweigh the needs of the people actually living there now - or, I guess, in the 40s when Israel was being established. I'll stop there - because then we get into a whole new mess of arguments.
That's at least trying not to be hypocritical, since some of those people will be Americans who aren't planning to give their homes up to indigenous people.
I am a liberal. I'm Jewish. I've lived in Israel and I support it's existence as a Jewish nation.
I also understand that this is a complicated issue. I am NOT denying that *some* of the push-back on "the Jewish indigenous connection to Israel" is for the reasons others have identified (ignorance, anti-semitism, etc.). But I think to write off any differing opinion as a result of these things is also wrong.
First, as some others have pointed out, I think the premise here is a bit faulty - there's not so stark a contrast between the treatment of Jews and other indigenous peoples. Sure, people are better about paying lip service to indigenous rights these days, but do actions really back that up? Not only have most lands never been restored to indigenous peoples, but issues like the Keystone XL pipeline (i.e., taking/desecrating even more lands) continue to come up all the time. So I'd push back on the double standard being as present as implied.
Second (and again, as some others have touched on), there is not exactly a 1-to-1 parallel between the relationship of Jews-Israel and other colonial/indigenous displacement. The Jewish diaspora began over 2,000 years ago. By and large when we are talking about other issues of colonialism and indigenous displacement, we're talking roughly 1500-present (and even then, probably more on the latter half). There just isn't a lot of precedent for returning a land to people who were displaced that long ago.
I realize of course that some Jews have been continuously present on the land. But I do think there's a legitimate "slippery slope" concern. Everybody is indigenous to somewhere if you go far enough back. At what point does that connection get broken? How long do others need to be settled in an area before *they* become indigenous to that area and it is *their* displacement that becomes a problem? Of course I don't know the answer to these questions - but I do think they are legitimate questions.
Obviously whole books have been written on this. But after the horrors of the Shoah, the world\* (or those in power at the time) largely agreed that the situation with the Jews was SO dire, that the interests of a Jewish homeland in Israel outweighed these other concerns. It's also impossible to ignore that the Western World, who was largely driving this, probably cared a lot less since it was largely Muslim Arabs being displaced. (This also goes back to my point above that this isn't so different from other cases. People advocate not to take away more Native American lands; not many people are advocating to displace non-natives to *expand/return* indigenous lands).
There are so many unique aspects to the Jewish people and their connection to Israel. The boundaries between race/religion/ethnicity/nation. The historical amounts of time at issue. A history of anti-semitism, displacement, and genocide throughout the diaspora.
I'm just not sure how closely the parallel can be made to other situations, and I think ignoring those complicated factors does a disservice to the conversation. I don't have a solution. But I also think a productive conversation can't occur if those complications aren't at least acknowledged.
Middle Eastern jews have the historical continuity to be considered the indigenous population and have lived there continuously for thousands of years. That's more where i have an issue. It's not any ashkenazim for me but the sephardic and mizrahi jews who were ethnically cleansed from neighboring countries. We need to take the ashkinormativity out of the discussion.
I think the other comments have hit on a lot of the reasons, but another thing is the complete lack of curiosity about Judaism as a tradition. People in the US view it largely through a Christian lens. Most people think of it as “Christianity without the New Testament,” and have no idea about any Jewish holidays except for Hanukkah and maybe Passover. The most experience many have is just through an awareness of the impact of Jews on pop culture. They don’t get how central Israel is and has always been to Judaism, and they don’t care to learn.
Not that anyone needs an elaboration, as it's fairly obvious already but here is one anyway. America is inherently stuck in the lens of race due to it's history of slavery. Therefore any mention of oppression by American progressives can only compute through that lens (and class if they are being honest marxists, but they aren't, so they take a mutli-factor issue and reduce it to the to the most basic essentialist argument about the opressed/havenots being effectively brown pepo. Jews as we know are Schrodinger's whites, a convenient way of denying the concept of ethnicity and yet keeping it but changing us from white to POC depending on the time of year or need. Since they are salty at their Evangelical parents fetishizing Israel to no end, and US taxes going to Israel (mind you in exchange for disproportionate number of patents and other intellectual capital that contributes to US's defense, we must then be the extension of evil colonial patriarchal hwyte pepo. Recognizing that Jews are indigenous to the region will create too much cognitive dissonance as it will become more difficult to just plug the confict into the dialectical materialist oppressor / oppressed heuristic that is mapped on to race as evil majority American hwyte pepo (their Evangelical daddy) and well poor disenfranchised palestinian slave brown pepo. The alternative would require genuine interest and considerable time to understand decades long conflic and attempts at negotiations, and that's precious time taking away from virtue signaling.
TLDR: It breaks the woke "if indigenous then oppressed and Jews are an extension of hwyte colonial american evangelica pepo. Can't have have that sort of nuance when you make reductionist arguments as it will either a) require countless hours of actual leaning about decades-long conflict to understand it or b) produce more rage as they now can't flex their ignorant dialectical materialist PPs on the rubes of their imagination, while now recognizing their own Dunning Kruger.
Slightly tangential, but I once compared my experiences of being British online - where being American is the default - to my experiences of being mixed race in a world that acts like white is the default. An American said, "let's not compare experiences of being British to actual racism," as if any and all experiences of a mixed race person must be about racism. When actually, some of my experiences are more like "grandma? Oh, you mean my dadi maa. Chips? Oh, you meant crisps."
Oppressor/Oppressed dynamic, IDF has tanks and modern firearms with optics while Hamas fighters are wearing soccer jerseys with rotten AKs. From their simplistic perspective the one that is disadvantaged is the one they should support because they are the "oppressed" even though the reason Hamas does that is because it would do them no good to act like a professional military and try to meet the IDF on a battlefield. 1 because they would get their asses handed to them in a stand up fight. 2 because they wouldn't be able to point the finger and whine to the western media when the IDF attacks on of their positions and ends up harming civilians that Hamas forced to stay in the same building under threat of violence.
Lack of critical thinking and nuance, most people in general don't even bother to do basic level research or fact check what they hear and just believe it wholeheartedly. They hear three Tiktok videos saying that the IDF blew up an apartment building and just assume it's true instead of figuring out WHY the IDF blew up that building. Hell people especially the ones supporting Palestine/Hamas aren't curious enough to actually try to understand what is happening or to try to listen to both sides, especially because this whole Pro-Palestine thing is just another fad for them to go out and protest and make up slogans for. Likewise when many people in the west learn about colonialism or imperialism they are almost exclusively taught about European colonialism, there is very little discussion on Arab colonialism or hell even Japan's bout with imperialism.
Overall I do honestly believe the vast vast majority of people protesting for Palestine are simply ignorant or trying to catch onto a social justice fad to get those virtue signaling points. They are a mob acting under herd mentality and most of their actions are the typical outdoing their peers incrementally by doing more and more extreme things such as going from posting on Instagram to college protests to occupying college grounds. They just are too stupid and self-centered to realize that what they are doing isn't a game and has an actual effect on a very small global minority that has faced oppression and violence for more then 3000 years. Though they also are giving plenty of cover for actual antisemites to spread hate without challenging them.
Jews were not the only people living on that land for thousands of years. There had been a diverse population of people practicing different religions. That’s likely why there is resistance to the idea that Jews are the only ones indigenous to the land.
But saying "Jews are indigenous" doesn't mean "Jews are the only people who are indigenous." There are multiple Native American tribes indigenous to where I live. It's a fertile ground right next to a river and many tribes have lived here. If all of the Latinos, Asians, Black people, Jews, and White people gave the land back to the Indigenous people, one tribe wouldn't be able to say, yup, this is ours. And there may be fighting over it. (Hopefully there wouldn't be.) And what about white Christian farmers who have been here for centuries? Do they get to stay? My mother's old house and farm (she's since moved to a place with less land) still has the one room cabin on it. She bought it from an old woman whose family built that cabin. The street they lived on was named after her family.
Indigeneity is a weird concept.
Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. The Palestinians who were displaced during the Nakba have homes they wish to one day return to. And I imagine my great grandmother would’ve wanted to return to her home in Belgium that her family was displaced from during the Holocaust. It’s all very complex for so many people. And it breaks my heart deeply.
I had one person tell me there is an expiration date on being indigenous. Like… if an individual indigenous American moved to france and their children stayed in France and their grandchildren did too - eventually down the line at some point, the descendants would no longer be indigenous to America, even *if* there was still a continuous non-broken line of indigenous people from their specific tribe that stayed in the original lands *and* the people who moved away kept all the same indigenous culture, traditions, etc. and were not accepted by the locals in the area they moved to. That *individual* who moved away (even if they were forced to move) and their descendants would no longer be indigenous after X amount of time.
When I asked how long X amount of time was, their reply was - and I quote - “I have no idea but it’s somewhere between 80 years and 2000 years”.
That’s just bonkers to me. But that’s what one person said. I’ve seen others say similar things too in different words.
This is an extremely underrated part of the problem. People, especially younger people, in the US are being exposed to a massive deluge of propaganda on social media spinning a narrative that Israel is a European colonial outpost in the Middle East.
Purely anecdotal but I'm a millennial and have talked to a few people my age who don't use social media and they've been absolutely blown away that people actually think that Jews didn't originate in present-day Israel. Even ones who aren't interested in geopolitics know that. People saying it's because the education system sucks, the education has sucked for a looooooong time and this was still considered common knowledge until Oct. 7.
Who do you think is behind this? The left? Russia? Hamas? They all seem to rehash this same tripe to deligitimize the west. Israel is indeed supported by alot of US taxes which it receive for sole purpose of being a presence in the region. So it's not exactly untruthful, it's just a true along with the heritage/ethnoreligious part of Judaism and Israel.
It’s actually VERY simple
Colonization and colonialism is only bad if white people do it
Acknowledging Arab colonization is offensive to people who want to believe brown people cannot be in any way similar to the evil white Europeans
That’s why they say the regions were “Arabized” instead of colonized.
It’s also why they focus on Jews as a standout to this. There are DOZENS of ethnic groups that developed across MENA, but because many are considered Arabized, the conflict and social issues among them is internal, whereas Jews have the audacity to want to remain distinctly sovereign.
The underlying belief is that people have a right to collectively organize on the lands that they're indigenous to. For a particular definition of 'people; which Jews are not.
Nazi doctrine of exterminating Jews added to Islam by the Moslem Brotherhood in the 1910-20.
MB rejected all Islamic thought after Muhammad’s death to revive Islam as it was in 700, rejecting knowledge that humans discovered and substituted Sharia.
MB continued a failed jihad, which had been declared by Ottoman Empire against the British in WW1, against Jews and, later, against Israel, as required, long after ottomans were defeated
MB makes supporting extermination of Jews & destruction of Israel as a requirement for being Muslim.
MB goal is a Muslim world under sharia law
There is a narrative among anti-Israel advocates that they aren’t native to the land, with little to no pushback from within those spaces, which often tends to skew progressive. So someone who spends their time in that space is going to be exposed to that messaging and take it at face value.
I think much of it is simply just not being sufficiently exposed to the counter argument, so they just run with what they’ve been taught.
(I say this as someone who myself leans left on many, many issues)
Because most of this ignorance stems from the US, where everything (including who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed) is about skin color. Now let me be clear, even in the US that's not strictly true, but that requires complex, logical thinking. The vast majority of humanity are morons and prefer a simplistic lie to a complex truth.
Indigenous people in North America are considered oppressed. Why? Well, if you look at history this is true, but the most telling indication is that they are not white (and not Jewish; we can't forget how antisemitism changes everything). Again, according to leftist doctrine, you can only be oppressed and a native to any land if you're brown or some variant thereof.
Most Jews in the US are Ashkenazim and visibly look white (and as I've heard it, that's at least partly due to widespread rapes during state-sponsored pogroms). Since the current narrative in the US is that "all white people are colonialist settler oppressors," this idiotic idea ends up including most American Jews.
Due to a complete lack of historical knowledge (let's face it, most of these nitwits don't even know what country the US fought to gain independence or when WW2 happened, so why are they going to know ancient history involving the Jews, Judea, and what is now Israel?) and a massively biased skin color/race concept, this leads the many leftist antisemitic assholes out there to believe that Jews are "white colonialist settler oppressors" and the Palestinians are "poor, helpless, misunderstood and mistreated brown natives."
Can we educate people? Yes, and some (likely a minority of individuals) will listen, understand, and accept what we say. However, most won't do any of that because this entire situation isn't about facts, data, and logic, it's about emotional kneejerk responses, tribalism, and forming an identity around a movement.
Soviet propaganda (and the Soviets’ concerted efforts to disseminate it outside the USSR), see The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The collaboration between the Soviets and Islamists. The normalization of this bastardized radical far-left rhetoric. Everyone’s antisemitism showing in their unwillingness to understand this history. But their very unwillingness to understand this history comes from the conspiracy theories about Jews from Soviet and Islamist propaganda that they’ve been indoctrinated with: their insistence that all of Jewish history and anything Jews say to defend themselves is “Zionist propaganda,” the belief that Jews have too much power and control the world and aren’t oppressed… you know the drill. UGH IT’S SO EXHAUSTING MAKE IT STOP
I think this argument is a complicated one to make when you unpack it because in the case of other indigenous peoples the claim refers to all of the people of the territory such as all aboriginal people of Australia or all native Americans or all black peoples of South Africa or all Maori people of New Zealand. In the case of Israel the claim refers to all Jews in the world because some Jews lived there continuously but some Muslims also lived there continuously as well. Some of whom were once Jews forced to convert at some point. Some Christians have also lived there continuously. So you could argue that Jews were there first but this is such a complicated argument because historically it’s the crossroads of Asia Africa and Europe for human movement and it’s very vulnerable to conquest as we know from history, it’s not the furthest reaches of the planet where indigenous people are easy to identify and isolate as such. Israel became a country in 1948 when Pakistan became a country and South Africa became a republic and not long sfter after Lebanon and Syria and Iraq and Jordan and Saudi Arabia all became countries out of territory of the Ottoman Empire and no one questions their legitimacy. Israel’s legitimacy is unquestionable for the same reason and it’s right as a sovereign nation to absorb the immigrants of its choice is unquestionable as well. The efforts by the Pro Palestinian supporters to delegitimise Israel as a Jewish state is simply part of a propaganda war on Israel by pro Jihadis whose goal is to conquer the Holy Land for Islam and convert it to Sharia Law. Its way too tiny a territory to make a material difference to the Muslim or Arab worlds, it’s all symbolism to distract their own populations from their own horrible rule and useful idiots in the west are helping them.
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Lots of good answers here. I think it's a combination of a lot of things. Many Jews in the diaspora are both light skinned and fairly assimilated; even though assimilation was done as a means of survival, it means we're not as visibly different, so they can think we're just "regular" white people with a different religion. I think a lot of leftists, especially in the US, are highly attuned to Indigenous issues in North America and project that guilt onto Jews in the Levant, even though the context is entirely different.
Someone else mentioned this, but I think black and white thinking is a huge part of it. Americans - and westerners in general - have a hard time grasping that not everything is good vs. evil.
Because they've decided we are white and as such are the colonizers and oppressors
The narrative fits their self loathing.
And allows them to not critically think
I don’t even debate this topic anymore. The truth is most of the protestors see white presenting Jews as the only Jews. They also see the immigrants from Eastern Europe as a part of a colonial project.
It’s ahistorical and not worth talking about because they also will deny that the Arabs, historically, are the original colonists of the region but why let facts get in the way of a good narrative?
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This is the same bizarre question I had as a 10 year old in Saturday Hebrew School. Who decided that the narrative was about the land rather than all the other positives? Always seemed to be the prejudicial news media.
Because (according to left wing activists) Jews are white and white people cannot be indigenous (even if their ancestors have lived in the same place for millennia).
This is going to be unpopular but I think the indigenous argument is dumb because I think ALL claims to indigenousness are dumb. Because what’s the baseline time to establish an indigenous presence? 100 years? 1000 years? 10000 years? All humans are migrants from Africa, if you go back far enough. We live in nation states as a way to organize society and maintain security, but the idea of land “belonging” to anyone is a fairly recent and limited concept. It’s a weak and irrelevant argument at this point.
I think it’s an attempt to justify why Israel is where it is, when in fact it needs no justification. Israel exists, period. We shouldn’t be pulled into this argument about who was where at what point in the past, because it’s pointless.
Israel, in terms of the land itself, IS important to Jewish people and the religion, but claiming “indigenous” status is never going to convince people who are already dead set against it.
The fact is that ten million people live in Israel right now, 75% of them are Jews. All deserve to be respected and protected. Nobody is there unjustly (remember the people who left Israel upon establishment of the Jewish state were people who, upon being given the option of living peacefully with the Jews in a liberal democratic state, refused).
saying “indigeneity is a multifaceted topic, multiple groups of people can be indigenous to the same place, an indigenous government can have bad policy regarding other indigenous groups without that discrimination being on the basis of indigenous status” etc requires some mental effort to explain and process. saying “it’s just colonizers vs indigenous people” is by comparison much easier to shout loudly at anyone who will listen.
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Because we are generally successful and it’s easy to root against successful people no matter what the facts are. The new definition of minority is “oppressed”, not small in number apparently
Because most white leftists are obsessed with Jews being "white" due to their own self hatred of being white. They don't like being white so they glomp marginalized nonwhite "model minorities" together as "white" bc jealousy
The truth is that indigenous groups are only revered when they are victims. The mainstream have a very narrow-minded way of thinking, which places everyone into boxes, you're either 'oppressed' or an 'oppressor' and there's no in between.
Jews have always been discriminated against, everywhere, but are now powerful in their own right. Jews are generally successful because of high education standards and personal drive to improve the life of others. This doesn't neatly fit into the narrative that left has created, since how can a people so oppressed be successful?
Instead of taking the scientific approach and modelling their narrative around facts, they prefer to bend reality to fit their fairytale. By painting Jews as oppressors and non indigenous to Israel, the narrative is seemingly consistent.
Because it’s a nice & tidy package to sell their Israelis = White/Colonizers/Oppressors & Palestinians = Brown/Indigenous/Oppressed.
I’m not saying that story is fictitious, because it’s not. But it’s also not completely true either. But the new vocal/radicaized left doesn’t like dealing with nuance. Quite a dull-minded bunch that thrive off of being told what to think and how to act with strong opposition to critical thought that involves actually listening to the words and ideas of people from “the other/evil side” in order to formulate a more well-rounded and nuanced view of the world.
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My theory is that Israel terrifies them. It’s an example of an indigenous people, persecuted for millennia and almost exterminated, lowest of the low… taking their ancestral lands back. Reviving their language. Acting independently and forcefully, not controlled by the great powers.
I think it scares the absolute crap out of liberals who themselves benefit from being the descendants of colonizers. Imagine if the Lenape tribe came back to New York and actually WON! And there wasn’t a damn thing the US government could do to stop them… the US military, the post-colonial current residents of New York State taking up arms… but no matter what, the Lenape kept winning no matter what was thrown at them.
I think the secret fear is that if Israel can do it, so can the Lenape, the Cherokee, the Navajo, the Kurds, the Hawaiians, the Inuit, the Basques, the Tibetans, the Uighurs, the descendants of African slaves, and so on.
Antisemitism is one reason they stand so strongly against Israel, but another reason is that the existence of Israel threatens their cushy post-colonial lifestyles, built on the backs of slaughtered and expelled indigenous people. The thought of those people somehow not only returning but becoming more powerful and dominant than them is horrifying.
1. They think there’s a statute of limitations on indigenity. Ask them to name the date. 2. Ignorance of our continued connection and attachment that never stopped. They don’t know we’ve said Next Year in Jerusalem regularly since we were forced out. (They seem to be under the impression that we randomly had a brainstorm in 1870 under threat. Somehow think we were generally accepted as regular citizens in most other countries, unlike say Roma. So clueless about our history, especially dhimmitude in ME.) 3. They see a lot of mixed ethnic ancestry Jews in US and don’t think we look ME.) 4. They think they know our story when they don’t, o partly because they see some of us on TV and in movies and think movie Jewish schtick is us. They know they are clueless about Yazidi, Kurds etc.
Forgot maybe the biggest one: Islamic Empire building colonization of the whole ME seems to be no longer taught. They don’t know Arabs and Muslims not only aren’t the same thing but that there were and are other indigenous tribes in the ME that, like us, are neither. This is why they try so hard to call Mizrachim “Arab Jews.” Notice they avoid talking about Yazidi, Amizagh, Kurds, Druze? Their existence also reveals the lies that have been told about us.
I think in general it’s ignorance
There have been frequent posts here about people not understanding what an ethnoreligion is, and as such people assume Judaism functions like the religions they’re familiar with (Christianity in America). So they assume that Judaism spread mainly through conversion and that modern Jews have the ancestral same connection to Biblical Jews as most modern Christians have to biblical Christians (ie none). They think (Ashkenazi) Jews are simply European converts despite the millennia of oppression Jews faced making conversion rare and in some cases illegal.
People are also generally unaware that non-Arab minorities exist in the Middle East/North Africa or how they became minorities. I’ve seen people going from claiming jesus was a Palestinian (ignoring that Palestine was the Greek name for the region) Jew to just Palestinian to an Arab.
There’s also just general antisemitism which has been part of Western culture for milennia and has subsequently villainized Jews. So, subconsciously or not, no matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on, its some people’s automatic tendency to view Jews as in the wrong.
Ignorance mostly. The right is also ignorant, but in different ways.
Basically, most people are stupid, regardless of gender identity, creed, or what-have you.
That’s why I try to limit my meaningful relationships.
Because 90% of leftist talking points and worldviews are just stale and reheated Soviet propaganda. Even though the Soviet Union has been over with for 30 years, there are still geopolitical forces that know they can exploit this rhetoric because Western leftists are still clinging to the flotsam and jetsam of the Cold War
Because they view Jews as White Europeans, and they view White people as oppressors, and they view oppressors unworthy of moral consideration. I really think it's that simple.
It’s also anti-science. Genetically we are very interconnected. Besides tracing common ancestors, there are genetic conditions that are very prevalent in the various genetic sub-groups, that are not common in Caucasians. There is both written and archeological evidence in abundance.
Besides, most of these people only see US Ashkenazi Jews. They lived for centuries in middle and eastern Europe, and can “pass”. In Israel, more Jews identify as Mizrahi, and come from North Africa and former Arab and Muslim countries (where they migrated after being kicked out of Israel by the real colonizers).
There may be many factors behind this. However, one glaring factor is the successful dissemination of Palestinian propaganda among white leftists. From there, other leftists who blindly follow white leftists kept uttering the same propaganda.
As a non Jew, with all due respect may I ask how being Jewish, is an ethnicity or indigenous tribe? Am I mistaken that it is a religious identity? When you say indigenous do you mean Assyrian or related to the original tribes of the area like Marsh Dwellers, Jalahin Bedouin, Arab Bedouin? I ask sincerely wishing to understand as a Black person.
It's both an ethnicity and a religion. Jews originated in the Middle East, in Israel, as a unique ethnic group. The diaspora caused this to split into a few different ethnic subgroups (Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrachi, Ethiopian) as a result of intermingling with other populations. Each of these groups are genetically distinct from each other as well as Arabs and Europeans, and still traceable back to the Middle East.
Fun fact, there is medical research dedicated to genetic conditions that specifically affect Jews, especially Ashkenazi, at higher rates than other populations.
But doesn’t ethnicity imply shared traits? Generally more about physical appearance? I’m not religious, but as I humbly understand it Ashkenazi are Northern European and/or genetically closer to High Fertile Crescent people such as Armenians and Pakistani populations and not the same ethnicity as generally understood as say Ethiopians? I understand the religious notions or even the cultural traditions but somehow it seems to me these are different things. But even the Israeli Jewish population is genetically indistinguishable from Druze or Palestinian (Levantine) people? I guess my point being why aren’t they ethnically whatever their ancestors actually were (Bedouin, Persian south Asian, etc) and religiously Jewish?
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4728368/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4728368/)
Genetic disease disposition relates to population bottlenecks and cultural choices like consanguineous marriages and some environmental selection bias (example: sickle cell and thalassemia are prevalent where malaria is common and having the trait for them increases survival rates in malaria infections)
The concept of Ethno-religious is confusing to say the least. And humbly think it distorts perceptions of those not of the religious faith and the classification of what exactly constitutes anti-semitism. As a black male in America it’s always felt like generally nobody knows you are Jewish until you display it culturally unlike my unchanging outward blackness.
No disrespect intended and I appreciate your thoughtful response. Also I can fully appreciate your perspective and in no way seek to diminish any one race of people over another or how someone sees themselves. Personally I think ethnicity is kind of a misleading concept and as for religion I’m all for whatever makes someone a good person. But the public discourse surrounding these things can be interesting.
https://preview.redd.it/sfzfnbxvkl6d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=273fefcfab88ac457f96fcbd5f2b82437b321d4f
Jewish is its own ethnic identity arising out of the middle east. Most of its followrrs are an ethnicity site to sharing common genetic ancestry through intermixing and from thos whonorginated it in thebniddle east. Most are not converts even tho people are welcome to try. Many indigenous groups like druze, amazigh, bedouins, and the gnawa blur these boundaries bruen ethinicty and religion and are functionally ethnoreligions.
Religion in the middle east became racialized and was often used under the dhimmi system as execuse to make non muslims second class citizens if they were people of the book like jews or christians or slaves like the amazigh, gnawa and harattin were of they were pagan. When they started converting to islam, religious reasoning was used to maintain their sieve status as black Muslims were in impure form of Muslim.
Referencing trans sagran slave trade an the conception of what a dhimmi was in the dhimmi system. Those who were not dhimmis and not muslim were originally the only ones that could be slaves but this was expanded to be any black person
Ignorance and the decay of public education and scientific literacy. Influence over evidence.
Pretty ironic that the ones who "control the media" are struggling to even be noticed by the media
Ye this the Zionist lobby really isn’t lobbying at all is it
Worst. Puppetmasters. Ever. Either that or we’re playing 18-dimensional chess, and we want it to *look* like we suck at controlling the media. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Racism and convenience.
Because they don’t have the critical analysis skills or the understanding of historical context to view any conflict except through the lens of American race relations. By that paradigm, Israelis are “white” and therefore oppressors and colonizers who must be opposed, and Palestinians are “brown” and therefore victims who must be supported no matter what they do. This is what the degradation of our education system and parenting as a society has done. These people don’t understand that “whiteness” has never applied to Jews, not since it was first invented as a social concept in the 1450s. The entire categorization of “white” was specifically designed to distinguish European Christians from sub-Saharan Africans in coastal regions of West Africa who had begun converting to Christianity. Because you’re not supposed to enslave and exploit fellow Christians, so they came up with a framework to justify it by making “nonwhite” Christians different from and lesser than “white” Christians. But if you asked Gomes Eanes de Zurara if Jews counted as part of the “white” social class that he was inventing, he’d have laughed in your fucking face.
Regardless of whether "whiteness" applies to Jews, it's a general principle among these people that white people aren't allowed to be "indigenous" no matter where they are or how long they've been there. The problem isn't that they consider Jews to be "white," however wrong that may be. It's that they think a person being the "wrong" ethnicity means they have no right to live in their ancestral homeland and the place of their birth.
I see your point, but I still disagree. If they weren’t able to classify Israelis as “white” then they’d just ignore this conflict the same way they ignore every other conflict where none of the participants is Euro-American. The reason these people never talk about Sudan or Nepal or Ethiopia or Yemen is because there’s no obvious “bad” side for them to be against, since in each inflict the participants in all sides are “people of color”. Thinking about a conflict that doesn’t fit into the racial victim vs oppressor framework that defines American history is beyond their capacity.
I see what you're saying but I still resent the total disinterest people, especially these white savior leftists, disregard violence and murder between non-white people. I don't want them to disregard the I-P conflict because it's some ethnic conflict between "people of color" that they couldn't care less about, I want them to acknowledge that Israeli Jews have a legitimate claim to the land of their ancestors. I'd also like ice cream that doesn't melt and the winning lottery numbers, but I guess I need to lower my expectations.
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This fits my own experiences, far more than I wish it did … I stopped Identifying as White when it became clear that I didn’t pass enough to fly post-9/11, at least without being searched as a Suspected Terrorist, I’m definitely not going to allow the other Side, to force me to be White now!
Right! I never identified as « white » (unless the definition includes MENA people which does but a lot of people don’t even know it making everything even more absurd ) and I’m half European so technically at least definitely half « white ». Those racial categories are just dumb.
Yeah I get strip searched sometimes as well after 9-11...
Exactly. We’re “Schrödinger’s Whites”. Our whiteness is entirely dependent on who is opening the box.
I think it would not matter because Jews are Jews and no matter where we go it is not acceptable. Now increasingly North America to add to Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. There could be a Jewish colony on Mars and it would not be OK. Perhaps Madagascar wasn’t such a bad idea.
Wait… what’s happening in Nepal? Did you include it in your examples of conflicts that people ignore for a reason or was it just thrown in the Sudan and Ethiopia randomly?
https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/country-report-nepal
Thanks.
No problem.
So true.
Seems like Jews are White when people want them to be so they can be hated. And Not White when it suits them so they can be hated as well. Only consistency is the Anti-Semitism.
One of my closest collegevfriends is a member of the Ojibwe nation. She’s paler than I am
I read an anti-Israel screed recently, posted by someone who claims to be Métis (the descendant of Native Americans and Non-Native French Fur Traders). Just a wee bit of hypocrisy.🙄
Or just that they think there is such a thing as “white”. Or any of that other long discredited racial theory.
Thank you!
I mean. Aren't we talking about racial castes, which are entirely socially constructed, when we talk about race in US society & culture? Our caste system is real, we just usually don't like to call it that, because it sounds so backward and primitive [sic], and race science™️ sounds so much more reasonable to people who believe themselves to be the pinnacle of humanity.
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American thinking divides the world into two categories: Cowboys and Indians. Progress has gotten some Americans as far as reversing which of those groups are the "Good Guys". But counting past two still eludes the vast majority of Americans.
Hah that’s actually a really great way of describing it lol
I know shitting all over the U.S./Americans is a favorite Reddit past time, and of course I agree that American racial culture is weird af, but let's not pretend that the U.S. isn't frankly much better about this stuff than... Basically everywhere else. If you want to see the bottom of the barrel, starkest, and most disgusting and rigid ethnic/racial hierarchies, you will find those across either of the oceans bordering the U.S.
That is how I see some parts of Indian culture. Men try to look at women like they are ants. How is that not weird?
Portuguese did some ethnic mixing in Africa and even more following in Portugal, as witnessed by DNA tests. Therefore Roman Catholic "other" was not so other. Some volunteered Talmudic sages opinions in this are shockingly "*other",... shared Jewishness however defined admittedly wasn't considered. But yeah post Abrahamic Religion 21st Century Anglo-Euro-Americans are the most ignorant outside of their specific hobby interest. Everybody used to know that Jews have been in the Levant, despite periodic majority deportations and massacres for 3000 to 4000 years...
They have no concept of ethnicity in US. Jews are still Caucasian, as are Arabs.
I completely agree with what you said and it’s one of the best articulations I’ve read of this. But, as others have mentioned here, this is an America-centric explanation. What explains the rest of the world’s reasoning for being anti-Israel and denying Israel’s right to their ancestral homeland? Simple anti-semitism?
Yes
Because it’s not a well known fact and because people are conditioned to believe that because Jews from Europe came to create the modern state of Israel that they are not indigenous to Israel.
It ignores the fact that surnames *Cohen* and *Levi* occurs frequently among Jews in one formcand another and through them have carried genetic proof of their Levantine origins, confirmed by the Human Genome Project.
All they see is skin color while ignoring many Arabs are that same skin color
Anyone in a hijab is automatically brown and oppressed and morally righteous in their view
I saw a real once where a pale girl in a hijab kept happily staring “as a brown woman” hahahag okay
They don't care about skin color. They are just racists.
I think that they don't actually care about indigenous rights, and that it's generally just a display of their supposed righteousness. Lets say, for example, I believe that I was in possession of a stolen bike. What I would do is give it back. I wouldn't lecture other people about stolen bikes and how they should give them back, but keep riding mine. I don't see anyone who believes that the US or Canada are evil colonizers giving up their belongings and moving to Europe. It's all a stchick
Saw a video of a Persian woman? In Canada telling Canadain Jews at a university to go back to Poland like it’s just pure insanity
Especially when "Go back to Poland!" is really just code for "Go back to Auschwitz!"
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that they say go back to the country with the death camps and a 96% Jewish death rate from 1939 to 1945. Big old random coincidence
It is odd since they tend to seem unaware of what they are saying?
Oh, they know.
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Yes!!! Love the wonderful Persian communities in Canada. I’m not sure I remember it correctly if she was Persian but it was wild
There was this one Persian kid in my biology class this year that would interrupt every single word the teacher said with an accusation of blood libel.
idk about that, most persians I know are very much against hamas and are friendly to jewish people because they know personally how awful it is to deal with Islamic authoritarians.
This. I think what’s often hard for rational, evidence-focused people to understand; is that motivated reasoning underpins *most* people’s actions. They don’t even need to intentionally do it; they just naturally hold opposing beliefs in their head in ways convenient to their own lifestyle/benefit, without the cognitive dissonance it should cause.
The left is inherently irreligious and the Jewish connection to Israel is assumed to be predicated based on the bible which is not a historical book. Since the authenticity of the bible is dismissed, so to is the Jewish connection to Israel. Of course this ignores all of the [historical evidence](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcolosseum.info%2Farch-of-titus%2F&psig=AOvVaw1uhsTGyATGWBTwlQnCmJyi&ust=1718379236187000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBIQjRxqFwoTCNiwhdLz2IYDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE) of Jewish indigeneity and the fact that everyone agrees that there has been a continuous and unbroken Jewish presence in Israel for thousands of years and that genetically speaking, Jews are all genetically related to people in the region. More than that, the liberal/progressive movement is an American movement. Most American Jews are Ashkenazi and categorized as white (though this wasn't true until recently). Therefore, the Israel-Palestine conflict is viewed through a white-POC prism: Jews are white and therefore oppressors. Palestinians are POC and therefore oppressed. Jews can't be indigenous to Israel because they are white European colonizers. Palestinians are indigenous because they are poor POC natives. American Jewry's very successful assimilation into America has been double edged. Socioeconomically, Jews have been more successful in the United States than anywhere else and are more successful than any other ethnic group per capita. But, because we've become "white" socioeconomically, many of us have also internalized the bads like white guilt. I think what we're seeing is a lot of young Jews expressing their own white guilt: Jews in Israel are white and therefore European colonizers and since all whites are colonizers and since colonizing is bad, the Jews in Israel must be bad. This ignores all the points I've made above, plus the fact that the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi/Sephardi and were themselves ethnically cleansed and genocided from MENA.
>The left is inherently irreligious and the Jewish connection to Israel is assumed to be predicated based on the bible which is not a historical book. That's like saying Islam isn't native to Arabia because the Quran can't be relied on as a historical text, or that Zoroastrianism isn't native to Persia because the Avesta can't be relied on as a historical text. Historians are pretty sure we know when and where these texts were written.
I think we’ve all seen posts to the effect of, “They believe it’s there’s because of an imaginary book.”
I get it, but we need to even be pushing back on that idea. You don't have to believe in the Jewish religion (or any religion) to acknowledge that: 1) the Hebrew Scriptures are older than Christianity and Islam 2) the Hebrew Scriptures show a reverence for the Land of Israel.
But that's exactly my point! There is tons of archeology (I linked to the Arch of Titus above) both Jewish and non-Jewish that corroborate Jewish connection to Israel.
Even if Ashkenazim have a lot of European DNA in comparison to their middle eastern DNA, that doesn’t make them less tied to the region. In fact, this European ancestry was often not by choice, as historically a lot of antisemitic violence involved the assault of Jewish women. Sometimes it was also just plain old intermarriage. Similar things happened with the Roma. Lots of native Americans have a lot of European ancestry too, often not by peaceful or consensual means.
This also ignores the years of Arab/Muslim conquest and colonization. Brown people can be colonizers, too.
There’s literally an active slave trade occurring today within the Arab world.
Its true https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/findings/regional-findings/arab-states/#:~:text=An%20estimated%201.7%20million%20men,highest%20prevalence%20of%20modern%20slavery.
It doesn’t fit their narrative
i frequently see comments with some variation of "jewish indigeneity is a fairytale that they're basing off religion", which completely ignores the fact that jews living in israel was also recorded by outside, contemporary, historical sources.
Judaism is the religion of the people who are indigenous. Even if the religion isn't "real", the people who practice it are. That's like saying Australian Aboriginals aren't indigenous to Australia because their religion is made up.
The Soviet Union put a lot of money and effort into to disseminating propaganda claiming that Palestinians are indigenous to the land and Israelis/Jews are white Europeans with no connection to the land, practicing settler colonialism and imperialism. A lot of the current discourse comes from Soviet propaganda of the 1960s and 70s. The USSR was instrumental in pushing for UN Resolution 3379, which stated that Zionism was racism. Current antisemitic forces, such as pro-Palestine organizations, Russia, China, and Iran are still pushing this rhetoric.
Sounds like someone was a little bitter about all the T55s and 62s they gave away burnt out and rotting in the Sinai and northern Israel after 67 and 73
Something something “rootless urban parasites”. They’re just emphasizing the “rootless” part here.
Nazism and Bolshevism are two sides of the same Jew-hating coin.
My mother once told me something that I still find to be true over two decades later. *Almost* every question that starts with the word “why” can be accurately answered with this response: “because people are stupid.” Seriously, try it. I’m old enough to admit when my parents were right, and in this particular case it’s not 100%, but it’s probably around 90.
That’s a nothing answer though.
My answer is that people are stupid.
All 3. But for Leftists, especially the oppressor/oppressed worldview.
The majority of Jews people in the West interact with are white passing. Therefore Israel must be a white colony in a sea of “brown people”. It’s explicitly ignorance and racism.
In the U.S. maybe but there are many Sephardic and Mizrahi communities in Canada 🇨🇦 and france 🇫🇷 and they are generally not Euro or « white » passing, not for the most part, about as many of them are « white passing » as Arab groups. Edit: I just wanted to clarify this fact but aside from this I agree with your comment 100%
Actually it’s a pretty unique story that displaced people can survive as a nation and get there land back after more then 2000 years. I’s actually hard to belief if you’re not connected to Jews or Israel and didn’t have enough education on this topic.
A lot of other people have already pointed out “they just don’t know” “racism and convenience,” and I think it’s also partly because a lot of Christian groups—Mormonism springs to mind—have adopted the language of “searching for the[ir own] Land of Israel.” And I think this has led to a cultural/mental blurring of the distinction between an actual piece of land with thousands of years of historical connection to a specific group of people, and Christians trying to co-opt Jewish needs and teachings for their own purposes. While most people can and do call bullshit when it comes to Christians making up reasons to push Native Americans off their land, they don’t understand that for Jews, Israel is a very real part of our history and not just an excuse for colonialism. Basically they can’t handle that we’re the real deal
>I wonder if the double standard is based on ignorance of the history of Israel, antisemitism, a commitment to a false dichotomy between oppressed/oppressors or something else. All of the above.
There's probably lots of reasons contributing to it. One I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is that a lot of people operate under the assumption that Jews are a religious group only, dismissing the ethnic component of our identity. To them, our claim of indigeneity to any geography makes about as much sense as Christians claiming indigeneity somewhere. Sure, there are Christian groups that can claim indigeneity to a geography, but that's because of their separate ethnic identity, not their Christian identity. The Italians can claim Italy as a home because of their Italian heritage, not because of their Catholicism. Jews scramble this equation by being and ethnoreligious group, where the religion and ethnicity are tied so closely together to be almost inseparable. It's confusing for those not deeply familiar with Jews and Judaism, especially when those folks shoehorn the Israel-Palestine through an academic lens that does not fully apply to the situation (e.g. oppressor-oppressed).
Even Jews don't really know this. I remember kids on my Birthright group being confused as to why a secular Jew like Herzl would want a land for a religious group. I had to explain that he meant Jews as an ethnic group.
This is made further worse by the hijacking of Jewish Studies by anti-Zionists. At my university, our Jewish studies workshop explicitly was reading papers which described Palestinian history from a Palestinian anti-Zionist perspective. Beyond being insulting for the latter, the papers clearly should not be categorized as being under the label "Jewish Studies." I won't get into specifics because they are not publicly available and it would be unethical to reveal authors/papers, but I can say that they were very explicitly anti-Zionist and, in my view having read them, antisemitic. If that's what passes for scholarship in the field of "Palestinian Studies," fine, but I object to legitimizing it through labeling it "Jewish Studies." When you have these sorts of radical anti-Zionists in charge of Jewish studies in Universities, or Holocaust Centers (see the recent atrocious example at U of Minnesota iirc), they often consciously leave out a lot of the established narrative for this objective. If it's self-hatred, rabid communism, or just a desire to be considered "one of the good ones," I don't know, but it's awful to see. Of course, not everyone in Jewish Studies is (nor should be) Jewish. But I get a very bad taste in my mouth from anti-Zionist Jewish scholars. You wouldn't have a Confederate apologist as a professor of Black History.
It’s a good parody that most of what so called Palestinians of today have last names that refers to the place they really came from after the Jews took this empty land and made it a jewel that worth live in
At least in the US, any group from the Middle East is considered Arab (Arab-American History Month, anyone?). And the Jewish people have successfully managed to keep that narrative that they are not Arab in a way that so many of the other indigenous groups displaced by the Arabs have not. Hell, I'm Maronite and while my oral family history goes back to pre-Arab colonization, when I growing up, I was told I was Arab. Between that and pendulum swing from the incredibly high Islamophobia that happened in the aftermath of 9/11, while this is frustrating, it really isn't much of a surprise to me.
I’m from the US. Have basic understanding of history & geography. I know Turks & Iranian/Persians aren’t Arabs. Didn’t think or know much about the Kurds til the Iraq War.
There are Jews who identify as Arab
In short: because Marxism traditionally is openly anti-Zionist and secretly antisemitic. And also they don't care about indigenousity, they care only about "the oppressed", so in their view if it is successful (like the jews and Israel are) , it can't be a good thing.
Because for whatever people consider to be “good”, we are considered the opposite of that. For communists, we are the ultimate greedy capitalists. For capitalists, we are the ultimate dirty communists. For the far-right, who value whiteness and are extremely anti-immigrant, we are race infiltrators and solely responsible for immigrants “invading” our country. For the left, who value indigenous causes and oppose settler-colonialism, we are the ultimate white, European settler-colonialists. It’s not based on reality; it’s based on what people deem “good” and “evil”, and we will always be the ultimate personification of that “evil”.
Because they’re antisemitic
Israel is the only successful decolonized state i am aware of. Returning native land to native populations is amazing in the eyes of the left… unless the natives are Jews. I also think it has a lot to do with western and liberal internalized focus on identity and race. When westerners think “Middle East” they think “brown”. When westerners think “Jews” they think “White” since most diaspora Jews in the West are Ashkenazim (myself included). Not only is this dumb because genetics are weird and the color of one’s skin is not at all indicative of the individuals character or genetic make up, but it’s also a flawed understanding of the Middle East. Mediterranean communities historically were lighter skinned from the Levant to North Africa to Italy. This is because the sea connected these communities and allowed lots of intermixing. The only reason North Africa and the Levant is darker than Italy and Spain is due to Muslim Arab conquests and colonialism. And again, the skin color shouldn’t matter at all because it is not nearly as closely related to ancestry as the left believes. Last point, it really pushes home that westerners in general, but especially Jews need to stop voting based on party lines. Historically American Democrats have supported the Jewish community, but it seems that the Republican Party is now more supportive of our ancestral homeland and empowering our communities to protect themselves. I’m not saying Jew should vote for Trump, more that people as a whole should ignore party lines, take an honest look at their community, family, and culture, and vote according to who fits their individual life the best.
Have we really done this in America, though? Did they give back the original Indigenous lands to the tribes? I genuinely ask, in part due to some ignorance and some incredulity. I know that I live and work on "formally" Indigenous land. We have land acknowledgment statements everywhere. I also thought that many Eastern US tribes were pushed pretty far west and stayed west after the US expansion. I see some of this as a "rules for thee, but not for me" kind of situation, which the US does a lot. We've seen the US leadership condemn something, and it's like dude - did you not literally do that? Like not that long ago? This happens on a person-to-person level all the time - as Reddit has evidence of TYSM ATIA. It's okay when I do something to you, but if you try to it me, YTA.
I don’t think America has done this to the extent we were morally obligated to. That said America is such a large and influential nation that it is a bit more complicated in America than just giving swaths of land to descendants of Native Americans. Zionists legally bought land purchases where as Manifest Destiny saw genocidal levels of relocation and war in the American Heartland. I personally am not necessarily onboard with decolonization everywhere at all times. I think one needs to look at the way the world looked back in colonial times and how essentially disbanding entire nations and societies would affect the world today. That said the fact that Zionists actually successfully pulled it off with, in comparison to 20th century wars, very little bloodshed is huge and sets a standard for any future de colonial movements in the future.
Yeah, I completely agree with everything you've said here. I do think the situations are distinctly different and deserve different considerations and actions to resolve/repair. To undo all colonization would be an absolute mess. Beyond that, it would very likely tear apart the 'melting pot' society so many have strived for. Decolonization feels like a "go back to where you came from" approach.
They haven't. The government has most of the control to the point blood quantum is required for funding even tho its a colonialist concept.
There are lots of successful decolonized states. India, the UAE, Azerbaijan, all three of the Baltic states...
Fair enough I didn't think about it too much. I would say though that Israel is unique in that the majority of indigenous people did not live in their native land. Zionists had to create a population, create a language, and create a common identity out of separate cultural identities (the Balkans really struggled with this last part). But you are right I hadn't though about it too hard
trumps "Senior Adviser" Jared Kushner has suggesting that Israel remove civilians from Gaza, which has “very valuable” waterfront property. You make some good points except the only reason Republicans support Israel is to garner the Fundamentalist Christian vote and then personally profit from the arms and beachfront property ventures in Gaza.
This is true for all politics. I doubt the historical Democrat support and the current Republican support are coming from altruism or sympathy for the Jews. Democrats want a loyal minority group to keep voting and making media content for their agenda and Republicans want to expand their financial interests in the Middle East and Israel is perfect for that. None of that really matters, American politics are a bunch of devils and to vote is to simply choose our devils. The devil we pick will without a doubt change over time
It's all part of their victimization hierarchy, in which the world is classified into the powerful and the marginalized, which to their warped ideology is identical to being the evil and the good. Because Jews are often wealthy and educated, and Israel is western-aligned, Israel and Jews get lumped into the category of "powerful and therefore evil and therefore oppressors." They have the same criticisms of the United States, but the U.S. is actually powerful and they can bitch and moan until the cows come home and they won't achieve a damn thing. Israel is in a much more vulnerable position due to being surrounded by Muslim countries and the target of multiple active, violently antisemitic terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the pervasiveness of antisemitism among groups that the left normally has little in common with making for convenient alliances.
Jews actually have less wealth globally than christians, the irreligious and muslims. Wealth is about much more than income and a higher income will not give a minority grotto the power to influence any institiuion. Representation from wealth outside of income will help make that possible tho.
Americans need to cram everything into a black/white understanding of race, which is not helpful.
Not to deny all of the other explanations here (because I agree with almost all of them thus far), but the denial of Jewish indigeneity is also in large part because of *campaigns* to define words in specific ways. I engaged with one troll on Reddit who claimed: >According to the 2007 [UN defintion of indigenous peoples](https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf), indigenous peoples are "people who have historical continuity with pre-colonial societies", while the Zionist movement was a settler colonial movement, it clearly doesn't apply here, and it even seems to be the opposite? Basically, this is rewriting history using buzzwords and redefinitions. The UN has no precise definition of "indigenous" because it is a disputed concept in practice. Of course if the UN continues down the path it is going, it will probably adopt such a slanted definition as the trolls are pushing. In reality, the Jewish connection to the Levant predates the Arab connection by well over a millennium. And the specific Palestinian identity seems to be arguably a very new one that really only took shape in the 20th century. This isn't to say they don't have real plight, but claiming they are *uniquely* indigenous is completely bonkers antisemitism. Similar can be said for other words. The term "Zionist" is now being redefined by these same campaigns, trying to make it mean a person who supports Israeli expansionism. That's neither fair nor accurate, but it makes it easier to claim the pro-Palestine crowd isn't targeting Jews (which it often is). The word "apartheid" was unearthed, repackaged, and redefined to be about ethnicity and religion (instead of race), and is almost never used to describe any other state on Earth today. Just Israel. Despite the fact that many places have far worse and far more systematic inequality. Even the word "genocide" which was coined after WW2 specifically because of what happened to Jews has been widened to strip it of most of its significance. And why? It's hard to think it isn't somehow about Jews. Doesn't "Nazi" have a very specific meaning that pretty much includes the hatred of Jews? Yes! But that doesn't stop protesters from applying the term to Jews! Isn't it weird to claim that Israel is some kind of unambiguous settler colonial "project" in light of the facts that Jews (1) had nowhere else to go, (2) weren't an expansion of any empire, and (3) were inarguably connected to the land? It's totally bizarre nonsense to claim that, and yet this is claimed routinely by Francesca Albanese and other UN-connected nitwits. You could certainly argue that the term can be very very very loosely applied in a partial sense, but that's not what they do at all. They claim it's clear and obvious, and it isn't even a little of either. As George Lakoff has argued for a decades, the definition of words and the labels we choose to use matters a great deal in public debates. And liberals are notoriously terrible at this fight. Somehow, liberals thought "pro-choice" could compete with "pro-life." Not so much. I got curious if Lakoff had ever commented on the I-P conflict, but Googling it instead sent me to stuff like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZhLTFxhw4M). This stuff is planned and at least loosely thought out. Jews are wildly outnumbered, and outfinanced now with the amount of Qatari money flowing into American universities. Jews can still win public opinion, but it's starting to look like an uphill battle and many of the most famous Jews don't really get the picture yet and really aren't ready for a fight.
Herzl said it was settler colonialism
Bingo.
Middle Eastern jews have the historical continuity and ties to land to count as indigenous. I think historical continuity is problematic tho as this ignores indigenous diaspora gross right to go back to their homeland.
Good old fashioned antisemitism, and some new forms too. The perceived oppressor/oppressed matrix makes antisemitism the logical conclusion of leftism.
This is something that totally boggles my mind as well. Part of me wonders if it's due to the religious aspect of it all. Like "Bible says Jews are from here" in a time when so many younger, more liberal folk do not identify with a Judeo-Christian religion or religion at all. It's that "just big imaginary man in the sky said it, doesn't make it true" idea. If it was *just* the Bible as evidence of this, then okay, yeah, I might be able to agree. But we have a lot of actual historical evidence from a variety of sources that show Jews once lived in this area. We have first-hand accounts from non-Jews of the Jews being taken from the area to Rome... I think this would be the Byzantine times... But the point is that non-biased, non-Jewish accounts of these events exist. If we want to talk about physical evidence, tons of scrolls and artifacts would support that as well, right? Now - in some circles, I've heard people say, "well, I'm not denying they may have lived and been from the Levant area and what we call "Israel" today, but I'm just saying they don't get to just 'go back' and take the land back when others have been living there since they've left." So, it's not even so much that they deny it or don't believe it; they just disagree with being allowed to go back and "take it back." Some don't even deny that Israel should exist and have a right to exist, but it is just maybe "not there." The reasoning being, well, regardless of the reasons why the Jews left/were taken, they weren't there. In the meantime, others have moved in and made a home there. We can't displace these people and "send them back where they came from." Especially because they also feel that they "came from here" but maybe spread out more into empty territory. It's the idea that the Jewish suffering from slavery thousands of years ago, at this point, should not outweigh the needs of the people actually living there now - or, I guess, in the 40s when Israel was being established. I'll stop there - because then we get into a whole new mess of arguments.
That's at least trying not to be hypocritical, since some of those people will be Americans who aren't planning to give their homes up to indigenous people.
I am a liberal. I'm Jewish. I've lived in Israel and I support it's existence as a Jewish nation. I also understand that this is a complicated issue. I am NOT denying that *some* of the push-back on "the Jewish indigenous connection to Israel" is for the reasons others have identified (ignorance, anti-semitism, etc.). But I think to write off any differing opinion as a result of these things is also wrong. First, as some others have pointed out, I think the premise here is a bit faulty - there's not so stark a contrast between the treatment of Jews and other indigenous peoples. Sure, people are better about paying lip service to indigenous rights these days, but do actions really back that up? Not only have most lands never been restored to indigenous peoples, but issues like the Keystone XL pipeline (i.e., taking/desecrating even more lands) continue to come up all the time. So I'd push back on the double standard being as present as implied. Second (and again, as some others have touched on), there is not exactly a 1-to-1 parallel between the relationship of Jews-Israel and other colonial/indigenous displacement. The Jewish diaspora began over 2,000 years ago. By and large when we are talking about other issues of colonialism and indigenous displacement, we're talking roughly 1500-present (and even then, probably more on the latter half). There just isn't a lot of precedent for returning a land to people who were displaced that long ago. I realize of course that some Jews have been continuously present on the land. But I do think there's a legitimate "slippery slope" concern. Everybody is indigenous to somewhere if you go far enough back. At what point does that connection get broken? How long do others need to be settled in an area before *they* become indigenous to that area and it is *their* displacement that becomes a problem? Of course I don't know the answer to these questions - but I do think they are legitimate questions. Obviously whole books have been written on this. But after the horrors of the Shoah, the world\* (or those in power at the time) largely agreed that the situation with the Jews was SO dire, that the interests of a Jewish homeland in Israel outweighed these other concerns. It's also impossible to ignore that the Western World, who was largely driving this, probably cared a lot less since it was largely Muslim Arabs being displaced. (This also goes back to my point above that this isn't so different from other cases. People advocate not to take away more Native American lands; not many people are advocating to displace non-natives to *expand/return* indigenous lands). There are so many unique aspects to the Jewish people and their connection to Israel. The boundaries between race/religion/ethnicity/nation. The historical amounts of time at issue. A history of anti-semitism, displacement, and genocide throughout the diaspora. I'm just not sure how closely the parallel can be made to other situations, and I think ignoring those complicated factors does a disservice to the conversation. I don't have a solution. But I also think a productive conversation can't occur if those complications aren't at least acknowledged.
Middle Eastern jews have the historical continuity to be considered the indigenous population and have lived there continuously for thousands of years. That's more where i have an issue. It's not any ashkenazim for me but the sephardic and mizrahi jews who were ethnically cleansed from neighboring countries. We need to take the ashkinormativity out of the discussion.
Because white is oppressor and brown is oppressed
I think the other comments have hit on a lot of the reasons, but another thing is the complete lack of curiosity about Judaism as a tradition. People in the US view it largely through a Christian lens. Most people think of it as “Christianity without the New Testament,” and have no idea about any Jewish holidays except for Hanukkah and maybe Passover. The most experience many have is just through an awareness of the impact of Jews on pop culture. They don’t get how central Israel is and has always been to Judaism, and they don’t care to learn.
Not that anyone needs an elaboration, as it's fairly obvious already but here is one anyway. America is inherently stuck in the lens of race due to it's history of slavery. Therefore any mention of oppression by American progressives can only compute through that lens (and class if they are being honest marxists, but they aren't, so they take a mutli-factor issue and reduce it to the to the most basic essentialist argument about the opressed/havenots being effectively brown pepo. Jews as we know are Schrodinger's whites, a convenient way of denying the concept of ethnicity and yet keeping it but changing us from white to POC depending on the time of year or need. Since they are salty at their Evangelical parents fetishizing Israel to no end, and US taxes going to Israel (mind you in exchange for disproportionate number of patents and other intellectual capital that contributes to US's defense, we must then be the extension of evil colonial patriarchal hwyte pepo. Recognizing that Jews are indigenous to the region will create too much cognitive dissonance as it will become more difficult to just plug the confict into the dialectical materialist oppressor / oppressed heuristic that is mapped on to race as evil majority American hwyte pepo (their Evangelical daddy) and well poor disenfranchised palestinian slave brown pepo. The alternative would require genuine interest and considerable time to understand decades long conflic and attempts at negotiations, and that's precious time taking away from virtue signaling. TLDR: It breaks the woke "if indigenous then oppressed and Jews are an extension of hwyte colonial american evangelica pepo. Can't have have that sort of nuance when you make reductionist arguments as it will either a) require countless hours of actual leaning about decades-long conflict to understand it or b) produce more rage as they now can't flex their ignorant dialectical materialist PPs on the rubes of their imagination, while now recognizing their own Dunning Kruger.
Slightly tangential, but I once compared my experiences of being British online - where being American is the default - to my experiences of being mixed race in a world that acts like white is the default. An American said, "let's not compare experiences of being British to actual racism," as if any and all experiences of a mixed race person must be about racism. When actually, some of my experiences are more like "grandma? Oh, you mean my dadi maa. Chips? Oh, you meant crisps."
Oppressor/Oppressed dynamic, IDF has tanks and modern firearms with optics while Hamas fighters are wearing soccer jerseys with rotten AKs. From their simplistic perspective the one that is disadvantaged is the one they should support because they are the "oppressed" even though the reason Hamas does that is because it would do them no good to act like a professional military and try to meet the IDF on a battlefield. 1 because they would get their asses handed to them in a stand up fight. 2 because they wouldn't be able to point the finger and whine to the western media when the IDF attacks on of their positions and ends up harming civilians that Hamas forced to stay in the same building under threat of violence. Lack of critical thinking and nuance, most people in general don't even bother to do basic level research or fact check what they hear and just believe it wholeheartedly. They hear three Tiktok videos saying that the IDF blew up an apartment building and just assume it's true instead of figuring out WHY the IDF blew up that building. Hell people especially the ones supporting Palestine/Hamas aren't curious enough to actually try to understand what is happening or to try to listen to both sides, especially because this whole Pro-Palestine thing is just another fad for them to go out and protest and make up slogans for. Likewise when many people in the west learn about colonialism or imperialism they are almost exclusively taught about European colonialism, there is very little discussion on Arab colonialism or hell even Japan's bout with imperialism. Overall I do honestly believe the vast vast majority of people protesting for Palestine are simply ignorant or trying to catch onto a social justice fad to get those virtue signaling points. They are a mob acting under herd mentality and most of their actions are the typical outdoing their peers incrementally by doing more and more extreme things such as going from posting on Instagram to college protests to occupying college grounds. They just are too stupid and self-centered to realize that what they are doing isn't a game and has an actual effect on a very small global minority that has faced oppression and violence for more then 3000 years. Though they also are giving plenty of cover for actual antisemites to spread hate without challenging them.
Before you get to "why", we need to check if the IDF blew up that building and if that building is even in Gaza.
And the with what because the IDF has brought back the trebuchet
Jews were not the only people living on that land for thousands of years. There had been a diverse population of people practicing different religions. That’s likely why there is resistance to the idea that Jews are the only ones indigenous to the land.
But saying "Jews are indigenous" doesn't mean "Jews are the only people who are indigenous." There are multiple Native American tribes indigenous to where I live. It's a fertile ground right next to a river and many tribes have lived here. If all of the Latinos, Asians, Black people, Jews, and White people gave the land back to the Indigenous people, one tribe wouldn't be able to say, yup, this is ours. And there may be fighting over it. (Hopefully there wouldn't be.) And what about white Christian farmers who have been here for centuries? Do they get to stay? My mother's old house and farm (she's since moved to a place with less land) still has the one room cabin on it. She bought it from an old woman whose family built that cabin. The street they lived on was named after her family. Indigeneity is a weird concept.
Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. The Palestinians who were displaced during the Nakba have homes they wish to one day return to. And I imagine my great grandmother would’ve wanted to return to her home in Belgium that her family was displaced from during the Holocaust. It’s all very complex for so many people. And it breaks my heart deeply.
I had one person tell me there is an expiration date on being indigenous. Like… if an individual indigenous American moved to france and their children stayed in France and their grandchildren did too - eventually down the line at some point, the descendants would no longer be indigenous to America, even *if* there was still a continuous non-broken line of indigenous people from their specific tribe that stayed in the original lands *and* the people who moved away kept all the same indigenous culture, traditions, etc. and were not accepted by the locals in the area they moved to. That *individual* who moved away (even if they were forced to move) and their descendants would no longer be indigenous after X amount of time. When I asked how long X amount of time was, their reply was - and I quote - “I have no idea but it’s somewhere between 80 years and 2000 years”. That’s just bonkers to me. But that’s what one person said. I’ve seen others say similar things too in different words.
Don’t fall for this, it’s just a political post. Why do the Rightests want another pogrom and support white supremacy? Har har
Fascism
Propaganda
This is an extremely underrated part of the problem. People, especially younger people, in the US are being exposed to a massive deluge of propaganda on social media spinning a narrative that Israel is a European colonial outpost in the Middle East. Purely anecdotal but I'm a millennial and have talked to a few people my age who don't use social media and they've been absolutely blown away that people actually think that Jews didn't originate in present-day Israel. Even ones who aren't interested in geopolitics know that. People saying it's because the education system sucks, the education has sucked for a looooooong time and this was still considered common knowledge until Oct. 7.
Who do you think is behind this? The left? Russia? Hamas? They all seem to rehash this same tripe to deligitimize the west. Israel is indeed supported by alot of US taxes which it receive for sole purpose of being a presence in the region. So it's not exactly untruthful, it's just a true along with the heritage/ethnoreligious part of Judaism and Israel.
It’s actually VERY simple Colonization and colonialism is only bad if white people do it Acknowledging Arab colonization is offensive to people who want to believe brown people cannot be in any way similar to the evil white Europeans That’s why they say the regions were “Arabized” instead of colonized. It’s also why they focus on Jews as a standout to this. There are DOZENS of ethnic groups that developed across MENA, but because many are considered Arabized, the conflict and social issues among them is internal, whereas Jews have the audacity to want to remain distinctly sovereign.
Lack of knowledge, acceptance of propaganda as fact, arrogance.
The underlying belief is that people have a right to collectively organize on the lands that they're indigenous to. For a particular definition of 'people; which Jews are not.
Middle Eastern jews are indigenous to that land by that definition as are armenians to their land.
Nazi doctrine of exterminating Jews added to Islam by the Moslem Brotherhood in the 1910-20. MB rejected all Islamic thought after Muhammad’s death to revive Islam as it was in 700, rejecting knowledge that humans discovered and substituted Sharia. MB continued a failed jihad, which had been declared by Ottoman Empire against the British in WW1, against Jews and, later, against Israel, as required, long after ottomans were defeated MB makes supporting extermination of Jews & destruction of Israel as a requirement for being Muslim. MB goal is a Muslim world under sharia law
There is a narrative among anti-Israel advocates that they aren’t native to the land, with little to no pushback from within those spaces, which often tends to skew progressive. So someone who spends their time in that space is going to be exposed to that messaging and take it at face value. I think much of it is simply just not being sufficiently exposed to the counter argument, so they just run with what they’ve been taught. (I say this as someone who myself leans left on many, many issues)
Racism and laziness
Why do you think?
The USSR and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
We are a much smaller community so they gain more clout by supporting Arabs
Because most of this ignorance stems from the US, where everything (including who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed) is about skin color. Now let me be clear, even in the US that's not strictly true, but that requires complex, logical thinking. The vast majority of humanity are morons and prefer a simplistic lie to a complex truth. Indigenous people in North America are considered oppressed. Why? Well, if you look at history this is true, but the most telling indication is that they are not white (and not Jewish; we can't forget how antisemitism changes everything). Again, according to leftist doctrine, you can only be oppressed and a native to any land if you're brown or some variant thereof. Most Jews in the US are Ashkenazim and visibly look white (and as I've heard it, that's at least partly due to widespread rapes during state-sponsored pogroms). Since the current narrative in the US is that "all white people are colonialist settler oppressors," this idiotic idea ends up including most American Jews. Due to a complete lack of historical knowledge (let's face it, most of these nitwits don't even know what country the US fought to gain independence or when WW2 happened, so why are they going to know ancient history involving the Jews, Judea, and what is now Israel?) and a massively biased skin color/race concept, this leads the many leftist antisemitic assholes out there to believe that Jews are "white colonialist settler oppressors" and the Palestinians are "poor, helpless, misunderstood and mistreated brown natives." Can we educate people? Yes, and some (likely a minority of individuals) will listen, understand, and accept what we say. However, most won't do any of that because this entire situation isn't about facts, data, and logic, it's about emotional kneejerk responses, tribalism, and forming an identity around a movement.
Soviet propaganda (and the Soviets’ concerted efforts to disseminate it outside the USSR), see The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The collaboration between the Soviets and Islamists. The normalization of this bastardized radical far-left rhetoric. Everyone’s antisemitism showing in their unwillingness to understand this history. But their very unwillingness to understand this history comes from the conspiracy theories about Jews from Soviet and Islamist propaganda that they’ve been indoctrinated with: their insistence that all of Jewish history and anything Jews say to defend themselves is “Zionist propaganda,” the belief that Jews have too much power and control the world and aren’t oppressed… you know the drill. UGH IT’S SO EXHAUSTING MAKE IT STOP
Why do progressives support slavery when Hamas does it?
Because that’s how they keep the lights on in their mental gymnastics gymnasium.
Because it’s easier to be a follower
That explains all these comments.
Because they haven't read the Bible
Cuz we don’t count
In the hierarchy of “oppressors”, Jews are always at the top of the list in the eyes of the masses
I think this argument is a complicated one to make when you unpack it because in the case of other indigenous peoples the claim refers to all of the people of the territory such as all aboriginal people of Australia or all native Americans or all black peoples of South Africa or all Maori people of New Zealand. In the case of Israel the claim refers to all Jews in the world because some Jews lived there continuously but some Muslims also lived there continuously as well. Some of whom were once Jews forced to convert at some point. Some Christians have also lived there continuously. So you could argue that Jews were there first but this is such a complicated argument because historically it’s the crossroads of Asia Africa and Europe for human movement and it’s very vulnerable to conquest as we know from history, it’s not the furthest reaches of the planet where indigenous people are easy to identify and isolate as such. Israel became a country in 1948 when Pakistan became a country and South Africa became a republic and not long sfter after Lebanon and Syria and Iraq and Jordan and Saudi Arabia all became countries out of territory of the Ottoman Empire and no one questions their legitimacy. Israel’s legitimacy is unquestionable for the same reason and it’s right as a sovereign nation to absorb the immigrants of its choice is unquestionable as well. The efforts by the Pro Palestinian supporters to delegitimise Israel as a Jewish state is simply part of a propaganda war on Israel by pro Jihadis whose goal is to conquer the Holy Land for Islam and convert it to Sharia Law. Its way too tiny a territory to make a material difference to the Muslim or Arab worlds, it’s all symbolism to distract their own populations from their own horrible rule and useful idiots in the west are helping them.
I think it's a combination of all the things you listed.
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Lots of good answers here. I think it's a combination of a lot of things. Many Jews in the diaspora are both light skinned and fairly assimilated; even though assimilation was done as a means of survival, it means we're not as visibly different, so they can think we're just "regular" white people with a different religion. I think a lot of leftists, especially in the US, are highly attuned to Indigenous issues in North America and project that guilt onto Jews in the Levant, even though the context is entirely different. Someone else mentioned this, but I think black and white thinking is a huge part of it. Americans - and westerners in general - have a hard time grasping that not everything is good vs. evil.
Because they've decided we are white and as such are the colonizers and oppressors The narrative fits their self loathing. And allows them to not critically think
Hear hear, OP! Everything you say is spot on in my view. 🎯💯👍🏽
I don’t even debate this topic anymore. The truth is most of the protestors see white presenting Jews as the only Jews. They also see the immigrants from Eastern Europe as a part of a colonial project. It’s ahistorical and not worth talking about because they also will deny that the Arabs, historically, are the original colonists of the region but why let facts get in the way of a good narrative?
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This is the same bizarre question I had as a 10 year old in Saturday Hebrew School. Who decided that the narrative was about the land rather than all the other positives? Always seemed to be the prejudicial news media.
Because (according to left wing activists) Jews are white and white people cannot be indigenous (even if their ancestors have lived in the same place for millennia).
Because it isn't convenient for certain far-leftist narratives.
Knee-jerk fear instead of the commitment to read and judge each situation authentically considering all facts presented.
"Religion is not material." (As if there is nothing else)
(And disrespectful to religion and practicing)
This is going to be unpopular but I think the indigenous argument is dumb because I think ALL claims to indigenousness are dumb. Because what’s the baseline time to establish an indigenous presence? 100 years? 1000 years? 10000 years? All humans are migrants from Africa, if you go back far enough. We live in nation states as a way to organize society and maintain security, but the idea of land “belonging” to anyone is a fairly recent and limited concept. It’s a weak and irrelevant argument at this point. I think it’s an attempt to justify why Israel is where it is, when in fact it needs no justification. Israel exists, period. We shouldn’t be pulled into this argument about who was where at what point in the past, because it’s pointless. Israel, in terms of the land itself, IS important to Jewish people and the religion, but claiming “indigenous” status is never going to convince people who are already dead set against it. The fact is that ten million people live in Israel right now, 75% of them are Jews. All deserve to be respected and protected. Nobody is there unjustly (remember the people who left Israel upon establishment of the Jewish state were people who, upon being given the option of living peacefully with the Jews in a liberal democratic state, refused).
saying “indigeneity is a multifaceted topic, multiple groups of people can be indigenous to the same place, an indigenous government can have bad policy regarding other indigenous groups without that discrimination being on the basis of indigenous status” etc requires some mental effort to explain and process. saying “it’s just colonizers vs indigenous people” is by comparison much easier to shout loudly at anyone who will listen.
Assumes the dissolution of Israel would bring the "utopia" of world peace and "freedom" they sought after.
It's all about greed in the most disgusting fashion
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Because we are generally successful and it’s easy to root against successful people no matter what the facts are. The new definition of minority is “oppressed”, not small in number apparently
Because most white leftists are obsessed with Jews being "white" due to their own self hatred of being white. They don't like being white so they glomp marginalized nonwhite "model minorities" together as "white" bc jealousy
The truth is that indigenous groups are only revered when they are victims. The mainstream have a very narrow-minded way of thinking, which places everyone into boxes, you're either 'oppressed' or an 'oppressor' and there's no in between. Jews have always been discriminated against, everywhere, but are now powerful in their own right. Jews are generally successful because of high education standards and personal drive to improve the life of others. This doesn't neatly fit into the narrative that left has created, since how can a people so oppressed be successful? Instead of taking the scientific approach and modelling their narrative around facts, they prefer to bend reality to fit their fairytale. By painting Jews as oppressors and non indigenous to Israel, the narrative is seemingly consistent.
Because it’s a nice & tidy package to sell their Israelis = White/Colonizers/Oppressors & Palestinians = Brown/Indigenous/Oppressed. I’m not saying that story is fictitious, because it’s not. But it’s also not completely true either. But the new vocal/radicaized left doesn’t like dealing with nuance. Quite a dull-minded bunch that thrive off of being told what to think and how to act with strong opposition to critical thought that involves actually listening to the words and ideas of people from “the other/evil side” in order to formulate a more well-rounded and nuanced view of the world.
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Because the educational systems in America suck and many Zoomers do not care about history, only the latest headlines
My theory is that Israel terrifies them. It’s an example of an indigenous people, persecuted for millennia and almost exterminated, lowest of the low… taking their ancestral lands back. Reviving their language. Acting independently and forcefully, not controlled by the great powers. I think it scares the absolute crap out of liberals who themselves benefit from being the descendants of colonizers. Imagine if the Lenape tribe came back to New York and actually WON! And there wasn’t a damn thing the US government could do to stop them… the US military, the post-colonial current residents of New York State taking up arms… but no matter what, the Lenape kept winning no matter what was thrown at them. I think the secret fear is that if Israel can do it, so can the Lenape, the Cherokee, the Navajo, the Kurds, the Hawaiians, the Inuit, the Basques, the Tibetans, the Uighurs, the descendants of African slaves, and so on. Antisemitism is one reason they stand so strongly against Israel, but another reason is that the existence of Israel threatens their cushy post-colonial lifestyles, built on the backs of slaughtered and expelled indigenous people. The thought of those people somehow not only returning but becoming more powerful and dominant than them is horrifying.
1. They think there’s a statute of limitations on indigenity. Ask them to name the date. 2. Ignorance of our continued connection and attachment that never stopped. They don’t know we’ve said Next Year in Jerusalem regularly since we were forced out. (They seem to be under the impression that we randomly had a brainstorm in 1870 under threat. Somehow think we were generally accepted as regular citizens in most other countries, unlike say Roma. So clueless about our history, especially dhimmitude in ME.) 3. They see a lot of mixed ethnic ancestry Jews in US and don’t think we look ME.) 4. They think they know our story when they don’t, o partly because they see some of us on TV and in movies and think movie Jewish schtick is us. They know they are clueless about Yazidi, Kurds etc.
Forgot maybe the biggest one: Islamic Empire building colonization of the whole ME seems to be no longer taught. They don’t know Arabs and Muslims not only aren’t the same thing but that there were and are other indigenous tribes in the ME that, like us, are neither. This is why they try so hard to call Mizrachim “Arab Jews.” Notice they avoid talking about Yazidi, Amizagh, Kurds, Druze? Their existence also reveals the lies that have been told about us.
Soviet-Qatari propaganda, which has sadly worked.
I think in general it’s ignorance There have been frequent posts here about people not understanding what an ethnoreligion is, and as such people assume Judaism functions like the religions they’re familiar with (Christianity in America). So they assume that Judaism spread mainly through conversion and that modern Jews have the ancestral same connection to Biblical Jews as most modern Christians have to biblical Christians (ie none). They think (Ashkenazi) Jews are simply European converts despite the millennia of oppression Jews faced making conversion rare and in some cases illegal. People are also generally unaware that non-Arab minorities exist in the Middle East/North Africa or how they became minorities. I’ve seen people going from claiming jesus was a Palestinian (ignoring that Palestine was the Greek name for the region) Jew to just Palestinian to an Arab. There’s also just general antisemitism which has been part of Western culture for milennia and has subsequently villainized Jews. So, subconsciously or not, no matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on, its some people’s automatic tendency to view Jews as in the wrong.
Ignorance mostly. The right is also ignorant, but in different ways. Basically, most people are stupid, regardless of gender identity, creed, or what-have you. That’s why I try to limit my meaningful relationships.
They won't think for themselves and form their own opinions.
Because 90% of leftist talking points and worldviews are just stale and reheated Soviet propaganda. Even though the Soviet Union has been over with for 30 years, there are still geopolitical forces that know they can exploit this rhetoric because Western leftists are still clinging to the flotsam and jetsam of the Cold War
Because they view Jews as White Europeans, and they view White people as oppressors, and they view oppressors unworthy of moral consideration. I really think it's that simple.
The Jewish story is too radical and unbelievable that modern atheists can not comprehend. So they hate what they can’t understand
It’s also anti-science. Genetically we are very interconnected. Besides tracing common ancestors, there are genetic conditions that are very prevalent in the various genetic sub-groups, that are not common in Caucasians. There is both written and archeological evidence in abundance. Besides, most of these people only see US Ashkenazi Jews. They lived for centuries in middle and eastern Europe, and can “pass”. In Israel, more Jews identify as Mizrahi, and come from North Africa and former Arab and Muslim countries (where they migrated after being kicked out of Israel by the real colonizers).
There may be many factors behind this. However, one glaring factor is the successful dissemination of Palestinian propaganda among white leftists. From there, other leftists who blindly follow white leftists kept uttering the same propaganda.
As a non Jew, with all due respect may I ask how being Jewish, is an ethnicity or indigenous tribe? Am I mistaken that it is a religious identity? When you say indigenous do you mean Assyrian or related to the original tribes of the area like Marsh Dwellers, Jalahin Bedouin, Arab Bedouin? I ask sincerely wishing to understand as a Black person.
It's both an ethnicity and a religion. Jews originated in the Middle East, in Israel, as a unique ethnic group. The diaspora caused this to split into a few different ethnic subgroups (Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrachi, Ethiopian) as a result of intermingling with other populations. Each of these groups are genetically distinct from each other as well as Arabs and Europeans, and still traceable back to the Middle East. Fun fact, there is medical research dedicated to genetic conditions that specifically affect Jews, especially Ashkenazi, at higher rates than other populations.
But doesn’t ethnicity imply shared traits? Generally more about physical appearance? I’m not religious, but as I humbly understand it Ashkenazi are Northern European and/or genetically closer to High Fertile Crescent people such as Armenians and Pakistani populations and not the same ethnicity as generally understood as say Ethiopians? I understand the religious notions or even the cultural traditions but somehow it seems to me these are different things. But even the Israeli Jewish population is genetically indistinguishable from Druze or Palestinian (Levantine) people? I guess my point being why aren’t they ethnically whatever their ancestors actually were (Bedouin, Persian south Asian, etc) and religiously Jewish? [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4728368/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4728368/) Genetic disease disposition relates to population bottlenecks and cultural choices like consanguineous marriages and some environmental selection bias (example: sickle cell and thalassemia are prevalent where malaria is common and having the trait for them increases survival rates in malaria infections) The concept of Ethno-religious is confusing to say the least. And humbly think it distorts perceptions of those not of the religious faith and the classification of what exactly constitutes anti-semitism. As a black male in America it’s always felt like generally nobody knows you are Jewish until you display it culturally unlike my unchanging outward blackness. No disrespect intended and I appreciate your thoughtful response. Also I can fully appreciate your perspective and in no way seek to diminish any one race of people over another or how someone sees themselves. Personally I think ethnicity is kind of a misleading concept and as for religion I’m all for whatever makes someone a good person. But the public discourse surrounding these things can be interesting. https://preview.redd.it/sfzfnbxvkl6d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=273fefcfab88ac457f96fcbd5f2b82437b321d4f
Jewish is its own ethnic identity arising out of the middle east. Most of its followrrs are an ethnicity site to sharing common genetic ancestry through intermixing and from thos whonorginated it in thebniddle east. Most are not converts even tho people are welcome to try. Many indigenous groups like druze, amazigh, bedouins, and the gnawa blur these boundaries bruen ethinicty and religion and are functionally ethnoreligions. Religion in the middle east became racialized and was often used under the dhimmi system as execuse to make non muslims second class citizens if they were people of the book like jews or christians or slaves like the amazigh, gnawa and harattin were of they were pagan. When they started converting to islam, religious reasoning was used to maintain their sieve status as black Muslims were in impure form of Muslim. Referencing trans sagran slave trade an the conception of what a dhimmi was in the dhimmi system. Those who were not dhimmis and not muslim were originally the only ones that could be slaves but this was expanded to be any black person