If Jews Are Not Indigenous to the Land of Israel, Then What Does ‘Indigenous’ Even Mean?

If the Jewish people – whose ethnogenesis occurred in the Land of Israel; whose language, civilization, calendar, literature, and legal tradition developed there; whose continuous presence there has never entirely ceased for more than three millennia; and whose prayers have pointed toward Jerusalem for nearly two thousand years – are not indigenous to that land, then the word indigenous loses any coherent historical meaning.

That thought struck me while recently watching Rudy Rochman on Jubilee’s Surrounded debate series – a format built more to provoke than to clarify. Rochman made what should have been an unremarkable claim: that the Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel. The response was not evidence but ridicule – not archaeology or history, but a familiar assertion: that Arabs are the indigenous people of “Palestine,” and Jews are somehow European colonizers.

Pause there.

“Palestine” is not an ancient indigenous name. It was imposed by Rome after the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 C.E., when Emperor Hadrian renamed the province of Judea as Syria Palaestina to diminish the Jewish association with the land. Nearly eighteen centuries later, the League of Nations Mandate retained that Roman name for the territory under British administration. In one of history’s more striking inversions, an imperial label is now treated as evidence of indigeneity, while the people whose homeland was renamed are cast as outsiders.

That inversion has become so familiar, it often goes unnoticed.

Which raises a more serious question than the debate itself: what do many activists now mean by indigenous?

Because whatever they mean, it is not how the term has generally been understood.

Historically, indigeneity refers to a people whose cultural, linguistic, and civilizational origins are rooted in a specific land; who formed as a distinct collective there; whose identity and traditions remain tied to it; and who often endured conquest or displacement while preserving that connection.

Put differently, indigeneity asks where a people became a people – not where every one of its descendants happened to be living centuries later.

By that standard, few peoples and lands match more clearly the idea of indigeneity than the Jewish people with the Land of Israel.

Hebrew emerged in the Land of Israel. The Israelite faith now called Judaism developed there. Nearly every major narrative of the Hebrew Bible unfolds there. The Jewish calendar reflects the land’s agricultural rhythms. Jewish law contains land-specific commandments. Jewish prayer faces Jerusalem. The Passover Seder ends with “Next Year in Jerusalem.” Throughout the history of the Jewish diaspora, Jewish identity remained oriented toward return.

This is not nationalism projected backward. It is a clear case of a people maintaining a land-based identity across centuries of exile.

Nor does this depend on accepting the Bible as literal history. The Jewish connection to the land is documented through archaeology, inscriptions, coins, external records, and linguistic continuity – alongside a continuous, if diminished, presence spanning millennia.

It is also reinforced by modern genetics.

Across Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi populations, peer-reviewed genetic studies consistently identify shared Middle Eastern ancestry – clustering Jewish populations with one another and with Levantine groups rather than with the European populations among whom many later lived. These findings strongly undermine post-1948 claims that Jews are primarily descendants of European converts or the medieval Khazar kingdom. That theory, popular in modern anti-Israel polemics, finds little support in modern population genetics, which instead points to a common Near Eastern origin with later admixture.

In other words, the historical and genetic records converge.

None of this was controversial until it became politically inconvenient.

The difficulty lies not in the evidence but in the framework used to interpret it.

Thus, before Jews can be characterized as “colonizers,” their status as a people must first be erased, reducing them instead to a purely religious identity.

But Judaism is not a religion in the way that Christianity or Islam are. It is not a universalist faith. It is the religious, legal, linguistic, and cultural expression of a people – the Jewish people – an ethnoreligious civilization tied to a specific homeland. Even the English word “conversion” only approximates the Hebrew term giyur, which means joining a people, not just adopting beliefs. A ger enters a shared law, memory, and identity. It is why Ruth – perhaps history’s most famous ger – upon completing her giyur, pledges, “Your people shall be my people.”

For over three thousand years, Jews have understood themselves as a people – Am Yisrael.

No one argues that Native American nations cease to be indigenous because outsiders can join them. Yet in the Jewish case, the fact that people can join the Jewish people through a giyur is used by many anti-Israel activists to erase Jewish peoplehood and recast Jewish identity as being “only” religious.

By stripping Jews of their peoplehood, one can recast some of them as “Europeans” who merely adopted an ancient Middle Eastern faith.

But even for the roughly 44% of Israeli Jews who are Ashkenazic, that leap requires ignoring Jewish history.

For centuries, European societies did not consider Jews European or “white.” Jews were treated as an alien people – Semitic, Levantine, perpetually foreign – segregated, expelled, and often massacred, culminating in genocide precisely because they were seen as non-European.

Then, with striking convenience, those same societies – or their intellectual successors – rebranded Jews as “white European colonizers.”

Few reversals have been as abrupt – or as useful.

The same pattern appears in the colonialism argument.

Colonialism has recognizable features: an empire or metropole sends settlers to expand power, extract resources, and govern territory.

So simple questions follow:

What metropole sent the Jewish Zionists?

Where was the imperial center directing them?

What empire extracted wealth on their behalf?

The historical record offers clear answers: none.

Jews purchased land in Ottoman and later British-controlled Palestine – often at inflated prices. They built institutions independently. They fought the British when immigration was restricted right before and during the Holocaust. Britain armed, trained, and commanded the Arab Legion – the most formidable army opposing Jewish independence.

Jewish sovereignty emerged not as an extension of empire but in conflict with it.

Colonial movements do not ordinarily wage armed revolt against the empire supposedly directing them, nor do they typically emerge by defeating both that empire and the regional armies it armed and supported.

Nor does seeking outside support make a movement colonial. The Zionist movement, like many movements of stateless peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sought backing from great powers. The pattern is common: the Kurds appealing to Britain and France after World War I, later to the United States; Tibetan leadership seeking international support; or Balkan national movements aligning with larger states – all without being recast as colonial agents.

Seeking great-power support is a recurring feature of national liberation movements. It is not what makes them colonial.

These comparisons are not obscure. They are simply overlooked.

Why?

In part because antisemitism continues to shape how Jewish history is interpreted. But also, because contemporary usage often conflates residence with origin. A population may live somewhere for centuries without that place being where it developed as a distinct people. Indigeneity is not about who lived somewhere most recently, but about where a people took shape.

Nor is it erased by exile. Native American nations did not lose their status after forced removal. By the same reasoning, Roman conquest did not erase Jewish indigeneity.

Instead, a new criterion has quietly emerged: permanent political powerlessness.

In much of today’s indigeneity discourse about Israel, origin and continuity are no longer enough. To be considered “indigenous,” a people must remain dispossessed. Sovereignty becomes disqualifying. Success becomes suspect.

Of course, this standard is not applied consistently. No one suggests that greater autonomy would make the Māori, Sámi, Navajo, or Cherokee less indigenous.

Only the Jewish case is subjected to a definition in which established markers suddenly fail.

None of this denies that Palestinian Arabs have deep roots in the land. Indigeneity need not be exclusive. The issue is the insistence that Jews uniquely do not qualify.

And that insistence produces distortions.

Jews are variously cast as European outsiders, white colonizers, religious converts with no ancestry – and, when convenient, descendants of the ancient Israelites whose history is invoked only when it can be used against them by claiming they themselves conquered the land from the Canaanites. Jewish history is accepted when it indicts Jews and rejected when it legitimizes them.

At that point, the conclusion has already been decided. The definition is simply rewritten to reach it.

If the Jewish people are not indigenous to the Land of Israel, then indigeneity no longer refers to origin, continuity, or civilizational development. It becomes a political label – granted or withheld as needed.

And once a definition must be rewritten for one people – and one alone – it ceases to be a definition.

It becomes a weapon.

Which is why Jews need not accept the premise – or the burden. The Jewish case for indigeneity in the Land of Israel is not marginal or ambiguous. It is paradigmatic.

If indigeneity must be redefined to exclude one of history’s clearest examples of a conquered and colonized indigenous people – whose identity, language, civilization, and origins are all rooted in a single ancestral homeland – then the problem is not Zionism or the Jews.

It’s the people who distort the definition of indigeneity.