I’ve seen & heard this a few times, that Zionists will justify their claim of ownership to Palestinian lands by pointing at the Bible for evidence that they were the original inhabitants of that land. They don’t consider it the West Bank, they call it Judea and Samaria (as seen on The Setters documentary). I haven’t read the bible and tbh don’t know that history very well of which people lived where but I’m sure the history is not as simple as this. Anyone have any good reads or insights into this history?
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Is it really that complex?
- Religion doesn’t give you free license to violently conquer a country in any case.
- Indigeneity doesn’t come from being able to trace an ancestry to a place, nor from having “one’s people” as its first inhabitants. This is a conception of indigeneity rooted in property rights that we need to move past. Indigeneity is rather, in effect, defined relationally to settlerdom.
- Even so, what the Hell would make Zionist Ashkenazim, rather than Palestinians, the heirs of an extinct culture? It can’t be either lineage or culture, because by any metric Palestinians are closer to, and modern Jews futher from, Ancient Judea than the Zionist narrative would like.
Its cope. The romans never emptied palestine of peoples, that would be nonsense. Those that weren’t expelled stayed behind and became the modern day Palestinian populace. Ancient judea also wasnt an ethno-state, not everyone there was jewish.
It’s irrelevant. No historical claim to a land justifies genocide or ethnic cleansing.
The historical (oral/religious/textual) and archeological records agree starting with the first diaspora: Babylonians come, cause first diaspora, Persians come and restore judea. Romans come, cause second diaspora. No Jewish polity controls the levant for the next milinium (Khazars* do control the northern caucuses and part of Ukraine tho)
This is the important part, any Jewish states claim to the levant has 1900 years of squatters rights in the way. Before the first diaspora is debated but it (shouldn’t) matter
Re: Jews are native
According to the Bible, no. Jews are ethnically dubious slaves of Egypt, they could very well be from the levant, but God tells Moses to go to the promised land, not the homeland. Anyway they wander for 20 years before discovering Jerico and the Canaanites, God tells them they must cleanse the land in his name, so they do.
So within Judeo-Christian mythos Israelites are a genocidal group of colonizers.
Archeological history suggests that the ancient tribes of Israel did in fact originate from the levant, but fun fact, Muslim rulers allowed amd sometimes encouraged Jewish migration into their territories. Aside from a brief pause during the crusades, Jews were able to return to the levant and many in fact did. Modern DNA testing shows that modern Palestinians are descendents of the Levant and are the closest relatives of the Jewish ethnicity.
Excellent distinction about homeland vs promised land
Since they pull direct lineage from Abraham for the 12 tribes their homeland would actually be Ur, I imagine this is part of how they get Iraq in the ‘Greater Israel’ idea
