Iâve seen a post going around linking people to a site called Decolonize Palestine as a resource on the conflict.
Please donât use this site or reblog that post. It is a highly biased anti-Israel resource.Â
The bias is present even in the title:Â âdecolonizeâ in this context implies that Jews are colonizers of Israel, rather than the descendants of its indigenous Israelites.
This is a lie. Jews are indigenous to Israel. Hereâs the definition of Jews on Wikipedia:
Jews (Hebrew: ×Ö°××Öź×Ö´××â Yehudim, Israeli pronunciation [jehuËdim]) or Jewish people are members of an ethnoreligious group and a nation originating from the Israelites and Hebrews of historical Israel and Judah. Jewish ethnicity, nationhood, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the ethnic religion of the Jewish people, although its observance varies from strict to none.
This definition meets all the requirements for the definition of being indigenous. Here is a good piece about this subject, interviewing a woman who is both Native American and Jewish, someone who understands the term âindigeneityâ through both of these prisms and bases her explanations on the UN definition of what makes a people indigenous.
Jews have retained the original identity of their ancestors, their customs, traditions, language, religion, etc. That Jews are Middle Eastern and the descendants of the Israelites is backed up by archeology, documentation and lineage records, as well as DNA studies.
In contrast, the people we refer to today as Palestinians arenât indigenous to this disputed land. Theyâre Arabs and as such, they are only native to the Arab Peninsula, like all Arabs are. This is a fact that people tend to not be aware of due to the Arabsâ 7th century settler-colonialist conquest of the Middle East.
Archeology verifies that while Jews have a history in Israel that goes back at least 3000 years, Arabs had conquered the land in the 7th century, as presented in this timeline.
The Palestinians today arenât indigenous, they are the descendants of colonizers. That doesnât mean they have no rights in the land. They do. Just like the offspring of the Mayflower pilgrims have rights in America. These descendants were born and have lived for centuries in America and as such, they have rights there. That doesnât make these people indigenous and to claim that they are would be offensive to the First Nations and erasing their identity as the real indigenous people of America. In the same way, to erase and distort Jewish identity in order to misrepresent Jews as colonialist settlers while trying to portray Palestinian Arabs as indigenous to Israel is untrue and it is offensive to Jews. And it is just as dangerous as denying the indigenous status of the First Nations in America can be.
When a websiteâs very title canât get the basic facts of a highly complicated conflict right, please be highly skeptical of any further âfactsâ it tries to offer. Also, ask yourself who are the people running this site. Do they have the knowledge and expertise to answer the questions that they presume to be answering in their FAQ and âmythsâ pages? Are they using neutral resources or politically biased ones? I had a look at one âmythâ that they set out to bust. A lot of the links are to articles unavailable for free to the public and originating with either Palestinian publications or Palestinian authors. Some of the links are broken, which is suspicious for a site that seems to have been founded not that long ago. The one link that is available and not from a biased source shows that the quote as it appears on the DP site has been taken out of its context and distorted. Lastly, why is there no âAboutâ page detailing who these people are in the name of the transparency that should be there, especially on a site encouraging people to donate money to them?Â
Please be careful with the resources you consume and pass along to others!
