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Over the past decade or so, the claim that Jews are the Indigenous people of the land claimed by the state of Israel has become increasingly prominent.[^note1] Showing up in editorials, blogs, academic work, and popular discourse, this claim seeks to refute the idea that state Zionism is an ongoing racist and colonial project of dispossession. Some such statements include the following: “Among all the indigenous peoples of the world, the Jewish people have a unique tale. Suffering displacement from their ancestral land twice (the Babylonian captivity in 597 BCE and the diaspora from 135 CE), Jews nonetheless succeeded in retaining their cultural connections to the Land of Israel and returning to it, achieving sovereignty once more in 1948”; “On Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) [an annual celebration of the “reunification” of Jerusalem in the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967] we celebrate an indigenous people displaced from their land by colonizing Empire (a succession of Christian or Muslim empires, to be specific) returning home, gaining self-determination, and then regaining access to the lost city that had been holy to them for 3,000 years.”[^note2] This narrative of Jewish indigeneity depends on seeing the territory of the state of Israel as the historical homeland of the Jewish people/nation, conceptualizing the creation and maintenance of the Israeli state as a reclamation of that homeland by that people/nation, viewing Palestinians as temporary intruders occupying another people’s rightful territory, and construing the exercise of sovereignty by the Israeli state (including the mass decimation of Palestinian communities) as legitimate self-defense of that collective right to place. None of these assumptions is supportable. They depend on the interested erasure of Jewish history, Palestinian history, the history of expansive and institutionalized Zionist violence, and the history of the category of Indigenous peoplehood.

The series of assumptions noted above would appear completely nonsensical if they were offered about somewhere other than Israel. A series of foreigners simply had a collective “right” to a territory in which they had never lived and their ancestors had not lived for almost two millennia (if ever); a claim to political self-determination can skip almost two millennia with no collective attempt to reoccupy the supposed homeland as the principal and governing site for that collective (in the ways asserted by Zionism); vast persecution and mass murder in one (set of) location(s) justifies vast persecution and mass murder in another; over 750,000 people just left their homes and villages (the story often offered of the Nakba, despite a series of uprisings and a concerted struggle for self-determination over the prior twenty plus years). The mental gymnastics to sustain these claims are simply astounding. Perhaps more astounding is the regularity with which they are performed and asserted as common sense, as simply an incontrovertible fact, and by which efforts to point out the absurdity of such claims is cast as itself persecutory. This is Zionism as murderous gaslighting. This is the work of what I elsewhere have characterized as settler common sense — the normalization of the conditions of settler colonialism as the taken-for-granted background for policy and everyday perception.[^note3]

Before going further, let me say something about from where I come. I’m an Askenazi Jew who descends from people who all lived within the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires in the late nineteenth century (then broken up into a range of countries after World War I whose borders changed somewhat frequently in the early twentieth century and since). My family came to the US as part of the great wave of Jewish migration between 1870 and 1924, most (six of my great-grandparents) arriving before World War I. I come from and remain Yiddishkeit, although in kinship and solidarity with other non-Zionist Jewishnesses in the US and globally. I was born and grew up on Lenape land and currently reside on both Occaneechi and Haudenosaunee lands. I also should note that I will not debate whether the mass murder, further dispossession, and starvation occurring in Gaza and the West Bank is genocide. It is. I will not debate whether the state of Israel is engaged in a monstrous violation of human rights and basic human decency. It is.[^note4]

With regard to the notion of Jewish indigeneity, beyond the immense time lapse between the Roman destruction of the Second Temple and efforts to de-Judaize Jerusalem and its environs in the first two centuries CE and the advancement of Zionist claims to a homeland in Palestine through settlement and great power maneuvering in the wake of World War I, the question remains of whether Jewishness prior to Roman campaigns of expulsion should be understood as expressive of peoplehood/nationhood.[^note5] There was a government in Judah/Judea (although for almost all of the Second Temple period it was under one empire or another - Persian, Hellenistic, or Roman), and the Temple provided a centerpoint of ritual Jewish observance. Does that fact, though, make it a homeland? While Jews were known as such through reference to Judea (as more or less engaging in shared practices of everyday observance and ritual calendar of worship as the people there), they lived spread out across the Mediterranean and Levant, stretching up to the Black Sea, and extending into Persia, as well as elsewhere. More to the point, perhaps, the vast majority of Jews in this period did not live in Judea, and those communities had existed for centuries prior to the Roman counterinsurgent occupation and cleansing that pushed most Jews out of Jerusalem (although still remaining in large numbers in the Galilee). Erich S. Gruen notes, “By the time that the Roman commander Titus leveled the Temple, Jews abroad far outnumbered those dwelling in Palestine — and had done so for many generations.”[^note6] Although in certain ways the Jewish world centered on Jerusalem as the site of the Temple, to which annual contributions were sent and to which ritual pilgrimages were made, the forms of Jewish life outside Judea were not in any meaningful sense dictated by authorities of any kind in Judea. Jewish communities across the ancient world were distinctive in their local circumstances, often having some sort of self-administration, while participating in the life of the places they inhabited. There were active inter-regional connections among Jewish communities not triangulated through Judea, and there was no political authority or tie back to Judea. Synagogues had their own independent existence in these communities, in ways that were different from each other but recognizable as centers of Jewish sociality (within their local contexts and to Jews elsewhere). This formation does not resemble at all what we usually mean by “peoplehood” or “nationhood” now, particularly inasmuch as those terms are filtered through the idea of a self-governing political order with a territorial base of some kind or shared patterns of collective occupancy in a known area. As Ross Shepard Kraemer observes, “An alternative narrative, whereby Jews consciously and deliberately chose at some point to leave their ancestral lands for whatever reason, undercuts modern nationalist narratives. So, too, a historical narrative in which, having left the homeland, Jews were happy (or happy enough) in their new residences, did not seek to return to the homeland, and even began to think of themselves not as aliens but as at home, has tremendous currency in current contestations between Israelis and Palestinians.”[^note7]

If we want to think about a Jewish peoplehood that dates from the time of ancient Judea, what ties Jews together is not occupying the land of Israel as a coherent unit or collective entity of some kind. It’s an expansive and multilayered network through which persons, families, and communities move in which ongoing communication and shared behavior, custom, stories, rituals, and other practices and philosophies provide a basis for enacting what is widely recognized among these sites as Jewishness. Judea remains the Holy Land, but that designation does not translate into a collective assertion of occupancy in a place that grounds Jewish people as a polity/nation.[^note8] A narrative of Jews as always yearning for a return to Zion as homeland also cannot be sustained by later history.[^note9] In the Talmudic period (third through seventh centuries CE) in addition to the absence of evidence of a large-scale effort to relocate to Judea by far-flung Jewish communities even after direct Roman aggression had ended (again, not surprising given the absence of such a desire when the Temple still stood), many Jewish intellectuals wrote of other spaces as a homeland, including Babylonia being depicted as such in the Talmud.[^note10] Fast-forwarding a number of centuries, in the European milieu in which a range of Zionisms emerged in the late nineteenth century, there were any number of articulations of Jewish nationality that understood it as a series of links among properly semi-autonomous communities/zones within extant multinational empires, not as a singular polity in dispersion from a proper (originary) location. The idea that there was an exile that produced a Jewish diaspora through the loss of the homeland is basically a retroactive fiction: it has far more to do with very longstanding antisemitic Christian narratives of the wandering Jew (as a punishment for murdering Christ), and post-Enlightenment European discourses of racialized territorial nationhood, than Jewish history in antiquity. The idea of the land of Palestine as the site of a Jewish political order that represents the proper and singular national territory of the Jewish people en toto is a late-nineteenth-century notion generated by European Jews, who had no direct connection to Palestine and who conceptualized those persons, communities, and peoples who lived in Palestine — and had for centuries — as backward and lacking in meaningful culture and development (a point to which I’ll return). To say that Jews have a connection to Palestine that precedes that of Palestinians is to conflate what Jewishness was in the ancient world — and the place of Jerusalem and its environs within that network of belief/relation — with the retroactive vision of Jewish national identity developed about fifty years before the Israeli state declared its own existence (a vision ordered around European ideologies of political collectivity as well as Eurocentric views of nonwestern places and populations).[^note11] The story of a lost ancient homeland reclaimed through Zionism, then, is a tendentious invention.

Even if one brackets the problems in the imagination of Israel as the originary site of a Jewish nationhood, the claiming of the category of indigeneity for state Zionism makes little sense, or at least has virtually no relationship to the discourses of international Indigenous political struggle from the 1920s onward on which that claim draws and which it abuses. As used in the context of international law and policy and global movements for self-determination, Indigenous does not mean a generic firstness, a kind of primordial claim to have been in a place since time immemorial or to have been the place in which a people’s identity took shape (an oft-repeated idea in claims to Jewish indigeneity in Palestine). Assertions of Jewish indigeneity largely traffic in this kind of association, as if Jewish claims to Palestine arise out of an originary — and, thus, morally unimpeachable — connection to the territory as the site from which Jewish peoplehood emerged.  For example, Matthew Gindin asserts, “What makes a people indigenous to a place is their having become a people in that land, and having all the earmarks of a unique culture associated with that place,” adding that, based on this definition, “the Palestinians do not have a comparable claim of indigeneity to the Jewish one, based on ancient formation in the land of Israel,” and he concludes that “Jewish indigeneity and indigenous rights in Israel must be respected for the international idea of Indigenous Rights to make any sense at all.”[^note12]   However, as Daniel Delgado, a Jewish and Quechua rabbinic student, observes, “we need to understand that ‘Indigenous’ - always capitalized - is an intrinsically political term, created in response to colonization”: “The umbrella term ‘Indigenous peoples’ was adopted by the nascent Indigenous peoples movement of the 1970s as an explicitly internationalist term to highlight the communality of experience between disparate peoples around the world….That is, resistance to colonization was always part of the definition and the intent.”[^note13]   The term/concept Indigenous gains meaning in contrast to assertions of authority by states composed of settlers from elsewhere over lands already occupied by existing peoples. It is a political designation that indicates a particular kind of colonial relation in which peoples’ full governance in relation to their home territories has been denied by those states — settler-states — that nonconsensually exert jurisdiction over those territories as the domestic space of the nation-state.[^note14] In the words of Haunani-Kay Trask, the famous Kanaka Maoli intellectual and activist, Indigenous peoples have “had their nationality forcibly changed in their own homeland.”[^note15]

Perhaps the best way to illustrate this point is to look at the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).[^note16] Adopted by the UN in 2007, it was the result of decades of organizing by those who came together through identifying themselves and each other as Indigenous peoples.[^note17] Article 3 states, “Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development,” and article 5 indicates, “Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social, and cultural institutions, while retaining their right to participate fully, if they so choose, in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the State.”[^note18] These provisions underline the separateness of Indigenous peoples as political entities whose existence as such cannot be subsumed or erased by the nation-state or states that claim to have authority over them. Such governance includes “the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired” (article 26.1), and the document insists, “States shall give legal recognition and protection to these lands, territories and resources” (article 26.2), while states also may not partake in “any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples” (article 8.2.a) or “any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources” (article 8.2.b). Indigenous peoples, then, are landed sovereign polities whose status as such has been denied by the states that enclose them, which seek to impose modes of governance and placemaking on them (when not aiming to dismantle and disperse them entirely) within broader structural dynamics of erasure and dispossession.[^note19] In the preamble, UNDRIP characterizes this context as “historic injustices as a result of, inter alia, their colonization.” Further, in the words of George Manuel, whose manifesto The Fourth World and whose organization (The World Council of Indigenous Peoples) played a central role in jump-starting international discussion of Indigenous rights, Indigenous peoples are those “who do not as a group control the national government of the countries within which they live.”[^note20] As reflected in UNDRIP, the refusal of the givenness of state jurisdiction and the affirmation of a self-governing peoplehood distinct from the regular law and policy of the settler-state are crucial to defining what Indigenous as a concept means and does within the context of international law and the very political discourses which Zionists seek to appropriate.

The existence of the state of Israel and its enshrinement of the idea that it is a Jewish state clearly have nothing to do with the principles articulated through the frame of indigeneity. As Shiri Pasternak suggests, narratives of Jewish indigeneity constitute “colonizing cosplaying,” or, in Sabina Ali’s terms, “weaponize indigeneity.”[^note21] In addition to the dispossessive and exterminationist violence toward Palestinian collective existence that has characterized Israeli policy since its founding, the Basic Law adopted in 2018 asserts an absolute claim to Jewish sovereignty in and through the state that makes evident that, whatever one might say about such ethnonationalism, it is not Indigenous peoplehood within international law and policy.[^note22] That law asserts as its “Basic principles,” “The Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish People, in which the State of Israel was established” (1.a), “The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination” (1.b), and “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People” (1.c). The use of “historical homeland” speaks to the fact that it was not understood or operating as such a homeland in any meaningful sense in the lead-up to the founding of the Israeli state. The relation between that supposed homeland and “Jewish People”-hood is also quite muddy. To realize peoplehood through the state, rather than the state being the expression of an existing landed people, suggests that Jewish peoplehood is not contained in/by the state, instead referring to a collective whose contours have little to do with the state but for which the state stands as a kind of material representation. That the state is not coincident with Jewish peoplehood, and that its status even as the ostensible material symbol of such peoplehood is somewhat tenuous, can be seen in the section “The connection to the Jewish people.” It includes the provision, “The State shall act in the Diaspora, to strengthen the affinity between the State and members of the Jewish People” (6.b). Jewish peoplehood, therefore, not only is not coincident with the state and its territoriality and is not itself such a territorial formation, but those “in the Diaspora” still need to be persuaded that it any way constitutes a homeland or realization, given that the “affinity” between the state and the peoplehood for which it putatively stands remains in question and in need of fortification as a legitimating project for that state. Returning to the third of the basic principles, that self-determination within/through the state of Israel is “exclusive to the Jewish People,” this provision signals the presence of other assertions of self-determination with regard to the territory claimed by the state that need to be disavowed and foreclosed. That very negation is precisely the kind of dynamic to which UNDRIP speaks, as the denial of the existence and right to governance of peoples whose territories lie within the claimed boundaries of a state.

Moreover, the very actions forbidden by UNDRIP — in terms of seeking to deny the existence of distinct peoples, dispossess them of their lands, disable their governance, and limit participation within the life of the state — are what have characterized Israeli policy toward Palestinians. Before elaborating on this point, though, I should note that there’s a great deal that can be said about the fundamentally Eurocentric orientation of Zionism from its emergence in the late nineteenth century through its institutionalization in/by the Israeli state, including the subordination of non-European Jews themselves who have been cast as in need of training in civilization and routed into lower class occupations and less resourced residential sectors. As Edward Said observes, “in formulating the concept of a Jewish nation ‘reclaiming’ its own territory, Zionism not only accepted the generic racial concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually peopled not by an advanced but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominant,” adding, “Israel was a return to a previous state of affairs, even if the new facts bore a far greater resemblance to the methods and successes of nineteenth-century European colonialism than to some mysterious first-century forebears.”[^note23] The Israeli state began as a project to construct a nation-state by a minority population that would displace and supplant the existing non-Jewish majority through mass destruction and terror and, subsequently, through militarized occupation and enforced disappearance. Important Zionist leaders in pre-1948 Palestine clearly indicated the intent to displace the non-Jewish population in ways that denied the existence and legitimacy of Palestinian placemaking, governance, and sovereignty over the territories they’d inhabited for generations. In 1938, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency (effectively the leader of the Zionist forces and communities in Palestine) and later the first prime minister of Israel, indicated to the Jewish Agency Executive, “I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it,” and Yossef Weitz, the head of the settlement department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) (the organization charged with acquiring land for Jewish settlement) and an instrumental figure in Palestinian dispossession and the subsequent erasure of former Palestinian presence across Israel, wrote in 1940, “The only solution is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries. Not a single village or a single tribe must be let off.”[^note24] These statements indicate a clear awareness of extensive Palestinian landedness which needs to be eradicated in order to produce a Jewish state, as the condition of possibility for the emergence of such a state.  Prior to the coordinated program of violent expulsion that began in December 1947, the statistics of Jewish and Palestinian inhabitance and landholding were wildly lopsided. In 1946, Jews numbered 608,225 of a total population of 1,912,112, so about a third, itself a vast increase from about 60,000 Jews in 1914 - illustrating how the British (in their role as the controlling power in Palestine from 1917 to 1947) helped facilitate Jewish settlement.[^note25] With respect to land ownership, in 1947 Zionists held about 1,734,000 dunams (the land measurement under the Ottoman Empire), which was about 6.6 percent of the land in Palestine.[^note26] Thus, even under what amounted to British protection and encouragement of Zionist efforts, the Jewish presence in Palestine, demographically and geographically, was dwarfed by Palestinian presence and connection to place.

In order to enable the declaration of a Jewish state as the fulfillment of the Zionist project, launched from Europe and enabled by colonial powers (including the US), this clear Palestinian predominance — and its implications for legitimate political organization and governance in Palestine — needed to be remedied. In February 1947, the British announced that they would be transferring authority over Palestine to the UN, and on November 29, 1947, the UN passed a resolution for the partition of Palestine into two states, one that would primarily be Jewish and the other Arab.  In the wake of this UN resolution, Zionist forces organized a campaign of militarized assault, terror, and mass expulsion that has come to be known by Palestinians as al-Nakba, the Catastrophe.[^note27] The Jewish Agency had been building up a military for years prior (known as the Haganah), by 1946 having a fighting force of tens of thousands who were armed and trained. In addition, there were several Jewish militias, most notably the Irgun. By the end of 1947, Ben-Gurion led a Consultative Committee that included eleven members, including Weitz, that coordinated the destruction of Palestinian villages and the clearing out of cities. These assaults began in December 1947, with test campaigns against the villages of Khisas and Balad al-Sayk and the Arab neighborhoods in Haifa. Given the absence of British response, the wave of bombings, killings, and expulsions expanded exponentially in February 1948.[^note28] Crucial knowledge about village locations, size, leadership, etc. had been gathered for years through Zionist surveillance, which had been amassed in the extensive village files held by the JNF. By the time of the official British withdrawal from Palestine, May 15, 1948, and Israel’s attendant declaration of its independence as a state,[^note29] all of the cities within its claimed boundaries had been cleared of Palestinian presence (with Jaffa being the last on May 13) as well as villages on the coast and much of the Galilee. As Ilan Pappé notes, “All of this took place before a single regular Arab soldier had entered Palestine….Between 30 March and 15 May, 200 villages were occupied and their inhabitants expelled.”[^note30] There was public knowledge of this dispossessive onslaught, since, as Pappé observes, “the foreign press, especially The New York Times, were methodically reporting Jewish attacks on Palestinian villages and neighborhoods.”[^note31] This systematic de-Arabization of Palestine continued through the summer of 1949. However, such removal did not end then, with expulsions of tens of thousands of Palestinians beyond the 1948 borders through the end of the 1950s - particularly in the Galilee and the Negev (reducing numbers of Bedouins there to less than 13,000 by 1951).[^note32]

In the wake of the expulsions and destruction of villages, the JNF oversaw the process by which they were turned into Jewish settlements or made into forests, both of which covered over the existence of such villages. The circulation of the slogan that Israel was “making the desert bloom” (a phrase which I heard a great deal throughout my childhood) worked to efface colonial dispossession, casting what came before the Zionists as an empty wasteland — a version of the narrative of terra nullius quite common within modes of settler conquest and occupation.[^note33] The fact that leaders of the armed groups who conducted these assaults became major political figures in Israel (including many of the prime ministers), these assaults were denied by the state, a narrative of Palestinian voluntary migration was institutionalized in a wide range of ways and through numerous forms of law and policy (to which I’ll turn shortly), and the conditions produced by the mass migrations resulting from bombings and concerted programs of armed terror were normalized as a common sense background of Israeli policy and national life all illustrate how the state officialized the Nakba as the organizing background for Israeli governance on the territory claimed as the state.

In a pattern familiar to settler-states, Israel legally redefined Palestinians and their lands in ways that sought to deny their collective existence, landedness, and governance while subjecting them to a separate and subordinating legal regime — precisely the kinds of strategies repudiated by UNDRIP.[^note34] Those Palestinians who forcibly had been expelled from their lands and property officially were recast as “absentees,” even as they were prevented from returning (either across Israel’s declared borders or from other spaces within Israel’s claimed territory), suggesting less a coordinated and encompassing program of dispossession than a pattern of voluntary migration. A dizzying series of statutes were enacted to translate individual property claims and collective Palestinian placemaking as the absence of legally recognizable title. These included putting territory that had been forcibly cleared by Zionist forces under a custodian, in the process recoding them as state lands that could then be transferred and sold; conveying millions of dunams from the state to the JNF, which barred them being acquired, leased, or sub-let by non-Jews since the JNF was dedicated solely to the Jewish people; allowing the state to seize land deemed necessary for development, settlement, or security; defining what had been communal village pasture lands and Bedouin territories as state lands, since they ostensibly lacked any lawful owner;[^note35] and regularly extending the municipal boundaries of Jewish local communities and of cities, shrinking the territory for resident Palestinians villages and eliminating entire Bedouin villages, offered no legal recognition at all, even as these groups are themselves formally Israeli citizens. By the 1990s, ninety-three percent of the territory within the 1948 boundaries was one form or another of state land or held by the JNF, and three percent was privately Jewish-owned, leaving only roughly three percent for Palestinians who were about seventeen percent of the population in Israel after the wave of expulsions and who have at least doubled in total number since then.[^note36] While here I have focused on displacement, dispossession, and colonial governance within 1948 borders (also known as the Green Line), since it bears most on Jewish claims to indigeneity in Israel, similar tactics have been used in what have been known as the occupied territories — those areas seized by Israel in 1967.[^note37] Those areas, particularly the West Bank and Gaza, have seen more wholesale modes of exterminationist violence in recent years, either directly conducted by the state or sanctioned by it.

The Israeli state also depends upon a distinction between citizenship and nationality, through which Palestinians who live within the Green Line officially can be classed as citizens — and Israel can declare itself in nominal terms to be a democracy — while functionally containing them and denying them access to the rights and privileges afforded Jews. The Law of Return (1950) enables Jews (those born of a Jewish mother or formally converted) to become citizens.[^note38] The Nationality Law (1952) cleaved citizenship from nationality, including all Jews and only Jews within the latter while repealing the 1925 statute under the British Mandate through which all inhabitants had been recognized as citizens and nationals of Palestine and limiting Palestinian citizenship to those who had been present in Israel from 1948 to 1952, thereby denationalizing Palestinians as a whole and denying citizenship to those who had been expelled beyond 1948 borders during the Nakba and subsequent removals. As Noura Erakat illustrates, “Under this legal framework, Palestinian Muslims and Christians were excluded from becoming nationals of Israel because they were not Jewish. Palestinians obtained the right to be juridical citizens of the state but never members of the nation, a bifurcation between citizen-only and national-citizen that enabled the state to provide basic rights to land residency, housing, movement, and employment on a discriminatory basis with the explicit purpose of privileging Israel’s Jewish population.”[^note39] This distinction between citizenship and nationality helps license the continued existence of the Jewish Agency, the JNF, and the World Zionist Organization as entities with quasi-governmental functions in Israel whose resources and benefits are limited to Jews. Moreover, the state of emergency declared in 1948 with the founding the state, which allows for the promulgation of emergency regulations distinct from regular law (itself separate from the explicit military rule that Palestinians in 1948 borders were under until 1966, despite being citizens), has never lapsed, and such regulations routinely are used to deny Palestinians due process, habeas corpus rights, property rights, and territorial integrity for Palestinian areas.[^note40] The idea of Jews as a nation, then, does not straightforwardly designate a coherent historical and ongoing collective, but instead serves as an enabling fiction for the notion that the Israeli state realizes that putative entity — the Jewish nation — such that it can regulate, strangulate, incarcerate, dispossess, and murder Palestinians (including those officially considered citizens) while presenting the state as the proper and obvious embodiment of a national identity/will, rather than as a colonial invasion and occupation in the name of people from elsewhere whose presence in that place relies on an ongoing, multidimensional matrix of pervasive state violence — backed by the US.

As scholars in Indigenous studies have illustrated, a primary way that states legitimize their own jurisdiction over Indigenous peoples’ geographies and sociopolitical networks is by transposing Indigenous social systems and modes of collective placemaking and self-rule into the terms of the occupying state. In that process, such land and political claims are represented as meaningless, partial, and/or deficient, and then the state either purchases the land (as if it were merely private property, rather than part of a web of collective landholding and governance) or proceeds to declare the land as some version of unowned waste — either way, making the land available for distribution to settlers.[^note41] Israeli policies have been and are intended to foreclose Palestinian collective presence and its implications for matters of sovereignty and self-determination, including denying the existence of any form of Palestinian peoplehood. As Prime Minister Golda Meir asserted in 1969, “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”[^note42] Such a narrative requires disappearing village and Bedouin histories of collective placemaking that extend back generations (if not hundreds of years), self-generated administrative systems and governing councils that crisscrossed Palestine, the movement for Palestinian independence and self-determination in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, mass Palestinian uprisings for national self-determination during the British Mandate (especially from 1936-9), the assertion of rightful Palestinian political autonomy at the UN and in international fora, and the collective remembrance of the Nakba and insistence on a right of return.[^note43] Israeli policies have been and are intended to dispossess Palestinians of their lands, to cast dispossession as a blameless disappearance while actively blocking connections to place and erasing signs of Palestinian histories so as to produce, as Shiri Pasternak suggests (drawing on the work of Jean O’Brien), the sense of a grounding Jewish firstness.[^note44] These policies seek to render Palestinian landedness and governance an impossibility, or so diminished and subject to state intervention and caprice as to be almost meaningless, while asserting the ahistorical givenness of Israel’s political and cultural geography — such that the putatively Jewish state appears as the container for time itself in ways that seek to foreclose Palestinian pasts, presents, and futures.[^note45] These are the acts of a settler-state.

Are Palestinians Indigenous? Do they seek to assert their self-determination and freedom through that rubric of international law and policy and in solidarity with forms of Indigenous internationalism? That is a question for Palestinians to answer.[^note46] However, does their continuing struggle against the onslaught and erasures of the Israeli state fit within the terms of Indigenous internationalism, the politics of resistance to settlement, and the resurgence of other political orders? Yes, it does. Claims to Jewish indigeneity are another strategy of obfuscation, of making occupation into a commonsensical framework that normalizes institutional and everyday oppression and dispossession, of asserting a Jewish nationality that has no historical existence in the terms proposed and whose realization is the neverending Nakba. This story of Jewish indigeneity is a settler fantasy set in motion and licensed by the vicious legacy of European colonialism and its civilizational scale of human worthiness. It is a fantasy from which Jewish people and the Jewish people — who are not now and never were the supposed nation in whose name Zionism and the Israeli state enact their murderous violence — must wake up.

Not in my name.

 [This post is my analysis, and nothing in it should be taken as representing or indicating the opinion of my employer.]

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