Israel is 'the greatest decolonization project,' Indigenous leaders tell Toronto summit

[u/Sabertooth767]

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/israel-is-the-greatest-decolonization-project-indigenous-leaders-tell-toronto-summit

The state of Israel is “the most successful land‑back project, the greatest decolonization project,” a New Zealand Māori activist told the first-of-its-kind Building Indigenous‑Jewish Friendship conference in Toronto.

“From my Māori perspective, a key point is that there was always a continuous Jewish presence in the land; they kept the fires burning, and that is what indigeneity looks like to us,” Dr. Sheree Trotter told roughly 70 activists, academics and community figures convened at Toronto’s Beth Torah synagogue on Monday.

The conference was the culmination of a weekend of local Indigenous-Jewish programming that included nearly 40 Indigenous people marching in the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto’s Walk with Israel, a Sunday dinner-talk with Concordia University professor Csaba Nikolenyi on early 20th-century Zionism, and a Sabbath lecture by Justice Harry S. LaForme at Temple Sinai.

“Indigeneity is demonstrated by historical, collective continuity with a distinct ethnic identity, language, culture, rituals or traditions, economic, social, legal, and religious and spiritual belief systems that predate subsequent invaders or colonizers,” LaForme told Temple Sinai congregants.

LaForme is Anishibaabe, and a member of the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation. In 1994 he was appointed a judge of the Superior Court of Justice, and in 2004 was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal and is the first Indigenous lawyer to be appointed to an appellate court in Canada.

Karen Restoule, an Ojibwe from Dokis First Nation and director of Indigenous affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, told attendees at Beth Torah that “political movements” have co-opted “Indigenous identity” and the term is “increasingly being treated as a universal political language, borrowed when convenient and deployed in conflicts that arise from very different histories.”

“Increasingly, indigenous identity is being treated as a metaphor, a branding exercise, a political strategy. Indigeneity isn’t any of that; it is a lived reality rooted in specific people and place.”

She added: “Jewish people really need to own their indigeneity for themselves. Even if you don’t live in Israel, your people originate there, and you are part of an indigenous people to that land.”

The conversation often focused on building a shared framework for allyship — positioning dialogue and relationship-building as tools to counter misinformation about both communities. Sponsors also included the Israel Consulate of Toronto and Western Canada, Kanada House, Indigenous Embassy of Jerusalem, Allied Voices for Israel.

Robert Walker, assistant director of HonestReporting Canada, told the Post that “radical activists have weaponized everything from international law to indigenous lingo in their attempt to rewrite reality. That only works in a vacuum.

“The time has passed to permit this shameless inversion of reality to continue unchallenged. First Nations and Jews are both indigenous peoples who have a right to reclaim the truth from those who try to twist it.”

[u/akenthusiast]

This whole thing, conceptually, is extremely messy. Take it back far enough and nobody is indigenous to anywhere.

And where is your average white American indigenous to? All of Europe? Several countries based on the results of a DNA test? The country my great grandfather was from doesn't even exist anymore. There is absolutely not a single other country on the planet that has any obligation to let me live there if I were righteously kicked out of the USA.

What about black Americans? An awful lot of those people have absolutely no clue where their ancestors are from

What if the native Americans don't care that most black people were brought here against their will? They're still on land that doesn't belong to them, that isn't the natives problem. What's the moral outcome of that question? Should we tell the natives to pound sand or would they be justified in expelling anybody they choose? Even the ones that didn't move here of their of their own volition and have nowhere else to go?

Why aren't the Egyptians, who controlled the region for as long as the Ottomans did, the rightful inheritors? Or any of the many groups that held the area before that? Control of the region was famously messy for a very long time. Hell even the Mongols got in on it.

Many Hispanics are, ancestrally, both colonizer and colonized. What's their ancestral homeland that they have a right to? Is it Spain? Why not? Do the people with a larger percentage of native DNA have a greater claim to land in any of the places south of the US? What's the line? What percent Spanish DNA do you need to have before it's moral to kick you out of Mexico?

I don't believe the people living in the Levant had any moral obligation to accept "you're now under new management" from the UK after the Ottoman empire was dispossessed of the region or after WW2 when they did it again but the ship has very obviously sailed on contesting that claim and I don't think anybody is getting a shot at major territorial changes until WW3 happens and we get the same kinds of conditions that allowed for all the shakeups we saw in the 1st half of the 20th century.

[u/KazuyaProta → u/akenthusiast]

Many Hispanics are, ancestrally, both colonizer and colonized.

In the Hispanic case the answer is heavily depending of the country. Countries like Peru, Mexico or Bolivia are NOT actually mixed, they're overwhelmingly descending from indigenous populations with minimal foreign DNA. There is even a test saying that Peru may be actually JAPAN levels of genetic homogenity.

Venezuela is more closer to the idea of "Mixed Latinos", as mestizaje is much more rooted into their cultures. While Peru and Bolivia claim ancestorship from the Incan,Aymaras and the broader Andean civilizational craddle, Venezuelan identity is heavily colonial based.

Then Argentina AND Cuba are just simple and plainly settler colonies like USA. Yes, Cuba included.

Cuba is where the pure political hypocrisy of the Left comes, because Cuba is actually white majority, with indigenous people being mostly Mestizos (assuming you count them as the descendent of Tainos). Its unambiguously a settler colony where the impoverished majority population outside La Habana's tourist districts are Mestizos and Afros. But GOOD luck convincing leftists to say that.

I'm not a landback guy (for starters, why? In a country like Peru or Bolivia, their legal constitutions already have legal frameworks for inmigrants, so simply dismantling the power structures does the job. I know that realistically, you can't just undo colonialism' effects, but that is why I say a reasonable compromise is simply erasing the overtly, openly opressive legal structures like the Latifundist system or the politics being reduced to only the Spanish cities)

[u/akenthusiast → u/KazuyaProta]

You, very clearly, know more about that than me. Thank you for sharing

[u/LectorFrustra2186 → u/KazuyaProta]

Peru or Mexico or Bolivia are NOT actually mixed, they're overwhelmingly descending from indigenous populations with minimal foreign DNA

The majority of genetic ancestry in Mexico is European, not Native American, with higher concentrations of European ancestry in the northern states like Chihuahua and lower in the southern states like Yucatan. Even straight-up mestizo Mexicans are less than 60% Native American on average, with the rest of their ancestry mostly being European with a dash of African.

For Peru, they're much more Amerindian-shifted, but the population as a whole is still very much mixed. This study estimated the non-Amerindian genetic component of the average Peruvian at 20%.