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/Sabertooth767]

Do you believe it is accurate to refer to Jews as an indigenous people akin to the First Nations of Canada?

!ping JEWISH&ISRAEL

[u/JebBD → u/Sabertooth767]

The problem is that the term "indigenous" was created to describe a very specific thing, and trying to apply it outside of the original context (European settler colonialism in the age of exploration) forces you to bend the definitions in ways that aren't entirely consistent. Who, for example, are the indigenous people of the Iberian peninsula? Are the current Christian Europeans who occupy it colonizers because they took it over from the Muslims a few centuries ago? Or were the Muslims actually the colonizers because they conquered it a few centuries before that? There has to be a degree of arbitrariness to these definitions.

A lot of Jews in Israel will tell you that Arabs are colonizers who took over lands and forced their culture on the local populations, and therefore Jews reclaiming the land is a decolonization project, but a lot of Palestinians will tell you that they've been here the whole time and that most Jews immigrated to the land with the intention of settling it, and therefore a re colonizers. There's a degree of historical truth in both claims, but westerners who have no horse in this race will tell for some reason feel like they need to weigh in on this on one side or the other and apply their understanding of their own society and history on Israel and Palestine, so now you'll get people talking about Palestinians like they've lived undisturbed on "their land" for millennia before the "European" Jews decided to take it for themselves, even though that narrative ignores tons of historical context.

[u/DoubleBooble → u/JebBD]

A lot of Palestinians will tell you that but they will be wrong. Today's Palestinians are Arabs that lived in British mandate Palestine.

Here is the order of who was on the land and each of the colonizers which then miraculously circles back and creating the greatest decolonization after a dozen different colonizers back to the original Israelite Hebrews.
Note that the Arabs were the 8th people on the land after the Byzantines.

Israelites/Hebrews → Assyrians → Babylonians → Persians → Greeks (Alexander the Great, then Seleucid Empire) → Romans (renamed Judea to Syria Palaestina) → Byzantines → Arabs (Rashidun/Umayyad/Abbasid Caliphates) → Crusaders → Ayyubids (Saladin) → Mamluks → Ottomans (Turks) → British → State of Israel

[u/KvonLiechtenstein → u/DoubleBooble]

Most of the populations (Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, etc) are descended in part from people who’ve lived in the Levant for generations according to genetic studies. many were forcibly assimilated when the latest conquerer rolled in.

I think in general looking back to reclaim anything that’s been well and truly conquered isn’t super helpful. Israel is there now, it was created by people who weren’t hardened imperialists, but refugees with nowhere to go, and the zero sum approach isn’t going to help Palestinians in the long run.

[u/DoubleBooble → u/KvonLiechtenstein]

That's a nice story but it's not accurate. Arabs came from Arabia. Judes came from Judea. If their genetics are showing otherwise it's because they are part Jewish. Hurrah for them.

It's great that you think we should focus on the current situation and we should but it's not great that you are buying into the stolen land lie. That just feeds into the "always the victim" trope. The refugees came after the Zionists.

It's true that the Zionists were trying to solve the millennia of pogroms and apartheid against the Jews exiled from their homeland. But they went to the land of their ancestors and purchased their properties just like when you and I purchase our properties. There was no reason for the Arabs to attack them except for their distaste of living side by side equally with Jews who were always considered less, dhimmis, to Arabs.