Prof Ilan Troen
Topic: Indigeneity; A Jewish Perspective
Ilan Troen is Lopin Professor of Modern History Emeritus at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, Stoll Family Professor in Israel Studies Emeritus at Brandeis University, USA, and founding director of the Israel Studies centers at both institutions. He is Founding Editor of the journal Israel Studies, and 2023 recipient of the Association for Israel Studies “Lifetime Achievement Award.” His most recent book is Israel/Palestine in World Religions; Whose Promised Land?
Transcript
Indigeneity; A Jewish Perspective
I would like to share with you the ways in which indigeneity is used politically to deny the legitimacy of the State of Israel. Much of the research and thought found in this essay derive from my recently published book: Israel/Palestine in World Religions; Whose Promised Land? (New York/London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
The issue of indigeneity has both a secular and a religious component. It is fascinating how religion or theology and secular discourse complement one another and how religious discourse that has historically been used in explaining how societies were organized, and land was claimed has come to be expressed in secular terms since the 20th century.
Here is the crux of the problem. This land – the Holy Land for the three major monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – has been historically claimed in theological terms. Even within other religions and other venues throughout the world, it has been believed that if a people’s god were stronger and defeated other gods then the believers could legitimately claim territory. That has been the case with regard to Palestine where conquest has been crucial in determining ownership. There is a significant exception. Jews believe that they themselves might be responsible for the loss of control and even suffer exile if they had sinned rather than explaining such loss as a weakness of their Lord. Moreover, they have long believed that they would return to the Holy Land since their God had promised it to them. For all monotheism’s, God’s intentions and plan have a role in determining to whom the land belongs.
Palestine, since the 7th century, had largely been Muslim except for two centuries when Christians controlled it during the crusades (1095 – 1291). Until the First World War and the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Islam claimed possession as a part of the Abode of Islam – ‘dar al-Islam. This historic fact came to a dramatic end when a Christian power – the British Empire – unexpectedly announced that Palestine would be given to the Jews for their National Homeland with the division of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of its defeat in World War I. However satisfying to some Jews and Christians, this was a shock to Muslims. It is here that the current Arab/Israeli dispute has its contemporary beginnings.
However, modern conflicts take place not only in the mosque, or in the church, or in the synagogue. They are fought over in international forums such as the League of Nations and the United Nations or in the academy and the “public square.” In all of these venues the discourse is secular, not theological. This is why and when religious discourse must find secular language and terms to express traditional beliefs. It is at this historic moment of change that the issue of to whom the land belongs transits from theology to secular discourse.
It is my contention that “supersessionism” or “replacement theology” is really a form of denying indigeneity to Jews. Traditionally associated with St. Augustine (354-430 AD or C.E.). It holds that the Christian Church has superseded the Jewish people in the role of being party to a covenant with God. Thus the Jewish role in history was terminated together with its special relationship to the Holy Land. Rather, Jews were to be scattered among the nations of the world and, in some versions, endure punishement for their rejection of the Savior. Moreover, Islam would later claim that Christianity itself was superseded removing Jews even further from a role as actors in history, and thereby denying them the right to claim a vital and ongoing connection to the Holy Land and to benefit from the secular concept of indigeneity.
The competing claims to authenticity can be found in the foundational documents of contemporary antagonists in the wars raging in and around Israel/Palestine. Israel’s Declaration of Independence (1948), the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Covenant (1964 and 1968) and the Hamas Charter (1988 and 2017) all assert legitimacy and authenticity in their claims to the same territory. All claim being indigenous.
The Israeli Declaration of Independence begins: “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people.” This contention has its roots in those sections of the Bible that describe events that took place about 3,700 years ago and that are repeatedly reaffirmed thereafter. Jewish peoplehood and the historic connection to that land “between the [Jordan] River and the [Mediterranean] Sea has been understood and accepted by Jews themselves and by the people amongst whom they lived over more than three millennia. It has become challenged only recently by those who deny Jews indigeneity in the context of the Arab/Israeli conflict.
These Jewish claims are based on and the varieties of ways in which indigenous claims are made in the modern world. They are publicly expressed in secular terms as found in a series of paragraphs of the Israeli Declaration of Independence: territory may be conquered; it can be made productive and fruitful; it may be purchased; the population may have a long connection with it; and it has been the site in which the national culture was shaped.
Each of Israel’s opening paragraphs refers to a principle by which a modern “people” claims land. U.S. President Wilson’s “14 Points“ or “principles“ reference the rights of peoples/nations to claim territory as a basis for establishing a modern state. They have become essential in the discourse of contemporary national liberation. Moreover, the centrality of the modern concept of a nation is expressed in the title of the League of Nations (1920-1946) and the United Nations (1946 --) that have the responsibility for establishing the legitimacy of states.
Since it is peoples that create nations, it was essential for Jews to be able to make their case in secular terms that they were a nation. Conversely, those who deny the validity of Zionism and a Jewish State argue that Jews are not a people or a nation. That is the argument made in the PLO Covenant.
The PLO Covenant begins with the assertion that Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestine people and an indivisible part of the Arab homeland. Thus, they attempt to establish the novel and difficult claim of ancient origins. There is ample physical and documentary evidence for Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians and Hebrews but the name “Palestine” was formally affixed to the Holy Land only in the second century A.D./C.E. by the Romans after a failed Jewish revolt against them around 135 A.D./C.E. The Romans quashed the revolt but also decided to punish the rebels by removing their name from that territory. It should be added that there were no people in “Palestine” at that time calling themselves “Palestinian.” That term for a people is a modern, twentieth-century invention.
The PLO Covenant also negates Jewish peoplehood by claiming it is only a term properly applied to adherents of a religion, not to a people. The charge is that Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality, nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of their own. The implication is, in effect, that every Israeli is defined only by a religious identity. Thus, there is a total denial of the ethnic, national, cultural aspect of most of the people who live in Israel. In addition, the charge is that Israel is an outgrowth of imperialism and therefore Israelis are colonial settlers. This leads directly to the assertion of Jews as foreign to the land and the denial of Jewish indigeneity.
The Hamas Charter doesn't even bother with the issue of peoplehood. In fact, as a purely theological statement, Palestine belongs to Islam. Jews or Christians may have no claim to it, nor legitimacy. Both Jews and Christians are dhimmis – non-Muslims living in a Muslim state. As people of The Book [Bible] who follow authentic prophets – Moses and Jesus, they are to be respected but have inferior rights and unique obligations particularly the payment of special taxes. They may not rule nor aspire to independence and sovereignty. That's a theological impossibility, and therefore Islam must engage in a war against them – a jihad – if they reject this Muslim position.
The reality is different for most Jews who see themselves as a historic people with mutual obligations to each other even though we have lived in different diaspora communities. There are five living generations of my family in this country. Some go back several hundred years to the Abu Khatzira family of North Africa, particularly Morocco. We also have Karites, who lived in Egypt for over five hundred years, and we also have people from many different places across Europe. Some people speak Ladino, others speak Yiddish, and others are fluent in a host of modern languages. For all, Hebrew is shared as a sacred language and for some has been used over centuries in normal, every day circumstances. All see themselves as connected to eachother.
None question the authenticity of their relationship to this land in the present nor in the past. The challenge of “indigeneity” becomes an important issue only after the First World War. As noted above, legitimacy could be granted by other categories such as conquest. Conquest was legal until the creation of the United Nations in the 1946. So was purchase. Former Englishmen and Americans bought from France much of the western portions of North America in 1803. Dutch settlers had earlier purchased Manhattan. Later, the United States paid the Russians for Alaska. Labor, or actually working the land, was very important since the writings of John Locke (1632-1704), the English philosopher, who argued that cultivating relatively underused land endowed a settler with ownership. Thus, nut gatherers may have some rights even though they just collect the produce that God provided by its natural presence on the land. Shepards invest more labor, so they have more rights. But the farmer who, by the sweat of his brow makes the land productive, has even greater rights. Thus making the land fertile and developing it, is not an original Zionist idea. It motivated Thomas Jefferson and successor Americans to justify the move westward across North America. Land left vacant or underdeveloped was at risk to those who would invest themselves in cultivating it. By the 20th century, the concept of history is added to this list and becomes essential if not primary.
Why is “history” important? It begins to take the place of theology during the nineteenth century. Indigeneity, or connecting a particular people with a particular land, becomes a formal and key part of the international, legal discourse by the 1960s. Legal discussions of “indigenous” began in Central America in mid-twentieth century as part of the attempt to protect the culture as well as the economic rights of tribes long-established in the area. The ILO - International Labor Organization – took the initial lead in this movement as it spread to New Zealand and Australia, and to Canada and the United States. That is where there are societies of “natives,” “indigenous,” “aborigines,” and “First Peoples” who existed – from a Western or European perspective – before the age of discovery by Christopher Columbus and his successors. The ILO’s hope was that defining indigenous peoples could serve to protect particularly their cultural rights from the modern state and their economic interests from capitalist economies. It took half a century -- until 2007 -- for the ILO initiative to find expression in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). It is a legally non-binding resolution, not a binding law or a treaty because of the objection of the Americans, Canadians, and other peoples who are unwilling to surrender sovereignty and primacy to native populations. Nevertheless, protecting the culture and the economic wherewithal of the truly indigenous, meaning peoples who were not yet discovered or known to the Western world before Columbus, became how indigeneity was initially formulated.
But any good idea may be imitated, corrupted, and used in unintended ways. In the 1990s it was largely some Bedouin intellectuals and sympathizers from my university (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), who understood that indigeneity could be used in their political program against the policies of the Israeli government in making their case for ownership and control over land and maintaining aspects of their culture that conflicted with norms prevalent in contemporary societies. Other dissident Arab groups also found the concept useful in pressing their own claims. By the first decade of the 21st century indigeneity became a thread binding many Arabs of Israel together when they sought to challenge Israeli policies.
How, then, can one develop and apply indigeneity in the polemics of the ongoing Jewish/Palestinian conflict. There are ample precedents throughout the Middle East for doing so. The basis for making claims of indigeneity are chiseled in stone, some are on papyri, and others have come to be printed in books. While the list in the Middle East could include the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Jews, the crucial question is who of those that existed in the past are also present in the modern world? This is an issue that does not frequently occur in Europe or in North America, or in much of the Middle East, where perhaps the only generally accepted indigenous peoples are the Berbers of North Africa and Arabs who live in the swamplands in Iraq around Basra. Proving continuity between the past and the present is daunting and difficult. One can't go out in the streets of the Middle East and identify living examples of peoples represented in the numerous museums of the region or the world.
My argument is that the Jews have a relatively good case to be an exception. The speak Hebrew, although with probably an accent strange to those who lived in the Holy Land 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. The streets and schools are filled with children bearing names like Abraham, Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca, and so on. The places and locations of the cities, towns and landscapes are the same or similar to those in use millennia ago. In fact, there are more than 2,000 locations in Israel identified by archaeologists as having Biblical origins. By language, by place, by memory, by continuity of residence, Jews can legitimately claim continuous presence. Moreover, a vital connection has been maintained of many years and at significant distance through performance of religious and cultural behavior over the centuries that references the ongoing connection with the Holy Land.
Inquiring into the demographic history of the country is also pertinent. How many people actually lived here at the time of Jesus? How many lived in Palestine at the time of the Byzantine Empire, when the Holy Land became Christian? How many people lived here at the time of Muhammad? William Foxwell Albright, a distinguished archaeologist argued around 1930 that there were 3 million people here at the time of the Byzantine Empire. Accepted estimate count at least a million and a half at the time of Jesus. All the data point to far more people in the past than in the recent past. By way of a telling example, the Roman amphitheater still standing in Beit Shean can hold 4,800 spectators. The population that could produce that many people for an audience was lacking until after the establishment of the State of Israel. That section of Israel/Palestine, along the deep valley in which the Jordan River runs, was considered a significant granary in the Roman period but had deteriorated into a largely abandoned and desolate region until recently.
Similarly, there were only about 40,000 people in Jerusalem in 1840, of whom a plurality were Jews. Today the number is approaching a million. Agriculture, industry, commerce, towns and cities are now restored to a land that had been described in the Bible as one “flowing with milk and honey.”
In 1800, there were around 250,000 in Palestine/Israel, and even fewer than 200,000 during many of the preceding centuries, certainly since the end of the Crusades. Indeed, Palestine lost most of its population after the Muslim conquests. It has been for long period underpopulated and underdeveloped.
Anti-Israel polemics often point to the low numbers of Jews relative to Muslims and refers to the territory as “Arab Land.” One might make similar observation about the lack of a significant Christian population compared with the Muslim majority. However, one should also ask why there were so few Muslims. The answer is found in the lack of attention focused on the country during the 13 centuries of largely Muslim rule by the regions great Muslim empires. In the many centuries preceeding the end of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, Muslims chose to live elsewhere. In this reality, it is clear why the Jewish and Christian populations were not substantial. They would have had the added disability of living in an underdeverloped land where Muslim law relegated them to an inferior population suffering legal disabilities that would have impaired their ability to improve it. Nevertheless, there is a record of repeated attempts by Jews to enter and settle in the land despite discrimination, objective difficulties and official opposition. As by way of but one example, Jews who were farmers in the ancient world and through the Roman conquest found it difficult if not impossible to acquire land, lacked equal legal status, or were structurally disempowered. Even when they attempted to return, it was hard to maintain a viable presence.
With the weakening of the Ottoman Empire restrictions on dhimmis lost their effectiveness in the face of Christian European states who obtained “capitulations” from the Ottoman authories who could protect Christian immigrants. Jews also benefited from this easing of restrictions and the population of Palestine doubled from 250,000 to about 500,000 during the nineteenth century. In this environment of growth, a host of new institutions were established together with the introduction of modern European innovations in agriculture and the country’s integration into a transportation and commerial network that transformed the Mediterranean as a bridge, rather than a barrier.
How many people live in the Holy Land now? Fourteen million with a rapidly growing population. At the time when the Balfour Declaration was announced, 1917, there were 700,000 people from the river to the sea; Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Over the past century the country grew more than 20 times and has achieved levels of prosperity in relation to other developed regions of the world. Moreover, a quarter of a billion trees have been planted in a land that had for centuries been perceived as a barren desert. It has again become a dynamic and productive country.
Significantly, there were pilgrimages to Medina and Mecca, but they were no pilgrimages to Jerusalem. It may be that in current Islamic theology Jerusalem is the third most important city within Islam, but there has been a large gap between it and the Mecca and Medina as a venue of active veneration.
In this underdeveloped, underpopulated land where even those who would have gladly settled in it were discouraged, an exclusive claim of indigeneity is not persuasive and, in fact, so long as it was part of a large and powerful Muslim empire, it would hardly need to be made at all. It did become relevant when that Empire was dissolved and contending peoples made claims for portions of it. Indigeneity then enters the arsenal of legal and linguistic instrument employed on behalf of national agendas. Consider the following:
When the Ottoman Empire dissolved, its diverse populations began to make claims based upon their antiquity, often imagined. It is in the 1920s that Israel’s Christian neighbors in Lebanon to the north voiced claims that they are descendants of the Phoenicians, that the Copts in Egypt to the South are descendants of the Pharaohs. The people who live in East in Iraq or ancient Mesopotamia are really modern Babylonians.
The first large rooms in the National Museum of Turkey in Ankara are devoted to the Hittites because Kamal Ataturk and the modern, secular Turkish national movement claimed descent from them. The use of ancients to claim peoplehood in the modern period is a twentieth century phenomenon and is related to the need to find a language other than theology to justify control over the land.
This phenomenon was greatly encouraged after 1967 when Gamal Abdel Nasser was defeated and died shortly thereafter. With his passing so did much of the energy for pan-Arabism, a pan-nationalist ideology that espouses the unification of all Arab peoples into a single nation-state, comprising all Arab countries of West Asia and North Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea. The expanse is referred to as the Arab world. The demise of this idea resulted in additional peoples claiming indigeneity based on alleged relations with peoples who existed in the ancient world.
For example, the Hashemites of Jordan, who were clearly transplanted by the British after the First World War and who had previously lived their entire historical experience in what is Hejaz or southern region of Arabia. Instead of this large peninsula becoming Hashemite Arabia, it became Saudi Arabi since the competing Saudi tribes overxame the Hashemites and expelled them. The British compensated the Hashemites with a portion of what was intended for Palestine and termed that territory Transjordan. This new country became merely “Jordan” when the Hashemites succeded in wresting a portion of Palestine on the West Bank of the Jordan River and the eastern part of Jerusalem during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
This historical event is reflected in Jordanian currency after 1967 with King Hussein with one arm outstretched over Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque. The other arm extends over a holy site at Petra near Aqaba/Eilat. As a Muslim whose family had traditionally been protectors of Muslim holy places he added this historic role to a Nabatean site while alleging historic connections to the Nabateans – a non Muslim people who played a significant role in the region prior to not only Islam but Christianity.
At the same time, the Arabs of Palestinian claimed that they are “Jebusites.” Who are the Jebusites? Ironically, for thousands of years they were known largely or even exclusively in Biblical texts and and in Jewish prayers. They are identified as the people who lived in Jerusalem when David captured the city.
The need to claim origins iss also found in local Christianity. Some Palestinian Christians established themselves as direct descendants of early Christians who remained in the land since the time of Jesus. They institutionalized this belief through Palestinian Liberation Theology, citing as their inspiration 1 Peter, 2:5 that references “the living stones” on which a new church will be built. This assertion uses as evidence that the name of the theologian, Naim Atik, who formulated this concept in the 1980s. Atik in Arabic, means ancient, as it does in ancient and modern Hebrew. This new local Christian movement may have been well described as a case of “theopolitics” – a term invented by the Palestinian Theologian Mitri Raheb from Bethlehem who called explicity for expressing traditional theology in contemporary political terms. He provides the clearest example of how a supersessionist Christian expresses his view that Zionists are merely colonial-settlers rather than an indigenous people legitimately returning to their homeland.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam enjoy very rich multiple strands of alternative theologies. The Roman Catholic Church has long objected to Zionism. There's a famous meeting between Herzl and Pope Pius X in 1904 where Pope Pius X rejected Zionism and threatened to send large numbers of missionaries to Palestine to convert Jews who might come to the country to recreate a national homeland. Nevertheless, in November 1947, the Vatican, that had long opposed Zionism, came to support partition, which meant creating a Jewish state alongside an Arab one. In 1965, in the contemporary theological formulation of Nostra Aetate, traditional supersessionist theology was altered by allowing for the vitality and the legitimacy of Jews in history and releasing them from the charge of deicide. Not only did Roman Catholicism change, but so did much of the rest of Christianity. Mainline Protestants were probably the single most important advocate for a Jewish State in mid-twentieth century and Evangelical or Pre-Millennials have become so at present.
Some elements in Islam have also changed. While the Jewish state may be a theological impossibility for many – perhaps even most – there have been signs of accommodation. The president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat came to Jerusalem in 1977armed with a fatwa, a religious document provided by the chief Iman of Al-Azhar University Cairo that stated that within Islam there is the possibility of making peace with the Jews and recognizing their state. The Abraham Accords of 2020 between Israel and Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates reflect that change. Do does the willingness of Mansour Abbas, the leader of a fundamental Islamic party in Israel, to join the Israeli Cabinet under the last government.
Nevertheless, not only Hamas but large elements within Islam particularly in the Arab world remain adamantly and even violently opposed to a Jewish state. Such an opposition inevitably couch their language in the mix of theological and secular terms that reference the foreign aspect of contemporary Jews to the Holy Land and therefore their lack of rights for any claims to it. It is in this context that the appropriation of indigeneity has become a useful tool in the polemics of the Arab/Israeli conflict. 164 countries in the world recognize the legitimacy of the state of Israel. That number is likely to continue to increase even as the false charge of the absence of indigeneity for Jews to the land from which they sprang and have been associated for millennia remains part of the polemics of the ongoing conflict.