Settler Colonialism or Re-indigenization?

On the heels of World War Two, communist China invaded and occupied Tibet. The Chinese government encouraged mass immigration of ethnic Chinese into Tibet. Many thousands of Tibetans were killed and many, including the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, were forced to flee to India where they formed diasporic communities. Some seventy years later we see diasporic Tibetan communities have spread to a number of large cities across the Western World.

It is the dream of the Tibetan people in exile to once again establish themselves in their native homeland with self-determination. Let's imagine how that dream might play out centuries from now in a different political landscape in which China loses political control of Tibet. It will start with a nationalist movement amongst diasporic Tibetans to re-establish themselves in their native homeland. But re-indigenizing themselves into Tibet will not be without challenge in this imagined future.

The land is now occupied by ethnic Chinese who have lived there for generations. So, when diasporic Tibetans reinsert themselves by buying up all available land and establish settlements across Tibet, the local ethnic Chinese feel threatened. They resist them with violence. A few decades later the United Nations intervenes and decides to partition Tibet into two geographically interdigitated sovereign nations, one for ethnic Chinese and the other for ethnic Tibetans. The Tibetans accept this arrangement as the best option for allowing peaceful co-existence, the ethnic Chinese reject it and continue to envision the entire region as rightly belonging to them.

Let me ask you a few questions. Do the diasporic Tibetan's have the right to reestablish themselves in their ancestral homeland despite having lived elsewhere for generations? I think most of us would answer in the affirmative. They are indigenous to this land and it was taken away from them. They have a right to return.

Would their re-establishment be an example of settler colonialism? I think most of us would say definitively “no”. Rather, it was China who annexed Tibet and settled it in an act of settler colonialism. Tibetan's re-establishing their sovereignty in the region is an act of re-indigenization rather than settler colonialism. They are undoing the harm that was done to them, their way of life and culture.

If this is true for Tibetans, why would it be any different for Jews in their native homeland in the Lavant? Let's explore this further.

Like Tibetans, Jews have been exiled by settler colonial enterprises on multiple occasions from their homeland in the southern Levant¹, only to reestablish their self-autonomy as an independent state at several points in history.

In the seventh century CE, a new religion arose in the Arabian Peninsula -- Islam. Like settler colonialists before them, the Arabs used conquest to rapidly expand their empire and religion out of Arabia and across the Middle East and North Africa. In this process, they colonized the native homeland of the Jewish People. Many other indigenous groups across the Middle East and North Africa were also colonized and dominated.

Like diasporic Tibetans, many Jews left Palestine. This occurred due to persecution, which included periodic forced conversions to Islam, and from economic difficulties resulting from foreign rule and oppression². While many Jews left, others remained, just as some Tibetans have remained in Tibet. These impoverished Jews continued to live in their homeland amongst the Arab settlers until joined in the 19th and 20th centuries by many additional Jewish returnees from the diaspora seeking to re-indigenize themselves. This return of Jews to their homeland led to the birth of the country of Israel following the UN partition plan of 1948.

Like our envisioned future for ethnic Tibetans and ethnic Chinese, the resulting Israeli/Palestinian conflict should be understood in the context of re-indigenization. Re-indigenization may lead to conflict with currently present groups which resulted from occupation centuries before. Both the re-indigenizing group and those already present have a right to the land³.

If Jews have a right to their native homeland, then why are they charged with settler colonialism by some? The truth is that the history of return of diasporic Jews to the Levant has none of the classic marks of settler colonialism. This is recognized even by those academics who make the charge. For example, academic Oren Yiftachel charges Israel as being an example of a settler colonial state simply because Jews came from Europe. We will talk more about this later and why the settler colonial charge hinging solely on a European connection is a racist idea. But first, it is important to note that Yiftachel nevertheless saw Israel as a very different type of settler colonialism than the European norm. The differences he noted “include Zionism’s nature as an ethno-national and not an economic project, the status of most Jews as refugees, the loose organization of diasporic Jewish communities as opposed to the well-organized metropolitan countries, and the notion of ‘return’ to Zion enshrined in Jewish traditions.”⁴ Amnon Rubinstein and Alexander Yakobson summed up these differences mentioned by Yiftachel as follows: “Zionism was a colonialist phenomenon in all respects and fully resembled other examples of modern colonialism – apart from the fact that it was a national movement, that it was not motivated by a desire for economic gain, that it arose out of Jewish suffering and was realized by people who may be defined as refugees, that the settlers had no colonial mother country, and that the bond with the Land of Israel was part of the traditional historical identity of the Jewish people.” ⁵ You can taste the sarcasm. The charge of settler colonialism is paper-thin and has little merit.

Here is the history of Jewish re-indigenization in a nutshell. First, the initial waves of return occurred during the Ottoman Empire when a Muslim government ruled Palestine from afar. These first immigrants were primarily Jews from Russian fleeing persecution. They bought land and made settlements on unoccupied land. This process of Eastern European Jews returning and settling on available land continued under the British following World War I. After the genocide of Jews in World War II at the hand of the Nazi's, the floodgates of immigration opened up with hundreds of thousands of Holocaust refugees immigrating to British occupied Mandate Palestine. But never in this process did Jewish-owned land constitute a Colony of Great Britain or any other European power. Instead, the British stubbornly refused to grant Jews any sort of political autonomy and actively supressed the immigration of Holocaust refugees. Rather, the entirety of Mandate Palestine was treated as a single administrative unit by the British. Jews in Mandate Palestine ended up fighting the British in an insurgency and Palestinian Arabs did the same. Both of these groups also clashed with each other. When Great Britian decided to wash their hands of Mandate Palestine and leave, in was the United Nations who ultimately decided to split Mandate Palestine into two sovereign nations, one for Jews and the other for Arabs. Jews accepted partition and formed the State of Israel. The Arabs rejected partition, clinging to the concept that the entirety of the region belonged to them and only them.

Jews used the imperial powers of the time to buy land and immigrate to Palestine. They used the imperial power of the Muslim Ottomans before World War I and of the imperial British after World War I. Zionist Jews were not those imperial powers. Nor was Israel ever an imperial colony. It was the United Nations who granted Israel sovereignty and when they did none of the imperial powers of the day, including the United States, supplied the newly declared State of Israel with the arms it so desperately needed to fend off six Arab armies bent on her genocidal destruction. They all had arms embargoes with Israel. The simple truth is that Western nations were willing to sit back and watch the newly declared State of Israel be annihilated along with her Jewish refugees. Rather, it was the communist government of Czechoslovakia that came to Israel’s aid by selling it arms, thereby saving it from annihilation. As for the imperial United States, she played little role in Israel’s formation. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that a close bond formed between Israel and the United States. So much for Israel being a colonial enterprise of Imperial powers!

Given Israel fits few of the defining marks of settler colonialism, why do some make this charge? The answer is simple. The Jews who initiated the return to Palestine were from Europe and had come to resemble Europeans in many physical traits. Local muslim populations in the Levant objected that these were not true Jews of Levantine ancestry. When their cause was taken up by university academics and students on the far-left, Israel was branded as another European colonial enterprise despite the fact it did not fit that paradigm⁶. This attack on the indigeneity of Jews of European ancestry is a form of racism based on skin colour. In this case, the discrimination arises because the indigeneity of a group is challenged due to having too pale a skin colour⁷ and their re-indigenization attempt is thus branded as settler-colonialism. In contrast, when freed slaves from the United States re-indigenized themselves into west Africa and created a new state, Liberia, they were not denounced as settler colonialists by the masses. Yet, like in Israel, the re-indigenization of Liberians resulted in conflicts with local groups of people who had never been slaves. Why did Liberia escape the far-lefts ire while Israel did not? We presume it was because Liberians were not "white". The charge of settler colonialism for Israel but not Liberia is very much tied to skin colour.

The great irony is that Nazi Germany persecuted European Jews because they were not European enough. They were the other, a different race that had to be purged from the gene pool in their twisted eugenic mindset. Now, some from the far-left on university campuses charge Jews with being settler colonialists precisely for the opposite reason! In their equally twisted mindset European Jews are too white, too European to represent an indigenous group in exile. Any movement of "white European" Jews into the Middle East is envisioned by them as settler colonialism. But the immigration of "white" Jews to Israel is no different than the movement of "Arab" Jews from Iraq, Syrian, and Yemen to Israel except for skin colour.

How did diasporic Jews in Europe become “white”? Jews over the centuries have come to resemble the physical characteristics of the peoples they lived amongst all over the world. This happened for two reasons. First, like all indigenous peoples, Jewish women have been subject to rape at the hands of the local peoples they lived amongst. Matrilineal inheritance of Jewish status is enshrined in Jewish law. Thus, the child of a Jewish mother is considered to be Jewish even if conceived via rape from a non-Jew. Second, intermarriage (involving conversion of a spouse, usually a women) may have also contributed, though intermarriage was historically banned by the Christian and Muslim nations that Jews have lived amongst for much of history. Both rape and limited intermarriage helped to mix the gene pool of Jews with their local host populations. Thus, In Europe, Jews have obtained many Caucasian traits, in Ethiopia they obtained dark skin colour, in India they came to resemble Indian peoples and across the Arab world, Jews have obtained (or retained?) Arab features.

This mixing of gene pools in the Diaspora has no bearing on being a people. Diasporic Jews have remained a people in a continuous line from when their ancestors left the Levant to the present. In the same way, many full-status native Americans and Canadians have obtained considerable European ancestry and may exhibit light-coloured skin, or African ancestry and exhibit dark-coloured skin. They are still fully native. In Canada, native status is not based on genes but rather on the status of the father. If the father has native status in a tribe, then his daughters and sons do as well, even if the mother was of African, European or some other descent.

These modes of either patrilineal or matrilineage inheritance of group status ensure the continuation of peoplehood for indigenous groups in a way that is completely unconcerned with genetics and physical traits. This concept is often foreign to many Westerners who may envision peoplehood as defined by genes and appearance. For example, a person may say they are half-Irish and half-Japanese. In Judaism, you cannot be half-Jewish. You either are fully Jewish or not Jewish at all. Jews are a people, not a race with one specific skin tone, not just a religion, not just a nationality.

While so-called "white" European Jews spear-headed the return of diasporic Jewry to the Levant, European Jews make up less than half of the composition of Israeli Jews today. Shortly after the State of Israel was established in 1948, between half a million and a million Jews immigrated to Israel from Arab lands where they resembled the local Arab populations in skin colour and other features. These Jews left their Arab diasporic communities for a number of reasons, but a large factor for many was a surge in persecution that followed the 1948 war when Arab armies from five Arab counties tried to obliterate Jews in the newly founded State of Israel and failed miserably. Almost the entirety of diasporic Jews living in these Arab countries immigrated to Israel, often penniless, leaving behind their properties and taking little more than the shirts on their backs. As a result of this Jewish "Nakba", Jews in the state of Israel today are not primarily of “white European” background. In addition to a host of Arab Jews, there are also Indian Jews, Iranian Jews, and Ethiopian Jews as well, and these non-European Jews make up the majority. The myth that the State of Israel is a white settler colonial enterprise simply is not true. It is time to bury that racist hatchet, and accept Israel for what it is – re-indigenization!

How does this affect campus? The charge of settler colonialism placed on Jews is inherently racist and we urge universities to acknowledge this racism and purge it from their curricula. It was progressive university professors who drove the racist eugenic mania of the 1930's that went hand-in-hand with Nazi Germany's Jew hatred, and it is radicalized university professors who are currently driving the equally racist settler colonial demonization of Israel, its Jewish citizens, and all who support them. This agenda is being taught like dogma by certain professors in courses at most universities in the Western world. Racism is racism, whether it comes from the far-right or the far-left and university professors should not have the right to promulgate it in the name of academic freedom.

There are generally four or five categories of colonialism that are recognized by academics. It is time to encourage academics to consider re-indigenization as an alternative paradigm. As decolonization movements unfold, these will likely be following by re-indigitation movements like those that resulted in the formation of Liberia and Israel. Liberia and Israel can be used as case studies of re-indigenization. The conflicts that occurred with local peoples in both examples can be used to help guide future re-indigitation attempts as indigenous groups around the world achieve varying levels of autonomy.

Footnotes

1. The Assyrians literally attempted to re-populate the northern region of the Jewish homeland with foreign settlers in the eight century BCE in an attempt to weaken native Israelite identity and avoid revolts. After the Assyrians, other foreign powers meddled in Jewish autonomy in their homeland. These included the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and then the Byzantines. Jewish self-autonomy re-asserted itself periodically during the transitions between some of these empires.

2. Under Muslim rule, native Jews and Christians in the Levant were forced to pay an additional pol tax called the Jizya. The tax was onerous enough that many converted to Islam to avoid having to pay the tax (see Encyclopedia Britannica entry of Jizya: https://www.britannica.com/summary/jizya). One of the key functions of the tax was to humiliate non-Muslims. For example, the 16th century Islamic saint Ahmad Sirhindi stated (Letter No. 163): "The real purpose of levying jiziya on them is to humiliate them to such an extent that they may not be able to dress well and to live in grandeur. They should constantly remain terrified and trembling. It is intended to hold them under contempt and to uphold the honour and might of Islam." Muslims did not have to pay the pol tax, so this aspect of society was structured in an apartheid-like system.

3. Re-indigenization must be done with great care to ensure that local populations are respected. But local populations also have a responsibility to act ethically towards those who are re-indigenizing. In the case of the Palestinians, they chose not to accept the UN partition plan that would have given them statehood in 1948 and instead went down a path of violence in an attempt to regain the whole of Palestine for themselves. The sensible path forward is for Palestinians to accept that Israel and its 7 million indigenous Jews are not going anywhere and for Israelis to realise that the 5 million Palestinians are not going anywhere. Both have a right to the land and both must share the land equitably, peacefully, and in a way that allows both groups the self-determination they deserve.

4. Yiftachel, O. 1998. ‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaising Israel/Palestine. Constellations: International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory. 6: 364-390.

5. Yakobson, A. and Rubinstein, A., 2008. Israel and the family of nations: The Jewish nation-state and human rights. Routledge.

6. Jews have always held land in their native homeland in the Levant. This homeland was renamed Palestine by the Romans. Diasporic Jews purchased and settled additional land during the era of the Ottoman Empire as did many Muslims from outside of Palestine. Jewish purchase of land continued after Britian occupied Palestine following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire following World War 1. Under British occupation, both Palestinian owned land, Jewish owned land, and what would become the country of Jordan made up Mandate Palestine that the British administered. Jewish-owned land was never a colony. The United Nations, not Great Britian, split Mandate Palestine into a Palestinian administered sector and a Jewish administered sector, while the Jordanian sector had already been split off from Mandate Palestine by the British, and was afforded its independence as a distinct state. The Jewish-owned sector became the current State of Israel. At no point was there in existence a Jewish colony of Britian or any other Western power. The charge of settler colonialism has no basis in history.

7. That indigenous groups can have pale skin colour is born out by the Sami of northern Scandinavia, an indigenous group that has been heavily persecuted despite having pale-coloured skin. Some so-called "anti-Racism" proponents have made the false and highly bewildering claim that racism only comes from people with “white” skin towards people with “dark” skin and that people with white skin cannot experience racism from people with dark skin. Frankly, this notion itself is racist. Not only can people of colour be racist towards other racial groups, but they can also be racist towards people who are “white”. This notion is even encapsulated in some of our racial terminology like “racialized group”. To the extent that race exists at all (i.e. as a social construct with little if any biological reality), “whites” are also a “race” and thus “racialized”. It is not possible for anyone not to be racialized.