What are the two prime commodities of an indigenous people? Peoplehood and land. A specific land.
The story of the Jews as an indigenous people is one of the oldest but best-kept secrets of mankind. It is a story whose value has been denied, ignored. Perverted into lies by those who hate us. Those who lie about our origins. Those that lie about who we were and who we are.
There are those who impose a narrative on us that we are illegal occupiers, strangers in other people’s land when, in truth, we are, quite simply, a people connected to a small specific plot of land. A people who, throughout history, were deprived of our right to live in peace on that land. A people cast out to be despised in foreign lands. Through the ages, no matter how much we tried to integrate, to succeed, in their societies, we continue to be hated.
So, we prayed to return to our ancient land, and even when we did, we are not allowed to live in peace.
We are the Jews, and that land is Israel. We have a unique calendar which annually repeats that ancient message. In our daily prayers, on our holy days and festivals, we are reminded about our history – who we are, and where we came from. It’s been this way for thousands of years.
It is an unbreakable story that links us to our land, and with our God, whether we live there or not. And, as evidence of this truth, it is chronicled in the oldest book known to man, the holy Bible.
It tells of a particular people, anchored physically and spiritually to a prescribed land, a promised land, and to a commitment that has tested us for thousands of years – and is testing us today.
Our story tells of a God who created heaven and Earth, a God that created everything that walks upon the Earth, a God that created man and woman. A God who spoke to a man, Abraham, and told him that He would make of him a great nation if we kept His laws and commandments. As it is written in Genesis 12:2-3, “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on Earth will be blessed through you.”
And Abraham took his people to the place that God promised. And God made of Abraham a people that cherished the land and, with generations, that land became Israel.
Let me stop here to tell you that I am not offering you a Bible lesson. I am giving you a proven political history of the Jewish people and Israel. Here is part of that proof:
When Abraham died, he was buried in land he owned in Hebron. He and his wife Sarah, and the wives of Isaac and Jacob, Rebecca and Leah, are buried there. This is no legend. You can visit their tombs in Hebron today.
Our land is mapped with the genetics of our people. The historic locations of the tribes of Abraham are recorded in those maps, proving a recorded history. Each generation adding their story to the growing picture of a Jewish people committing themselves to the land that God gave them. Tribes like Manasseh, Efraim, Simeon, Dan, Judah, Reuben, and Gad. Places like Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem.
The story comes with tales of conflict, death, forced deportations, exile. Stories familiar to indigenous people whose rights and land have been robbed by others. And to those snatched from their indigenous lands as slaves. That story is our story.
How the Jews were stolen from their indigenous land
The Egyptians in the 13th and 14th centuries BCE took us as slaves to build their palaces, pyramids, and other sites for pharaohs that afflicted us before we were led to freedom by Moses back to the Promised Land.
But because we had lost our faith, we were doomed to roam aimlessly for a generation before God, using Moses as His messenger and leader, lay on us commandments of how to be a people of moral values. Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not steal. Thou shall not envy your neighbor. Thou shall not commit adultery. A code of conduct, laws, that are the cornerstone of what makes us all decent human beings and a civilized society.
I guess that’s what makes Jews such great lawyers today.
But freedom from conquerors and slavery did not end with our exodus from Egypt and our return to our Promised Land. In the 6th century BCE we were uprooted and again led into slavery by the Babylonians, and here we have a connection with other indigenous people removed by force from their native land.
A sad song sung by the indigenous people of Africa, taken as slaves to foreign lands, namely America, with the echoes of our Jewish pain in exile as “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” That negro spiritual has its roots in Jewish suffering and exile. Just as Black Americans are indigenous to Africa, so are we Jews indigenous to the Land of Israel.
“As we remembered Zion”!
Zion. Zionists. The ageless desire of Jews to return to our ancient homeland.
Zionists? Where have we heard that word? Ah, yes. As a curse, as a modern insult spewed out by antisemites. Jew-haters who tell you they have nothing against Jews. It’s just the Zionists they hate.
We returned to our land from Babylon and, under King David (circa 1,000 BCE), it was united; and the progress continued under Solomon (957 BCE), who built the Temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem in honor of our God. Telling Him in prayer and reverence that we kept our commandment and have returned.
This, at a time when Mohammad hadn’t been born and there was no Islam. And certainly, no Palestinian people. Later, the Maccabees miraculously defeated the Greeks in 160 BCE, and we celebrate that victory in our festival of Hanukkah.
But the Romans came to conquer our land. They destroyed our holy Temple, knowing it was a symbol of who we are. Masada fell with the sacrifice of the Jewish defenders, who chose to die on that mountain top than surrender into slavery.
Those who didn’t die hid in the northern Galilee or escaped, particularly to North Africa and down into Ethiopia. Legend has it that the Ark of the Covenant is in the Church of Mary Zion in Axum, Ethiopia. Ethiopian Jews claim they descended from the Jews that escaped the Roman destruction of Judea.
Jews dragged from the Holy Land were taken to Rome as slaves or fed to the animals as entertainment for the Roman public in the Coliseum. You can see evidence of that plunder and eviction etched into the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum.
Later, we were subjugated by the Muslims and by the Ottoman Turks. But we maintained a presence in the land, and many began to return to enter into commerce or work the land as subjects of the Ottoman Turks.
Our history is so deeply etched in violence and grief that we have a unique prayer that we recite on special occasions – “Ve’hi She’amda,” which says: “In every generation they rise up to destroy us, but we have faith in the Holy One, blessed be His name, who will deliver us from their hands.”
We have been saying that prayer a lot lately.
And in every generation, they do indeed rise up to destroy us. Can anyone doubt this is not true today?
This is part of the burden that we indigenous Jews have carried through the ages. According to genetics and DNA sampling, as well as historic records, Ashkenazi Jews – Jews who traditionally lived in Eastern and Central Europe, and to a lesser extent Western Europe – originated in the Middle East, moved to southern Europe, then northward in the Middle Ages.
Egyptian Jews and Moroccan Jews were descendants of the Jews that fled Israel during the Babylonian and the Roman periods.
We know that Sephardi Jews – descendants of the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 – had arrived there from the Middle East long before Christianity. They later fled to North Africa, following their expulsions from Spain and Portugal
The point is this. Jews were expelled or fled from our ancient Land of Israel, be it called Judea or other tribal areas in Israel, and they found their way into Africa, as well as into Europe. But Israel has always been our magnet – the source of our indigenous Jewish DNA.
At a traditional Jewish wedding, what are the two prayers that a bridegroom says before he is allowed to slip the ring onto his bride’s finger?
“Behold! You are consecrated to me with this ring according to the Law of Moses and Israel.”
Then he breaks a glass under his foot as a reminder that he has an obligation to protect Israel and ensure that our Temple in Jerusalem will not fall again.
And yet, today, the enemies of Israel, the enemies of the Jews, attempt to reduce us with insults and slander, claiming we are colonial occupiers of a land not ours. Not that it is the land of the Jordanians anymore, or the Egyptians or Arabs or Muslims, certainly not the Romans – but of the Palestinians.
This is such an outrageous lie. There were no Palestinians in the period, the history, we are discussing here. And yet it has taken hold not only in the minds of our immediate and direct enemies. It has flooded Western progressive radical thinking.
When the Mamluks conquered the land in 1260, there were Jews in Safed, and especially in Jerusalem. Gaza and Hebron had smaller communities, and several Jewish villages remained in the Upper Galilee. But they couldn’t find any Palestinians.
The Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks found Jews - but they couldn’t find any Palestinians.
With the increasing delegitimization being waged against us, this message must be front and foremost.
Let me end with this thought.
If Black Americans were to retrace their heritage back to the places in Africa from which they had been so brutally removed barely 200 years ago, possibly by Muslim slave traders, to reclaim the land of their heritage, would they be internationally condemned?
And if, while succeeding in establishing a corner of existence on land once theirs, would an American president force a resolution in the UN Security Council accusing them of illegal occupation?
Of course not.
So why the Jews, who are returning to land once ours 2,000 years ago?
Let us say it clearly and affirmatively: Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel. ■
Barry Shaw is a senior associate for public diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies and author of the three books Israel Reclaiming the Narrative; 1917. From Palestine to the Land of Israel; and Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Antisemitism.