No, National Geographic, the Oslo Accords are not about "returning" land to Palestinians - by Elder of Ziyon

...Too many people think it is axiomatic that a people called the Palestinians have been indigenous to the region and deserve to control "their" land. However, the Palestinian Arab people are an invention of the 20th century.

Elder of Ziyon..
27 November '18..

Update: CAMERA’s Israel office yesterday prompted correction of a National Geographic article on the preservation of biblical archeological texts which contained an ahistorical reference to disputed West Bank land.

Words matter, and when lies get embedded into everyday descriptions of the Middle East as fact it is enormously difficult to set the record straight.

National Geographic has a nice article (not yet online) about the race to find and preserve Biblical archaeological texts, many of which can be found in Israel and areas controlled by Israel. But one parenthetical statement makes one wonder who does fact checking for the esteemed magazine.

"In 1993, after signing the Oslo Accords - which provided a framework for returning disputed territories to Palestinian control - the Israeli government launched Operation Scroll, an urgent survey of all the archaeological sites the country potentially stood to lose."

It is nice that the author didn't lazily say "occupied territories" instead of "disputed territories," but it is quite untrue that Oslo was about "returning disputed territories to Palestinian control."

Because they were never under control of anyone known as Palestinians, nor were they ever under control of any independent political entity since the Romans defeated the Jews in 70 CE.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Standing Rock to Israel: We belong to the land - by Mara Cohen

...The Water Protectors in the prayer camps at Cannonball at 10 below zero with the snow blowing sideways in the dark have this in common with Israelis: they belong to the land. As the Jews are the first indigenous people in the world to have regained their ancestral homelands, sovereignty and self determination, you give hope. Pray for us. I’m going for some sufganiyot.

Mara Cohen..
Opinion/JPost..
14 December '16..
Link: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/From-Standing-Rock-to-Israel-We-belong-to-the-land-475409

Standing Rock Sioux Rez is the northernmost of the Seven Council Fires of the Lakota People.

A remnant of the 1851 Ft. Laramie Treaty lands apportioned to the North Plains Tribes in exchange for those tribes’ allowing lands ceded by them go to incomers in return for goods, rights (education and medical care) and most importantly, the promise that they would be left alone, no more of their land taken by the tide of landless people moving toward the setting sun like a blight of locusts. All the tribes gave up land in exchange for peace.

But there was no peace. The other Lakota-Dakota- Nakota tribes, known collectively as the Oceti Sakowin, had to go to war again against the United States of America. This time it was to enforce the 1851 treaty against the depredations of those seeking mineral riches in Montana and traveling across the Bozeman Trail, which is called Thieves’ Road in Lakota. The people who crossed it hunted, fed themselves and even set up villages and farms, ranches and trading posts. And then the US Army built forts along this road through Lakota country, to protect the US citizens from the consequences of their own actions in violating the treaty.

That war to enforce the 1851 treaty resulted in what became known as Red Cloud’s War, and during that war, my great-great-grandmother, a Jewish peddler’s young daughter, was taken captive by the Lakota. She was one of about 3,000 non-Indians taken as captives and one of the few of that 3,000 to prove smart enough and tough enough to survive, to be adopted into a Lakota family and become a Lakota woman herself. We found her parents’ ketuba in an old parfleche bag between old Chief Swiftbird’s log cabin walls when it was being taken down in the 1950s. There it was, concrete proof of the captive girl who was strong enough to survive. It was also concrete proof for her great-granddaughter, who was in her sixth year of conversion to Judaism, that her call to become Jewish had some basis besides her own intellect; she too had been present at Sinai.

Indigenous Archaeology: What Has It Got To Do With Arabs In Haifa? by Sheri Oz

...All minorities, regardless of the length of time they have been in the country, have important stories to tell and control over the unearthing of their histories and the telling of them should belong to them. . . as long as they do not try to rewrite history to create a “narrative” that distorts history for political purposes.

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
19 November '16..

When a respected archaeology journal accepts a paper that categorizes a population as indigenous when it is not, it cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.

Archaeologist Dr. Talia Shay taught at the Technion in Haifa until 2013. There is little online evidence of professional activity since then but she did publish a new article this year in a respectable international journal: Archaeologies. Archaeologies is rated in the top quartile of about 250 archaeological journals around the world. This makes her article worth reviewing because it is a contribution to growing attempts to disavow Jewish indigenous status in Israel and anoint the Palestinian Arabs as the indigenous people.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Pro-Palestinian Vs. No-Palestinian: There Is Another Way, And The Dare Stands. - by Sheri Oz

...The choice is theirs and theirs alone. They just have to decide to re-write their future all by themselves. Do I believe they can do that, or that they even want to? Not very likely, I think. And even if the answer was “yes”, how long would it take me to trust them? A very long time. But I never say never. And the dare stands.

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
02 November '16..

Here is a unique proposal – become the newest indigenous people in the world. In other words, Palestinian Arabs, you can write your own future. I dare you to. Or, you can continue to bask in the attention afforded you as you persist in the victimhood imposed upon you years ago by your fellow Arabs, based upon an imaginary past.

* * * * *

Pro-Palestinians want to see one state “between the river and the sea”; in other words, they want Israel to cease to exist. No-Palestinians deny the Palestinian Arabs the right to define their own identity. I am an Okay-You-Want-To-Be-Palestinian-But Not-Like-That kind of person. If you really want a name that symbolizes subjugation and failure, that is your prerogative; but does it mean you really have to be a failed People?

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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The struggle between Zionism and … something else

...The answers are provided, ironically, by the UN, in its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, which asserts the right of self-determination as well as the rights to maintain the culture, institutions, religion, and language for indigenous peoples. It grants them the right to live in peace and security, and to not be subjected to genocide or expulsion from their native lands. It calls for them to have free access to their religious sites, and for them to be free from incitement to racial hatred against them. Zionism is the principle, justified by historical experience, that these rights can be guaranteed for the Jewish people only in a state under Jewish sovereignty. So why was there so much opposition to the passage of this resolution? After all, it was the World Zionist Congress.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
30 December '15..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2015/10/is-zionism-colonialism-or-indigenous-self-determination/



The World Zionist Congress met last week for the 37th time since it was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. Like many Jewish institutions today, it has become a battleground for the Right and Left. But what happened at the meeting put into clear focus that the struggle is really between Zionism and … something else.

An organization called LAVI introduced a resolution (the English version is here) calling for the recognition of the Jewish people as an indigenous nation:

The bill declared that “the Jewish people is a Semitic people, indigenous to the Land of Israel and seeking international recognition of its indigenous status” …

The proposal argued that “Israel’s contrived Western identity” was not only handing ammunition to its enemies to falsely label Zionism as a “colonialist” project, but that it was also placing an artificial barrier preventing peace between Israel and its other “Semitic” neighbors.

It included a statement that it “does not negate the indigenous status of any other people.” Nevertheless, it barely passed, by a vote of 51% of the delegates.

I believe that the essence of Zionism is the assertion that the Jews are an indigenous people to the land of Israel, with indigenous rights (sometimes called aboriginal rights) in the land. In fact, the Jewish people are one of the oldest documented indigenous peoples, with a unique language, culture, religion and history tied directly to the land of Israel.

The resolution refers to the struggle of the Jews to return to the land after displacement by “Roman imperialism,” but it could also have mentioned the conflict between the Jews and the Arab imperialists of the seventh century or the Jordanian and Egyptian ones that invaded the land in 1948.

A moment’s reflection should suffice to show that the narrative by which the Jews suddenly appeared in 1880 or 1948 to dispossess a flourishing ‘Palestinian’ people is nonsense. Jews have been physically present here to some extent since biblical times, and they are the paradigm case of ‘a people’ in history. ‘Palestinians’, on the other hand, are Arabs who are mostly descended from recent arrivals from Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Transjordan. Their specifically ‘Palestinian’ culture developed very recently, in opposition to what they see as the threat of Jewish (non-Arab and non-Muslim) sovereignty. They didn’t even call themselves ‘Palestinians’ until the 1960s; and prior to 1948, ‘Palestinian’ meant ‘Palestinian Jew’.

The Arabs know that Zionism rests on Jewish peoplehood, and on the connection of the Jewish people to the land – our indigenousness. They know that their moral case to displace us is based on the argument that they are a long-term indigenous people and we are European colonialists. Thus they insist there is no Jewish people, only a religion. Thus they attempt to erase Jewish history in the land – by arrogating Jewish holy sites to themselves and by physically destroying archaeological evidence of the ancient Jewish presence. Their claims may appear ludicrous, but they have been successful in persuading large numbers of people.

The most ancient of indigenous Middle Eastern peoples vs. the colonialist myth

...We must re-assert that Jews are the most ancient of indigenous Middle Eastern peoples, with a history of continuous residence in what is now known as the Arab world going back 3,000 years. Moreover, the colonial relationship between Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews and the Arab Muslim conquerors is the exact opposite of what reporters and western observers believe: the Jews of the region are the colonised and the Muslims the colonisers. For fourteen centuries, Jews survived at the beck and sufferance of their Muslim rulers.

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
15 September '14..

This summer’s Gaza war has highlighted the role of the media and opinion formers in shaping a hostile view of Israel and a more favourable understanding of Hamas. Two journalists, formerly staffers with mainstream media, Matti Friedman and Tom Gross, have called the biased reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict a ‘political weapon – with which they arm one side in the conflict.’

There are many reasons why journalists have become accessories to Hamas’s propaganda war, behaving as activists rather than reporters. They relay a picture of Palestinian victimhood and Israeli extremism and intransigeance, suppressing any facts that make a nonsense of this narrative. Tom Gross identifies one reason:

” …Many have a kind of guilt about being white and Western, and the history of their own colonization. Israel is perceived as a white country and the Palestinians are perceived as non-white, even though in fact many Palestinians have lighter skin than some Israelis. Many Western journalists abroad have barely heard of the fact that there are Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews.”

This is a key reason why organisations like mine, Harif, have been trying to raise awareness that Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews constitue over 50 percent of Israel’s population.

We want people to ask why these Jews ended up in Israel. They did not move to Israel only out of Zionism, although this was a factor : the majority fled their countries as refugees – out of fear, to escape harassment, violence and death.

They fled the same conditions of intolerance and bigotry that are now forcing the other non-Muslim minorities of the Middle East to choose between extinction or exodus.

Colonists and Other Forgotten Facts about the Arab-Israeli Conflict

...The Yazidi in Iraq and the Christian Copts in Egypt are not "occupiers" or "settlers;" neither are the Jews in Israel. They are both victims of a common enemy that seems to want a Middle East free of non-Muslims.

Ezequiel Doiny..
Gatestone Institute..
15 August '14..

The current Palestinian narrative is that all Muslims in Palestine are natives and all Jews are settlers. This narrative is false. There has been a small but almost continuous Jewish presence in Palestine since the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome two thousand years ago, and, as we will see, most of the Muslims living in Palestine when the state of Israel was declared in 1948 were Muslim colonists from other parts of the Ottoman Empire who had been resettled and living in Palestine for fewer than 60 years.

There are two important historical events usually overlooked in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

One is the use that Muslim rulers made of the jizya (a discriminatory tax imposed only on non-Muslims, to "protect" them from being killed or having their property destroyed) to reduce the quantity of Jews living in Palestine before the British Mandate was instituted in 1922. The second were the incentives by the Ottoman government to relocate displaced Muslim populations from other parts of the Ottoman Empire in Palestine.

Until the late 1800s entire ancient Jewish communities had to flee Palestine to escape the brutality of Muslim authorities. As Egyptian historian Bat Ye'or writes in her book, The Dhimmi:

"The Jizya was paid in a humiliating public ceremony in which the non-Muslim while paying was struck in the head. If these taxes were not paid women and children were reduced to slavery, men were imprisoned and tortured until a ransom was paid for them. The Jewish communities in many cities under Muslim Rule was ruined for such demands. This custom of legalized financial abuses and extortion shattered the indigenous pre-Arab populations almost totally eliminating what remained of its peasantry... In 1849 the Jews of Tiberias envisaged exile because of the brutality, exactions, and injustice of the Muslim authorities. In addition to ordinary taxes, an Arab Sheik that ruled Hebron demanded that Jews pay an extra five thousand piastres annually for the protections of their lives and property. The Sheik threatened to attack and expel them from Hebron if it was not paid."

The Muslim rulers not only kept the number of Jews low through discriminatory taxes, they also increased the Muslim population by providing incentives for Muslim colonists to settle in the area. Incentives included free land, 12 years exemption from taxes and exemption from military service.

The First Modern Indigenous State - Israel

...The so-called "Palestinian national movement" is not a national movement of an indigenous people. It is a national movement designed specifically to overthrow the indigenous people and replace that people with the very people who conquered them and held them in something akin to servitude (dhimmitude) for thirteen long centuries. Like indigenous peoples throughout the world, the Jewish people, too, are worthy of self-determination and self-defense.

Michael Lumish..
Israel Thrives..
09 January '14..

I have been arguing for some time that we need to place the long Arab war against the Jews of the Middle East within the modern western civil rights paradigm.

If the west, or at least the western-left, honors the struggle among people of color for national liberation, or if they support the struggle among women for full and equal rights throughout the world, or if they believe that Gay people should be afforded equality before the law, surely they must accept that the Jewish people also deserve rights to self-determination and self-defense against our persecutors.

Over at Israelycool, Ryan Bellerose, a Native-American Canadian activist has a few words on the matter:

The actual working definition of “indigenous people,” (not the Wikipedia version, nor Merriam Webster, both more suited to plants and animals) for purposes of this essay is that developed by aforementioned anthropologist José R. Martínez-Cobo. With this as my foundation, I will detail why Jews are indigenous to Israel, and why Palestinians are not.

Martinez-Cobo’s research suggests that indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system.

The Jews of the Middle East are a persecuted indigenous minority.

There are two reasons why they are considered not to be so by most in the west. The first reason has to do with the type of unacknowledged racism that makes up "progressive" political culture. The second has to do with the misunderstanding between indigenous rights and what Bellerose calls "rights of longstanding presence." The Jewish people are the only people on the planet who can claim indigenous rights within the Land of Israel. The Arabs, as the conquerors of the region thousands of years after the establishment of Israel as the Jewish national home, are not.

Jews Are the Indigenous People of Israel. Where's the Coverage?

SC..
CAMERA Snapshots..
31 January '13

There is a growing protest movement among the indigenous peoples in Canada, including the so-called First Nations, the Arctic-dwelling Inuit, and a group called the Métis. They are demanding a greater share of natural-resource royalties and more input on environmental issues. The story has made it into the U.S. press with stories on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and in The Wall Street Journal, which wrote:

On a recent day, several members of the tribe gathered around a fire in a teepee to mark a hunger strike by the chief of another indigenous group. They pointed at the smoking chimneys of local refineries as a symbol of the land they believe Canada has taken from them and the economic benefits they say it has promised but not delivered.

Of course, the usual suspects have been quick to link the Canadian protests, known as Idle No More, to the Palestinian cause, Ha’aretz running an article under the headline “Lessons of a 'Canadian intifada'”. The Electronic Intifada reported on a statement of solidarity signed by Palestinian activists:

As Palestinians, who struggle against settler colonialism, occupation and apartheid in our homeland and for the right of Palestinian refugees – the majority of our people – to return to our homeland, we stand in solidarity with the Idle No More movement of Indigenous peoples and its call for justice, dignity, decolonization and protection of the land, waters and resources.

We recognize the deep connections and similarities between the experiences of our peoples – settler colonialism, destruction and exploitation of our land and resources, denial of our identity and rights, genocide and attempted genocide.

The truth is quite different, naturally. Last week, Ryan Bellerose, the son of a Métis leader wrote an article in The Metropolitain:

The Progressive West Supports the Quest for a Judenrein State of Palestine

Matthew M. Hausman
American Thinker
27 March '11
H/T Ted Belman

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/03/the_progressive_west_suppo.html

In seeking to impose a Palestinian state on Israel, the Obama Administration, European Union, and western media have displayed a cynical contempt for history that is astounding in its breadth and scope. Pressure is brought to bear solely on Israel, who is expected to sacrifice sovereignty and security in the name of an ideal that is premised on a repudiation of the Jews' right to self-determination in their ancient homeland. The Palestinians are expected to concede nothing -- not even their oft-stated goal of the phased destruction of Israel. Nothing illustrates the hypocrisy better than a comparison of their demand that Israel accept an Arab "right of return" with their ambition for a state that would be ethnically cleansed of all Jews. Like the Nazis with whom the Mufti and other Arab leaders were so closely allied during the Second World War, they seek to create a Judenrein state as a springboard for the elimination of a Jewish presence in the Mideast. Ironically, western progressives are enabling the process, even though it entails human rights violations that would certainly be illegal in liberal democracies.

The continuing support for the Palestinian cause by the United States and European Union -- and their contribution of billions of dollars that fund antisemitic propaganda masquerading as school curriculum, line the pockets of the corrupt Abbas regime or end up in the coffers of Hamas -- would indicate an abdication of reason if the true goal were to achieve a lasting, substantive peace. However, such behavior is not incongruous if the real purpose is political realignment with the Arab-Muslim world at the expense of Israel's integrity as a democratic, Jewish nation. Although Obama and the EU claim only to support the rights of the Palestinians as an indigenous people, they have adopted the cause by uncritically promoting a revisionist narrative that is built on a denial of Jewish history. However, the Jews' rights as an indigenous people were recognized historically and under international law long before the term "Palestinian" was ever used to refer to an Arab population that accreted largely through immigration during the sunset years of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish people originated in ancient Israel; the Palestinians did not.

The Arab-Muslim world's true intentions regarding peace with Israel should be apparent from its centuries-long oppression and subjugation of Jews in Arab lands and its stated refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish nation. The two-state solution is proffered as a ruse for the destabilization of Israel, and western apologists are complicit in the charade by their refusal to insist on Arab recognition of Jewish historical rights, and by their failure to condemn the Palestinian goal of state building through ethnic cleansing. Whereas any perceived attempt by Israel to transfer Arab populations would certainly inspire international condemnation, the Palestinians' open and notorious aim of expelling Jews from historically Jewish lands -- lands that were never part of any sovereign Arab nation -- is met with conspicuous silence or tacit approval. Indeed, President Obama's demand last year for a building freeze in Jerusalem was a blatant attempt to coerce Israel to implement apartheid-like measures against her own citizens in order to limit the Jewish population of her capital.

Nevertheless, Jewish habitation in Judea, Samaria, and Israel proper, including Jerusalem, was a fact from antiquity into modern times -- until Jordan conquered the territories and dispossessed their Jewish inhabitants during Israel's War of Independence. When Jordan (then known as Transjordan) conquered Judea and Samaria in 1948, it expelled the Jews living there, collectively dubbed these territories the "West Bank," and annexed them in violation of international law. Israel's subsequent acquisition of these lands in 1967 in truth effectuated their liberation from foreign occupation; and renewed Jewish habitation thereafter constituted nothing more than repatriation. Israel's liberation and administration of Judea and Samaria were perfectly legitimate under prevailing standards of international law, despite Palestinian claims to the contrary. In fact, it is Palestinian land-claims that are dubious, based as they are on Jordan's transfer of its negotiating "rights" over these territories to the Palestinian Authority as part of the Oslo process. Because Jordan seized these lands illegally, however, it never possessed lawful title in the first place, and accordingly had no legitimate rights to convey to the PA.

US endorses absurd postcolonialist resolution

Fresnozionism.org
21 December '10

In 2007, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 61/295, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This past week, the US endorsed the resolution, after initially voting against it along with Australia, Canada and New Zealand. All four nations have now endorsed it, making it unanimous.

The intent is purportedly to protect people like Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians against exploitation and denial of rights by the majority culture. In fact, it represents a breathtaking invasion of the sovereignty of any nation that contains a subculture that defines itself as ‘indigenous’.

The declaration has a long preamble and 46 articles. It does not contain a definition of ‘indigenous’, because

According to the Chairperson, Ms. Erica Irene Daes, Rapporteur of the Working Group, this was because “historically, indigenous peoples have suffered, from definitions imposed by others” (E/CN.4/Stib.2/AC.4/1995/3, page 3).

The ‘working group’ which developed the declaration did provide a definition, but it was never officially adopted by any UN body. Here’s part of it, which may give you an idea of their thinking:

Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them.

They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system.

Naturally, the Palestinian Arabs claim to be an indigenous people. By way of illustration, if this claim were to be upheld, what would the declaration imply?

(Read full "US endorses absurd postcolonialist resolution")

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