This essay is adapted from a presentation delivered at the American Academy of Religion 2025 Annual Conference and draws on ongoing dissertation research.
In a Times of Israel blog post, Dani Behan cites a United Nations working definition of indigeneity and concludes: “In anthropological terms, indigeneity pertains to ethnogenesis, i.e. ‘where a people became a people’…Ashkenazi Jews—and Jews more broadly—meet all of the most important, relevant criteria” for claiming the Land on which the modern State of Israel exists as their homeland. In a Forward Community post, Micha Danzig and Yirmiyahu Danzig describe Zionism as “the first successful indigenous movement of a dispossessed and colonized people regaining sovereignty in their indigenous homeland.” In Tablet Magazine, Ryan Bellerose writes, “Archaeology, genealogy, and history all support the Jewish claim to indigeneity.” Across these and other examples from a particular subset of English-language Jewish media, a striking pattern emerges: Jewish people are framed as indigenous[1] to Palestine; Zionism is recast as an Indigenous liberation movement; and the State of Israel is described as the realization of Indigenous rights, a decolonial project, or even a model of “Land Back” for Indigenous peoples to emulate. In this post, I outline the findings of my study of the uses of the language of Jewish indigeneity in prominent Jewish publications, noting its drastic increase in recent years. I then turn to a critique of this deployment and outline what it might mean to engage more deeply with Indigenous thought.
Encountering “Jewish indigeneity”
I began paying closer attention to claims like these in early 2024 while doomscrolling during a live-streamed genocide in Gaza. Seeing Jewish indigeneity invoked in real time to defend bombardment, siege, and mass dispossession was jarring. Indigeneity—long articulated by Indigenous peoples as incommensurable with state violence and colonial extraction—was being mobilized to justify precisely those forms of violence.
Jewish symbolic, theological, ritual, and affective attachments to Palestine date back millennia, and Zionism as a political project has existed for over a century, so why has indigeneity become such a strategically compelling framing only recently? While I am not one of the first to notice and interrogate claims of Jewish indigeneity, the growing visibility of this rhetoric raised a set of research questions for me: Was it actually new? If so, when did it emerge, who was using it, and where was it primarily circulating? And what kinds of arguments, frameworks, and evidence were being mobilized to make these claims?
Indigeneity—long articulated by Indigenous peoples as incommensurable with state violence and colonial extraction—was being mobilized to justify genocide in Gaza.
Because I initially noticed claims about Jewish indigeneity appearing most frequently in Jewish media, I conducted a systematic survey of the most widely read English-language Jewish outlets. This analysis revealed that the rhetoric was concentrated in user-generated opinion pieces and blog posts published in Zionist-leaning Jewish outlets, such as The Times of Israel, The Forward, The Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), and others. These outlets also offered a more stable archive than social media or comment threads, making it easier to track and analyze trends over time.
By contrast, the language of Jewish indigeneity was largely absent or minimal in more progressive, non-Zionist, anti-Zionist, or ultra-Orthodox publications, such as Haaretz, Moment, Mishpacha, Tikkun, Jewish Currents, and others. This uneven distribution suggested that, while the discourse is growing, it remains polemical: actively shaped, debated, and negotiated rather than taken for granted. Importantly, it also indicates that this is not the Jewish discourse but a specific ideological formation within the broader and internally diverse landscape of Jewish public discourses.
Tracking the discourse over time reveals a clear shift. Mentions of Jewish indigeneity[2] were marginal until the mid-2010s. They rose gradually, with noticeable peaks around 2014 and 2018, before rapidly increasing after 2020. This trajectory mirrors key historical moments, including the global rise of Indigenous rights; intensifying Israeli ethnonationalist policies; Palestinian activism and BDS campaigns; and a broader turn to liberal identity politics in the United States. These convergences created an opportune moment for some Zionists to deploy indigeneity as a counter-narrative to charges of Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism.
Where Palestinians Appear—and Disappear
Much of this discourse is shaped by how Palestinian indigeneity is addressed, subordinated, or erased. Many authors simply omit Palestinians—the people who have lived on the Land for centuries—reproducing a familiar settler-colonial pattern in which Indigenous peoples are rendered invisible to make room for a new or supposedly “original” population.
When Palestinians are mentioned, they are often reframed as generic “Arabs,” linked to seventh-century Arab Muslim conquerors and positioned as culturally rooted elsewhere. Other authors emphasize pan-Arab identity, suggesting that Arabness disqualifies Palestinians from being Indigenous to Palestine and that they already have many Arab nation-states to which they could belong. Some claim that Palestinians primarily descend from more recent migrants responding to early Zionist development, while a subset denies the historical existence of a distinct Palestinian people altogether, despite the irony that both Jewish and Palestinian national identities emerged in the same historical period.
Even when Palestinians are occasionally acknowledged as having deep ties to the Land or as “also indigenous,” they are usually framed as biologically adjacent “tribal cousins” to Jews. In these accounts, Jewish entitlement to the Land remains primary and uncontested.
What This Discourse Does
This discourse has significant consequences:
First, it naturalizes a singular Jewish story and recenters Zionism as the default way of being Jewish. The narrative—“We were here first, we were displaced, and now we have come home”—is treated as common sense, masking its distortions, gaps, and omissions. Alternative histories and visions of Jewishness, such as diasporic nationalism, Bundism, non-statist cultural Zionism, and anti- or non-Zionist traditions, are marginalized or erased. The language of Jewish indigeneity reinforces the notion that authentic Jewishness is oriented toward territorial possession of Palestine, most fully realized through the modern nation-state.
Second, it inverts settler-colonial critique. State Zionism, long understood—including by many of its founders—as a settler-colonial project, is recast as decolonization and Indigenous liberation. Jewish people are positioned as the colonized Indigenous population, while Palestinians are discursively displaced as Arab latecomers, invaders, opportunists, or, at best, secondary occupants.
Third, it weaponizes Indigenous rights language. A moral and political framework developed (and critiqued) by Indigenous peoples to challenge dispossession and assert sovereignty is redeployed to defend a powerful settler state and the ongoing occupation and displacement of Palestinians. Israel is positioned as exceptional, righteous, and beyond critique, shielded from accountability by the very framework meant to contest domination.
This is what I mean by weaponizing indigeneity.
Reading With Indigenous Articulations of Indigeneity
Indigeneity is a contested category. It is shaped by colonial encounters and used by states and institutions to name, delimit, manage, and eliminate populations. At the same time, it is articulated by Indigenous peoples as a useful category for rebuilding communal identities and relationalities, protecting Land rights and sovereignties, and cultivating global solidarities.
Indigenous scholars, activists, and communities consistently insist that indigeneity is not simply “who was here first,” a checklist of criteria, or a matter of DNA. Indigeneity has been meaningfully articulated as a deep-time, reciprocal, kin-based relationship to Lands and all beings, oriented toward obligation rather than ownership, possession, extraction, and elimination. By contrast, Zionist uses of indigeneity operate through a logic of possession: “We are indigenous based on [insert criteria], therefore we are entitled to a nation-state, to possess the Land, and to eliminate or expel others from it.”
These logics are fundamentally incommensurable. Settler frameworks treat Land as possession, as property, enabling forms of violence—including ecocide and genocide—embedded in colonial and nation-state structures. Indigenous peoples articulate Land as part of an interconnected web of relations and responsibilities, a mode of relating that cannot be reconciled with the structural violence that modern nation-states—including Israel—inflict on Lands and Peoples.
Why This Matters
This discourse is dangerous for everyone. Most immediately, it further endangers Palestinians by providing a rhetorical shield for occupation, dispossession, apartheid, and genocide. For Jews, it reinforces a narrow and violent Zionist vision of what it means to be Jewish. For Indigenous peoples globally, it dilutes, distorts, and weaponizes a hard-won category of resistance against ongoing colonialism and extraction.
[1] I use lowercase indigenous when referring to Jewish claims of indigeneity in order to reflect prevailing usage in my dataset. Across hundreds of instances, only a small number of authors capitalize Indigenous, which is more commonly associated with Indigenous political movements and rights frameworks.
[2] The dataset includes: The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, The Forward, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), Tablet Magazine, Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), The Jewish Press, Jewish Journal, The Algemeiner, The Jewish Chronicle (UK), The Canadian Jewish News, The Australian Jewish News, and J-Wire. Reposts between outlets (e.g., articles reposted from JNS in The Jewish Press) are not included. The graph records whether an article includes any reference to Jewish indigeneity to Palestine, rather than the number of times the term appears within a single article.
