This land is our land
JVL Introduction
Julia Bard looks critically at DNA services which promise to reveal the essence of “who you are”, in terms of geographical and ethnic origin.
She highlights the imprecise and highly contested nature of the term “ethnic group”, making it clear that ethnicity has much more to do with interaction between mobile, fluctuating human groups that have shifting, overlapping historical and current experiences, than with genetics.
The Jewish claim that they have a right to “Judea” and “Samaria” going back to biblical times is absurd, but the case against settler colonialism – and for Palestinian rights – is quite independent of arguments about who got there first.
Victory requires a recognition of common humanity, universal human rights and the necessity for justice now. It depends on the possibility of peoples of different ethnicities – all of them “impure” and overlapping to various degrees – finding ways of living together in mutual solidarity and support.
This article first appeared in the Autumn/Winter 2022 edition of Jewish Socialist. The print edition of the magazine is available for purhase here.
This article was originally published by Jewish Socialist on Sat 21 Jan 2023. Read the original here.
This land is our land
Searching for some ultimate bedrock of our identity is not a useful or progressive basis on which to fight for justice and human rights, argues Julia Bard
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Debating “who was there first” is a dead end. Israel-Palestine has had different peoples there throughout history, not just Jews or Arabs, and the idea that Arabs suddenly replaced an earlier population is absurd and only used to try legitimizing Zionist narratives and treating Palestinians as second class. The reality is that Palestinians are descendents of all the people who have lived there, including Hebrews, which people like Ben-Gurion acknowledged.
Soliman “the idea that Arabs suddenly replaced an earlier population is absurd”
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It is clear from both the historical record and DNA analysis of Middle Eastern populations that the number of people who were involved in the seventh-century Islamic conquests and moved from the Arabian Peninsula to the Fertile Crescent and beyond was quite small.
A significant proportion of these (perhaps even the majority) were not even Arab speakers: a very large proportion of the original Islamic conquerors were from Yemen (the only extended area in the Arabian Peninsula which supports agriculture), and were probably speakers of Old South Arabian languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_South_Arabian), rather than Arabic. The Islamic conquest of Spain was carried out almost entirely by Berber converts to Islam.
The great majority of people in the Middle East are descendants of the people who lived there before the Islamic conquests, with some Arabian-Peninsula genetic admixture.
It took hundreds of years for the majority populations of the Middle East to adopt Arabic as their language (thereby becoming Arabs) and to change their religion, normally from Christianity, to Islam. According to a recent study, “historians surmise that Syria-Palestine crossed the threshold of a Muslim demographic majority in the 12th century, while Egypt may have passed this benchmark even later, possibly in the 14th”: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/how-did-christian-middle-east-become-predominantly-muslim#:~:text=Although%20we%20lack%20reliable%20demographic,passed%20this%20benchmark%20even%20later%2C
In North Africa, the genetic evidence is even more stark; there are no genetic differences between Arabs and Berbers (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470015902.a0027485#:~:text=No%20genetic%20differences%20have%20been,are%20genetically%20diverse%20and%20heterogeneous.), and there is apparently very little Arabian Peninsula genetic admixture dating from the time of the Islamic conquest; the majority population just shifted over time from being Berber (and Berber-speaking) to being Arab (and Arabic-speaking).
How about we stick to provable records like say land ownership demonstrating who has the right to live there? But That would be easily abused by a country that uses dirty tricks, violence and naked land grabbing to disinherit the real owners. hell we the British did it set when we created the current country diden’t we?
Nothing will change until all the people realise they have equal rights to live there and are allowed to do so! No more this side has extra rights and the other side has lesser rights if any. There will never be peace until that is balanced and like in South Africa peace and recognition of all the issues that have happened are acknowledged and apologies and reparations are made. Then and only then may this endless cycle of hate and violence stop!
With respect I think this is looking at it from the wrong perspective. “Indigenous” for me means the existing settled population. Let’s suppose we can establish that Welsh people were the dominant population in England 2,000 years ago. That doesn’t give someone from Swansea the right to steal a house in Birmingham and throw the lawful resident out of Britain.
It doesn’t matter if the Birmingham householder arrived from Afghanistan or Ukraine 2 weeks ago or if the householder can trace her family back to 1066.
Settler Colonialism and Ethnic Cleansing are always morally wrong. The resident of Swansea only has a case if the house in Birmingham was stolen from her. In which case as with all stolen goods she is entitled to her property back.
Jews are entitled to get back the property the Nazi stole in Berlin, Palestinians should get back the property in Jaffa stolen by Zionist Jews in 1948. What might have happened two thousand years ago doesn’t matter.
I go along with the gist of Bard’s article that any human/social/political taxonomy which purports to be based on DNA is clearly fallacious, as well as the observations concerning the political nature of the definition “Indigenous Peoples”.
But when focusing on the Palestine/Israel situation, I think this article omits a crucial point which distinguishes the Zionist project from other akin, yet more “accomplished” settler colonial projects e.g. the USA, Canada, Australia or New Zealand:
The Zionist project is no more nor less “moral” or “just” than the latter. But whereas the latter have by and large accomplished their mission, having reduced the “indigenous” population to an insignificant minority which limits its current struggles to rectifying racist perceptions, socioeconomic discrimination and cultural autonomy, the Palestinians still face an existential struggle for their physical survival, let alone the issue of sovereignty. For the Zionist project is still very much an ONGOING project. No way can Zionism accomplish its stated aim of a “Jewish state”, on whichever proportion of the territory between the Mediterranean coast and river Jordan, without having ultimately to resort to a massive second ‘Nakba’.
The case against settler colonialism can certainly not be resolved by arguing about “who got there first”, as Bard observes, but nor can it be reduced to the issue of equal civil rights. The only way of achieving any form of coexistence in that country must go via the dismantling of the Zionist project. It’s either that or crimes against humanity on a large scale.
I was told I was “half Welsh and half Scottish” based on my parents’ surnames Richards and McDonald. But only back a couple of generations the Welsh side of the family has Cornish and Scottish roots and the Scots side has English and Irish. So we are British mongrels. Also everyone in the UK has an immigrant background since the end of the ice age when Europeans could migrate across a land bridge. Where and how you are brought up seems to me to be more important than ethnic identity. Good article.
James Kemp and David Hawkins, thank you, you have saved me from writing my views. What keeps me awake at night is, how this is all going to come to an end?
It should be through the UN but as we all know, every resolution against Israel has been vetoed by the US, so no action is ever taken.
Why does the US shield Israel, because it sees it as its Fully Armed Middle East Military Base. This for me is where we should start criticising the United States support for Israel and I’m not alone on this.
This article, excellent though it is, omits what to me is the worst flaw in the whole ‘ancestry’ racket. To find out ‘where you come from’, if that is a meaningful concept, you would first of all need to specify a time period.
For example, five hundred years ago, my ancestors were nearly all living in Britain. Does that make me ‘British’? Perhaps, but we all came out of Africa, probably in several migrations tens of thousands of years ago, so paleoanthropologists would say that 100 thousand years ago, my ancestors lived in Africa. So now I am ‘African’?
But suppose I want to know where my ancestors lived say, two thousand years ago. Then I would need a database of human DNA samples round the world dating from that period. And likewise for any other specific time in the past. With human migrations happening all the time, masssive datasets would be needed.
What the ancestry racket does is to blur over all these fine distinctions by comparing your DNA with the DNA of people living now, round the world, and identifying your ‘origin’ with the majority genetic profile of those people. So if I turn out to be (for example) 40% Irish, that is 40% of the people living in Ireland now, not 2000 years ago. Massive exchanges of population have taken place between Ireland, Scotland and England since then, not to mention contributions from Spain (Spanish Armada shipwrecks!), France and elsewhere.
The indigenous Australians, whose ancestors have lived on the continent for 40 thousand years, might be identified with people from Melanesia, because the typical Australian DNA profile now is white European.
The whole thing is nonsense parading as science.