Indigenous People? Really?

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“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

This chant, long a favorite of Palestinian terror groups, has become increasingly mainstream in recent years, particularly after the Oct. 7, 2023 jihad massacre of 1,200 Israelis. Back in Nov. 2018, CNN commentator and Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill repeated the phrase while speaking at a United Nations event. CNN subsequently fired Hill, but it is unlikely that he would have been fired if the same scenario played out today. The phrase has become mainstream.

This is true despite the fact that “freeing” Palestine from the river — the Jordan — to the sea — the Mediterranean — would mean the complete eradication of Israel, and likely a new genocide of the Jews. Meanwhile, the declaration that “Palestine will be free” assumes that it is being trodden underfoot by invaders and occupiers, and that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the area.

This idea, too, is gaining increasing acceptance today. As far back as Oct. 2018, Brown University’s Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs sent out an announcement about “Indigenous Peoples’ Day Weekend,” the university’s leftistreplacement for Columbus Day weekend. The indigenous peoplebeing celebrated, the announcement stated, included “567 Federally Recognized tribes, 61 State Recognized tribes,” as well as “Hawaiians and the people indigenous to its territories in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans,” all of whom have allegedly suffered “genocide and forced assimilation.”

Gratuitously added to these oppressed indigenous people of North America were the Palestinians: “From Standing Rock to Palestine, Indigenous communities across the world continue to experience the pernicious effects of settler-colonialism on their sovereignty, their health, and their access to their traditional lands and practices.”

The backdrop of Brown’s statement is an understanding of the situation of Israel and the Palestinians that is widely accepted today, and has been succinctly enunciated in the Harvard International Review by Hatem Bazian, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley of some of the keenest preoccupations of modern academia: Muslim American Studies; Colonialism and Post-Colonial Studies; Arab and Arab American Studies; Critical Race Theory; Palestine Studies; and Comparative Liberation Theologies: “Over a 50 year period,” Bazian has written, “the indigenous Palestinians faced an emergent European nationalist movement that succeeded in dispossessing them and transforming their ancestral homeland into a modern nation state that locates its genesis in the biblical text.”

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), popularly known as the UN Refugee Agency, agrees, stating: “Jewish nationalist ideology, Zionism, led to claims on Palestine for the Jewish people. Zionism began in Europe, in reaction to pogroms in the east and assimilation in the west. Early in the 20th century, Zionist leaders began planning for Jewish settlement in Palestine, and the removal of the indigenous population.”

Zionists believe that Jews should return to Zion, that is, the land of Israel, as their rightful home. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has directly contradicted the central Zionist claim, that the land of Israel is the ancestral home of the Jews, and has advanced a counterclaim: “Our narrative says that we were in this land since before Abraham. I am not saying it. The Bible says it. The Bible says, in these words, that the Palestinians existed before Abraham. So why don’t you recognize my right?” An Abbas spokesman has said in a similar vein: “The nation of Palestine upon the land of Canaan had a 7,000-year history B.C.E. This is the truth, which must be understood, and we have to note it, in order to say: ‘Netanyahu, you are incidental in history. We are the people of history. We are the owners of history.’”

Dimitri Diliani of the Fatah Revolutionary Council likewise declared that “the Palestinian people [are] descended from the Canaanite tribe of the Jebusites that inhabited the ancient site of Jerusalem as early as 3200 BCE.”

But is that really true? Are the Palestinians really the indigenous people of the area that the State of Israel now occupies, and were they really displaced by the Israelis?

There is no trace of support for such an idea in history. No archeological evidence, or evidence of any other kind, has ever been found to substantiate a link between the ancient Canaanites or Jebusites and the modern-day Palestinians. The land that is now the State of Israel corresponds roughly to the lands known in ancient times as Judea, Samaria, Idumea, and Galilee, and was inhabited by Jews. In A.D. 134, the Romans expelled the Jews from the area in retaliation for a revolt against their rule led by the self-appointed messiah Simon Bar Kokhba; as an insult to the Jews and to efface any traces of their connection to the land, they renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and the region Palestine, a name they plucked from the Bible, as it was the name of the Israelites’ ancient enemies, the Philistines.

Subsequently, Palestine was the name of a region but never of a people or of a political entity. The area that was Palestine was part of the Roman Empire until it was conquered by the Arabs. Later it came under the control of the Turks, who ruled it until the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I.

Indigenous people? That would be the Israelis.