#legitimately curious if theres a definition that threads this needle

[vermiciousyidreborn]

So people keep assuring me that Palestinians are also indigenous to the southern levant and...well, I admit I'm skeptical of this. Like, I'm NOT advocating expelling them or genocide, etc. Those are all bad, just questioning the notion of indigeneity here. Mostly as a consequentialist. If Palestinians are indigenous to the Levant, that seems to imply other things. Let's think through this.

We're going to set aside the UN notion of indigenous because that's crafted to exclude Jews and often enough this is a statement by people who reject that and consider Jews to be indigenous, they're often saying both groups are. So...I guess that means something like "A group is indigenous to the region where they underwent ethnogenesis" so we'll take that as our definition of indigeneity. Jews are indigenous to the Levant, check. We're good. Arabs are indigenous to Arabia. All makes sense.

So, anyway, what's an ethnic group? From Wikipedia:

An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a people of a common language, culture, common sets of ancestry, traditions, society, religion, history, or social treatment.[

Ok, so common language, culture, traditions, history, etc.

So European American Protestants are indigenous to North America? Common history (going back to the 1600s!), identify as a group, believe they have a common culture (even if we need to break things up more finely, you can find common cultures, say, New England, or Midwest, wee American Nations), common language (English, which I will posit is part of why there's basically a moral panic about Spanish and has been almost my entire life, in much of the country). Note that an ethnicity "can include" and doesn't need ALL of these things.

So it seems pretty solid that European American Protestants are, at the least, a collection of ethnic groups unique to North America. Which means they did ethnogenesis here. Which means they're indigenous now.

So...let's be clear, to me this is a reductio ad absurdam. OF COURSE white US protestants are not indigenous to North America! But I've yet to see definitions that mark Palestinian Arabs as indigenous to the Levant without also implying that white Americans are indigenous to fucking Ohio (along with the rest of the country).

Especially when you consider that white american protestant as an identity in this sense is older than a distinct Palestinian identity. It just brings us to the eternal questions that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict brings up and that people REALLY don't want to discuss:

When, if ever, does indigeneity expire? Personally, I think it doesn't, and Jews are and will always be indigenous to the Levant, just like the Cherokee Nation is indigenous to the US Southeast, even though they've been displaced. Though I know many "Pro-Palestine" activists implicitly believe indigeneity does expire, at least for Jews, but even if I weren't Jewish, I wouldn't want that precedent set because it would fuck over EVERYONE

When does a colonizer become indigenous to the place they colonized? This is rarely discussed, but lies implicitly behind a lot of things. Again, I want to avoid setting bad precedents, but I don't see how Palestinian Arabs can have hit this threshold and white people in the US haven't, which leads me to reject the idea that colonizers can ever become indigenous, at least while holding onto the identity that did the colonization (White and Arab, respectively, hell, White Christian and Arab Muslim if we want to get more specific).

Now, I don't believe colonizers need to be killed or expelled, I'm generally against violence outside of self-defense, but I do think that the rhetoric we use matters, and I want to interrogate it.