Are the Jews of Israel an Aboriginal People?

I have recently read two articles, A Native and a Zionist, and Native, Jewish Bond Thicker Than Water, by Ryan Bellerose, published last March in the Métropolitain, a Montreal newspaper, and reprinted in the Jewish Tribune, and last June in the Toronto Sun, respectively.

The author is a Métis from Alberta. He founded Canadians for Accountability, a native rights advocacy group, and is an organizer and participant in the Idle No More movement in Calgary. And he calls himself a Zionist.

Citing the work of anthropologist José R. Martínez-Cobo, Bellerose concludes that Jews fit the definition of an aboriginal people. Their lands were occupied, first by the Romans, then by the Arabs in the seventh century. While different Jewish communities have slightly different traditions, they all share the same root culture and it has remained unchanged. And they have resurrected their traditional language, Hebrew.

“Alone among other nations, Jews’ language, history, culture and folklore were born and forged in the Holy Land. There is no statute of limitations on being indigenous. In stark contrast, Arabs arrived to the Holy Land only in the seventh century, when Arabian armies colonized the Middle East. Longstanding presence may generate rights, but it is not synonymous with being indigenous,” he wrote.

Liberal MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler agrees. The Jewish people, he has stated, is the only people in the Middle East that still inhabits the same land, embraces the same religion, studies the same Torah, harkens to the same prophets, speaks the same aboriginal language – Hebrew – and bears the same aboriginal name, Israel, as it did 3,500 years ago.

No other people in the region, including today’s Palestinian Arabs, can make that claim, since their cultures all derive from Christianity or Islam, neither of which existed back then.

Israel, then, is the aboriginal homeland of the Jewish people across space and time and is, Cotler asserts, a successor state to the biblical, or aboriginal, Jewish kingdoms.

So why do few people (other than Jews) see us as the indigenous people in Israel? Is it simply that we were outside the land of Israel for too long? But some North American and Australian natives lost their lands and sovereignty at least 300 years ago, yet they are still referred to, in Canada, as ‘first nations.’

Nor did Jews vanish: they continued to live in the region, albeit as “dhimmis,” second-class people who did not enjoy certain political rights reserved to Muslims, and who were subject to payment of special taxes. In 1945 there were between 758,000 and 866,000 Jews living in communities throughout the Arab world; Jerusalem had a Jewish majority in the 19th century.

No, the reason for the denial of Jewish nationhood is the religious theory known as ‘supersessionism.’ From its inception, the founders of Christianity taught that G-d’s ‘Old Covenant’ with the Jewish people was fulfilled and was now replaced (superseded) by the ‘New Covenant in Christ,’ and so Judaism (and the Jews) were supposed to disappear. The Church was the ‘new Israel.’

Centuries later, theologians of Islam adopted similar views, which helps explain the hatred by many in the Arab and larger Muslim world toward Israel. Jews were not just ‘settlers’ taking Palestinian land (the way European colonists did in Africa, Australia and the Americas) but were an inferior people for whom Muslims had been taught to show contempt.

More recent, secular versions of supersessionism can be found in the various Marxist screeds against Zionism. Karl Marx himself denied Jews were a nation but rather a “caste,” surviving only because of their economic usefulness to the larger society, and Communists usually opposed the idea of a Jewish state. The animus against Jewish nationhood can also be found in works such as those of the British historian Arnold Toynbee, in which he spoke of the Jewish people in terms of a “fossilized civilization.”

When it comes to the denial of the right of Jews to exercise sovereignty in the land of Israel, what we sometimes find is an underlying theological condition.