Jewish Indigeneity

"We will not recognize Israel at all, because it is our land."

"At that moment [when two Hamas operatives dressed as ultra-Orthodox Jews before detonating two separate bombs to maximize Jewish deaths] I remembered what Israel did against our people."

"I say it's the fault of those who came from America, Britain, South Africa, to settle in my country, to settle in Palestine. They killed themselves."

"According to the Koran, Jews will be dismissed from Palestine and Palestine will be liberated by Muslims."

"An open-ended ceasefire is forbidden, because our land is occupied."

(Now deceased) Hamas political leader Dr.(MD) Abdel Aziz Rantisi

 

Jews, as it happens are not authentically indigenous to Poland or to Brooklyn. New genetic technologies confirm that Jewish origins are in the Middle East, going back to the Neolithic era. There has been, furthermore a permanent presence of Jews in the Middle East in all the millennia since then. Much, much predating the Zionist movement calling on the diaspora to re-assemble in their ancestral homeland, made urgent for survival of Judeans following the Holocaust. 

 

In Israel the majority of the population are primarily descended from North African and Middle Eastern Jewish communities who sought refuge in Arab communities after their forcible expulsion from Judaea, by the Roman occupiers of Judaic geography, after the cataclysmic Judean revolt and Roman response that levelled much of Jerusalem, along with the Second Temple of Solomon. The rest are comprised of the descendants of European Jewry returned to the homeland.

 

Hamas named their October 7 massacre in southern Israel after the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood occurred as a savagely sadistic sacrifice to Islam by a theocratic fanatical terrorist group. The Al-Aqsa Mosque was built over the ruins of the Temple Mount which formerly sited the Temple of Jerusalem, erected in 515 BCE, its destruction by Rome dating from the year 70CE. The laughable fiction that Jews are not indigenous to the land that Israel sits on is a Palestinian fantasy.

In 1948 when the United Nations partitioned the British Mandate of Palestine with a Jewish portion and an Arab portion, the Jewish establishment in the region immediately accepted, while the Arabs refused, leading to a joint Arab-military invasion to evacuate Jews from their nascent state. An enterprise which failed, leaving the Arabs calling themselves Palestinians who had fled prior to the invasion, disappointed that their expectation of return to take possession of the land Israel sits on, was no longer possible.

Since that long-ago event, attempts to work out peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinian leaders negotiating on behalf of those whose interests they claimed to represent failed, time and again. Despite the fact that Israel offered concessions and compromises and the Palestinians offered none on their part, in the end refusing all conciliatory offers for peace. The latest such agreement, hosted by former U.S. President Clinton, saw Yasser Arafat in 2000 tell Bill Clinton that he would be risking  his life by agreeing to the peace offer. 

When Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005 from the Gaza Strip, forcibly evacuating settlers to leave the area to the Palestinians, Ariel Sharon thought that this would be an opportunity to convince the Palestinians that peace was possible. Philanthropic American Jews spent millions offering a vast greenhouse operation to the Palestinians in Gaza, who contemptuously destroyed it rather than develop it into a worthwhile enterprise and opportunity for employment. Palestinians destroyed all the synagogues after the withdrawal.

Lawlessness became the order of the day in Gaza, although the secular Fatah which also ruled the West Bank was in authority. With the arrival of Hamas, for whom Islam is paramount, the two factions faced off in a civil war of extreme brutality, with Hamas finally prevailing, killing and expelling Fatah from Gaza. Hamas's rule served to restore order, and it was an order based on ruthless autocracy, one that focused not on building a civil infrastructure but a military encampment to which the population's welfare was an afterthought.

"As Hamas took over the remnants of PA institutions in the strip, it established a judiciary and put in place authoritarian institutions. In theory, Hamas governs in accordance with the sharia-based Palestinian Basic Law, as does the PA; but it has generally been more restrictive than the law requires, including by controlling how women dress and enforcing gender segregation in public during the early years of its rule. The watchdog group Freedom House found in 2020 that the “Hamas-controlled government has no effective or independent mechanisms for ensuring transparency in its funding, procurements, or operations.” Hamas also represses the Gazan media, civilian activism on social media, the political opposition, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), leaving it without mechanisms for accountability."

Council on Foreign Relations

A parade for the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s militant arm, is held in Gaza. Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images