I was thinking about the word indigenous the other day, and how it has basically become the ultimate moral trump card in modern political discourse. It is like this magic shield that confers instant legitimacy on whoever can claim it and turns their opponent into a villain by default. Today's prompt from Daniel is about this very thing, specifically how the label is being weaponized in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how that compares to the struggle for Native American sovereignty here in the United States. We are diving into a paradox today: the more we try to define indigeneity, the more it seems to apply to everyone and no one simultaneously. If we trace every land claim back to its origin, we eventually hit a wall of universal conquest. So, why do we pretend there is a correct date to stop the clock?
It is a massive topic, and I am glad he sent it over. Herman Poppleberry here, by the way. What is fascinating is that the way we talk about indigeneity has shifted so much just in the last few years. We have moved past the simple colonialist versus native binary into something much more complex. There was a piece in the Algemeiner just this week, March sixteenth, two thousand twenty-six, that framed this as indigenous Zionism or peoplehood Zionism. The idea is that Jewish claims to the land are not just about who was there first in a chronological sense, but about a continuous cultural and spiritual connection that never actually broke. It is a shift from historical presence to a living identity.
But that is where it gets tricky, right? Because if we are tracing every land claim back to its origin to find the rightful owner, don't we eventually hit a wall where the logic just falls apart? If you go back far enough, almost every piece of habitable land on this planet was taken by force from someone else. So why do we act like there is a correct date to stop the clock? Is it nineteen forty-eight? Is it the nineteenth century? Is it the time of the Bible? If the yardstick is the time of the Bible, wouldn't we wind up arguing about whether the original ancestor was a human or a single-cell organism?
The choice of when to stop the clock is almost always a political decision rather than a historical or biological one. The United Nations has this framework called the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or U-N-D-R-I-P, and they very intentionally avoided creating a strict definition of who counts as indigenous. They left it as a sort of self-identification based on historical continuity, which sounds nice in theory, but in practice, it creates this massive definitional gap that people use as a weapon. Is indigeneity a biological fact, a cultural continuity, or just a political tool? That is the question at the heart of the shift toward peoplehood Zionism. It argues that being indigenous is about the persistence of a distinct civilization despite displacement, rather than just a game of musical chairs.
It feels like a zero-sum game. If one group is indigenous, the other must be a settler or a colonizer. But look at the actual science. We have seen these massive D-N-A studies coming out over the last couple of years, like the survey from late two thousand twenty-four and early twenty-five that looked at ninety-three ancient individuals from nine southern Levantine sites, dating from twenty-four hundred to nine hundred B-C-E. They found that both modern Jewish communities and Arabic-speaking Levantine communities derive at least fifty percent of their genomes from Bronze Age Canaanites. So, biologically speaking, the people fighting over the land are literally cousins who share the same ancestors from four thousand years ago.
And that is the Canaanite irony. The biblical narrative describes the Israelites conquering the Canaanites, but the genetic data shows they were largely the same people. The distinction was cultural and religious rather than biological. When people use the European colonialist narrative against Jews, they are essentially trying to erase the last three thousand years of history. They focus entirely on the Ashkenazi Jews who lived in Europe for a few centuries while ignoring the fact that those people still carry Middle Eastern D-N-A. Peer-reviewed genetic studies, like those in the journal Human Gene, have thoroughly debunked the Khazar hypothesis. That is the false claim that Ashkenazi Jews are just descendants of Turkic converts from the eighth century. The science is clear: Ashkenazi Jews stem from a common Middle Eastern origin. Period.
You are talking about groups like J-I-M-E-N-A, pronounced hee-MAY-nah, the Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa. It is wild how that part of the story just gets edited out of the Western progressive narrative. If you admit that half of the Jewish population in Israel consists of people who were ethnically cleansed from neighboring Arab countries—we are talking about eight hundred fifty thousand people from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, and Egypt—the settler-colonialist label stops making any sense. You are just looking at a massive population exchange that happened within the same general region. How can a Jew from Baghdad be a European colonizer in Jerusalem?
It is a total erasure of the Mizrahi experience. If you look at the work of activists like Avi Benlolo, he has been hammering this point home for years. The indigenous Zionism framework is an attempt to reclaim that identity. It says that being Jewish is not just a religion you can practice anywhere, but a peoplehood that is tied to a specific geography. But you raised a good point about the regress problem. If we go back to the single-cell organism, we are all the same. If we go back sixty thousand years, we are all African migrants. Every population has displaced someone. The Israelites displaced the Canaanites, who likely displaced someone else. The Arab conquests of the seventh century displaced the Byzantines. So the question becomes: how long do you have to be away from a place before your indigenous status expires? And how long do you have to be in a place before you become indigenous to it?
It is a question of recency versus depth. In the West, we tend to prioritize whoever was there right before the most recent conquest. In the American context, that means the Native American tribes that were here when Europeans arrived. But even those tribes had histories of migration and conquest among themselves. The Lakota, for example, moved into the Black Hills and displaced other groups not that long before the United States showed up. We tend to romanticize a static version of history where everyone was just sitting still until the sixteenth century, which is not how human history works. We are a migratory species.
The American situation right now is actually a perfect example of the hypocrisy in how these labels are used. The Trump administration has proposed cutting about one billion dollars in funding for Native American programs in the two thousand twenty-six budget. They are looking at gutting things like the Bureau of Indian Education Construction Fund. So, on one hand, you have the United States leading the world in human rights rhetoric and talking about the importance of indigenous sovereignty, but on the other hand, the actual legal and financial reality for the five hundred seventy-four recognized tribal nations is incredibly precarious. The Monroe Doctrine of eighteen twenty-three set the stage for westward expansion and systematic dispossession, and yet today we use the language of indigenous rights to critique other nations while ignoring our own treaty obligations.
It is a live contradiction. You have activists like Nick Tilsen, spelled T-I-L-S-E-N, from the Oglala Lakota tribe who are drawing these direct lines of solidarity between Pine Ridge and Palestine. They frame it as a shared struggle against settler colonialism. But if you look at the legal mechanisms, they are totally different. In Canada, for example, the Federal Court ruled in twenty-five that U-N-D-R-I-P actually creates an enhanced duty to consult with indigenous peoples. It has real legal teeth there. In the United States, we endorsed the declaration back in twenty-ten, but we treat it more like a suggestion than a mandate. Cases like Isleta versus Burgum, which was filed by the Native American Rights Fund, or N-A-R-F, in twenty-five, show that the government still feels it can withhold education funding from tribal nations whenever it wants.
The difference is that in the Middle East, the indigenous claim is being used to justify the existence of a state, whereas in the United States, it is being used to claim rights within or alongside a state. When Jews say they are indigenous to Israel, they are using it as a decolonization narrative. They are saying that after two thousand years of being ruled by Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and the British, the native people finally have self-determination again. It is the ultimate successful indigenous rights movement if you look at it through that lens. But the US government's refusal to honor its treaties, like we are seeing with the two thousand twenty-six budget cuts, shows that even when your indigeneity is legally recognized, it doesn't protect you from the power of the state.
But that lens is exactly what the other side rejects. They see the arrival of Jews from Europe in the early twentieth century as a foreign invasion, regardless of what the D-N-A says or what happened in the year seventy A-D. To them, indigeneity is about who was living there in the immediate pre-modern era. It is a clash of two different definitions of time. One group is looking at a two-thousand-year arc, and the other is looking at a hundred-year arc. And both sides feel the other is engaged in a form of erasure. The Palestinian narrative often ignores the Jewish presence that remained in the land for those two thousand years, while the Zionist narrative can sometimes flatten the centuries of Palestinian cultural development.
And both can be technically correct within their own frameworks, which is why the either-or binary is so destructive. There are scholars in the Times of Israel and various academic journals who argue for a both-and framework, where you acknowledge that both Israelis and Palestinians have legitimate indigenous claims to the same small piece of land. If you accept that, the whole moral trump card thing falls apart because you can't use the label to delegitimize the other person. You are forced to deal with the reality that two peoples are rooted in the same soil. If everyone is indigenous, then the word loses its power as a weapon of exclusion.
That is the uncomfortable question, though. If everyone is indigenous, then the word loses its political power. The power of the word indigenous comes from its exclusivity. It is meant to create a hierarchy of who belongs and who doesn't. If we admit that a Mizrahi Jew from Baghdad and a Palestinian from Jaffa both have Bronze Age Canaanite D-N-A, then the genetic argument for one over the other disappears. It becomes a question of culture, politics, and who can build a more functional society. We are essentially using ancient biology to avoid talking about modern governance.
The genetic data is really the most fascinating part of this because it is so objective and yet so ignored. When people push the Khazar hypothesis, they are engaging in a form of scientific denialism. But that fact is politically inconvenient for people who want to frame the conflict as white Europeans versus brown Middle Easterners. It is a racialized framing that doesn't fit the reality of the region. If you walk through the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, you can't tell who is Jewish and who is Arab just by looking at them half the time. The skin color gradient is basically identical. The Western progressive movement has tried to export the American racial binary of white versus black or white versus indigenous to a place where it simply does not apply.
It is a form of ideological colonialism in itself. You see that in the way the Native American struggle is co-opted, too. When people use the phrase from Pine Ridge to Palestine, they are often flattening the very specific treaty rights and legal history of tribal nations into a generic anti-Western slogan. The Native American Rights Fund spends its time fighting for water rights, mineral rights, and the protection of sacred sites based on specific legal treaties signed with the United States government. That is a very different thing from a high-level geopolitical struggle over national sovereignty and borders. N-A-R-F is currently gearing up for a massive fight over public lands and critical minerals as the Trump administration looks to privatize those resources in twenty-six.
I think the most important takeaway is that indigeneity is not a static property that you just have or don't have. It is a dynamic legal and social construct. The moral weight we give to being first in time is often just a way to avoid talking about who is powerful right now. There is also the question of what happens to the people who aren't indigenous. If we decide that only indigenous people have a right to the land, what do we do with the hundreds of millions of people in the United States, Australia, or Israel who were born there but don't have that ancestral connection? Do they just not have rights? The logical conclusion of the radical indigenous movement is often a form of ethnic cleansing in reverse, which is just as morally bankrupt as the original conquest.
It leads to a very dark place if you follow it to its extreme. You end up with a world where your rights are determined by your bloodline from three thousand years ago rather than your status as a human being living in the present. We should be moving toward a world where rights are universal, not one where we are constantly digging up ancient graves to see who gets to live in which apartment building. So, how do we evaluate these claims when we see them in the news? Instead of looking for who was there first-in-time, maybe we should look for peoplehood markers. Is there a living culture, a language, a calendar, and a connection that has persisted through time?
I agree, but I also think we have to respect the depth of those roots. The reason the Jewish claim is so powerful is that it is not just about genetics; it is about a peoplehood that maintained its language, its calendar, and its connection to that land for two millennia of exile. That is an incredible feat of cultural endurance. You see something similar with the tribal nations here. Despite the boarding schools, the forced relocations, and the systematic attempts to erase their culture, they are still here, and they are still fighting for their sovereignty. The depth of the roots matters because it informs the identity of the people living there today.
So maybe the real yardstick shouldn't be who was there first, but who has refused to let go. But even then, you have two groups in the Middle East who have both refused to let go. The Palestinians aren't going anywhere, and the Jews aren't going anywhere. No amount of arguing about the Bronze Age is going to change that. The weaponization of the indigenous label is just a way to delay the inevitable realization that they have to find a way to share the land. It is a way of looking for a total victory that doesn't exist. If you can prove your opponent is a colonizer, you don't have to negotiate with them; you just have to wait for them to leave. But the Jews aren't leaving because they are already home. And the Palestinians feel the same way.
The tragedy is that the international community, and especially activists in the West, are fueling this binary thinking because it fits their own domestic political narratives. It is much easier to post a hashtag about decolonization than it is to understand the nuances of the Isleta versus Burgum case or the genetic overlap of the Levant. We like our stories to have clear heroes and villains. But history is just a long series of migrations, conquests, and intermingling. If we are going to use the word indigenous, we should at least be honest about how messy it actually is.
We should also look at how this plays out in other places, like Australia. They had the Uluru Statement from the Heart back in twenty-seventeen, which was a beautiful call for a First Nations Voice to be enshrined in the constitution. But then they had the referendum defeat in twenty-three. It was a massive moment where the country had to decide how to reckon with its indigenous population. The defeat of that referendum showed that even in a wealthy, stable democracy, people are very resistant to the idea of creating special legal categories based on ancestry. It touches a nerve about equality and what it means to be a citizen.
It is the same nerve that gets touched when people talk about Jewish versus democratic in the context of Israel. How do you maintain a specific ethnic or cultural identity for a state while still being a modern, liberal democracy? It is a tension that every country with an indigenous population is dealing with right now. The United States is trying to solve it by ignoring its treaties and cutting budgets. Canada is trying to solve it through legal consultation. Israel is trying to solve it through national sovereignty. None of them have a perfect answer. And the Trump administration's approach is basically a return to the idea of the unitary state where everyone is just an American, and tribal sovereignty is a historical relic that we don't need to fund anymore.
It is a very blunt way of solving the problem, and it is going to lead to a lot of legal battles in the next few years. It is funny how the people who are most vocal about indigenous rights in the Middle East are often very quiet when it comes to the actual policy decisions being made about Native Americans in their own backyard. It is always easier to be a radical about a conflict ten thousand miles away than it is to look at the budget of the Bureau of Indian Education. That is the nature of the culture war. The indigenous label is a weapon of convenience. When it serves your narrative, you use it. When it doesn't, you ignore it.
If we actually cared about indigenous rights as a principle, we would be consistent. We would acknowledge the Jewish connection to the Levant, and we would also acknowledge the U-S government's obligation to the Navajo or the Lakota. But consistency doesn't win you points on social media. I think we have hit on the core of why this is so frustrating. It is the selective application of history. We pick a date that suits our politics and call it the beginning of time. If you start the clock in nineteen forty-seven, the story looks one way. If you start it in seventy A-D, it looks another way. If you start it in the Bronze Age, it looks like a family feud.
And if you look at it from the perspective of peoplehood Zionism, it is not even about the clock. It is about the fact that the peoplehood never ended. The connection is a living thing. That is what people mean when they say indigenous Zionism. It is not a claim about the past; it is a claim about the present. But we have to ask: is the moral weight of indigeneity based on the recency of the trauma or the depth of the roots? If a group was displaced fifty years ago, does that carry more weight than a group displaced two thousand years ago? Most activists would say yes, but most historians would say the connection doesn't just evaporate because time passes.
Well, I don't think we are going to solve the world's most intractable conflict today, but I think we have at least exposed why the current debate is so logically flawed. You can't use a word like indigenous as a moral club without being willing to look at the genetic, historical, and legal complexity that comes with it. It is about moving from a zero-sum game to a shared reality. If we can accept that multiple groups can have deep, ancestral roots in the same place, we might actually start making some progress. But as long as we are using the label to try to erase each other, we are just going to keep going in circles.
We should probably wrap it up there before we dive into another three-thousand-year history lesson. If you want to dig deeper into the colonialist framing specifically, we did a whole episode on that, episode ten nineteen, called The Colonialist Myth: Deconstructing a Modern Cliché. It goes into a lot of the language being used in academia right now and how it often fails to account for the nuances we discussed today.
Good call. And if you are interested in the internal dynamics of identity within Israel, check out episode twelve sixty, The Twenty Percent: Navigating Arab Identity in Israel, which looks at how Arab citizens of Israel—the Palestinians of forty-eight—navigate their own sense of indigeneity and belonging within a Jewish state. It adds a lot of necessary nuance to the binary trap we talked about.
Thanks as always to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping the gears turning behind the scenes. And a big thanks to Modal for providing the G-P-U credits that power the research and generation of this show. We literally couldn't do this without that compute power.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you are enjoying these deep dives, please take a second to leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. It really does help other people find the show.
You can also find us at myweirdprompts dot com for the full archive and all the ways to subscribe. We will see you in the next one.
See you then.
