\u00a0 <\/span>It was here that a distinctive indigenous Jewish culture, language and religion began to develop more than 3,000 years ago. And despite multiple dispersions there has always been a residual Jewish presence in the land, and for those in the diaspora, an inextinguishable longing for the land. Thus, as an indigenous person, it’s most natural for me to recognise in the Jewish experience and history the markers of indigeneity.<\/p>\nOf course, Arabs are indigenous too – to Arabia. They came to Palestine (so named by the Romans as an act of cultural erasure) many centuries later.<\/p>\n
One of presenters at Oxford remarked that Zionism is about reclaiming the land. \u201cWe walk the land. We know every stone – we know the land\u201d. (Yossi Shain, ISGAP 2023) This is very much an indigenous trait. The recovery of the Hebrew language is also an inspiration to other indigenous peoples seeking to revive their language.<\/p>\n
Moreover, while many critical race theorists insist on defining Jews as white, with all the attendant oppressor class guilt associated with whiteness, Jews generally do not identify themselves as such. Indeed, only two generations ago Jews were hunted down and murdered by the millions, in large measure because they were not<\/i> white.<\/p>\n
One of those in my own backyard recently took it upon herself to opine on Israel\u2019s evils in a prominent New Zealand newspaper. She spoke of her trip to \u201cPalestine\u201d, undertaken as part of a quest to work out her conflicted sense of identity as a person with a Christian mother and Jewish father. Her article was predictable in many ways. After describing what she saw as the suffering of the Palestinians and the culpability of Israel (with no mention of terror and rocket attacks and the need for security restrictions), the writer concluded:<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know how the story ends, but one thing is clear: if the question remains as to whether the Jewish people deserve a place to call home, we are still asking the wrong question. The answer to that will always be, unequivocally, yes. The question we should all be asking is whether the autonomy of Jews matters more than the human dignity and lives of Palestinians. My Jewish values of social justice and the sanctity of life guide me to believe that the State of Israel, as it exists today, isn\u2019t worth the cost.<\/i><\/p>\n
And there we have it. The questioning of Israel\u2019s right to exist. The author falsely posits a zero sum game, a false dichotomy between Jewish self-determination and Palestinian dignity. Both matter and need not be pitted one against the other. The writer failed to address the elephant in the room; the Palestinian leadership bears much of the responsibility for the plight of the Palestinians by refusing to make peace with a Jewish state in any part of the land, and by their endemic corruption and failure to provide for their own people or establish a free democratic society.<\/p>\n
Perhaps this young woman is unaware that without a state Jews would be left in a deeply precarious situation. This is proven by two thousand years of homelessness, incessant persecution, the Holocaust and the reluctance of the world to receive Jewish refugees before, during and after<\/i> the Holocaust. One painful lesson of the Holocaust was that the Jewish people should never entrust their existential security to the international community.<\/p>\n
Opposition to Zionism, (belief in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland), is one of the most pernicious forms of contemporary antisemitism. Whereas in the past Jews were persecuted for their religion or their race, now they are persecuted for their peoplehood<\/i>. They are denied the right to a national existence. As Professor David Patterson put it, anti-Zionism \u201cis the quintessential form of antisemitism\u201d in that it involves \u201cthe elimination of a place to go for the Jewish people\u2026 It undergirds the homelessness of the Jews, where the wandering Jew is forbidden to become the dwelling Jew\u201d. (ISGAP 2023)<\/p>\n
The denial of peoplehood, history, heritage, and connection to one\u2019s land, in concert with the usual demonization and double standards in regard to security, would be deeply dehumanizing for any people-group. But for Israel, the Jew among the nations, it is now the norm. The canary is long dead.<\/p>\n
No. I won\u2019t be forgetting the Jews anytime soon. Indeed, it seems obvious to me that all those who care about history, justice and decency should be resolutely unwilling to \u201cforget the Jews\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This was first published by the Jerusalem Post \u201cForget the Jews for a while and focus on your own backyard.\u201d This unsolicited morsel of advice left me taken aback. I had just spent two weeks at Oxford attending a course on Critical Contemporary Antisemitism by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":8088,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[343,77,980,47],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8084"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8084"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8089,"href":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8084\/revisions\/8089"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israelinstitute.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}