RUBENSTEIN: Comparing Palestinians to indigenous Canadians is both false and offensive

The best genetic, archeological and historical evidence proves the Jewish people, whether living in the modern land of Israel or the diaspora, are the descendants of, or successors to, the inhabitants of the ancient land of Canaan.Three thousand years ago, Canaan was a Semitic-speaking civilization and region in the Southern Levant, an area comprising modern-day Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Southern Syria and present-day Palestine' an area that includes parts of the ancient Jewish Kingdoms Judea and Samaria.The name Canaan appears throughout the Old Testament as a geographical region associated with the 'Promised Land' granted to the self-identifying Jewish people. In turn, the Canaanites are described as the regional residents preceding the arrival of the Israelites (eg, Genesis 15:18–21, Exodus 13:11).Canaanite culture was dominant in the Southern Levant during the Bronze Age (3,500 to1,200 B.C.) As the first Iron Age began, the Canaanite city-states faded and then disappeared.The Book of Joshua describes how the Israelites vanquished the Biblical Canaanites at Hazor, their reputed capital, as follows:“Joshua turned back at that time and took Hazor, and struck its king with the sword, for Hazor was formerly the head of all those kingdoms. And they struck all the people who were in it with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them … Then he burnt Hazor with fire.”— Joshua 11:10–11Challenging the conquest view is archeological evidence supporting gradual cultural evolution. Biblical scholar Mark Smith, citing such findings, suggests “that the Israelite culture largely overlapped with and derived from Canaanite culture... In short, Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature.”However, archaeological evidence of Jewish life can be found in more than 30,000 sites in Israel with antiquities dating back centuries. Moreover, after examining the DNA of 93 bodies recovered from archaeological sites around the southern Levant, researchers concluded that the modern populations of the region are descendants of the ancient Canaanites.As the best known of these modern populations, the Jews of Israel speak the ancient Semitic language called Hebrew. Although Arabic is also a Semitic language, there is no mention of more than a few Arabic speakers in the region until the 9th century BC. More such settlers flocked to the area following the Levant’s Muslim Arab colonial conquest in 636 AD.As for the people now called Palestinians, they are mentioned in neither of the Bible’s two testaments, nor the Muslim Quran.What is known about their origins highlights their diversity rather than unity. Palestinian scholars Ali Qleibo, an anthropologist and Samih Farsoun, a sociologist, both argue:“Throughout history a great diversity of peoples has moved into the region and made Palestine their homeland: Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines from Crete, Anatolian and Hellenic Greeks, Hebrews, Amorites, Edomites, Nabataeans, Arameans, Romans, Arabs, and Western European Crusaders, to name a few." "Each of them appropriated different regions that overlapped in time and competed for sovereignty and land. Others, such as Ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Persians, Babylonians, and the Mongol raids of the late 1200s, were historical 'events' whose successive occupations were as ravaging as the effects of major earthquakes""Like shooting stars, the various cultures shine for a brief moment before they fade out of official historical and cultural records of Palestine. The people, however, survive. In their customs and manners, fossils of these ancient civilizations survived until modernity — albeit modernity camouflaged under the veneer of Islam and Arabic culture.”In short, the Palestinian population, despite being predominantly Arab and Muslim, is not a homogeneous entity. As a result, Palestinian nationality is still a work in progress, its birth beginning in the first decades of the 20th century, only accelerating after the 1948 re-birth of Israel as a sovereign state.This is partly because the primary Palestinian framework of identity is a combination of family, lineage, clan, tribal, and Islamist affiliation, not nationality. It is also because unlike the Jews, including those living outside Israel, there are no unique historical, cultural, religious or linguistic features uniting them as a distinct people.As for the Jews, although many were killed or driven out of their homeland by the Romans during the first and second century AD, there has been a Jewish presence and unified culture in Israel and surrounding areas since ancient biblical times. Modern Zionism, a movement that began in the late 19th century in reaction to centuries of mass but not total exile, only strengthened an age-old, biblically-rooted desire to return home.Given this background, it boggles the mind how some activists, masquerading as scholars, can label the Israeli people “settler colonists” while calling the Palestinians the region’s indigenous people.For example, according to Megan Scribe, a member of the Norway House Cree Indian Band and indigenous education director of the Yellowhead Institute, Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), “The settler move to indigeneity [among the contemporary inhabitants of Israel] describes systemic ethnic fraud in late-stage settler colonialism. Ethnic fraud is the fullest extension of settler colonial dispossession. After disappearing, dominating and dispossessing Indigenous peoples, the settler becomes the Native.”This is surely a painfully ignorant dismissal of millennia of Middle Eastern history in which the Jews have been the victims of settler colonial dispossession for more than two thousand years, a process that continued with the rise of Islam and is now best exemplified by the Hamas desire to drive the Jews of Israel into the sea.Similar views are held by other propagandists. Ironically, few of them are indigenous Canadians.Less than three weeks after the October 7 unprovoked massacre of some 1,200 Israelis by Hamas, law students at Toronto Metropolitan University issued a statement justifying the attack as an act of “Palestinian resistance,” and framed Canada as a similarly illegitimate “settler colony.”“As people living in a settler colony on the lands of the indigenous Peoples of [sic] Turtle Island, we are directly implicated in the violence taking place in Palestine,” they wrote.A statement the week before from the York University Federation of Students likewise implied Canada deserved Hamas-style terrorist indiscriminate violence: “From [sic] Turtle Island to Palestine, and across all occupied lands, these events serve as a reminder that resistance against colonial violence is justified and necessary,” their statement read.Such activists often refuse to use the word “Israel,” favouring terms like “Occupier” or “Zionist Oppressor” instead; Canada is likewise referred to as “so-called Canada” or “unceded Indigenous land.”Most indigenous activists strongly oppose such analogies between Canada’s indigenous people and the Palestinians.In an October 20 letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly, a collection of “First Nations leaders” urged the Trudeau government to reject any notion that the Hamas massacres of October 7 had anything to do with “decolonization.”“There must never be an acceptance in a modern Canadian society of a justification for terror, violence, targeted civilian massacres, or kidnapping…. As Indigenous Peoples in Canada, we fundamentally reject the politically motivated adoption of our historic and ongoing relationship with the Crown by some Canadians to justify these evil actions by terrorists,” it read.These leaders recognized that mischaracterizing Israel as a colonialist, white supremacist enterprise is profoundly inaccurate. Most Israeli Jews are not “white” in the sense of having European ancestry and the privileged status taken by Europeans in the regions they have conquered. Instead, most of Israel’s Jews are “people of colour” — Mizrahim — who have always lived in the Middle East and North Africa, among the Arab, Turkish, Persian, Ethiopian, and other populations of the region.After more than two millennia of forced exile, persecution and genocide, the re-birth of Jewish sovereignty in their ancestral homeland is an extraordinary story of national emancipation. Jewish claims to the land go well beyond bible stories. Jewish religion, language, culture, holidays, rituals, liturgy, and history are as inseparable from historical Judea and Samaria as is the collective longing to return to the Land of Israel. Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba.

RUBENSTEIN: Comparing Palestinians to indigenous Canadians is both false and offensive

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