Explaining one of the newest buzzwords to gain traction at universities and in certain precincts of progressive social media, Tal Fortgang and Hannah E. Meyers examine indigeneity, and its implications for the Jews:
The progressive left increasingly values “indigeneity” above all. Progressives in the fields of education, entertainment, and even medicine routinely express the wish that every nation should be returned to its proper place, as if history had never unfolded. . . . Anti-Israel zealots, who were once content to argue that Israel is a legitimate state that exceeded the boundaries of its sovereignty, have fallen in line. Their main thrust is no longer that the putative occupation of the West Bank is unjust. Rather, they now believe and argue that Israel is illegitimate because it is a white European colonialist project that displaced native people of color. And the nub of the argument, logically necessary to every claim that Israel is colonialist or that Jews are white Europeans, is that Jews are not “native” or “indigenous” to the Levant.
Follow the logic. If Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated from Europe to Israel (or the Anglosphere) are colonizers rather than historically indigenous to the region, then they are not real Jews. They are impostors. . . . This narrative is . . . built on the idea that a people can be indigenous to a place, when in fact all human beings are ultimately indigenous to the same square of Africa.
This activist jargon necessarily assumes that Jews are white interlopers, bourgeois capitalists, “eternal wanderers” who colonize and subjugate, in mindset if not literally, wherever they go—Israel, America, or anywhere else. And as far as the Levant is concerned, this covers lands from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and from the Golan Heights down to Eilat.
Just imagine the uproar if whites on university campuses told Afro-Caribbean students that they were not really black and could not share the banner with black students from other parts of the world. The victims of such harassment would quickly and rightly have administrators in their corner. The school could lose its federal funding for allowing an out-group to tell an in-group who they are and who they are not, and which national bonds emerging from the mists of time are sufficient to confer unity. Yet that is what happens every time activists deploy the indigeneity canard to demonize Zionism as a colonialist project.
Fortgang and Meyers show that current civil-rights law can—and should—be used to defend Jews on college campuses against the attacks that stem from this demented logic.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/tal-fortgang/new-legal-approach-to-antisemitism/