Reassessing Indigeneity

Does it matter? Is it useful?

Indigeneity is one of these issues that I keep coming back to. I have excoriated some of its tenets in the past, and will continue to do so. Indigeneity or Indigenous Rights is the concept that peoples have rights to land insofar as their ethnogenesis occurred there. If this claim seems tenuous, it’s because it is. Must the Americans leave their country because they are not its original inhabitants? Most Americans know nothing of other nations. Asking them to go back to Europe is ridiculous. Their families have been in the States for decades, if not centuries. One could also claim that while Americans are comprised of different origins – Irish Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans, etc., they share a common “peoplehood” and history. Are Americans a new ethnicity? Are they now indigenous to the United States?

Indigeneity lies within a Leftist paradigm of politics. You can see this with its definitions. Disaffected Leftist Jews have propped it up as a justification for why the Jewish People are justified in having a state in the Land of Israel. We aren’t the colonizers that the Arabs accuse us of being. We belong here. It’s our land by rights.

However, these Decolonial Zionist types are often baffled by the fact that Leftists do not consider us indigenous in any way, shape, or form. To them, we never will be. Fundamentally, the Indigenous Rights movement is a form of racialized class warfare. The goal is to smash the pre-existing hierarchies of class, culture, and “whiteness” to move forward to a post-border future. If Leftists believe that certain groups are conducive to this task– Congratulations, you’re indigenous! If not, then you must be removed. History be damned.

In the aftermath of October 7^th, this has become increasingly clear to larger swaths of people. The effectiveness of the claim of Jewish Indigeneity to the Land of Israel has waned on two fronts:

1. The reaction of dyed-in-the-wool Leftists to October 7^th has been one of jubilation and celebration. They have made it evidently clear that we will never be part of the broader Leftist coalition. Strong Jews are the perennial boogeyman of those totalistic political endeavors. The cog that refuses to fit. Tevye can be lauded as a “good Jew”. He is in the Diaspora. He speaks Yiddish, and he forlornly looks to God when his village is getting pogromed. He is not powerful. He is not independent. He is not dangerous. That Jew is forever the whimsical fixation of the Leftist fantasy.

2. As the world’s relationship with the Jews has changed, so too has the Jewish relationship with the world changed. The growing tide of antisemitism on both the Right and the Left has forced Jews in both Israel and the Diaspora to start singing a different tune. It is evidently clear that old paradigms have been smashed. October 7^th did not destroy them; it merely informed us of their death. In conjunction with new political movements that are not interested in having the West administer the world anymore, many young Jews have started to ponder the utility of being under Western jurisdiction. To paraphrase Golda Meir, we are only pitied when we are weak. Young Jews are tired of being pitied. We want to be strong, we want to be secure, and we want our enemies to fear us. This can be seen most clearly by those formerly liberal or progressive Jews who have shifted rightward in the aftermath of October 7^th. We are undergoing a vibe shift, and Leftist politics writ large is becoming less and less fashionable amongst Jews.

With all this being said, I do not think that Indigeneity has no role to play in the Jewish future. As is often the case, Leftist critiques of systems happen to hold a lot of weight even if their proposed solutions are horrendous. Marx did have a point about the destructive and oppressive power of unrestricted capital. The same thing holds true here. If Jews want to be Indigenous, that is, true to our culture, religion, and civilization, then we must start asking ourselves what that looks like.

There have been attempts at this before, but none that are more than cosmetic. The Sudra was an effort to restore a sense of civilizational belonging that failed. The project felt ridiculously artificial to the point of parody. There was also something quite ironic about trying to adopt a non-Jewish shawl adopted by Babylonian Jews instead of the native Israelite Tallith.

Orientalism seems to be the primary motivator here. Many people seem to think that the pre-Arabian culture of the Middle East is identical to what is considered Arab culture today. In order for Jews to properly “RETVRN” to the ways of our ancestors, we must adopt Arab clothing, Arab mindsets, Arab food, etc., and claim it as our own. But the truth is that the historical record is more complicated. What was considered “Levantine” culture before the Arab Invasion would’ve looked remarkably more Greek or Roman than anything found here today. Much of the cuisine and clothing are, in fact, Arab in origin. While some things might have had antecedents in earlier Middle Eastern cultures, the Arabs had remarkable success in displacing what was here previously.

Decolonial Zionism has a truly noble desire. It seeks to restore a civilizational Judaism. A Judaism unmarred by the caprices of exile and circumstance. A Judaism that is revived – sustained by its land, people, and God. However, it fails to remove us from pre-existing cultural paradigms. Viewing Judaism through a lens of Indigeneity has caused us to define it by foreign terms. We are also not “Levantines”. We are Jews, first and foremost. Jews did emerge in a Levantine context, and this is where the majority of our ancestry stems from. But, as a matter of taste, I am not interested in reviving the worship of Molech in the spirit of being “based and trad indigenous Levantines.”

The impulse for revival is there. An excellent example of the type of revitalization we want to achieve is the dress of Dati-Leumi women in Israel. For nearly a century, Jewish women were made to wear dull and subdued colors. This was so as not to “attract attention” to themselves and more often than not, came from direct orders of the non-Jewish governments that Jews found themselves under. This still persists in some parts of the Orthodox world; take a walk through Meah Shearim and see how the women dress there. But this is not the natural state of affairs. Israelites loved color and expressed it in vibrant ways. Whether it be the clothes of the High Priest, Joseph’s coat, or the garments of the Eisheth Hayil described by Shelomo. According to Tanakh, Israelites wore vibrant and colorful clothing.

Dati-Leumi women, taking inspiration from Tanakh, adapted their own clothing to be stylish and feminine while being completely in line with Halacha – the native law system of the Jewish people. This is the example of Jewish culture building par excellence, and it would behoove us men to try and replicate it.

If we want to rebuild our civilization, we must first have an intuitive understanding of what that culture is comprised of. This is more difficult than meets the eye. Jewish civilization has effectively been extinct since the Romans destroyed the Temple. While certain aspects were preserved, more often than not, they were over-abstracted.

I hinted above of how Halacha, which is commonly understood to be religious law, is actually the native law system of the Jewish people. The Torah is not an abstract religious text meant to solely be the purview of Rabbis and scholars. It is the constitution of a lost state – divinely handed to us by God on Mt. Sinai, but humanly implemented by the Jewish High Court or the Sanhedrin. So, if we were to implement such a Halachic State, what would it look like? How is it run? Do we put possibly tens of thousands of Jews to death for not keeping the Sabbath? As religious as I am, the idea of corporal punishment for perceived religious violations makes me recoil.

The reason I bring this up is to broach: where are we going? The attempt of a Jewish Indigenous Rights movement moved in the right direction, but was deficient on many fronts. The revitalization of Jewish Civilization, a Civilizational Zionism, is necessary in order to truly liberate ourselves. Land alone does not mean anything if the spirit of the people within it is still dominated by foreign peoples.

I end with the words of Leon Pinsker, the first Zionist:

“At the very outset, we expect a great outcry. Most Jews, grown timid and skeptical, will declare the early activities to be the unconscious convulsions of a crushed organism… But “faint heart never won fair lady” and, indeed, what have we to lose?”