The website of the Canadian Museum of Hamn Rights presents the “Nakba” in a manner that vilifies Israel. It does not acknowledge that Jews are the long-standing indigenous people in the land and that they have a right of self determination. There is no mention that the root cause of Palestinian displacement was the Arab rejection of partition of the original two-state solution and the subsequent military invasion of Israel with the intent of destroying it.
Here I will focus on the issue of indigenity. I am a professional anthropologist and archaeologist who has conducted research in both Israel and other Near Eastern countries (e.g., Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey) for the last 25 years.
Some 90% of Jews, including myself, can trace their genetic origins back to the southern Levantine region extending in time over several thousands of years. Some of us have even deeper links to the region as my own Paternal paleo-haplogroup suggests that my roots extend even farther back in antiquity – to forty thousand years ago in this region! Jews are the clearly the indigenous peoples of the Land of Israel; we predate the later conquering Arab empires by tens of thousands of years.
The Jewish People are indigenous to their ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel, where there is a genesis of our culture, language and traditions. We have been in the land of Israel since antiquity and have always maintained a presence in our homeland.
Similarly, Hebrew cannot be considered a colonial language as it is a Semitic language from the Levant, not a European language that intrudes into the region. There are language families that have invaded the Near East from afar, such as the Turkic family which comes from Central Asia.
There were earlier inhabitants of the region, even before our ancestors arrived in the Land of Israel. These were the Canaanites. Our Patriarchs and Matriarchs interacted with them, fought with them, and sometimes were joined by them even before we were exiled in Egypt. The Age of Patriarchs is thought to have been sometime between 1750 and 1600 BCE.
While the Bible tells how the Israelites migrated to Egypt because of a drought in Canaan, there is also evidence that some stayed. These eventually join with those who return to Canaan with Joshua around 1200 BCE. There is significant archaeological evidence to show the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites. Destruction levels at several sites correspond to the events described in ancient written texts of the Canaanite-Israelite battles, such as in the book of Joshua or the Books of Judges. At most sites, however there is no evidence of destruction and the Canaanites joined and were absorbed into the ancient Israelite culture and political units. Thus, there was a fusion of the two people over time. Our roots, as a result, go deeper than ever imagined.
Jews are the original inhabitants of the Land of Israel who have kept continuous physical, religious, cultural and spiritual ties to the land for almost 4000 years. As the earlier inhabitants have disappeared, Jews are the earliest remaining indigenous people and thus the last surviving indigenous inhabitants of the Land of Canaan (known today and through the past 3000 years of history as the Land of Israel).
The earliest historical record of Israelites in the Land of Israel comes from independent sources in Egypt. There are monuments from the 19th dynasty at about 1200 BCE that mention Israel as a people. The Pharaoh Merneptah writes about smiting “Israel”. Soon after the Egyptian empire in the Levant collapsed and independent Jewish polities emerge across the region. These culminate in the formation of the United Monarchy of Israel under Kings David and Solomon about 1000 BCE.
There are no earlier examples of other peoples as being indigenous in the region that still exist today with the same culture, the same yearning, speaking the same language, and so on. This is why Jews are the only indigenous peoples of the Land of Israel. Anyone who came more recently are not indigenous. They are by definition, invaders!
In the 12th century BCE, a group of people that we know from Egyptian sources as “Peoples of the Sea” invaded Egypt. They came as invaders from the Aegean region as part of a mass migration. After being thrown out of Egypt, they landed on the southern coast of Israel and captured the cities of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath. We know their name because it was recorded in Egyptian texts as the “Peleset”. These became the “Plishtim” in Hebrew. The root word of “Plishtim” in Hebrew is “Palash”, which means to invade. The modern-day conjugation of the name Palestinian mean invaders in Hebrew. I participated in the excavation of one of the major Philistine cities – ancient Gath of the Philistines and the Hometown of Goliath.
The word Palestinian derives from Philistine, as the southern coastal plain of Israel is known as Philistia. This is where the Philistines of ancient times lived. The Philistines of antiquity were destroyed and dispersed as a people or nation by the invading armies of the Assyrians and Babylonian empires in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. They did not survive and had no known modern descendants in the region. While modern Palestinians often claim to be descendants of the Philistines, there no historical, cultural, genetic, or archaeological link between the two.
The word “Palestine” first appeared historically in the 5th century BCE. Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, wrote of a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê" between Phoenicia and Egypt in The Histories. This is a broader geographic region than biblical Philistia (mentioned above). Includes both the coastal and the inland regions such as the Judean Mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley (Wikipedia). But it was never used by these early writers as a name of a people nor as a replacement for the ancient state of Israel, Judah, or other Jewish political entity.
The name Palestine was given to the southern Levant by the Roman emperor Hadrian after he quelled a Jewish revolt in the area (132-136 CE, Bar Kokhba Revolt) and dispersed much of the population. He renamed the province of Judea and the Land of Israel as the Roman province of Syria-Palaestina to delink any connection to Jews. The Romans tried to wipe away the Jewish connection from the land by deporting vast numbers of Jews. Yet, large numbers of Jews continued to reside across the land.
There was always a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel despite the marauding armies of the various conquerors, whether they be Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, Persians, and so on throughout Jewish history. In contrast, the Arabs have a much more recent history in the land of Israel than the Jews do. They only arrived in the region with the Muslim conquest under Caliph Umar in 635 CE – less than 1500 years ago, while Jewish claims and rights extend back almost 4000 years. As such, Jews are not the colonizers!
In contrast, the Arab and Muslims living in the Levant came as conquerors into the Land of Israel in 635 CE (or 638) when they pushed north, east, and west out of Arabia to expand the Rashidun Caliphate. Linguistically, we can see from both recorded history and their family names, they come from the Arabian Peninsula – Mecca and Medina are their places of origin. They came as conquering hordes who created a pan-Arab empire extending at one point from Saudi Arabia to Spain, Iraq, and beyond. They conquered our ancient cities, towns, and villages, and renamed them.
A perfect example of this is the town that Jews in antiquity referred to as “Shechem”, which today is known by its Arabs inhabitants as “Nablus”. However, Nablus is not an Arab name. The name Nablus originated under the Romans and is derived from the name of the city they built atop the ancient city of Shechem. They, the Romans, called it Neopolis, or new city, which comes down to us as Nablus. The reason that the Arabs use a post-Roman name to refer to this town is because they were not in Israel before the Romans.
The Jews who live in Israel today did not return as part of an imperial adventure. Many have deep roots in the land as they never left. There were always Jewish inhabitants in the Galilee, southern coastal plain, and elsewhere in the Land of Israel through time. Those who have come in the past 150 years are the descendants of the deportees who returned many times over the past 2500 years to reclaim their ancestral land.
The planned Nakba exhibit by the Canadian Human Rights Museum purposefully misrepresents the history, archaeology and anthropology of the region. It ignores and misrepresents the facts on the ground that the Jewish people are the long-standing indigenous people of the region (i.e., Land of Israel and surroundings) from antiquity. The Museum has the obligation to tell the origin story of the Jewish People fairly and accurately. The CMHR is obliged to tell the story of Israel’s war of self-defense against the Arab invasion in 1948. I demand in the name of fairness and justice that the CMHR recognize the depth of our history in the Land of Israel rather than continuing to perpetuate lies and distortions.
