Resolving the entire Palestine/Israel conflict by just calling everyone Canaanites

Don’t argue with me, argue with the Bronze Age Levant

The problem with denoting things like claims to land, or indigeneity, on the basis of blood descent is you have an unsolvable problem of infinite regress. Zionism says go back to who the “native” population of Israel and Judah were in 1000BCE. Why? Why not go pre-Judaic?

“Indigeneity” is such a massive red herring in Zionist propaganda because whether “Jewish” or “Palestinian” (in scare quotes because the two are not, if we are being rational, exclusive concepts), there is (very distant) descent from pre-diaspora Levantine populations.

Zionist concepts of a specifically, quasi-racially Jewish indigeneity rest on fixing authentic descent at some indeterminate point before the final Roman diaspora and after the emergence of a distinct Jewish population from the general Canaanite population.

Of course the whole thing is left deliberately vague and mystical so that goalposts can be shifted to whatever the debate presently demands, but even despite that it’s impossible to justify.

When people talk about *serious* decolonization, *material* Land Back policies, it’s not about blood and soil. It’s not mystical. It’s material.

It’s about returning *the sovereignty over* stolen/colonialized land to the *social* descendants (or still living members) of+

+populations whose land (and, invariably, labor and lives) was expropriated by a *still existing* colonial regime.

When we talk about Land Back in the US, for example, we are talking about returning the *sovereignty over* this land to Native peoples whose land is *still being held* by the very same entity, the USA, which stole that land. It’s not litigating ancient blood rights.

The issue is that the actual political-economic entity which executed that theft of land and life *still exists* and therefore can be quite directly forced to make reparations. You can’t get reparations from a ghost, but the USA isn’t a ghost. It’s still here, and it’s a thief

Similarly, Nativeness isn’t a question of blood quantum. Native peoples determine membership according to their own political-economic, cultural, social definitions. It is not administered as if some objective DNA test.

All of which is to say, in the case of decolonizing the US, there is no vagueness, no problem of infinite logical regress. It’s a question of material political economy. It’s concrete. It’s *present*, not past. It is a theft *ongoing*.

By contrast it’s absurd to suggest an indigenous identity in the Levant originating 2000-3000 years ago because none of those entities still exist. You can’t get reparations from Babylon or Rome for their diasporic conquests because *they don’t exist* to draw reparations from

This is how you get a perverse, misdirected sense of “reclamation” in which what is being “reclaimed” is land owned by...other people who lived on the land as colonized peoples. Both past and present. It’s perverse.

The non-Jewish Levantine peoples were also conquered and colonized by the Babylonians and the Romans. And the Byzantines, and the Ottomans, and the British...etc etc. And now by Israel

It would be as if, in a scenario where the US were centuries-gone, a diasporic Cherokee population decided to “reclaim” land from Choctaw people living in the Southeast. It’s patently absurd

Zionist concepts of “indigeneity” are ludicrous attempts to force Palestinian people to pay a bill drawn on events to which no existing political-economic entity was party. In lieu of the actual parties, the Palestinian people become effigies. This is not decolonization.

The Palestinian people who today live as colonial subjects of Israel (and, by extension, of the US, as the patron state master of Israel) are also the descendants of very same victims of conquests and diaspora from which Israeli settlers claim *unique* descent.

Any concept of indigeneity that tries to draw a line between authentically indigenous Jewish settlers and non-Jewish Palestinians is a farce. It attempts to fix indigeneity at some arbitrary point in the past and ignore all that happened before or since

And, frankly, misrepresent that arbitrary past anyway, as if non-Jewish Levantine populations were perfectly separate from Jewish populations, which was *never* true