Michael Krampner, a retired American trial lawyer, who also earned a Ph.D. In Jewish history, lives in Jerusalem where he is improving his Hebrew, learning traditional Jewish texts, reading widely on historical and political subjects and is engaged with family.
There are many lies that the Arabs who call themselves ‘Palestinians’ and their useful idiots tell about themselves and about the Jews in their attempt to assert that they have a better claim to the land of Israel than do the Jewish people.
Some of them claim, for instance, that there never was a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
Some of them claim that the Jews were never a majority in ancient Israel.
Some of them claim that there were no Jews at all in Israel between the Roman expulsion and the Zionist movement for return to the land, and that all Jews are from Europe.
Some of them claim that there were no Jews in Israel in 1948 when Arabs supposedly welcomed the remnants of Jewry from Europe into ‘Palestine’ and that Israel is a European colonialist project.
In their alternative history, one for which there is no historical basis at all, they claim that Abraham, Moses, King David and other important Jewish religious and historical figures found in the Hebrew Bible and also Jesus of the Christian Bible were not quite Jews and Christians, but ‘Palestinians.’ This last lie arises from the same Arab impulse to appropriate what is rightfully the heritage of others that led Islamists to build a Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and another mosque over the Tomb of the (Jewish) Patriarchs in Hebron. Stealing the heritage of others is part of how Islamists generally and Palestinian Arabs in particular work.
In recent years, as the noxious theory of settler-colonialism has taken hold in Western universities, the Arabs and their supporters have become even more bold in claiming that the so-called Arab ‘Palestinians’ are the indigenous people of Israel and that the Jews are somehow colonialists or foreign invaders. That theory holds that an indigenous people are always indigenous to the last generation and are always oppressed and that ‘settlers’ or ‘colonialists’ are always oppressors to the end of time so that their status never changes.
It is an obviously foolish idea, the kind that third-rate academics love because it is simple, clear, completely wrong and relieves them of the responsibility to think.
People have moved over the face of the earth since time immemorial. No country existent today had precisely the same boundaries even 300 years ago.
Most of the people who now call themselves ‘Palestinians’ are not descended from anyone who ever owned land in Israel but from two groups of Arabs: those who were sharecroppers for absentee Syrian, Egyptian and Turkish landlords in the last years of the Ottoman era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and those Arabs who came to Israel between the eighteen-eighties and 1948 from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere to work on building projects during the Zionist building boom of that era.
Still, the notion of ‘indigeneity,’ the notion that some people are rooted in a specific land, is important to Jews and to Zionism, and because it is important to Jews and Zionism, the enemies of the Jews have constructed their false historical claims about the lack of Jewish connection to Eretz Yisrael and their equally false antagonistic history of Arab connection to the Land of Israel. I
n The Jews: An Indigenous People, the proudly Jewish Scottish-British author Ben M. Freeman briefly reviews the history of ancient Israel with specific attention to both the written and archeological evidence of that ancient connection. He then applies an innovative approach to the issue of indigeneity by taking the United Nations’ own flawed and politicized criteria for who should be classified as an indigenous people, and also the approaches of neutral scholars to that question, and shows that even though the dishonest U.N. treats Arabs as indigenous to Israel, according to a neutral application of rational criteria including most of the U.N.’s criteria, the Jews are the indigenous people of Israel.
The fact of Jewish indigeneity surely rankles the Israel-hating U.N. which is dominated by Moslem majority countries, ‘post-colonial’ sewers of despotism and corruption like South Africa and Venezuela and by Russia and its satellites like Belaruss, Kyrgistan, Khazakstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Quoting the scholar Sheryl Lightfoot, “underlying the U.N.’s seven criteria for indigeneity are these three ideas: (1) a pre-colonial presence in a particular territory; (2) a continuous cultural, linguistic and or social distinctiveness from the surrounding population, and ; (3) a self-identification as ‘Indigenous” and/or a recognition by other indigenous groups as ‘indigenous.’ As Freeman points out, the U.N’s definition, among its many faults, requires that people be colonized in order to be indigenous (a criteria that shows that the U.N. is not really interested in indigeneity but in wokeist vitim/oppressor thinking) and allows for recognition of indigeneity based on what other indigenous people say about them. This last criteria is odd in world that otherwise emphasizes self-definition, not definition by others.
Freeman therefore applies this definition of indigeneity, not just for Jews in Eretz Yisrael, but for any group claiming that status:
‘An indigenous people are a group whose collective identity began in one specific land, and it is in that land that they remain rooted (either spiritually, physically or culturally). This is their home and where they originated, developed and continued to be fixed through a connection to the environment and natural resources, living systems, culture and practices as a people, irrespective of their sovereignty in the land.’
The Jewish origins in Israel, the early history of the Jews there, the repeated promises by Hashem to the Patriarchs that Hashem will give the land to them and their descendants, the long history of struggling to return to the land, the prayers for two millenium facing Jerusalem and asking for return to the land and the customs related to the land reported in Mishnaic, Talmudic and other sources, the presence of some Jews in Eretz Yisrael through the centuries and many more reasons all militate in favor of deciding that it is the Jews who are the indigenous people of Israel and not the Arabs who call themselves ‘Palestinians.’
Besides Freemen’s argument, other authors have adequately proven that the notion of a ‘Palestinian people’ was an invention of Yassir Arafat’s Russian handlers in the 1960s when they realized that the surrounding countries could not drive the Jews out of the Middle East by warfare. As a result they rebranded the Arab war against the Jews as a ‘struggle for national liberation’ by ‘Palestine’ even though there was not and is not any ‘Palestinian nation’ to liberate.
Freeman’s book is admirably detailed and supported by fact and scholarly opinions as well as by reason and justice. His position that the Jews are the indigenous people of Israel is obvious to all who care even a little bit about the truth and Freeman makes it evident for those with no prior familiarity with the issue. His argument is lucid and clear and his summary of Jewish history is a worthwhile review for people who are not specialists in the field.
The book also contains interviews with five people who are connected to The Land of Israel, in which they explain what Israel means to them, although that is not the strongest part of this book. Freeman’s book is valuable for another reason also, perhaps an unintentional one: it shows that the enemies of Israel and the Jewish people are capable not only of monstrous acts of barbarity such as the October 7 massacre, but also of lying about anything and everything related to Israel’s just sovereignty over the ancient homeland of the Jewish people and that refuting those lies, as Freeman does, is a worthwhile Jewish endeavor.
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