The Fetish (and Myth) of Indigenous Palestinians
The leftist imagination of pre-state Israel is one in which Jews were the only immigrants into Ottoman-era and then British-era Palestine; everyone else already lived there. This is patently false.
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This is a guest essay written by Elyse Wien, just another Jewish New Yorker who moved to Los Angeles and complains about the lack of bagels.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Have you ever heard of the Mississippian Shatter Zone?
Neither had I, until I assisted a professor who specializes in Native American history.
The Mississippian Shatter Zone of the 1500s and 1600s is the breakdown of an earlier Native American political order. Part of it was due to the arrival of the Spanish, some due to longstanding conflicts, some due to new conflicts. In its place, new alliances and new tribes emerged. The Cherokee and Choctaw and Creek emerged as distinct polities. An intra-native slave trade ran rampant.
Most people would not consider whether the Cherokee had an origin. Most people, upon hearing the word “native” or “indigenous,” unconsciously sort these groups into a category without history; they are a static people living on the same land from time immemorial. There is no history, at least, not until the Europeans arrived in what become the United States.
The United Nations’ working definition of “indigenous” is one which tacitly affirms the notion that people living prior to European contact have simply always existed where they live — static and unchanging. From the definition that the UN cites:
“Indigenous communities, peoples, and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories. … They … are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories…”
The UN (and others enmired in far-Left ideology who consider themselves indigenous activists) fixate on the concept of “ancestral land.” Ancestral conjures to mind a murky but noble past, one stretching back perhaps centuries, perhaps longer. Time has no meaning with the term “ancestral.” It is sentimental and provokes a strong emotional response, but removes the population in question from anything concrete, from a history of their own.
Much of the Left today sees those they deem “indigenous” as a-historical. Conversely, these leftists see those they deem as “colonizers” to be super-historical, held above and outside of other world events. Both the perceived colonizer and the perceived indigenous people are seen as outside of history, as exceptional to their time and place.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the popular liberal and leftist narrative around Israel and “Palestine.”
You cannot go on Twitter without seeing a reference to the entirety of Israel being on “stolen land,” or on TikTok and not hear reference to Palestinians as “indigenous.” Such language is even common in academia, or at least in departmental graduate programs such as the one that I was in.
Meanwhile, what of Jews? The history of Jewish immigration into pre-state Israel is super-historical; that is, taken out of its historical context and scrutinized under a microscope to a degree never given to any of the other political movements of their historical contemporaries.
Who, then, are the “indigenous people” to Palestine and Israel? Were the Arabs and Muslims who are now living in Gaza, the West Bank, in other countries around the world, or the 20 percent Arab population in Israel part of the “indigenous” people, and the Jews — or as is popular to say now, the “Zionists” — the colonialists? The former population existing in the Levant from time immemorial, the Jews emerging as agents of European colonialism to steal the land?
Most people would be surprised to learn that the majority of Muslim, Arab, and Jewish immigration into what is now the State of Israel happened at around the same period in time, often for the same reasons.
The Ottoman Empire’s mid-19th century Tanzimat Reforms, the empire’s modernization and reorganization efforts, settled tribal violence and opened up land for purchase in Ottoman-controlled Palestine that had never been available before, including to Jewish refugees, other Jews of the Ottoman Empire, and to surrounding Arabs who bought and sold land.
Furthermore, the Russian Empire’s Pan-Slavist policies caused Muslims and Jews alike to flee from Russia to the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire’s Pan-Islamist policies diverted many such refugees strategically to the Levant to maintain a Muslim majority and Islamic ideology.
Other Arabs migrated to what is now the State of Israel due to other movements within the Ottoman Empire, such as Mehmet Ali’s Egyptian occupation of Syria or immigration waves of Algerian rebels. Altogether, the overwhelming majority of the population in Israel and Palestine migrated there during the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.
So are the Palestinians, as the Left would claim, “native” or “indigenous” to the land, farmers going back eons on ancestral lands?
Well, I do not dispute that, today, there are a people who go by the term “Palestinian,” just as there are people who go by the term “Israeli” or “Iraqi” or “Pakistani.” There are real identities based on real politics or nations. But I would not use the term “indigenous.” These are all modern terms for modern nations, created at close points in time to one another. The modernity of these nationalities does not make them any less real.
What is less real, as famed theorist Benedict Anderson would say, is the imagined past behind it.
Political historian Karl Deutsch once joked that a nation is, “a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.” In the 19th century, when theories of nationality and ethnicity abounded, French historian Ernest Renan (a complicated figure) noted that a nation is bound together more by what they have forgotten than what they remember.
Later, Anderson more closely inspects how we imagine ourselves as a “nation,” looking at the paradox that the concept of a “nation” is a modern phenomenon upheld through modern bureaucracy and technology, but nationalists and members of nations believe themselves to be reconstituting something of time immemorial, a political truth that stems from antiquity, the resuscitation of ancestral community.
So, let us return to the topic of Arab Palestinians and the Left’s imagination of them: simple farmers from time immemorial, working their ancestral lands before the disruption of “European” invasion or colonialism — and most notably, Jewish settlement, which they consider a form of European colonialism, or a project to advance European interests, so ergo, a colonial project.
Instead of relying on that politicized and imagined notion of indigeneity, let us examine the history of the demographics of Ottoman-era Palestine a bit more closely.
During the 19th century, the land that the West commonly referred to as “Palestine” was part of a region largely ruled from the vilayet, or province, of Damascus in Syria. What was later woven into the British Mandate in Palestine was composed of three sanjaks, or administrative districts: Jerusalem to the South, Nablus in the center, and Acre to the north.
The Arab and Muslim people — not always one and the same — who lived in these districts had a history, just as all people do. A number of historians and researchers, such as David Grossman and Seth Frantzman, have helped piece together the history of migration into Palestine.
For example, Frantzman’s Ph.D. thesis was on this very topic, entitled “Ottoman Arab Demography in Palestine from 1871-1948.” He undertook a massive analysis of the Ottoman census (or deftars) — various surveys such as those by the Palestine Exploration Fund, land registries, local newspapers, journals, and more — inputting this data into Geographic Information System software to reconstruct historical maps of Arab and Muslim migration and settlement into Palestine.
What we see from this research is that, prior to the 1850s, there was very little permanent settlement in these three administrative districts of the province of Syria. In fact, as Frantzman cited from the comprehensive study by Wolf Dieter Hütteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah, the first Ottoman census of 1596 not only shows that the region was sparsely populated, but by the beginning of the 19th century, Ottoman-era Palestine had an even smaller population than it did at the time of the first census in 1596.1
Some estimates place the total population — including Christians, Muslims, and Jews — at about 200,000. By contrast, according to historian Howard Sachar, before the first crusade in the 1100s, there were 300,000 Jews in Jerusalem alone, and they were still a minority. Thus, most historians and visitors of the time period would concur that Ottoman-era Palestine was sparsely populated.
In the beginning of the 19th century, of the sparse population in Palestine, there was frequent fighting. While to the present-day observer, we might say all are “Arab” or even “Palestinian,” that was not how one would have viewed themselves then. Instead, there was fighting between the Qays (those who believed they descended from the Northern part of the Arabian peninsula) and the Yamans (those who believed they descended from the Southern part of the Arabian peninsula).
More importantly, there were the Bedouins who were often considered the “real” Arabs, a nomadic people who, at the time, were the source of much violence — razing farms, robbing travelers, and so forth. Very little development occurred in the region in part due to the Bedouin violence, let alone the other ethnic feuds and the lack of arable land. Of course, all three of these populations would also have a history of immigration from the Arabian peninsula.
Are the groups above those that the Left today would call “indigenous”? It is difficult to say, as their numbers were few and they were soon massively outnumbered by new Arab, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish migration to the region in the latter half of the 19th century.
In the 1830s, the Egyptian leader Mehmet Ali conquered Syria and thus the three administrative districts known colloquially as “Palestine.” The Egyptians had roughly a decade-long rule there before being driven back out by Ottoman armies.
Despite the Egyptian military retreating in 1841, Seth Frantzman reported that 20,000 Egyptians stayed in Ottoman-era Palestine, penniless and available as cheap farm labor, constituting the “largest migration that the country had known during the 19th century.”
The Egyptian settlers who remained were largely regarded by those around them as squatters, living on land without having rented or purchased it, or having had it bequeathed through familial or tribal procedures.
Moreover, Egyptian migrants, now back under Ottoman rule, settled on land that, as Frantzman cited, “had been reported to Moses Montefiore in 1839 as available for purchase,” a later source of conflict in the region. Moses Montefiore was one of the original Western Jewish European investors after Napoleon’s emancipation of French Jews who aided Jewish refugees by purchasing land in Ottoman-era Palestine.
Meanwhile, Muslim migration into Ottoman-era Palestine and the resultant demography fundamentally shifted due to the mid-century Tanzimat Reforms. These were a series of Ottoman administrative reforms from the late 1830s to the 1870s that were meant to modernize and reorganize the empire. Part of the Tanzimat laws included land purchase and taxation reform, as well as the nominal guarantee of religious and ethnic equality.
The Ottoman Empire had long been in decline due to a combination of its own failings and a series of wars. For example, the Ottoman ulama (Muslim religious class) had not allowed in the printing press until the mid-1700s, supposedly out of fear for its impact on the Quran, but quite possibly to protect their own jobs as scribes.
The once-fierce Ottoman military and system of social mobility was overrun by nepotism. The means by which the administration received taxes was prone to corruption; the Sultan collected taxes via “tax farmers” who could take money from nearby people, give a fixed amount to the Sultan, and keep the rest. This system lent itself to corruption and many farmers left the countryside to avoid the tax farmers; as a result, agricultural taxes heavily declined.
The Ottomans were constantly embarking on or on the defense from religious or ethnic wars at their borders, first losing Hungary to the Austrian Empire at the beginning of the 18th century, and later fighting with Russia which wanted certain land and water rights, as well as control over their co-religionists and linguistic kin. After the end of the Crimean War in 1856, the Ottoman Empire was deeply in debt to France and Britain for their aid to the Ottomans against Russia.
Moreover, throughout the empire, non-Muslims such as Christians and Jews did not have the same legal and political rights as the Muslim population (though they did enjoy autonomy). Under the Tanzimat Reforms, all such restrictions were lifted and equality was legislated, if not always enforced or respected.
The Sultan wished to refill the empire’s dwindling treasury with taxes on agriculture, a sector of taxation that had lapsed due to both corrupt tax farmers and violence in the countryside. Thus, the Ottomans took a hardline stance against Bedouin violence, paving the way for people to settle in land that had previously been seen as too dangerous to enter.
Land registries were now systematized, having the effect of ending familial or tribal methods of passing on land that was by nature exclusionary to non-Muslims, but that also had the effect of allowing Arabs in more urban centers to purchase land and sell it to others, such as Jews, as well as to other Arab immigrants. This also encouraged more Bedouins to settle as well and changed the nature of seasonal work to more permanent residences.
Additionally, beginning in the 1850s, a number of Algerians who were followers of a rebel leader against France began settling in Palestine. The Algerian settlers came in in immigration waves through the mid-19th century and until the 1920s. Many of those Algerians stayed, but many also sold their land to incoming Jewish immigrants.
The demographics of the Ottoman Empire, and in specific the Levant, changed dramatically in response to the rise of a new ideological phenomenon: pan-nationalism, particularly Pan-Islamism and Pan-Slavism. Under Abuldhamid II, the Ottomans took a “keen interest” in maintaining a Muslim majority in Palestine — in response to Jewish immigration — and resettled Muslim immigrants in and around the region to make sure Islam remained the ideological basis of the area and the majority throughout the region.
The Sultan shied away from resettling Russian Muslim refugees into Jerusalem or Mount Lebanon, for fear that those regions’ large Christian populations would cause violence and that Europeans would intervene. Unlike Abdulhamid II’s resettlement of Russian Caucasian Muslim refugees into Palestine, he tried to stymie Jewish immigration, even though the Jews were fleeing from the very same government and ideology as their Muslim compatriots.
Abdulhamid II also implemented quotas on Russian Jewish refugee land purchases in Palestine and rebuffed the many attempts of French and British Jewish philanthropists who attempted to buy land for their impoverished and persecuted Russian coreligionists.
He remained a fervent supporter of Pan-Islamism, issuing decrees that the Ottoman Empire was to be considered a Caliphate and to be ruled by Islamic principle, ultimately resettling Muslim refugees into various regions regardless of their underlying culture or ethnic background, which led to ethnic conflict.
But in Abdulhamid II’s mind, that conflict was irrelevant; what mattered was a new conception of the state as one of Islam, not one of distinct nationalities and ethnicities that happened to practice the same religion. Pan-Islamism was a deeply modern phenomenon, a phenomenon that followed a similar historical trajectory to similar reactionary movements across Europe and Russia.
Contrary to much of the contemporary political propaganda that “Jews were gone for 2,000 years and then think they could return,” there was already an active and old Jewish community in Ottoman-era Syria and Palestine, let alone throughout the rest of the Ottoman Empire. Jewish communities were strong in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and other regions along the Galilee.
Over time, the Jewish population in Palestine had waxed and waned. The Jewish heyday was prior to the Roman Empire’s expulsion, massacre, and enslavement of around 600,000 Jews from what was then Judea in the year 70 AD. However, the Jewish population regrew in the region, to the point that, as stated earlier, there were 300,000 Jews living in Jerusalem alone up until about 1,100 AD, when the first Crusade massacred the Jewish population, with only around 5,000 Jewish families remaining after the Crusader’s religious massacres.
The Jewish population grew again, in part as an unfortunate side effect of the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, and also simply due to trade and other quotidian reasons for migration. In the 15th and 16th centuries, tens of thousands of Jews immigrated back into Palestine and Jerusalem. There was even a brief period of Jewish political sovereignty in Tiberias.
At times, Jews were once again majorities in cities such as Safed and Tiberias, and the Galilee towns became major centers of Jewish intellectual and spiritual life. By the start of the 1800s, Jews were still a minority, but they had hardly been absent for 2,000 years as goes the popular misconception, nor without a geopolitical history of their own. Jews were a minority, yes, but not by choice.
Meanwhile, in the late 19th century, the Jewish population of Russia was subject to severe violent persecution and poverty. Since Catherine the Great took Jews en masse into Russia in the 18th century after the Partition of Poland, Jews had been forced to live in the Pale of Settlement, a section of southern Russia and Ukraine, where they lived in poverty.
Worse, however, was the periodic state violence and kidnappings. Jewish children as young as 12 years old could be conscripted into the Tzarist Army as child soldiers and forced to serve 25-year periods, with any offspring of theirs considered to be military property. Under Tsar Alexander III and later Nicholas I, Jews were forced out of the countryside and into city slums, to the point that, at the end of the century, 40 percent of the remaining Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement relied on foreign charity.
Even worse, the existing populations were subject to pogroms, periodic episodes of violent ethnic cleansing, with whole Jewish villages subject to extermination. Historian Howard Sachar quoted the Tzar’s advisor Konstantin Pobedonost as saying about the Jews: “One third will die out, one third will leave the country, and one third will be completely dissolved in the surrounding population.”
Thus, during the period of nationalism, which not only included imperial pan-nationalism but also ethnic and religious liberationist nationalism, Jews were similarly so inspired. The Jewish political thought around this topic developed a sense of urgency in light of the severe violence that they were facing at the hands of the Russians, and the creeping rise of Western European “scientific racism” and Pan-Germanism, the culmination of which we saw so unfortunately come to fruition less than a century later under the Nazi regime.
So too under the Ottoman Empire, despite their sizable numbers and relative autonomy compared to Europe, Jews did not receive the same equal treatment under the law as their Muslim neighbors until nominally under the Tanzimat Reforms. Not to mention, Jews had also been subject to random bouts of violence.
One of many examples of violence against Jews in the Middle East prior to the State of Israel is the Damascus Affair of 1840. During the Egyptian occupation of Syria, a number of Jews in Damascus were accused of classic blood libel — supposedly killing a Christian monk and his Muslim servant to use their blood to make matzo. Many Jews were tortured until they “confessed” to their crimes.
This led to massive waves of violence and vandalism against Jews and synagogues in the region, until prominent Jewish voices in Britain and France put political pressure on their consuls to intervene. This event even called to attention American Jews, 15,000 of whom petitioned President Martin Van Buren to protest the treatment of Jews in the Levant.
Against this background and under the new land laws of the mid-19th century Tanzimat Reforms — as well as the legislation of religious equality and opening up of Palestine to non-Muslim foreign land purchases — Jewish philanthropists, refugees, and intellectuals worldwide began to purchase land in Ottoman-era Palestine, believing that Jews needed better protection than that afforded to them at the whims of empires.
Some land was purchased by famous Western European Jews such as Moses Montefiore and Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, who helped resettle Russian Jewish refugees. Other land was purchased by wealthy Baghdadi Jews and other Ottoman Jews. Still others bought land with their own funds and sought to begin learning trades that they had been banned from practicing throughout most of European and much of Russian history.
Jews, who had been traditionally banned from numerous professions including agriculture, believed deeply in the need to learn how to be self-sufficient, leading to one of the first and still-existent forms of Zionism: “Labor Zionism” (heavily related to Socialist Zionism).
As Jewish immigrants settled in Ottoman-era Palestine, purchasing land from Arab and Ottoman landlords at often exorbitant prices on account of their religion, Jewish settlements were able to create agricultural projects on land that many had previously seen as non-arable or too dangerous due to swamplands, malaria, and past Bedouin violence.
Jews were not the only to undertake these difficult agricultural projects, but their success also attracted neighboring Arab immigrants, many of whom Jewish landholding agriculturalists employed on their farms.
Economist Fred M. Gottheil analyzed the data behind this phenomenon, looking specifically at Arab immigration to what became the British Mandate of Palestine after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. He showed that the growth in the Arab population in British Mandatory Palestine would not be possible simply with natural birth rate population growth.2
Instead, he demonstrated that “Arab immigration accounted for 38.7 percent of the total increase in Arab settled population in pre-State Israel.” And, in comparison with Jewish immigration at the period, Arab immigration constituted 36.8 percent of the total immigration.
Gottheil also showed that 75 percent of the workforce in pre-state Israel was within Jewish-owned businesses, amongst which 60 percent were Arab workers, many recent immigrants for the sake of employment in these businesses and farms.
Thus, not only did Jews and other Muslim and Arab individuals immigrate to Ottoman-era and then British-era Palestine at the same time periods, but Jewish enterprises and the employment opportunities they offered were often a motivating factor for more and greater Arab immigration.
There is, perhaps, no better example of the Left’s treatment of Jewish history as super-historical, and the region’s Muslim inhabitants as a-historical, than the differential treatment they give to the historical creation of Israel, and the historical creation of other nation-states stemming from the same issues of the same time period within the same fallen empire (including Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania).
When Greece was given Thessaly in 1881, for example, they expelled its minority Muslim population at the start of its quest for an Orthodox Greek ethnostate, even after it had gained independence of the Ottoman Empire. As late as the 1930s, Greece was still deporting thousands of Muslims from its shores in an effort to maintain their envisioned ethnic and religious state.
Meanwhile, Greek Orthodox who lived elsewhere were persecuted by Muslims in the Ottoman Empire and turned instead to migrate to Greece. Nearly 500,000 Muslims in total were expelled from Greece, and around 1.5 million Orthodox Greeks from the Ottoman Empire entered the nation-state of Greece. Similar histories abound for other former regions of the Ottoman Empire. Romania, too, became independent by, as historian Kemal Karpat wrote, “seizing territories inhabited by Muslims,” as did many neighboring countries.3
And this is to say nothing of the rise of Pan-Arabism alongside Pan-Islamism, and the expulsion of ethnic and religious minorities from Arab-controlled regions, such as the massacre and expulsion of Jews in Iraq in the early 1940s that is known as the Farhoud, and their subsequent relocation into Israel.
In fact, Israel today is majority Mizrahi — meaning Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin — precisely due to mass expulsions of Jews from neighboring regions under Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic ideology.
Thus, the claim that the conflict of Israel and “Palestine” can be reduced to a narrative of the foreign colonists expelling the indigenous natives is not only false; it also perpetrates a dehumanization of each side of the conflict, subjecting those who are now called Palestinians and those now called Israeli to a place outside of history.
Much like Benedict Anderson’s “Paradox of Nationalism,” the Left imagines a homogeneous Arab-Palestinian antiquity that is, in fact, a product of modernity — that of the rise of nationalism and pan-nationalisms of the late 19th century. As a matter of fact, the leftist concept of indigeneity is an erasure of history that would fully align with the Pan-Islamic goals of Sultan Abdulhamid II: It erases the unique histories of the Muslim cultures and people who settled in Palestine and Israel and view them only through the lens of Islam, and moreso, as having a rightful claim to the land due to their religious commonality.
The leftist imagination of pre-state Israel is one in which Jews were the only immigrants into Ottoman-era and then British-era Palestine; everyone else already lived there.
This is patently false, and it is why I have become suspect of the term “indigenous.” While it can be useful and meaningful, it can also be fetishized and used to dehumanize and de-historicize multiple groups of people — playing on sentiment to political ends. “Indigenous” (much like terms such as “nation” or “religion”) has become such a cornerstone of the modern imagination of political and social arrangement that few question it; indigeneity in particular is sacred and taboo.
Hopefully, in the fight against our modern incarnation of antisemitism, we can lift these taboos and re-humanize this profound episode of Jewish history.
Hiitteroth, Wolf-Dieter and Abdulfattah, Kamal. “Historical-Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern Syria in the late 16th Century.”
“Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel, 1922-1931.” Middle Eastern Studies.
“The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
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Excellent piece. My “favorite” excuse for Palestinian terrorism that happened decades before the state of Israel is that there was no room for Jewish refugees escaping the antisemitic violence and persecution in the Arab World and Europe. In 1880 there were 300K people living in the entire land of Israel. Today there are 15 million Jews and Arabs in the same space with room for more. Terrorism against Jews is Israel was always about Arab supremacy and the Arab desire to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing against Jews.
I recently witnessed a professor wear a kafiyyeh before class started, then taking it off and lecturing a completely libelous, one-sided history of the Middle East with all sorts of slurs against Israel and stories without context. (To hear him talk, Israel woke up one morning in 1967 and decided to attack Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the six day war for land acquisition and never gave it back ... because I guess in his world Camp David never happened. Oh, and Jews didn't immigrate to Israel. Only "Zionists" did.)
Academia supported the Nazis in the 1940s and hasn't changed.
Oh. And did I mention this class is supposedly on American History?