Autochthonous Wars
The old fight for legitimacy.
Who is truly indigenous to the Holy Land?
Ever since Hamas’sOctober 7 attack and Israel’s kill-them-all retribution/ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza, a lot of young zealous Jews have been cranking out internet content about how Jews are the true originals. “We were there before any of these Palestinians arrived. They’re the real occupiers!”
People whose direct relatives had already lived in Palestine for generations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — when European zionist Jews first started settling there, pursuing the dream of a Jewish state — don’t have to make much of an argument. The fact that they had already lived on the land going back many generations stands on its own terms without need for much explanation. But for millions of Jews who are like me, whose ancestry goes back more than a thousand years to Western Eurasia, claims of indigenous status to the Holy Land is a lot more tenuous. Still most Jews just assume it’s true.
But what is the evidence Jewish autochthonous status, besides what’s written in Jewish religious texts that were turned into secular history by the zionist movement? There’s gotta be a definitive answer. We live in the age of genetics. What does the DNA say?
Well, the DNA says…whatever you want it to say.
It seems that the conclusion that geneticists reach on this topic tends to depend on their personal views on the origin of the Jews. If you tend to believe that Jews hail from the ancient Holy Land, you tend to to produce genetic studies that prove Jews show traits autochthonous to the Holy Land. If you’re skeptical of the origin myth you tend to produce studies that show Jews show traits more in line with local populations among the diaspora. It’s a funny thing. It seems scientists are using their science to confirm their pre-existing beliefs. To put it another way: for them genetics is the continuation of politics by other means.1
I’ve been reading some of the literature and the debates around it, and it’s true that some genetic markers show overlap with Middle Eastern ancestry. It’s also true that other genetic markets show huge overlap with European ancestry, as well as ancestry from the Caucuses and even Iran. It all depends on what you data sets you feed in, what genetic markers you focus on, what complicated computer models you use, and how you interpret the results. Probably the darkest genetic finding comes from studies showing that Jewish communities share a lot in common with current-day Palestinians, which on the one hand seems to confirm the zionist indigenous worldview but also makes Israel’s slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank happening right now even more insane.2 They’re doing fratricide.
I don’t want to make too much of all this gene science. As honest practitioners will admit, results produced by these studies are skewed by personal bias and politics. You can manifest pretty much whatever you want. There’s always room for creative interpretation.3
It’s not surprising that scientists can’t agree. Who is a Jew is not an issue that can be settled by “science.” It’s a political and cultural issue, an issue of identity. So the truth is probably somewhere in the hazy middle. Some Jews came from Palestine and there was also a lot of conversion and interbreeding happening over the centuries. Everything points to it — whether in their ancient homeland of Judea or later in the various diasporas: Jews were a religious group that intermixed with others and accepted converts. There were even instances of forced conversions.
Consider this: Herod the Great — the glorious “Jewish” king who rebuilt and expanded the Second Temple compound in Jerusalem — wasn’t really Jewish. Or, at least he wouldn’t be recognized as Jewish by the religious standards officially in play in Israel today.
Jews consider the one remaining section of Herod’s temple compound to be the holiest site in the world. One of the first thing that Israel did when it occupied Jerusalem in 1967 was to tear down a whole neighborhood in the Old City to create a plaza in front of the wall, so that it could be viewed and visited. For secular zionists recapturing this chunk of property was a messianic event: the Jews, many of them born in Europe, had finally come back to the Temple after 2,000 years of exile.
But it’s funny because King Herod wouldn’t be able to get citizenship in Israel right now. Orthodox rabbis today would classify him as an ancient goy. Why? Because Herod’s father was from an Idumean family that was forcibly converted to the Judaean faith, while his mother wasn’t even a convert but an Arab aristocrat.4
Apparently as king he took a lot of shit from the “real” Judaean elites in Jerusalem for his half-bred status and there was debate among the Romans whether or not to make him ruler of Judea because his lineage might pose problems to his authority. And Herod was concerned about it enough to invent an official biography for himself that made him a real Judaean. It’s funny. And I point it out only because obviously this kind of thing continued through the ages wherever Jews happened to live. Conversions and intermarriages. They happened more than most Jews realize.
Even if some group of European Jews originally did hail from Palestine a few thousand years ago, that connection is now so diluted and intermixed that it’s basically meaningless. It’s all blood and no soil.5 And so the autochthonous claims that many Jews make on Palestine are on very shaky ground. Not that anyone will listen. Zionism needs to make the argument that all Jews are indigenous to justify itself. It’s part of the myth.
—Yasha
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