No One’s Rights Should Depend on Where Their Ancestors Lived
Arguments over whether Israelis or Palestinians count as “really indigenous” are beside the point. No one’s human rights should depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors come from.
People who insist that either Palestinians or Israelis are “indigenous” to the land are embracing the logic of reactionaries. (Morteza Nikoubazl / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Claudia Tenney is a congresswoman from upstate New York. Much of her district (NY-24) was, for centuries before “New York state” came into existence, the territory of the Iroquois Confederacy. A right-wing Republican, Tenney presumably doesn’t think much of land acknowledgments or hand-wringing about the idea that NY-24 sits on “stolen land.”
And yet Tenney is in the news this week for introducing something called the RECOGNIZING Judea and Samaria Act. She wants to require that US government documents stop referring to the Israeli-occupied West Bank as the “West Bank” and start calling it “Judea and Samaria.” She claims that “the term ‘West Bank’” is “used to delegitimize Israel’s historical claim to this land.”
The idea seems to be that, because ancient Jewish kingdoms were located there thousands of years ago, and Israeli Jews are descendants of the people who lived in those kingdoms, Palestinian rights are irrelevant. It’s a bit like an extremely high-stakes diplomatic land acknowledgment.
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