Burgis writes in Jabobin that arguments ‘over whether Israelis or Palestinians count as “really indigenous” are beside the point’ (Ben Burgis, ‘No One’s Rights Should Depend on Where Their Ancestors Lived’, Jacobin, 07/03/24; available at: https://jacobin.com/2024/03/rights-ancestors-land-israel-palestine). In the following paragraphs I unpack Burgis’s rhetorical sleight of hand and argue that indigeneity matters. It matters because settler colonialism does.

All tricks begin with trust building exercises. Burgis first assumes what is an ostensibly sensible position. It is an acrimonious debate, but he is trustworthy, someone who is committed to opposing all outlandish approaches. Exhibit 1: Republican congresswomen Claudia Tenney. She lives on ‘stolen land’ (i.e., upstate New York) and represents the settlers who live there (the inverted commas around ‘stolen land’ are in Burgis’s original, but I wonder whether they are needed, since the land was actually stolen). Tenney has recently introduced the ‘RECOGNIZING Judea and Samaria Act’, Burgis notes, demanding that ‘US government documents stop referring to the Israeli-occupied West Bank as the “West Bank” and start calling it “Judea and Samaria”’. Burgis: ‘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. Tenney is far from the only one on the Right thinking this way as Israel rains death and destruction on the civilian population of Gaza and pogroms by Israeli settlers terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank’. Tenney is reproachable. Fact.

Enter Exhibit 2: ‘There’s also a misguided — and, I hope, relatively small — segment of Palestine solidarity activists who take the mirror image of this position. They’re rightly horrified by the denial of democratic rights to the Palestinians, and especially by the mass starvation and indiscriminate bombing in Gaza, where the Israeli military has displaced at least 85 percent of the population from their homes since October. This anger leads them to indulge in ugly rhetoric about how the entire population of seven million or so Israeli Jews, the great majority of whom were born in the country, are “settlers” and “colonizers”‘.

The activists are ‘misguided’, they ‘indulge’, their rhetoric is ‘ugly’. Lucky that we have Burgis in the level-headed middle! And then his conclusion: ‘no one’s human rights should depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors come from’. It sounds plausible. But – wait a second! – I see what he has done there … nice try.

First: being ‘indigenous’ is not only defined by the presumed location of one’s ancestors. Burgis assumes that this is common sense but is misinformed. ‘Indigenous person’ and ‘settler’ come into existence in the context of an unequal relation, a relationship that relies on a logic of elimination and is defined by political structures of domination designed to replace one collective with another. It is called settler colonialism. Burgis uses the scare quotes around ‘settlers’ and ‘colonisers’, but I wonder whether they should be used: one is a settler whether he is personally born in a place or whether he has moved to it, because he is engaging in a specific relationship of domination. Speculating how long it may take before a settler turns into a native is like wondering how long a captain of industry must exploit factory workers before he turns into a proletarian. Settlers are made by movement and conquest. Indigeneity is a consequence of exogenous domination (even the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples agrees). Burgis defines indigeneity without reference to settler colonialism, which is like defining, say, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ (which are also categories brought into existence in the context of a relationship) without referring to patriarchy, or defining ‘proletarians’ and ‘capitalists’ without reference to a particular mode of domination: capitalism. I could go on, but the main point is that it sounds dodgy. Is it deliberate?

Secondly, and in relation to everyone’s ‘human rights’, surreptitiously introduced in the analytical mix even if the ‘activists’ are definitely not saying that ‘settlers’ do not have human rights, let me ask: do they make sense without reference to domination? Does a call to uphold ‘everyone’s’ human rights in the context of genocide seem timely or appropriate? The rhetoric of Indigenous rights is not about ‘historic’ rights to land, it is not even about history; it is about a dehumanising system of domination, and it is about the present – a system and a present that disappear with Burgis’s sleight of hand. So much for being ‘beside the point’: indigeneity is the inevitable outcome of a settler colonial system of relationships. And settler colonialism is the very point of Zionism – replacing a collective on the land with another.

Burgis is happy to critique Zionism, but only if the critique is not about settler colonialism, which is like critiquing ‘capitalists’, provided that no reference is made to the way they accumulate capital: ‘The problem with Zionism is that it’s obscene for anyone’s status or rights in the area where they live to depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors lived. Zionism should be rejected not because we think Palestinians have a better claim than Israeli Jews to a blood-and-soil connection to the land, but on the basis of the universalist principles that have always formed the rock-solid normative basis of the socialist movement and, before that, were proclaimed by the French Revolutionaries in 1789’.

Again, nice try: true, the socialists and the ‘Revolutionaries’ proclaimed the principles, but they knew that their revolutions had to be victorious before they could be given social meaning. Avoiding a critique of settler colonialism as a mode of domination and then proclaiming that the principles ‘still’ stand when in reality they do not yet stand is a cop out. It is dodgy. Is it deliberate?

Then we get back to Burgis in the middle: ‘Zionism should be rejected because ethnostates are wrong in principle. No nation-state should be a state ‘of’ a specific ethnic or religious subset of its residents, and the most just solution would be a single secular democratic state with equal rights for everyone. People who insist that Palestinians are “indigenous” and Israelis are not, and who think this is what makes the struggle for Palestinian rights legitimate, are embracing the logic of reactionaries […] while reversing the implication. The problem with the Right’s claim that Israel is justified in denying basic rights to millions of people because of historical Jewish claims to “Judea and Samaria” is not that the right-wingers are misidentifying who counts as “truly” indigenous. The wildly reactionary premise is that this is even a relevant question’.

But one sure way of ensuring that the question remains irrelevant is to avoid a sound definition of what ‘indigenous’ means, or an analysis of a specific mode of domination. Settler colonialism is what Zionism set out to do, what it did, and wat it does. It is its achievement. It may stop in the future, and at that point, but only then, the meaning of ‘indigenous’ and ‘settler’ will be reconfigured, as the relationship that constitutes both will be dissolved. I look forward to that time. Does Burgis?