Indigenous settlers? Arama Rata, ‘Indigenizing Zionism: Narrative Claims Deployed by the Indigenous Coalition for Israel to Evade Settler-Colonial Characterization’, Middle East Critique, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous settlers? Arama Rata, ‘Indigenizing Zionism: Narrative Claims Deployed by the Indigenous Coalition for Israel to Evade Settler-Colonial Characterization’, Middle East Critique, 2026

21Jun26

Abstract: From inception, the Zionist project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine has been explicitly colonial. However, recent attempts have been made to frame global Jewry as indigenous to Palestine, including by groups who foreground their own indigeneity. This article focuses on the Indigenous Coalition for Israel, the New Zealand-based group whose founders opened the Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem in February 2024. Background details of the group’s members and networks are described, exposing a Christian nationalist agenda that is antithetical to indigenous liberation. Thematic analysis of claims made by the group via their website reveal narrative subthemes and rhetorical techniques used to serve two specific discursive functions: to invert the colonizer–colonized relationship, and to reject settler-colonial theory. Both enable Zionism to evade characterization as settler-colonial. Settler-colonial theory is shown to illuminate historical and contemporary power dynamics in Palestine. However, the abstraction of the theory leaves open conceptual gaps enabling the recuperation of its terms. This article concludes that indigenous liberation requires theory grounded in the historical trajectories and material realities of resistance and situated within the global systems sustaining colonial domination.

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