User:Vegan416/sandbox/Indegeneity

Yahel, H., Kark, R., Frantzman, S. (2012). Are the Negev Bedouin an indigenous people?). Middle East Quarterly, 4, p. 5: "Far from being the indigenous inhabitants, the Bedouin were relative latecomers to the Negev, preying on the villages and caravansaries that dotted the sparsely populated wilderness."; p. 14: "Although there is no official definition of indigeneity in international law, Negev Bedouin cannot be regarded as an indigenous people in the commonly accepted sense. If anything, the Bedouin have more in common with the European settlers who migrated to other lands, coming into contact with existing populations with often unfortunate results for the latter."

Frantzman, S., Yahel, H., Kark, R. (2012) Contested Indigeneity: The Development of an Indigenous Discourse on the Bedouin of the Negev, Israel. Israel Studies, 17(1), 78–104 :"The relatively new Bedouin claim to be classified as indigenous, having gained some international and academic support, is increasingly part of the self-perception of the educated elite among the Bedouin. However, the claim and international recognition face hurdles that the scholars mentioned above avoided discussing, many of which mirror the disputes and debates throughout the world that deal with indigenous peoples. For instance, one issue in the case of the Bedouin is the important and critical element of original occupancy of the land. The current Negev Bedouin tribes arrived to the Negev, from their historical homeland in the Arabian Desert, Transjordan, Egypt, and the Sinai, mainly since the eighteenth century and onwards. Scholars and activists have not wrestled or debated this issue."

Steven L. Danver (2013). "Palestinians" in: Native People of the World: An Encyclopedia of Groups, Cultures and Contemporary Issues. Routledge. p. 554: "Thus, Palestinians are considered by some to be the indigenous people of present-day Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Other scholars dispute this view, asserting that Jews and others resided in Palestine-usually defined as the narrow strip of land bordered by the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – long before the Arabs arrived in the seventh century.

Joffe, Alex (2017). Palestinian Settler-Colonialism. Begin-Sadat Center Perspectives Paper No. 577: "Echoing Inbari, it is not to be argued here that 'there are no Palestinians' who thus do not deserve political rights, including self-rule and a state. To do so would be both logically and morally wrong. Palestinians have the right to define themselves as they see fit, and they must be negotiated with in good faith by Israelis. What Palestinians cannot claim, however, is that they are Palestine’s indigenous population and the Jews are settler-colonialists."

Ukashi, Ran (2018). "Zionism, Imperialism, and Indigeneity in Israel/Palestine: A Critical Analysis". Peace and Conflict Studies: Vol. 25: No. 1 , Article 7, p. 13: "Again, while making exception for those Arabized Peoples that could justifiably claim lineage directly to antiquity, it can be demonstrated that of the significant cohort of Arab economic migrants to Palestine from modern-day Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere prior to partition in 1947, no reasonably Indigenous connection to the territory can be claimed."

Troen, I., & Troen, C. (2019). Indigeneity. Israel Studies, 24(2), 17–32: "We have argued that despite the admitted distortions there is a covert polemical advantage to designating Bedouins as well as other Palestinian Arabs as "indigenous" [...] The deliberate use of the term “indigenous” in spurious scholarship furthers tendentious narratives for partisan and polemical advantage".

Block, Walter E.; Futerman, Alan G. (2021). The Classical Liberal Case for Israel. Springer Nature. p. 28: "Therefore, the claim to the widely held idea that Palestinian Arabs are the indigenous population of the land, with a millennia connection to it, is simply not based on facts."

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Advocates of Zionism have viewed it as a national liberation movement for the repatriation of an indigenous people (which were subject to persecution and share a national identity through national consciousness), to the homeland of their ancestors as noted in ancient history.

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Swedenburg, Ted (2003). Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. University of Arkansas Press. p. 81. ISBN 978-1-55728-763-2. These primordialist claims regarding the Palestinians' primeval and prior roots in the land operated at the level of the collective. When it came to an individual's own family, however, Arab-Islamic discourse took precedence over archaeological justifications. I ran across no Palestinian villager (or urbanite) who claimed personal descent from the Canaanites. Villagers typically traced their family or their hamila's origins back to a more recent past in the Arabian peninsula. Many avowed descent from some nomadic tribe that had migrated from Arabia to Palestine either during or shortly after the Arab-Islamic conquests. By such a claim they inserted their family's history into the narrative of Arab and Islamic civilization and connected themselves to a genealogy that possessed greater local and contemporary prestige than did ancient or pre-Islamic descent. Several men specifically connected their forefathers' date of entry into Palestine to their participation in the army of Salih al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin), a historical figure whose significance has been retrospectively enlarged by nationalist discourse such that he is now regarded not merely as a hero of "Islamic" civilization but as a "national" luminary as well. (Modern nationalist discourse tends to downplay Salah al-Din's Kurdish origins.) Palestinians of all political stripes viewed Salah al-Din's wars against the Crusaders as a forerunner of the current combats against foreign intruders. Many considered Salah al-Din's victory over the Crusaders at Hittin (A.D. 1187) as a historical precedent that offered hope for their own eventual triumph even if, like the Crusader wars, the current struggle with Israel was destined to last more than two centuries. Family histories affiliated to earlier "patriotic" struggles against European aggression tied interviewees to a continuous narrative of national resistance. Villagers claiming descent from Arabs who entered Palestine during the Arab-Islamic conquest equally viewed these origins as establishing their historical precedence over the Jews.

Grossman D. (1984), Spatial analysis of historical migrations in Samaria, Geojournal, Volume 9, pages 393–406: "Migrations of families (mainly during the past three to four centuries) were recorded on the basis of local traditions in Samaria — the N part of the West Bank. [...] The same destinations were more important also for migrants from outside Samaria. A strong “push” factor was found to explain migration from Hebron, Gaza, and Egypt — all S of Samaria. Trans-Jordanian migrations were, however, the most important ones outside those originating in Samaria itself."

Muhammad Suwaed (2015), Historical Dictionary of the Bedouins, Rowman & Littlefield, p. 181 : "The tribes of the Bank region already penetrated the region during the period of the Ottoman rule. [...] The history of the Bedouins in Palestine goes back a long way. It starts with the Arab invasion of Palestine in the 7th century"

Gottheil, F. M. (1973). Arab Immigration into Pre-State Israel: 1922-1931. Middle Eastern Studies, 9(3), 315–324. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4282493

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Fuzzy

On the basis of the above descriptions, the relationship between minorities and the indigenous is one of fuzzy edges rather than bright lines.

https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/are-there-indigenous-peoples-asia

https://cidh.org/countryrep/Indigenous-Lands09/Chap.III-IV.htm

https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Publications/fs9Rev.2.pdf

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I don't have "my definition" for "indigenous". In fact I preferer to avoid using this word unless I don't have a choice, because this is such a fuzzy, ill-defined and controversial term. Just to illustrate using your own question about whether Balkan Jews are indigenous to the Balkans, I picked 3 definitions from reliable sources (there are many more definitions but I don't want to write a wall of text).

a) The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (and also Oxford Reference) definition: "Indigenous communities, peoples, and nations are those that, 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 in those territories, or parts of them." According to this definition it seem the Balkan Jews are indigenous to the Balkans, because they have some sort of historical continuity with the Jewish communities who lived there since 4th century BC (according to wikipedia) that is before the colonization/invasion of this area by the Roman empire and later the Ottoman empire.

b) political science is for everybody: an introduction to political science. University of Toronto Press: "Indigenous peoples - ethnic groups who are the earliest known inhabitants of an area." According to this definition it seem the Balkan Jews are NOT indigenous to the Balkans, because they are not the earliest known inhabitants of this area. The Greeks for example definitely came there long before them. and maybe other nations as well (I'm not an expert on the Balkan's ancient history).

c) Emory College, Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative: "A broad, working definition of Indigeneity is that it is a quality of a person’s and a group’s identity that links them to specific places with knowledge of and respect for original ways." This definition is completely vague and it's impossible to tell what is the status of Balkan Jews according to it. For example I don't even know what "original ways" would mean in this context.