Upstream

As the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people continues, it's crucial that we continue to critically scrutinize and dismantle many of the myths and deadly ideologies that Israel and its Zionist supporters use to try and legitimize their project. We began our ongoing series on Palestine with a critical exploration of Zionism, and in this episode, Part 8 of this series, we’ll be zooming in on one particular element of Zionism: the claim of indigeneity. Zionists claim that the Jewish people as a whole have a right to the land between the river and sea because they are, quote, indigenous, to that region. Putting aside the question of whether this assertion can be substantiated—what do we do with this claim of indigeneity, especially as we see it being weaponized by the forces of Zionism? This is a huge question, and in this episode we’ll explore what it means to be Indigenous—both in the context of settler-colonialism and also as a relationship to land—and how our understanding of indigeneity rel