Jew is a religious identity
I met an atheist Jew from California who claimed that Palestinians aren’t native to their land, but Jews are . because the word Jew comes from the Kingdom of Judah, which existed in some parts of what is today Palestine/Israel.
So I told him this:
The region we today call the Levant (a term coined by the French and British) has always been a hotspot of many and shifting identities. There was never a single, fixed identity at any given time.
Throughout history, the Levant contained many kingdoms and political entities. These identities were not static as borders changed constantly, and political entities rose and fell like everywhere else in the world.
The Kingdom of Judah was just one of many such entities. It was a political kingdom that emerged, conquered settlements, ruled for a period, and then ceased to exist just like every other kingdom around it.
It was also common to name political entities after founders or ruling families:
The Ottoman Empire after the Osman family
The Umayyad Empire after Bani Umayyah
Rome after Romulus
Saudi Arabia after Al Saud etc
So the Kingdom of Judah was likely named after a person, tribe, or ruling lineage. That means not everyone living in that kingdom was part of that founding group.
For Zionists to expect local people in the Levant or Palestinians specifically in the 21st century to walk around identifying themselves as “Jews” is like expecting people today to introduce themselves as Nabataean, Kedarite, Himyarite, Moabite, etc. 😅
No one does that, because all of those political identities ceased to exist a long time ago.
So one might ask: why do people still call themselves Jews today?
Because followers of a specific religion) one that continued to evolve through centuries of rabbinical scholarship) named their religion Judaism.
By the way, the term Judaism as the name of their religion does not exist in the Old Testament.
So Judaism as a religion does not automatically equal the ancient Kingdom of Judah or its supposed descendants today.
On top of that, the local population of the Levant gradually converted to Christianity, a religion born in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, after centuries of missionary work, Christian rule, and church–state policies .
As a result, the word Jew became not only politically meaningless for most locals to identify with, but spiritually irrelevant as well. Those who did not convert to Christianity continued to identify as Jews and naturally became a minority.
Then, after a long and complex history, came the 7th-century Arab conquest of the Levant.
First of all, Arabs did not enter the Levant as foreigners. Arabs were already an integral part of the Levant and Mesopotamia.
In fact, the earliest historical records of Arabs place them in these regions.
Secondly, the Arab armies coming from inner Arabia encountered a population that was mostly Christian, politically identified as Roman, and spoke Greek and some Aramaic.
They did not encounter the Kingdom of Judah, Phoenician etc . These identities had already ceased to exist long before the Arab conquest.
There were minority Jewish communities, but Jew was understood primarily as a religious identity, not a separate ethnic group distinct from local Christians. It’s similar to asking, “Why aren’t there pagans anymore in the Levant?” even though paganism preceded Judaism there. The answer is simple: people changed religions.
After centuries of conversion (not population replacement), the Levant gradually became majority Muslim, and Arabic replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca.
This process took literal centuries after the Arab conquest, according to Oxford research and mainstream academic scholarship. There is zero evidence that Peninsula Arabs slaughtered or expelled the local population and replaced them.
Thirdly, Arab rule ended over 800 years ago.
After that, the Levant was ruled by Turks and others, eventually ending with British and French rule. The Levant largely retained Arabic because the Ottomans inherited a land already unified by one language, so replacing it was unnecessary. Arabic also carried religious significance as the language of the Qur’an .
Then the British and French drew arbitrary borders and created the modern Levantine states. These new nationalities became those people’s modern political identities.
So saying Palestinians aren’t native is like saying Lebanese aren’t native. It makes no sense. These are modern national political identities referring to the residents of from towns and villages within borders created by European colonial powers.
Then comes the question: If that’s the case, why don’t you accept Israel?
Because Israel was not a state carved out for its local population who happened to be majority Jewish if that’s the case no one would have an issue.
But It was created by European settlers who arrived in the hundreds of thousands all of a sudden and demanded that locals leave their homes and surrender more than half their lan and they changed the demographic overnight.
Even land that was legally purchased was often restricted to settlers only, with locals expelled or barred from renting.
Later, European Zionists encouraged the migration of MENA Jews to Israel to counter local birth rates. This was facilitated by rising anti-Jewish sentiment in the Muslim world (similar to how Muslims were treated after 9/11), as well as Zionist terrorist attacks intended to pressure hesitant Jewish communities into emigrating.
Either way, Israel was not the homeland of a Jew from Yemen either. I just wanted to stress that the The creation of Israel was fundamentally a European settler-colonial project, not a MENA one.
Now let’s assume—purely hypothetically—that every self-identified Jew worldwide is a descendant of the ancient Kingdom of Judah, and that Palestinians aren’t.
What did global Jews genuinely have in common before the creation of Israel and the revival of Hebrew by a European linguist enthusiast ?
* A common language? No.
*A common appearance? No.
*A common land? No.
The only thing they shared was religion and religious lore.
Yes, atheist Jews exist . but that’s largely a modern phenomenon . Historically, atheism was rare. Jewish identity was overwhelmingly religious. In the MENA region especially, Jews were Jews in the literal religious sense.
For example, Yemeni Jews were Yemeni in every way except religion: appearance, dress, language, and culture. The difference was religious only. They were descendants of Himyarite-period converts to Judaism who never later embraced Islam.
So the point is not that Jews aren’t native to what we today call Palestine/Israel. But that not every Jew necessary has to be .
And Zionism undeniably was—and still is—an ongoing violent displacement and replacement movement.
Even before mandate Palestine was chosen, Zionism openly identified itself as a colonial project and considered places like Uganda and Argentina as possible destinations.
This debate should have ended a long time ago.
So I told him this:
The region we today call the Levant (a term coined by the French and British) has always been a hotspot of many and shifting identities. There was never a single, fixed identity at any given time.
Throughout history, the Levant contained many kingdoms and political entities. These identities were not static as borders changed constantly, and political entities rose and fell like everywhere else in the world.
The Kingdom of Judah was just one of many such entities. It was a political kingdom that emerged, conquered settlements, ruled for a period, and then ceased to exist just like every other kingdom around it.
It was also common to name political entities after founders or ruling families:
The Ottoman Empire after the Osman family
The Umayyad Empire after Bani Umayyah
Rome after Romulus
Saudi Arabia after Al Saud etc
So the Kingdom of Judah was likely named after a person, tribe, or ruling lineage. That means not everyone living in that kingdom was part of that founding group.
For Zionists to expect local people in the Levant or Palestinians specifically in the 21st century to walk around identifying themselves as “Jews” is like expecting people today to introduce themselves as Nabataean, Kedarite, Himyarite, Moabite, etc. 😅
No one does that, because all of those political identities ceased to exist a long time ago.
So one might ask: why do people still call themselves Jews today?
Because followers of a specific religion) one that continued to evolve through centuries of rabbinical scholarship) named their religion Judaism.
By the way, the term Judaism as the name of their religion does not exist in the Old Testament.
So Judaism as a religion does not automatically equal the ancient Kingdom of Judah or its supposed descendants today.
On top of that, the local population of the Levant gradually converted to Christianity, a religion born in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, after centuries of missionary work, Christian rule, and church–state policies .
As a result, the word Jew became not only politically meaningless for most locals to identify with, but spiritually irrelevant as well. Those who did not convert to Christianity continued to identify as Jews and naturally became a minority.
Then, after a long and complex history, came the 7th-century Arab conquest of the Levant.
First of all, Arabs did not enter the Levant as foreigners. Arabs were already an integral part of the Levant and Mesopotamia.
In fact, the earliest historical records of Arabs place them in these regions.
Secondly, the Arab armies coming from inner Arabia encountered a population that was mostly Christian, politically identified as Roman, and spoke Greek and some Aramaic.
They did not encounter the Kingdom of Judah, Phoenician etc . These identities had already ceased to exist long before the Arab conquest.
There were minority Jewish communities, but Jew was understood primarily as a religious identity, not a separate ethnic group distinct from local Christians. It’s similar to asking, “Why aren’t there pagans anymore in the Levant?” even though paganism preceded Judaism there. The answer is simple: people changed religions.
After centuries of conversion (not population replacement), the Levant gradually became majority Muslim, and Arabic replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca.
This process took literal centuries after the Arab conquest, according to Oxford research and mainstream academic scholarship. There is zero evidence that Peninsula Arabs slaughtered or expelled the local population and replaced them.
Thirdly, Arab rule ended over 800 years ago.
After that, the Levant was ruled by Turks and others, eventually ending with British and French rule. The Levant largely retained Arabic because the Ottomans inherited a land already unified by one language, so replacing it was unnecessary. Arabic also carried religious significance as the language of the Qur’an .
Then the British and French drew arbitrary borders and created the modern Levantine states. These new nationalities became those people’s modern political identities.
So saying Palestinians aren’t native is like saying Lebanese aren’t native. It makes no sense. These are modern national political identities referring to the residents of from towns and villages within borders created by European colonial powers.
Then comes the question: If that’s the case, why don’t you accept Israel?
Because Israel was not a state carved out for its local population who happened to be majority Jewish if that’s the case no one would have an issue.
But It was created by European settlers who arrived in the hundreds of thousands all of a sudden and demanded that locals leave their homes and surrender more than half their lan and they changed the demographic overnight.
Even land that was legally purchased was often restricted to settlers only, with locals expelled or barred from renting.
Later, European Zionists encouraged the migration of MENA Jews to Israel to counter local birth rates. This was facilitated by rising anti-Jewish sentiment in the Muslim world (similar to how Muslims were treated after 9/11), as well as Zionist terrorist attacks intended to pressure hesitant Jewish communities into emigrating.
Either way, Israel was not the homeland of a Jew from Yemen either. I just wanted to stress that the The creation of Israel was fundamentally a European settler-colonial project, not a MENA one.
Now let’s assume—purely hypothetically—that every self-identified Jew worldwide is a descendant of the ancient Kingdom of Judah, and that Palestinians aren’t.
What did global Jews genuinely have in common before the creation of Israel and the revival of Hebrew by a European linguist enthusiast ?
* A common language? No.
*A common appearance? No.
*A common land? No.
The only thing they shared was religion and religious lore.
Yes, atheist Jews exist . but that’s largely a modern phenomenon . Historically, atheism was rare. Jewish identity was overwhelmingly religious. In the MENA region especially, Jews were Jews in the literal religious sense.
For example, Yemeni Jews were Yemeni in every way except religion: appearance, dress, language, and culture. The difference was religious only. They were descendants of Himyarite-period converts to Judaism who never later embraced Islam.
So the point is not that Jews aren’t native to what we today call Palestine/Israel. But that not every Jew necessary has to be .
And Zionism undeniably was—and still is—an ongoing violent displacement and replacement movement.
Even before mandate Palestine was chosen, Zionism openly identified itself as a colonial project and considered places like Uganda and Argentina as possible destinations.
This debate should have ended a long time ago.
