Palestinians are indigenous. Here's why that's beside the point

Over the past two decades, the framing of Israel as a settler-colonial state and Palestinians as an Indigenous people has become mainstream in Western academia. During the genocide in Gaza, this discourse expanded beyond scholarly circles, placing Palestine at the heart of a global network of anti-colonial solidarity.

In Western public squares, solidarity dancers have performed Indigenous dances from the Americas and Oceania alongside the Palestinian dabke, while street murals have paired the keffiyeh with Indigenous motifs and iconographies of land and resistance.

Across activist and academic spaces alike, “Indigenous” has come to function as a moral symbol of purity and rootedness; an identity that promises authenticity in a world perceived as severed from land and nature. For many, this appears as a radical gesture; a joining of struggles across histories and geographies. For Palestinians, however, the picture may be more complicated.

Depoliticising Palestinian identity

The issue is certainly not being compared to Indigenous peoples, with whom Palestinians share much experience, but rather the use of the same rhetoric of recognition that has long governed Western representations of Indigeneity.

In 2022, Azmi Bishara, one of the most influential Palestinian intellectuals, expressed concern about this framing. In ‘Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice’, he describes Palestinians as “a native Indigenous people with national consciousness,” rather than simply Indigenous. For him, this distinction is crucial: Palestinians are “an Indigenous native people who had already developed a national consciousness and polity before being exposed to ‘politicide’ and expulsion by a form of settler colonialism”.

Bishara emphasises that he intentionally adds the phrase “with national consciousness,” not to create a hierarchy of Indigeneity, but because Indigeneity as deployed within Western liberal frameworks of recognition is largely depoliticised, cultural and symbolic. It denotes acknowledgment without consequence, a recognition that remains confined to what he calls “meagre compensations, cultural rights, respect for their memory (…) and, of course, ‘narratives,’ if they wish,” yet pointedly not to sovereignty or self-determination. He thus uses the frame strategically, aware of its significance as a shared platform for intersectional solidarity, but careful to avoid subordinating Palestinian identity to a depoliticised, heritage-based discourse.

This concern is not uniquely Palestinian; it speaks to a broader unease in critical scholarship about how the framework of Indigeneity can reproduce the very hierarchies it seeks to undo.

Moving the centre

Indeed, over the past few decades, Indigenous communities have moved to the centre of debates about the failures of Western epistemic centrality in knowledge production. Scholars have often treated Indigenous ways of life as an epistemological alternative to Western knowledge making.

From ecological systems and medicinal traditions to modes of social organisation, the histories and “cultures” of Indigenous peoples have been positioned as counterpoints to Western modernity; as reservoirs of authenticity and moral balance in an otherwise disenchanted world. This growing enthusiasm has produced calls for new research methodologies that “take seriously” Indigenous ontologies. Some even advocate a radical rethinking of Western ontology itself, inspired by the spiritual understandings embedded in indigenous lifeworlds.

Yet amid this enthusiasm, a troubling reduction persists: Indigenous peoples are often essentialised into cultural entities, imagined as closer to nature, to the earth, to an unmediated and “raw” form of social life. They become the epistemological wilderness to which those disillusioned with Western modernity retreat for renewal.

By treating Western knowledge as the normative centre and Indigenous knowledge as its corrective margin, the Indigenous continues to function as the conceptual “other” through which Western reason rediscovers itself. This rhetorical move is not without consequence.

As many Indigenous scholars argue, much of the contemporary fascination with Indigeneity transforms Indigenous existence into a symbolic resource for Western self-critique; an ethical metaphor rather than a political demand. It transforms living traditions into consumable worldviews compatible with Western institutions. Decolonization, they remind us, cannot simply mean appreciating Indigenous knowledge systems; it must entail the material return of land and sovereignty.

In light of these critiques, the question facing Palestinian intellectuals today is not whether Palestinians are Indigenous, but what is done with that designation, and by whom. And the question is not whether Israel is a settler-colonial state, but what that means in real-world terms.

Undoing violence

When Indigeneity becomes a romantic category, Palestine risks being folded into the same logic of recognition that turns Indigenous struggle into metaphor. The challenge, then, is to affirm the political and historical realities of Palestinian dispossession without allowing them to be absorbed into a global narrative that neutralises their radical specificity. To decolonize knowledge, in this sense, is not to romanticise the “Other,” but to confront the structures that make Indigeneity intelligible only as loss.

Solidarity with Palestine, in fact, offers an opportunity to rethink liberal frameworks of Indigeneity. Rather than imposing those frameworks on Palestinians, Palestinian experiences might instead prompt us to expand our understanding of Indigeneity, from the domains of narrative, heritage, and culture to the domains of sovereignty, self-determination, and the construction of political identity.

In the last two decades, scholars of settler colonialism have insisted that postcolonial studies’ conceptual tools are often inadequate for understanding forms of domination in which violence persists materially. Postcolonial critique has largely concerned itself with the discursive and rhetorical legacies of empire; language, representation, and memory. Settler-colonial studies, by contrast, presents itself as attentive to violence and to the methods by which it is reproduced and undone in material terms.

Paradoxically, the rhetoric of “decolonisation” and the language of “Indigeneity” often remain stubbornly symbolic. So much so that describing Israel as a settler-colonial state has ceased to shock many colonisers. One can now read pieces in Israeli media proudly stating that ‘Israel is a settler-colonial state – and that’s okay’, while others boast of affinities with established settler liberal democracies such as Canada and the United States.

It is hard not to see some solidarity movements with Palestinians sinking into symbolism: powerful and meaningful signs that are nevertheless limited to culture and representation. But if solidarity with Palestine travels beyond Palestine – and it should, indeed it does – then the ongoing campaign of genocide against Palestinians must be taken as a moment to rethink the material conditions of (un)doing violence.

It must push toward a redefinition of what “decolonisation” should mean in practice: real-world consequences for land, sovereignty, and political life for Palestinians, and for Indigenous peoples everywhere. Only then can such frameworks move beyond symbolic recognition toward a form of acknowledgment in which settler colonialism is not “okay.”

Izzeddin Araj is a Palestinian journalist and researcher. He is the Executive Director of Al-Araby Al-Jadeed and the former Editor-in-Chief of the Arabic network Ultra Sawt. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from The Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID).

Follow Izzeddin on X: @ArajIzzeddin

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.