Racism as Anthropology

"updated from

Sunday, April 22, 2007.

We visited the Burke Museum on campus this afternoon to see an exhibit of "modern" coastal art. A lot of very good work, though I wish there was more annotation and more art.

I did not expect to encounter racism.

On the way out we made a mistake. We visited an exhibit of photography by "indigenous peoples." At first I thought this was a great idea! Imagine if "natives" had a magazine called Native Geographic to compete with National Geographic! Seeing images by indigenous people was intriguing. I would like to see much more!

To my shock, amidst this varied collection of works by different first peoples, there were two pieces by a self identified "Palestinian/Iraqi." At first I thought I had misread and assumed this was by some person with mixed Palestinian and Iroquoi origins. That would be interesting!

No way. The images were made by a self described indigenous Palestinian, an indigenous native of Palestine. Taking on the blanket of first people elsewhere, he bemoaned how the natives of Palestine had been destroyed by you can guess who.

The Palestinians are many things, but they are NOT the indigenous people of Israel.

I admire my Palestinian brothers and sisters as children of the same distant origins, as victims of European arrogance and yes, even as victims of Hitler and the European concept of nationalism, i.e. Zionism.

BUT ... Palestinians are not an indigenous people any more than New Yorkers or modern natives of any part of the world with a long history of immigration and emigration qualify as "first peoples." I am a native Bostonian, that does not make me a cousin of Squanto.

This claim by Palestinians is part of a persistent racist effort to deny the Jews OUR heritage. Palestinian textbooks claim that they are the descendants of the ancient Palestinians while the Israeli Jews are impostors descended from Europeans who adopted the Jewish religion.

Here are a few facts:

1. The term "Palestine" in English comes from the Roman "Philistia." In modern Arabic, "Palestinians" are called "Philistines." The Romans renamed Judea "Philistia" after the Jewish Wars. The Empire's goal was to wipe out the Jewish heritage.

The Romans adapted a long abandoned name. There were once real Philistines, the sea people, relatives of the early Greeks and Phoenicians. The ancient Philistines, however, had gone or been conquered by Canaani, Hebrews, Egyptians, et al. some 500 years or more before the Romans came.

Palestinians are as likely to be descended from Marc Anthony, Cleopatra's last lover, as they are to be descended from Goliath, the Philistine giant.

The only national entity calling itself "Palestine" after Roman times was the Crusader state. Hardly an object of pride to Jews or Arabs!

Indeed until 1948, the word Palestinian was rarely used to refer to Arabs. "Palestinian" generally meant a Jew living or born in "Palestine." The "Palestinian Brigade" of the British Army in WWII was made up of members of the embryonic Israeli army, the Haganah.

2. Modern Jews can be shown genetically to be descendants of the people of pre-Roman Israel. In turn, those people were the descendants of the Canaanites and Babylonian immigrants who made up Judea before the Romans committed ethnic cleansing.

Undoubtedly, many Palestinians have the same roots as Jews, assuming Jewish conversion under the Roman sword and Islamic scimitar. The local Arabs of this region are no more the descendants of the Canaani than they are the descendants of Ishmael. Israel/Judea/Palestine has been the superhighway for armies going from Asia into Africa and vice versa for thousands of years. Arab Palestinians and Jewish Palestinians, are the descendants of ancient Hebrews, Canaani, Romans, Egyptians, European Crusaders, Kurds, etc. Genetic studies show that Israelis and Palestinians are close cousins.

There were identifiable Arabs in pre-Roman Judea, the Bedouins. Perhaps the Bedouin can be called an indigenous people. The Bedouin are an ancient people of the area, but today Arabs are not Bedouins and the Bedouin are as likely to side with Israel as they are with the PLO. For that matter the Druse, a non muslim Arab people, are ancient as well. Bedouins were a small minority in Roman Israel and perhaps can claim, if anyone can, the mantle of indigene.

3. Modern "Palestinians," the Arabs of the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, have become a people. They, like the modern Israelis, are a modern people burnished in the horrid fires of the last five decades of semitic wars. Zionist dogma, and my own beliefs, consider these people our equals and brothers. Like many Jews, I want peace AND brotherhood. We have much to gain from each other. Too many lives have been lost based on this pseudo history, too many lives of Semites, Arab and Jew.

Racism arises because it is part of the Palestinian canon that THEY, not the Jews, are the indigenous people of this land. I understand that even in UN run schools, textbooks teach this racist theory.

The Palestinian propaganda is as racist and as absurd as the claims of Afrikaners, having largely wiped out the indigenes of the Cape, to now be the indigenous people of South Africa. A modern Arab, the descendant of Romans and Arab invaders, is in some ways like an Afrikaner. At least this would be true if we assume that 13 hundred years after Omar's conquest of Jerusalem, Jews and Muslims have co-mingled our eggs and sperm and assume that the South Africans have similarly mingled their genes with those of the indigenous peoples.

The Palestinian claim to be indigenes is also akin to the Chinese claim that the Ching were Chinese, not Korean .. a claim that lies at the basis of the Chinese hegemony over Szechuan and Tibet as well as ancestral Korean lands bordering on their client state, North Korea.

This sort of racism always shares the idea of denying others their homes. It is no better when done by Jews than it when done by Arabs, but few if any Jews deny our common semitic origins.
For what it is worth, even after the Roman massacres, Jews lived continuously in Sephad and Tiberias. The majority of people in Hebron, the mythic burial place of Abraham, were Jews until a pogrom led by the Arabs in the 1920s. Jews, some claiming millennia long family trees, lived on in Jerusalem until we were expelled by the newly Christian Byzantine Romans. Later, when the great caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem, he invited us back and the Jewish quarter in what is now the Arab quarter of East Jerusalem persisted until 1948 when the Arab Legion expelled us.

None of this gainsays the real claims of our Semitic brothers and sisters. I won't use this space to re-argue all the complex issues of who is right and who is wrong in the confrontation between the Arabs and the Jews. However, any solution must be based on history, not racist mythology.

I am upset by the misuse of an academic museum. The Burke is an anthropology museum. This exhibit does harm to academic truth and worse to the causes of real indigenous peoples of the world.

The Burke Museum should be ashamed.