Journalists should be more sceptical of people claiming to be victims of colonial oppression.
In a week when a highly paid Aboriginal senator with English and Irish heritage claimed King Charles’s ancestors had stolen her land, too few asked about Lidia Thorpe’s generous salary or elite status as a federal parliamentarian.
Nor did enough pay attention to her mixed heritage. Neither is she ever challenged about standing with Palestinians against their Israeli colonisers.
Indeed, reporters here seldom ask the obvious question about pro-Palestinian, largely Muslim, anti-Israel protesters: aren’t they colonisers here?
Educated journalists should have worked out there is no evidence Jews, synonymous with Israel and Palestine for 3800 years, are colonisers.
Most of this column’s Aboriginal friends have no time for Thorpe. Many admit they have benefited from the education this “colony” has given them.
That’s not to downplay the history of frontier violence in Australia’s early days, especially in Tasmania. But Thorpe is wrong to claim Aboriginal imprisonment rates and deaths in custody today justify her protest in front of the King.
Friends of this column – Anthony Dillon and Warren Mundine – have pointed out many times that the 1991 Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Royal Commission report showed Aboriginal people die in prison at lower rates than the rest of the prison population.
The real problem is Aboriginal offending rates, especially in regional and remote communities, that often involve violence against women and children.
Yet no one, least of all King Charles, would deny Australia was taken from its Indigenous owners without treaty or negotiation.
That’s not the case with Jews in Israel.
The colonisers of Europe have far more in common with Palestinians than they do with Jews, either those who fled Europe after the Holocaust or those who never left their ancestral lands.
Most people who claim to be ethnic Palestinians also identify as Arabs, and Arabs did not originate in Palestine. They invaded from Arabia.
Arab Muslims outdid the Romans, Greeks and Alexander the Great in the colonising stakes.
Genealogical evidence today confirms most people who claim to be Palestinian are in fact of Arab background. Some can trace genetic links to the original Canaanite settlers of Israel and some converted to Islam after the Arab conquest. But all ethnic Jews, including Jewish families who fled Europe after World War II, can trace genetic heritage to the Canaanites.
The original Jews, who settled in ancient Israel and Judea, were a Canaanite clan. Only in the 1960s, after the formation of Yasser Arafat’s PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation), did the area’s Arabs start referring to themselves as Palestinians.
The word Jew is a translation of the Hebrew “yehudi” – a member of the tribe of yehuda (Judea).
Jews speak Hebrew, as did the ancient biblical Israelites. Their scriptures are written in Hebrew, the only Canaanite language still in use today.
Palestinians speak Arabic, not a language known in the area until after the Muslim conquest between 636 and 640AD. The word Palestine comes from the Hebrew, Anglicised as “Paleshet”, meaning “invader”.
Prominent local Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah last week shared a post from another Palestinian activist demanding people use the proper spelling for cities in Israel: Al-Quds for Jerusalem, Umm Khalid for Netanya and so on. This is laughable: the original Hebrew names predate Arab settlement by thousands of years.
Abdel-Fattah is in effect saying to someone like Thorpe that the real name for Uluru should be the coloniser’s name, Ayers Rock.
Palestinian activists rely on resettlement of Jews from post-Holocaust Europe to claim Israel is a settler colony without any apparent awareness that 400,000 Arabs moved to the area under the British Mandate between the late 19th century and 1930. They came because Britain enforced labour and wages conditions not available in the wider Middle East.
Arab Palestinians used to know the history. Yousef al-Khalidi, Arab mayor of Jerusalem, said in 1899: “Who can challenge the rights of Jews in Palestine? Good Lord, historically it is really your country.”
The famous Nazi collaborator and Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, oversaw a 1929 publication that said the Al Aqsa Mosque had been built on top of two Jewish temples. This is correct, archaeologically.
It says: “The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest (perhaps prehistoric) times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This too is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built an altar to the Lord.”
The UN’s own definition of indigeneity lists seven prerequisites. The Jews in Israel meet them all.
The third – a strong link to territorial and natural resources – is a slam dunk. Jewish practice and culture are inextricably linked to the physical land of Israel – much like traditional Aboriginal custom here.
Zion is a hill in Jerusalem. The return to Zion, a central feature of Jewish practice, happened after the Babylonian exile (and biblically, after the exodus from Egypt).
Jews still pray at the same sacred sites they prayed at thousands of years ago: what’s left of the temple in Jerusalem and the tombs of the matriarchs and patriarchs in Hebron, among others.
Hebrew place names today are the same as those used by the ancient Israelites. Even the Jordan River comes from the Hebrew word “Yarden”, meaning to descend.
Jews see themselves as custodians of the land. A major part of the Jewish project is environmental restoration: making the desert bloom again like the fertile land of the Israelites. They believe desertification and the rise of coastal swampland came from unsustainable Arab farming practices.
Like fallow land in Europe, Jews still use an ancient kosher practice called “shmita”; every seven years the land is rested from farming.
Arguing Jews are colonisers flies in the face of documented history, archaeology and genealogy.
Yet Palestine and Arabia are the crucibles of the greatest colonising forces in history: respectively the world’s 2.4 billion Christians and 1.9 billion Muslims. While Judaism predates both by thousands of years, there are only 14 million Jews worldwide.
As this column wrote on October 14 last year, a week after the October 7 massacre, Judaism is not a missionary religion. Jews have only one country and seek neither converts nor colonies.
That column also said “Israel needs to be feared” to survive in a region largely committed to its destruction.
The murders of October 7 last year and the anti-Semitism of Hamas and Hezbollah have cost tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian lives. Like the Islamist terror of al-Qa’ida and ISIS, most victims of Islamism globally are other Muslims.
That’s the real Palestinian tragedy – the repeated failures of their leaders to accept two-state solutions offered several times since 1947. And the willingness of Islamists to risk innocent Muslim lives.
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