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Indigenous Zionism Is Peoplehood Zionism
Israel’s First Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (C) stands under a portrait depicting Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, as he reads Israel’s declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv, May 14, 1948, in this handout picture released April 29, 2008, by the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO). Photo: REUTERS/Kluger Zoltan/GPO/Handout
Zion has figured powerfully in the Jewish imagination for millennia, at least from the time of the Babylonian exile, and the pre-exilic Psalms. Enter the “-ism” of the late 19th century, when Theodor Herzl translated that longing into a political movement — Zionism.
Even since Herzl, Zionism has existed in various forms — whether named or simply as an idea: Labour Zionism, Religious Zionism, Political Zionism, Practical Zionism, Cultural Zionism, Christian Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, and more. What most have in common is the conviction that the Jewish people have an ineradicable connection to the Land of Israel.
Enter Indigenous Zionism: a Zionism that recognizes that such connection is an indigenous bond, one in which Jewish Peoplehood is seen to have been forged through the relationship between land, ancestry, Hebrew writings, and the language itself, from which arise cultural and spiritual practices.
In the current torrent of academic fashions and activist orthodoxies, one idea that has captured the imagination of progressive movements is settler colonialism and the associated rhetoric of decolonization.
This theoretical framework purports to explain global history through a tidy dichotomy of settlers and indigenous peoples, of Western power and non‑Western victimhood. Yet when that model is applied beyond the contexts in which it was originally developed, especially in regions with complex histories, it does more harm than good.
Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the debate over Israel and Zionism. What is too often caricatured as settler colonialism is better understood through the lens of indigenous peoplehood, observing parallels that exist between Jewish historical experience and the stories of other ancient peoples. In this sense, Indigenous Zionism is above all Peoplehood Zionism: a recognition of ancestral connection, continuous presence, and deeply rooted land-based identity.
At its core, Zionism is the expression of a people’s right to self‑determination in its ancestral homeland. For the Jewish people, this is not an abstract political invention of the modern era, but rather the resumption of an identity shaped over millennia in the Land of Israel.
Long before Europe’s age of imperial expansion, Jews maintained a continuous presence in the Levant, a presence expressed culturally, spiritually, linguistically, and demographically. Settler colonial theory, which originates largely in Western academic circles, typically defines settlers as intruders acting on behalf of an external metropolis to subjugate indigenous populations; this definition simply does not fit the historical trajectory of the Jewish people in their homeland.
Contrary to reductionist narratives, Jews did not arrive en masse as white Europeans with the trappings of Western economic power. Firstly, there remained throughout centuries of exile, a small presence of Jews in the land. In Māori thought, this is the concept of “keeping the fires burning.”
The return of Eastern European and Russian Jews during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a two-fold response. On the one hand, Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine was legally enabled within an imperial reform context, whereupon, Jews embraced the opportunity of re-establishing themselves as a people in their ancestral land. On the other hand, it was — in so many cases — a direct reaction to persecution, marginalization, and threats to their existence. These were populations motivated by survival-driven desperation, not imperialist ambition. Whichever the driver, Jews overwhelmingly regarded the Land of Israel as the ancient cradle of their people, not as foreign soil. Even Arab leaders of the time acknowledged the Jewish historical connection. This historical reality is crucial: it differentiates a movement of return rooted in indigeneity from the archetype of colonial conquest.
A core problem with applying settler colonialism to Israel is that the theory collapses complex histories into a binary moral narrative: oppressor versus oppressed. Few human histories are so simple, and the Middle East is a region where multiple layers of civilization, conquest, displacement, and cultural survival overlap.
Indeed, the Arab conquests of the seventh to ninth centuries brought a sweeping linguistic and religious transformation across the region, one that subsumed many ancient peoples. Kurdish, Assyrian, Chaldean, and Amazigh communities, among others, maintained continuous links to their lands yet were subjected to cultural and political marginalization. This complexity underscores a fundamental flaw in settler colonial frameworks when applied universally. Indigeneity is not merely dispossession or victimhood; it is about genealogy, continuous presence, language, ritual, and identity anchored in a specific geography.
The broad misapplication of settler colonialism has very real political consequences. Once adopted unquestioningly by activists and academic institutions, it provides a convenient but woefully simplistic moral certitude: all historical wrongs arise from a single dynamic, and dismantling alleged structures of colonial power is supposedly the path to justice.
In practice, this framework frequently morphs from analytical model into ideological dogma. It becomes a “religion of grievance” with its own categories of original sin, penance, and absolution, where dissolving complexity via the dogma of colonial guilt eclipses other narratives of agency, resilience, and reconciliation. Those who resist this mode of thought are not simply arguing for historical nuance; they are confronting a contemporary orthodoxy that has profound consequences for real peoples and nations.
Consider, for example, the persistent accusation that Israel commits genocide against Palestinians. This claim often rests on rhetoric rather than careful historical and legal analysis, and well established definitions. The “religion of grievance” leads accusers to ignore the atrocities committed by non‑state actors such as Hamas, which has openly declared its intent to destroy the Jewish State. The machinery of international opinion, when driven by such problematic and simplistic narratives, tends to silence any call for impartial and disciplined inquiry.
Indigenous Zionism or peoplehood Zionism recognizes that nations are more than juridical entities. They are living communities formed by shared history, culture, memory, and connection to land. For Jews, this peoplehood has been further forged by exile, persecution, revival, and more recently statehood. In many respects, such experiences are consistent with what indigenous peoples around the world know intimately: that identity persists beyond displacement, and that belonging is more than presence. It is this peoplehood — not colonial conquest — that underpins the legitimacy of Zionism as a movement of self‑determination.
Further, Indigeneity is not contingent upon whether individual members of a community consciously affirm that identity. A Jew, Māori, or Native American person may choose not to self-identify as Indigenous for a range of reasons: cultural dislocation, assimilation pressures, internalized stigma, or the mistaken belief that indigeneity is synonymous with marginalization rather than cultural continuity and pride, or progressive politics rather than an authentic identification. Yet such individual positioning does not determine the status itself. indigeneity refers to the historical emergence, formation, and ongoing development of a people in relation to a specific ancestral land. It is a collective, relational, and genealogical reality, not merely a matter of personal declaration.
Detractors may object that indigeneity, like Zionism itself, is a political construct. Indeed, both movements have a political element, developed in response to historical circumstances. However, at the core there is a deeper meaning that transcends politics and historical contingency, which speaks to the essential element of peoplehood and its genesis in a particular place.
In an age of narrative wars, Jews have been falsely accused of being foreign white colonizers. The denial of indigeneity to Jewish people maps directly onto the experience of other Indigenous peoples, in which ideologies formed in the Western academy seeks to determine identity. Māori academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith emphasized that Indigenous Peoples must define and assert their own realities: “Our survival, our humanity, our worldview and language, our imagination and spirit, our very place in the world depends on our capacity to act for ourselves, to engage in the world and the actions of our colonizers, to face them head on.”
Jews can take their place in the Indigenous world, forerunners of decolonization, having regained sovereignty and restored their Indigenous language. They will write their own story rather than have it imposed on them by their ideological opponents.
To those ignorant of the deep layers of history involved, the accusation of settler colonialism may seem persuasive. To those who have examined the evidence, and who understand the dangers of flattening complex identities into politically expedient constructs, such claims fall short. Indigenous Zionism is not an oxymoron; it is the affirmation that the Jewish people’s claim to their land arises from continuity, culture, and unique identity — the hallmarks of genuine indigenous connection.
In a world increasingly shaped by monolithic narratives, reclaiming the richness of human histories — including the Jewish story — is not an indulgence in academic detail. It is a defense of a people’s right to define themselves on their own terms, rooted in their own histories. Indigenous Zionism, then, is simply peoplehood Zionism — an assertion that identity and belonging are not abstractions to be judged or negated by a fashionable but woefully superficial ideological dogma, but truths grounded in the enduring experience of a people with their land.
Dr. Sheree Trotter is Māori (Te Arawa). She earned her PhD in history from the University of Auckland, is the Director of Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem, a Fellow of London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, and Alumna of the ISGAP-Oxford Institute.
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Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him
Piers Morgan’s online debate about Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed containing allegations of Israeli dog rape was loud, chaotic and unenlightening — and I couldn’t stop watching it.
That’s a problem. Morgan’s format is a trap. On his YouTube talk show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, he pits people holding intransigent, often extreme positions against each other, goads them to yell at one another across Zoom, and positions himself as the voice of reason in the middle. It’s hateporn — addictive, and not reflective of reality.
And yet Piers Morgan Uncensored and many similar YouTube- and social-media based news programs are where people increasingly get their information and engage with controversial issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
These programs rack up views by persuading viewers there is no middle ground, no moderate position, no alternative to conflict. And their strategy is working.
The Kristof episode, which racked up 340,000 views in a day, is titled, “Torture Does NOT Work!” — all Morgan show names have one word in all caps and end in an exclamation point.
It begins with people shouting. “You are not a journalist!” Ana Kasparian, a commentator on another YouTube show, shouts at podcaster and online anchor Emily Schrader — before Morgan comes on to introduce the segment.
He quickly recaps the lurid details from Kristof’s New York Times oped, “The Silence That meets the Rape of Palestinians,” and a newly issued nearly-300 page Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence.
“As far as I’m concerned, the only cause is basic human decency,” Morgan says in his cool British accent, “If your first instinct about either report is to look for ways to smear them, you might have run out of that yourself.”
Yet the six deeply partisan guests spend the next 45 minutes smearing the reports, and each other.
Morgan’s introductory call for human decency is not a plea, it’s a ploy. He plays the mature voice of reason standing between the extremist pro-Israelis and the pro-Palestinians — not to persuade them to come to a moderate position, but rather to exploit the most virulent voices in order to generate clicks, while still claiming the cover of journalism. This approach causes real harm by giving extremists a megaphone, and a degree of exposure that all but guarantees that people actually trying to build a better future go unheard.
A recipe for drama
Morgan repeats this formula over and again. In an episode entitled, “Netanyahu CONNED Trump!” Dave Smith, a sidekick to Joe Rogan, accuses Israel of dragging the United States into the Iran war. In “I’m SICK of it!” commentator Megyn Kelly launches into a similar attack on Israel.
Morgan has had long interviews with white supremacist and proud antisemite Nick Fuentes (“What a crock of S***!”). In “STAND for Dead Soldiers!” Morgan hosted four Israelis at the extreme ends of the political spectrum and watched them fight when one refused to stand as a siren sounded to honor Israel’s fallen soldiers.
Not extreme or dramatic enough? How about the time Morgan hosted Crackhead Barney, a Black pro-Palestinian street activist, to explain why she harasses celebrities to get them to say, “Free Palestine.”
“I’m truly shocked/disgusted that @piersmorgan would have this nutjob & clearly unwell person to go on his show and even remotely try to talk about Palestine or the war,” wrote the Gazan-born activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
Alkhatib is a moderate Palestinian who works for a peaceful solution to the conflict. He has, unsurprisingly, not been on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Instead, Morgan’s choice of guests is calculated for maximum friction, a function of an attention economy that monetizes the time people like me spend watching the fights.
From ‘Animal House’ to Piers Morgan
Luring viewers this way isn’t exactly new. President Ronald Reagan called The McLaughlin Group, a current affairs program that ran on public television for 34 years beginning in 1982, “the political equivalent of Animal House”— more drunken frat house than graduate seminar. McLaughlin begat Crossfire, a CNN political debate program hosted by a younger Tucker Carlson that Jon Stewart once compared to pro-wrestling.
In 2025, Morgan, who came up in British tabloids before a long stint at CNN, moved away from traditional broadcast TV and went all in on social media and his YouTube channel.
His success on that platform is part of a larger shift in media from major institutions to independent personalities, and from actual news — the dutiful and expensive process of finding out and relaying what’s actually happening in the world — to opinion that spins itself as reporting, which is far cheaper and more entertaining.
That shift has come as audiences have moved from loyalty to long established institutions to following enterprising, independent personalities. The podcaster Joe Rogan has 20.9 million subscribers; Carlson has 5.6 million; Morgan’s show has 4.42 million subscribers and over 1.36 billion total views.
In other words, Morgan is not some guy some people watch now. He is what people will be watching in the future.
A bias toward extremes
That prospect should alarm us. Morgan’s shows rarely feature people working toward compromise or reconciliation. A Piers Morgan Uncensored discussion spotlighting the many civil society groups in Israel working toward coexistence? A show where he sits down with Arab and Jewish Israelis who share a vision for a common future? A segment that highlights the actual, albeit rare, instances of cooperation?
Pipe dreams. All that is also happening in Israel and the West Bank — but Piers Morgan Uncensored effectively censors it.
Compare that to Jon Stewart, who on The Daily Show last month conducted a long interview with the Palestinian and Israeli co-authors of The Future Is Peace, a book that calls for moving beyond violence and stalemate to a shared future. Same approach — a streaming interview on a hot-button topic, with an eye toward entertainment — but radically different editorial choices.
That episode garnered a mere 400,000 views. Morgan’s comparative millions of eyeballs may, in his mind, justify his guttersweeping approach to international conflict. And in his defense — and mine, for watching — it’s never boring. He can be a thoughtful and provocative interviewer, and his not-ready-for-primetime, self-created show allows him, when he so chooses, to platform voices that more mainstream venues overlook, like former Israeli Speaker of the Knesset and longtime peace activist Avrum Burg.
Alas, he stuck the erudite former statesman with a diehard evangelical and a firebreathing American Jewish conservative pundit. That episode is called, “A SHAME on Judaism!”
Whatever this is, it’s not journalism. But it is the future.
The post Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him appeared first on The Forward.
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Rashida Tlaib Introduces Resolution ‘Recognizing Ongoing Nakba’
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses attendees as she takes part in a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Thursday reintroduced a congressional resolution recognizing the 78th anniversary of what she described as the “ongoing nakba,” using the Arabic term for “catastrophe” deployed by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
The resolution, introduced on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, accuses the Jewish state of carrying out “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” against Palestinians, language that many pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress and advocacy groups strongly reject as inflammatory and inaccurate. The measure also calls for renewed US support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an agency that has faced mounting scrutiny from Israel and several Western governments over allegations that employees participated in or supported Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
In a statement announcing the resolution, Tlaib argued that the so-called nakba “did not end” with the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 and continues today through Israeli military operations and settlement expansion.
“War criminal Netanyahu and his cabinet have repeatedly threatened to ethnically cleanse the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, annex the land, and permanently occupy it. Today, they are extending these same threats towards southern Lebanon,” she said, referring to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and military operations against US-designated terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. “As we mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, we honor all of those killed since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began and all those who have been forced from their homes and violently displaced from their land.”
Activists often invoke the term “nakba” when discussing the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs following Israel’s War of Independence, many of whom left the nascent state for varied reasons, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. At the same time, about 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, primarily in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Tlaib’s resolution is co-sponsored by several prominent progressive Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Ayanna Pressley (MA), and Summer Lee (PA).
The move is likely to draw fierce criticism from pro-Israel lawmakers and Jewish organizations, many of whom argue the resolution ignores the historical context surrounding Israel’s founding and the 1948 war. Israel accepted the United Nations partition plan in 1947 to create two states, one Jewish and one Arab, while neighboring Arab states rejected it and launched a military invasion after Israel declared independence.
The resolution also calls for a so-called Palestinian “right of return,” a demand insisting that potentially millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees should be able to return to the land of Israel, a step that, according to proponents, would result in the abolition of the world’s only Jewish state.
“This immense trauma, including the loss of their loved ones and connections to the communities they grew up in, needs to be repaired. True peace must be built on justice and the inalienable right of return for Palestinian refugees,” Tlaib said in her statement.
While refugees are generally defined as those who flee a country out of credible fear of persecution, UNRWA uniquely defines Palestinian refugees to include all descendants of those who left the land, regardless of where they were born.
Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of the US Congress, has emerged as one of Israel’s loudest critics on Capitol Hill, repeatedly accusing the Jewish state of genocide and drawing rebuke from fellow lawmakers.
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Toronto Sees 50% Drop in 2025 Hate Crimes, Yet 82% of Religiously Motivated Attacks Target Jews
A member of law enforcement personnel works at the scene outside the US Consulate after shots were fired, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, March 10, 2026. Picture taken with a mobile phone. Photo: REUTERS/Kyaw Soe Oo
Even as Toronto recorded an overall decline in reported hate crimes last year, newly released data shows the city’s Jewish community continued to face disproportionately high levels of targeted antisemitism and violence amid an increasingly concerning social climate.
On Thursday, Toronto Police released its annual hate crime statistical report, showing that Jews accounted for 82 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in 2025, compared to 14 percent targeting Muslims.
Even though the Jewish community makes up less than 3 percent of Toronto’s population, officials now warn that Jewish residents are 14 times more likely than other residents to be targeted in a hate incident.
With 81 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded, Jews and Israelis were the targets of 35 percent of all reported hate incidents in the city.
Despite a 50 percent overall decline in reported hate crimes, from 443 in 2024 to 231 in 2025, Toronto has seen a 40 percent increase in such incidents so far this year compared with the same period last year.
Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw noted that, even with the overall decline, the Jewish community continued to be the primary target of hate-motivated offenses.
“We are steadfast in our commitment to confronting hate in all its forms and making it easier for people to come forward and report incidents of hate,” Demkiw said in a press release.
Because police-reported hate crime data only includes incidents that come to the attention of authorities and are later confirmed or suspected to be hate-driven, official figures likely underestimate the true scale of such incidents.
Over the past two years, Toronto authorities have expanded law enforcement capacity and resources to investigate hate crimes by establishing a Counter-Terrorism Security Unit and increasing specialized training for officers, while also strengthening Holocaust education initiatives and introducing digital literacy programs for youth aimed at countering online radicalization.
Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs Vice President Michelle Stock called the latest statistics “deeply alarming,” warning of a broader reality of hostility that Jewish families across the city are confronting on a daily basis.
“Toronto prides itself on being a city where people of all backgrounds can live openly, safely and without fear. Those values are undermined when any community no longer feels secure expressing its identity in public,” Stock said in a statement.
“From synagogues to schools to public displays of Jewish identity, blatant attacks against the Jewish community are becoming more frequent and more brazen,” she continued. “Jewish Canadians are being targeted simply for who they are. No one should have to think twice about wearing a kippah, attending synagogue, sending their children to Jewish schools or participating openly in Jewish life.”
The city’s figures reflect a broader nationwide rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel hostility, with the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada reporting a record high in anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2025 for the second consecutive year, documenting 6,800 such cases across the country.
According to the latest report, antisemitic incidents nationwide increased by 9.3 percent last year, surpassing the previous record total of 6,219 set in 2024.
With an average of 18.6 incidents per day, this figure represents a 145.6 percent increase from 2022, before the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Early 2026 data already indicate the country is now on track to see its most violent year against the Jewish community in recent memory, with more violent antisemitic attacks recorded so far this year than during all of 2025, B’nai Brith Canada reported.
In total, 11 violent antisemitic incidents have already been recorded across the country since January, surpassing the 10 violent cases documented during all of last year
“These brazen attacks on Jewish Canadians are a sign of a crisis of antisemitism that has spiraled out of control,” Simon Wolle, chief executive officer of B’nai Brith Canada, said in a statement.
“Violence such as this, which has escalated from targeting synagogues to targeting Jewish people directly, does not occur in a vacuum. It is what happens when governments fail to act despite mounting evidence that antisemitism is becoming more normalized and dangerous,” Wolle continued.
Last week, a group of Jewish worshippers standing outside the Congregation Chasidei Bobov synagogue in Montreal was targeted in a drive-by shooting, leaving one person with minor injuries.
A week earlier, three visibly Jewish residents were targeted in a separate antisemitic attack when suspects opened fire with a gel-pellet gun, causing minor injuries.