Claim

Arabs and not Jews are the indigenous people of Palestine/Israel

Fact

ALSO check out http://www.0censor.com/did-israel-steal-the-ancestral-home-of-the-palestinians-part-2/ showing Arabs immigrated much later

In Short: Because the Arabs' culture originated in Arabia they are indigenous to Arabia. Jewish culture originated in Israel which makes them indigenous to Israel.

Full Answer:

To understand this you need to understand what the term indigenous means. It refers to cultures (including religion, language, traditions etc).

Some answers here make an assumption of what indigenous means. It’s an adverb that means “originating or occurring naturally in a place”.

A few people on Quora incorrectly try to place Palestinians as the indigenous people of Israel. That’s incorrect because Palestinians are Arabs who transferred their Arabic culture, religion etc to the land of Israel. It didn’t originate or occur naturally there, it occurred naturally in Arabia.

While many Palestinians may have heritage based on conversion to Islam from Christianity and previously from Judaic culture they are still Arabised. This occurred starting around 632 CE during the Arab conquest of the Levant. These people on the whole traded their culture for a culture originating in the Arabian Peninsula in order to to survive. Therefore they became a part of a foreign culture to the one they were born into and their decedents lost that original culture completely. Their descendants basically joined another (conquering) nation.

I am British, I have a British culture, speak English and have British traditions. My ancestors maybe from Rome or Denmark or France but they didn’t keep whole or even partly intact their language, traditions, national dress and culture, they assimilated. Therefore they joined the British Nation and became British themselves.

It’s not a genealogy based thing, it’s cultural.

Palestinian Arabs are Arabs in every sense, so their culture is native to the Arabian gulf. Unlike my forefathers who assimilated, these Arabs kept the culture they are indigenous to. They also Arabised other cultures. This is a well documented historical fact.

Here is a similar example of how migration affects indigenaety. Many people here in the UK are indigenous to somewhere else. A Polish person here in the UK who has a Polish flag in his car and speaks Polish fluently, eats Kabanos and celebrates the holidays in a traditional Polish customary way is a Polish Brit. He is integrated but not assimilated. He is therefore indigenous to Poland but a citizen of Britain. Politically he’s British but indigenously he’s still Polish. One day his descendents might give up everything Polish and become indigenously British.

Palestinians speak Arabic and are either Muslim or Christian by religion. Christianity is indeed a religion that is indigenous to the region but Islam is indigenous to the Arabian Peninsula. Palestinian Nationalism is barely older than the 1960s. Their flag is the Arab Revolt flag. The same flag used by the Ba’ath Party of Arab Nationalism and a flag used in the Early days by Saudi Arabia. The Christians on the other hand are still Arabised but their religion is a local one however it originated with Judaism, because Jesus (their patriarch) was a Jew, had a Brit Milah, a Bar Mitzva, read the Torah in Hebrew etc.

Jews are indigenous to Israel wether they were a part of the Diaspora or wether they are descendents of Jews who never left the territory throughout the various occupations. In fact over 50% of the population of Israel are Mizrahi Jews from Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Iraq etc and of course Eretz Yisrael itself.

Why are Diaspora Jews indigenous to Israel? Well it’s simple. Jews kept their culture, religion, language (Biblical Hebrew) and on the whole tried to keep their bloodlines as far as possible. Although they maybe a little mixed now, for the vast majority of them, their mitochondrial DNA still carries genes that tie them to the Levant but that’s irrelevant to indigenaety because their customs, language, culture and religion are what makes them indigenous, but even taking DNA into consideration it’s why you can on the whole say a Jew often looks Jewish. The relatively small amount of converts added genetic diversity to the nation but it’s no different from a Black British guy being just as British as me. And I’m not a Jew by the way.

Jews made way more effort to be a nation in exile and keep their indigenous identity than practically any people’s in human history. We should stop trying to hand over their history and indigenous status to other people.

Hope that clears up indigenaety for you.

Source