The Zionist claim to Palestine, over other
proposals for a Jewish state, was based on the notion that Jews had a
hereditary right to the land that outweighed the equivalent
nationalist claims of the local
Arabs. According to
Mahmood Mamdani, the
Knesset unanimously codified the notion of Jewish indigeneity in Israel legally with the 1950
Law of Return, which grants any Jewish person in the world
citizenship upon entering the territory, whereas Palestinian Arabs, even if
born in the recently established State of Israel
to parents who had never left the territory, had to meet the criteria of the
1952 Citizenship Law. Part of that claim is based on the length of Jewish settlement in Palestine, so debates on
Palestinian archaeology and
Biblical archaeology have often focused on establishing or refuting Jewish indigeneity in the land. Archaeologist Brett Kaufman notes that archaeological and epigraphic evidence corroborates Jewish indigeneity in ancient Israel comes from multiple independent ancient sources outside the Hebrew Bible. Examples he cites include a 9th-century Aramaic inscription known as the
Tel Dan Stele, excavated in northern Israel, which references both a "King of Israel" and the "
House of David," providing non-biblical attestations of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as well as the Davidic dynasty. A Neo-Assyrian royal inscription dating to 701 BC names
Hezekiah, king of
Judah, and describes
Jerusalem as his royal seat, corroborating the biblical account. noting that in the early work of Israeli researchers, there was "a struggle to reconcile their belief in the biological unity-qua-shared historical origins of the Jews with the 'fact' of phenotypic evidence to the contrary." According to Abu El Haj, "Jews were presumed to be 'a people' descended from the
Israelites who were exiled from ancient Palestine," a view she considers "crucial to the ideology of settler-nationhood—to an understanding of
Jewish settlement in Palestine as a project of return—that formed the bedrock of the Israeli state."
Ilan and Carol Troen say that both Jews and the international community historically viewed Jewish presence in the land as indigenous until relatively recently. According to them, Palestinian Arabs began adopting an "indigeneity argument" in the 1990s to position themselves as the sole legitimate indigenous population. They argue this shift involved a re-framing of Jews as foreign invaders through a settler-colonial paradigm. They assert that claims denying a connection between modern and historical Jews lack factual basis, characterizing such arguments as a form of
supersessionism intended to challenge the legitimacy of the State of Israel. According to anthropologists Rachel Z Feldman and Ian McGonigle, "Israeli settler organizations and allied American-Jewish lobbyists have responded to international condemnation of the occupation by mobilizing narratives of indigeneity, claiming sovereign and divine rights to the land." Major Zionist organizations including the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the
American Jewish Committee, and the Israel Action Network of the
Jewish Federations of North America have stated that Jews are Indigenous to the Land of Israel. In 2015, a proposal titled "Recognition of the Jewish People as Indigenous to the Land of Israel" was submitted and approved by a 51% vote in favor at the
World Zionist Congress. The bill's author stated that the bill rejects "the core anti-Israel accusation that Jews are foreign colonialists in the country and instead affirms that the Jewish people have indigenous rights to live in their ancestral home." The proposal was opposed by the liberal Zionist organization
J Street, the Reform movement's
ARZA, and the Conservative movement's
Mercaz USA, among other organizations. Writing on the blog of the
New Zealand Jewish Council in 2024,
Ben Kepes has argued that "Indigeneity and colonialism" are "not useful metaphors for Israel", citing Jewish presence in the land for thousands of years. ==Palestinians as indigenous==