Alana Lentin on Zionist Claims of Indigeneity in the Racial Regime of Nativism

Transcript

Alana Lentin on Zionist Claims of Indigeneity in the Racial Regime of Nativism

Welcome to Battling the IHRA definition, a podcast by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. I’m Yulia Gilich, a member of the founding collective of the Institute.

Today’s episode features a recording of Dr Alana Lentin speaking at our October 2023 conference titled “Battling the IHRA Definition: Theory and Activism.” Alana Lentin, also a founding collective member of the Institute, works on critical theorizations of race, racism, and antiracism. Her talk is titled “Zionist Claims of Indigeneity in the Racial Regime of Nativism.”

Dr Lentin explains how the IHRA definition fits into the broader landscape of repression within the so-called war on Critical Race Theory or the war on woke. She looks at Zionist claims of Jewish Indigeneity to Palestine in conjunction with Indigenous politics and settler colonial context of Australia. In October 2023, during our conference, Australia held a referendum called Indigenous Voice to Parliament which if passed would have established an advisory body comprised of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, to represent the views of Indigenous communities in Australian parliament. This referendum, that Dr Lentin references, ultimately failed to pass.

Another piece of context: a few times during the talk, Dr Lentin refers to the slides on the screen. While we edited the recording to be legible in the podcast form so you don’t need to see the images to follow along, a video recording of this presentation is available on our website and is linked in the episode notes. So check out the video, the transcript of this episode, and other resources on the IHRA definition at criticalzionismstudies.org.

And now, here is Dr Alana Lentin with the talk, “Zionist Claims of Indigeneity in the Racial Regime of Nativism.”

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Let me begin by acknowledging the Awaswas people whose land we are on today, also the Gadigal and Wangal people whose land I live and work on. So the context of this paper is a chapter that I haven’t yet written in the book that I am currently writing, which is taking me quite a long time, which is ostensibly on the war on Critical Race Theory. And I look at that as a lens for exploring the current racial regime, you already evoked Cedric Robinson’s work, as obviously I’m using his concept, but also trying to use this methodological framework to do that work.

So I take, just very briefly let me say, my approach to it because I think it’s important. I take the so called war on Critical Race Theory or war on woke as as a strategy of counterinsurgency, to evoke Dylan’s words this morning, that targets Black, Indigenous, and other radical movements against racism and colonialism, for abolition and land back and so on, through the attack on knowledge and study, and which harnesses the neoliberal academic industrial complex that has already been today exposed, as implicated completely in militaries and ideological repression of colonized and marginalized populations around the globe to do its bidding through subversion of the language of academic freedom.

So we can already see, hopefully right at the beginning, how the IHRA definition sits within this archipelago of repression, and in my view, it needs to be placed in constant conversation with the multiple forms taken by racial colonial capitalism, and patriarchal white sovereignty. And I suppose what I bring to this conference, if anything, is a bit of a transnational or international dimension that looks beyond the borders of the US where this fuckery is also happening. So I was already thinking about using the framework of racial regimes. But then I heard this podcast with Robin Kelly. And he said this thing here, which really resonated with what I was doing, so this whole notion is part of a larger quote, in which he says, “… anti-wokeness is the perfect example of functioning of the racial regime.” And I don’t want to go into it too much, because I don’t want to take up too much time. And I think people are aware of this work. But I am taking from Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, the book in which Robinson elaborates on racial regimes. And the part of it that I’m interested in is this notion of racial regimes as being noticeable in being fought back against, and he calls them unstable truth systems that may collapse as he puts it, under the weight of their own artifices, practices, and apparatuses. But that’s why they’re constantly being kind of rebuilt. So the important point for me is that they’re made to appear natural, but obviously, they do possess a history that is discernible, and their mechanisms of assembly need to be kind of exposed. That is what Robinson is saying.

So my interest is in tracking and exposing the recursive recalibration of racial regimes as well as noting their points of weakness, right. So that’s just the background. Hopefully, I haven’t taken up too much time with doing that. So let me get on to what I’m interested in discussing here, which is thinking through the roles of Zionist claims of Jewish Indigeneity in Palestine in this recalibration of the racial regime. And I’m interested in how this works in conjunction with Indigenous politics and settler colonial contexts such as so-called Australia where I am based.

Obviously, there’s a long history of settler claims to Indigeneity. So here’s one example on the screen. This is the leader of the fascist One Nation party in Australia, a woman called Pauline Hanson, who in this video is telling Indigenous teenagers that she is Indigenous because, “I am native to the land. I was born here.” And incidentally, this is the other part of the you know, my interest, obviously, is that Hanson was responsible for passing a motion in the Senate against the teaching of Critical Race Theory. And only if we did have Critical Race Theory in Australia, that would be good, but we don’t have it. So there’s obviously both a right-wing and a so-called progressive version of Jewish claims to Indigeneity in Palestine. But both of them, I argue, formulate a racialized interpretation of Jewishness that denies colonialism and converges with nativism. And this exemplifies, I think, the ways in which racial regimes rely on an amalgamation of cultural, nationalist, and biracial motifs, creating illusions of historical and or scientific certainty, where in fact, there is only chaos, which is something else that Cedric Robinson talks about. While the right obviously wholeheartedly embraces the contradictoriness of its arguments, the confusion within the liberal or progressive stance on the relationship of race, colonialism, and Indigeneity, makes it available to those who want to cement a commitment to Zionism within institutionalized anti-racism, like the IHRA. So like Emmaia said this morning, we need to be also very attentive to what the libs are doing, because they’re probably more dangerous than the global far-right.

So as you’ll know, and let me not spend too long on this, there are long standing Jewish claims to Indigeneity that lay claim to comparisons with other Indigenous peoples. Obviously, there’s a lot of critical work that’s been done on this by historians who really kind of expose the completely mythological nature of all of this. And the right-wing position in many ways that we’re seeing play out in front of our eyes today. But you know, recent examples that you’d be familiar with Tzipi Hotovely, who’s the, you know, Israeli ambassador to London, who bases her claim that quote, “This land is ours, all of it as ours. We did not come here to apologize for that.” She bases that on the Midrash and she expresses Israel’s determination to claim sovereignty over the whole of Historic Palestine. More recently, you had Ben Gvir saying he and his family had more right to live freely in Judea and Samaria than Palestinians have to move freely around the West Bank. And we’ve already heard about the sort of the colonial, Euro-centric, and racist roots of Zionism and obviously these Jewish claims to Indigeneity have always mobilized a racialized conception of Jewishness, which relies on appeals to genetics as Nadia Abu el-Haj, among others, have shown.

Israel obviously is involved in attacks on diaspora Jewry, who are critical or skeptical of the occupation, so not necessarily only explicit anti-Zionist, by endorsing the separation into “good” i.e. Zionist and “bad” i.e. non- or anti-Zionist Jews. Only the former are considered real Jews, thus blurring the genealogical boundaries, in order to excise Jewish opponents of Israel from the boundaries of Judaism inclusion in which Israel asserts the right to define. So more in terms of the right-wing application of this.

Well, progressive Jewish claims to share affinity with Indigenous people cannot escape the fact that allegiance to Zionism more explicitly than ever before means open alignment with racist nativism, white supremacism, which are expressed often in fascist theories such as the great replacement theory, very popular among European white supremacists. So white supremacist allegiance to Zionism stresses the parallels between Zionist expressions of Indigeneity to Palestine, which they also espouse. So Europeans in this context then show themselves to be Indigenous people, much like Pauline Hanson, we are the real Indigenous people and we are being overrun by colonizing migrants, notwithstanding the fact that they also drop a bit of antisemitism in there by saying that it’s all George Soros’s fault at the same time.

So just an example, this is particularly interesting because this is David Starkey, who is a actually a historian of the Tudor Era from the UK, who spoke at the 2023 National Conservatism Conference in London in May 2023. Of course, that’s the organization established by the Israeli Zionist Yoram Hazony. And during that time, you can see the kind of dovetailing with anti-Blackness also, and I apologize with this in advance. But David Starkey gave a speech in which he explicitly, you know, went up against Black Lives Matter, saying “the determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery. In other words, this is why Jews are under such attack from the left. There’s jealousy fundamentally. There is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust, and a determination to replace it with slavery.” So this for me evokes what Rabab was saying earlier about how talking about antisemitism, canceling out any talk of anti-Palestinian racism, or in this case, anti-Black racism, so antisemitism is always on the top.

So where’s the link to Critical Race Theory? Well, obviously, there are Jewish opponents to Critical Race Theory, who are committed to Zionism and who claim that Critical Race Theory holds different standards for Jews and other racial and ethnic minorities on the grounds of what they believe is CRTs inherent anti-Zionism. They claim that CRT posits a binary oppressor-oppressed view, which they associate with, quote, “a habit of descending to antisemitism, as Jews do not ‘fit neatly in either category, because they are antisemiticly associated with having privilege.’” Now this, they propose, leads to a simplification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because Israel is wrongly, in their view, cast in the role of the oppressor. This is from this fellow, David Bernstein, whose book is on the slide.

So both Zionist Jews in the diaspora and Israel as a Jewish state become victimized by a form of reverse racism in this vision. So the inseparability of Jewish identity from Zionism in this view means that these Jewish opponents of CRT endorsed Jewish claims of Indigeneity. However, their rejection of CRT on the basis that it is said to reduce Jews and others’ moral worth, as they put it, to their racial characteristics contradict the reliance of the Indigeneity claim on genetics. So the Jews’ Indigenous position is actually contradicted by the demand that they also have for a post-racial, liberal, individual identity for Jews. However, these contradictions don’t actually imply incompatibility. Rather, what I think they show is the fact that the racial regime does not require coherence, right. These two things can go together.

So, shifting to Australia very briefly. Today, as we speak, people are voting on this Indigenous Voice to Parliament. So the centrist or progressive proponents of claims to Jewish Indigeneity also err on the side of Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Australia. And today this referendum is going to decide on recognizing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the First Peoples of Australia by enshrining an Indigenous advisory voice in the Constitution. Obviously, this has been massively critiqued by many Indigenous people, some are for, some are against. Here you have the Gumbaynggirr historian and Aboriginal Tent Embassy founder Gary Foley saying, “The whole exercise is just yet another effort to put a bit of lipstick on a pig. It’s yet another device to divert the people from the real issues of self-determination, economic and political independence, which have been the consistent Aboriginal political demand since the beginning of Aboriginal activism.” So that’s one side.

But the other side, which is the mainstream No Campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament has often dovetailed with your classical antisemitism. So you have this kind of conspiratorial antisemitism being mobilized. Also, this idea that it’s a globalist plot, all of that is in there. And ahead of today’s protests for Palestine, which is also happening in Sydney, the leader of the racist No Campaign, who’s also the leader of the opposition in the parliament, has said that anyone found protesting on behalf of Palestinians and who’s on a visa should be deported.

Now, this is the part I want to talk about and finish up with. So where are the Jews in all of this? Right? So there are Jews who support the Yes Campaign. And they have appealed to these Jewish claims to Indigeneity in Palestine in order to make their case and have appealed specifically to an affinity between Jews and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders on their shared Indigenous status. So one of the principal actors in the Yes Campaign is this fellow called Mark Leibler who’s the little guy with the glasses in the middle? He’s a tax lawyer. My partner told me I was being antisemitic about him. But anyway, so… Referring to Indigenous people, he has described, “our two peoples as sharing a land-based identity, historical and spiritual.” Referring to Yes Campaign leader Noel Pearson, who’s the guy with the hat, he says about Noel, “Noel also says that Indigenous Australians can and must resist victimhood as the Jewish people have done even in the face of persistent racism and victimization. This is where the voice comes in.” Now, so what I find interesting is that here Leibler is seeking the confirmation of Jewish identity via the appeal to his friend, Noel Pearson, Bagaarrmugu and Guggu Yalanji leader of the Yes Campaign, a longtime conservative Aboriginal leader. He endorses the assimilationist vision of the Yes Campaigns leaders and the Labour government who supports then that’s the fellow behind beside the guy with a hat, he’s the Prime Minister, which calls on Australians to leave the past behind and commit to a vision of the Australian nation into which Indigenous people can be folded by being recognized as the First Peoples but of course, neither compensated for genocide, land theft, child theft, mass incarceration, or anything else, nor enabling them to have pathways to self-determination or even land rights. So this is obviously the politics of recognition writ large, in almost exactly the same way as described by Glen Coulthard in his book Red Skin, White Masks.

So I’ve got a few things that I can say about this, but obviously, that critique of the folding in of Indigenous politics by liberal multiculturalism has been critiqued by Steven Salaita. Morgan Ndlovu makes the point that obviously you can’t discuss Indigeneity without discussing colonialism. In other words, there is no pre-given ontological state of being Indigenous; being Indigenous is only conceived in relation to being colonized. And therefore, the Zionist case for Indigeneity means absolutely nothing. I also dropped in their reference to Derek Penslar’ quite egregious kind of idea that, you know, Zionism is anti-colonial, and so on, and so forth.

But I just want to make this very last point. So all of this returns me to this idea of Robinson’s that it’s necessary to expose the history of racial regimes and situate them within their social context by threatening their authority and sapping them of their vitality, and therefore, undermining their founding myths. So the stakes of doing this work are very high, given the success of Zionist groups via the IHRA to subvert anti-antisemitism into institutionalized anti-racism, and EDI. So in Australia, if this referendum passes, which we’ll know in a few hours time, this will conceivably be made more difficult because there has been almost no pushback against the mobilization of Jewish claims to Indigeneity in support of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. At the same time, there have been few pushbacks against the antisemitic conspiracy theories that have fueled the No Campaign. In terms of the Indigenous proponents of the voice who are aligned with people like Liebler who have visited Israel or who have themselves proclaimed allegiance with Israel as Indigenous people, this is very worrying because Palestinians and anti-Zionists will not necessarily be able to rely on Indigenous leaders, academic or otherwise, to support them, particularly in these heinous times that we are seeing now.

Thank you very much.