Are indigenous land statements a green light for terrorism?
Michael Rubin
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Indigenous land statements, acknowledgment of peoples who lived on the land in centuries past, first became popular in Australia three decades ago as a way to push back upon the conceit that Australia was “territory without a master” prior to its colonization. Such statements have since spread to Canada and grow increasingly popular on U.S. university campuses. Harvard University, where students rally in support of Hamas and against Israel’s supposed “settler-colonialism,” has one. So does Columbia University, whose faculty members justify Hamas terrorism against the Jewish state. Cornell University, whose Jewish students today face death threats, adopted a land acknowledgment in 2021.
Put aside the virtue signaling of the land statements, or the fallacy of seeing land ownership as anything but fluid over the centuries. Native American tribes fought each other brutally, ethnically cleansed, and often enslaved each other.
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The settler-colonial rubric is also false. Jews are an indigenous people in the land Romans renamed Palestine to punish the rebellious Jews. Palestinian Arab identity is a relatively recent concept that grew in reaction to the immigration of European Zionists beginning in the late 19th century. Many Palestinians who say they are native to the land migrated to the region from Syria around the same time as Jews transformed a backwater into something with more potential. To call Jews colonists is dishonest. By the same standards, Palestinians are settlers. Likewise, if the Jews who immigrated to Palestine nearly 150 years ago are artificial, what does that say about the waves of migrants who settled or resettled in Europe after each World War? Or the Europeans who settled in America four centuries ago?
Those who prioritize academic theory over reality might insist each population represents settler-colonists. They may also argue that multigenerational societies, even those like Israel created by the United Nations, are illegitimate under international law. Enter Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland who was a U.N. high commissioner for human rights, oversaw a resolution that condoned “all available means, including armed struggle,” to establish a Palestinian state. The idea was simple: Israeli occupation made it a lawful target for any group, recognized or not, who declared themselves a resistance organization. Nor did the resolution differentiate between civilian and military targets.
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The problem with so many human rights organizations and activists is they subordinate the law to their own political agendas. Bashing Israel might be popular at the U.N. Human Rights Council or in Harvard Square, but every skewed anti-Israel resolution creates a precedent that radicals can embrace for their own anti-Western, anti-liberal agendas. If the U.N. blessed using “all available means” in response to Israel’s occupation of territory activists define as Palestinian, then by analogy, might descendants of the Massachusett Tribe or those claiming to act on their behalf argue that “armed struggle” is permissible to liberate Cambridge, Massachusetts? If Palestinian activists cited Robinson’s precedent to justify car bombs, why should a car bomb in Harvard Square be illegal? And if descendants of the Cayuga Nation decide to make common cause with the Islamic Republic of Iran to export revolution across upstate New York, why should the Cornell students harassing their Jewish colleagues be any less fair targets for those seeking broader liberation in and around Ithaca?
Ivy League schools are cloistered on the best of days; few are as worldly as they imagine. Progressives might justify the land acknowledgment ritual to atone out of a sense of historical guilt or their own notion of social justice, but the idea that they do no harm is false. The antisemitism we witness on college campuses is a symptom of a broader disease affecting America’s intellectual elite, one that embraces precedents that intersectional enemies of liberalism can cite to bring terrorism into America’s campuses, parks, and shopping malls.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.