Indigeneity as Cultural Resistance – Notes on the Palestinian Struggle within 21st Century Israel

Abstract

This article examines closely the Palestinian cultural resistance in the Galilee as an antidote to the Israeli claim of Jewish indigeneity and policies of oppression.

It begins by discussing the application of the term indigenous to the Palestinians in Israel; an application that is to this very day contested by scholars who prefer to see the Palestinian community as a national group engaged, with other Palestinian groups in a national liberation struggle.

The article focuses on various projects and highlights in particular projects that reconstruct the pre 1948 Palestine as means both of commemorating the Nakba as well accentuate and reaffirm the Palestinian indigeneity.

It concludes by pointing this kind of cultural struggle both as complimenting, rather the demoting, the national struggle, and at time as a struggle that on the face of it, has a chance of prevailing due the lack of interest or ignorance of the settler colonial state and its project of Judaization of the Galilee and the rest of Palestine.