Rabbi Yaakov Menken

You write this because you are a racist, filled with hate against Jews. Behold the founding of Tel Aviv on empty sand dunes, displacing no one. Dizengoff, who has a central square named after him, hoped the city would be a model of modern Jewish-Arab peace. Now do Jerusalem, which means something in only one language: Hebrew. It means City of Peace. When you claim these places rightly belong to someone else, QED you hate Jews, history, and the Bible.

You write this because you are a racist, filled with hate against Jews. Behold the founding of Tel Aviv on empty sand dunes, displacing no one. Dizengoff, who has a central square named after him, hoped the city would be a model of modern Jewish-Arab peace. Now do Jerusalem, which means something in only one language: Hebrew. It means City of Peace. When you claim these places rightly belong to someone else, QED you hate Jews, history, and the Bible.

Who Weeps for the Olive Trees When They Are Cut Down, and Who Burns and Uproots Them Without Remorse? Palestinians, Indigeneity, and the Evidence of History and Genetics For over four thousand years, the people of Palestine have lived, worked, and created in the Levant, leaving behind a continuous trail of culture and memory that no conqueror or settler-colonial project has ever erased. Their connection to the land is not just written in DNA, though genetics now confirms what Palestinians have always known. It is inscribed in architecture, in terraced hillsides built to conserve water; in the olive groves that families have tended for generations; in the fishing villages that dot the coast; and in the bustling markets of cities like Gaza, Hebron, Jaffa, and Jerusalem where trade has bound communities together since antiquity. Palestinian culture embodies this unbroken presence. Women’s embroidered thobes carry the motifs of villages passed down through centuries, each stitch recording identity and belonging. Traditional foods, olives, figs, za’atar, and lentils, echo ancient diets known from archaeology and scripture alike. The rhythms of life, from planting and harvest festivals to wedding songs and oral poetry, root Palestinians in the same soil their ancestors farmed thousands of years ago. Even as empires rose and fell, Canaanite, Israelite, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman, the people of Palestine remained, adapting while preserving continuity. This is the hallmark of indigeneity: not a fossilized identity, but a living culture shaped by and inseparable from the land. Genetics now confirms what this cultural record already makes obvious: Palestinians are the closest living descendants of the ancient peoples of the southern Levant. But even without DNA, one can recognize who is indigenous by asking: who weeps for the olive trees when they are cut down, and who burns and uproots them without remorse? The answer lies not in abstract ancestry claims, but in the lived relationship between people and place. Palestinians’ enduring care for their land, its soil, its groves, its water, is the clearest testament to their indigenity. Genetic and Historical Continuity in the Levant The modern political conflict over Palestine has produced competing claims of indigeneity. Zionist discourse often asserts a direct and exclusive Jewish link to ancient Israelites, while denying or minimizing Palestinians’ historical presence. In contrast, Palestinians and many scholars argue that their continuous residence, culture, and ancestry in the land make them the true indigenous people. This paper integrates two major strands of evidence, population genetics and historical continuity, to argue that Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine. Genetic Evidence of Deep Continuity Bronze and Iron Age Ancestry Ancient DNA has revolutionized our understanding of Levantine ancestry. Lazaridis et al. (2016) showed that Bronze Age Levantines were a genetic mixture of earlier Neolithic Levantine farmers and populations with ancestry linked to the Caucasus and Zagros mountains. This genetic profile persisted into the Iron Age, the period of ancient Israel and Judah. Modern Palestinians and other Levantines retain this same signature, indicating continuity from Canaanite and Israelite populations to the present (Haber et al., 2020). 1

You write this because you are a racist, filled with hate against Jews. Behold the founding of Tel Aviv on empty sand dunes, displacing no one. Dizengoff, who has a central square named after him, hoped the city would be a model of modern Jewish-Arab peace. Now do Jerusalem, which means something in only one language: Hebrew. It means City of Peace. When you claim these places rightly belong to someone else, QED you hate Jews, history, and the Bible.

Someone should ask Rabbi Yaakov what’s buried in the sand on Tel Aviv’s beaches.

You write this because you are a racist, filled with hate against Jews. Behold the founding of Tel Aviv on empty sand dunes, displacing no one. Dizengoff, who has a central square named after him, hoped the city would be a model of modern Jewish-Arab peace. Now do Jerusalem, which means something in only one language: Hebrew. It means City of Peace. When you claim these places rightly belong to someone else, QED you hate Jews, history, and the Bible.

You write this because you are a racist, filled with hate against Jews. Behold the founding of Tel Aviv on empty sand dunes, displacing no one. Dizengoff, who has a central square named after him, hoped the city would be a model of modern Jewish-Arab peace. Now do Jerusalem, which means something in only one language: Hebrew. It means City of Peace. When you claim these places rightly belong to someone else, QED you hate Jews, history, and the Bible.