A front page New York Times article headlined "Israel Struggles With Its Identity" includes this passage:
Few would dispute that, say, France can be both a French homeland and a democracy with non-French citizens, but Israel is a different case, not least because its Arab and Druse minorities are indigenous, not immigrant.
There are so many false assumptions packed into that single sentence that it's hard to unpack, but for starters, recall that the Franks themselves, as one website puts it, "were actually a Germanic people who decided to conquer the Gallic territory from the East." Israel's Druze came from Syria and Lebanon, while there's a plausible story that says the Palestinian Arabs are related somehow to the Philistines who came from the Greek Islands at roughly the same time that the children of Israel made their Exodus from Egypt and return to Canaan. In other words, categorizing some people as "indigenous" and others as "immigrant" is a dangerous and selective game. It's not clear why the Times would label Arabs and Druze as "indigenous" to Israel and imply at the same time that the Jews, on the other hand, are immigrants.
Update: G.L. adds:
1) Mainland (aka "Metropolitan") France has indigenous minorities such as the Bretons and the Basques -- not to mention people in Alsace from German stock. France also still rules various territories it colonized, such as:
- Tahiti with its indigenous Polynesian population;
- The Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, populated mainly by descendents of African slaves;
- French Giuana in South America, with many indigenous Indians and descendents of African slaves;
- Mayotte and Réunion Islands in Africa, with a mainly indigenous population.
2) I think in illustrating the problems in defining indigenous vs immigrant in Israel, The Philistine-Palestinian connection is the least plausible example. Much more glaring is the Arabians conquering, occupying and the land and forcibly converting much of the population in the 7th century, and the well-documented waves of Arab immigration in the 20th century from Syria, Egypt and elsewhere, drawn in by the jobs created by the expanding Jewish population. That is why UNRWA has as its very unique definition of a "refugee" as "persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948," because so many Arabs were newcomers or migrants.
