#judea

I am begging activists to open a history book. Calling Jesus "Palestinian" isn't just illiterate, it’s offensive historical revisionism.

Jesus was a Jew from Judea. The name "Palestine" was a Roman colonial invention applied over a century after he died specifically to erase Jewish connection to the land. He was a Jew living under Roman occupation - the Jews were the oppressed indigenous population, not the "occupiers."

The most hilarious part? Jesus was a Jew, and Jews aren’t even allowed to live in Bethlehem today. You are claiming a "Palestinian Jesus" in a city where the actual Jesus would be banned from entering because of his ethnicity.

This may be controversial, I don't know - but please hear me out. I think it's time we started phasing out and objecting to the terms "Jew" and "Jewish" for ourselves; and for that matter, "antisemitism" as the word for racism/xenophobia against us. This may be rather radical to some, but it really isn't if you look at the approach other indigenous peoples have had to this same problem. It is more respectful to call Diné people Diné than "Navajo", for instance; I myself am half Amazigh, and while the term "Berber" still sees use, it is widely being rejected as disrespectful. I am convinced it's time for Judeans - Yehudim - to follow this approach. The words "Jew" and "Jewish" (or, for that matter, their equivalents in most languages of peoples who oppressed us) were not our creations, and while we have put substantial time into getting comfortable using them (whether it be through the insistence on "Jewish people" or even reclaiming old slurs like "Jewess"), I think it's time we accepted that they've done more harm to us than good.

Calling us "Jews", "Juden", "Juifs", etc., has so often been used as a slur, and more than just that: it actively distances us from our roots in a way that's made our sociopolitical alienation easier. "Jewish" also has myriad problems; how many times have we heard ignorant Judeophobes insist that we aren't "real" Jews/Israelites/Hebrews - merely "Jew-ish". It's distortions like these that have made the job of those hostile to us easy, and our job in combating them all the more frustrating. A "Jew" has no country, can be called "just a religion", can be called "the Jew" as if a mere abstraction, an object. "Jewish" people - even if recognized as people - need not truly be what we claim to be. Our own indigenous name for ourselves - Yehudi, Yisraeli - generally does not share these problems. It can't be said that a Yehudi is "-ish". A Judean is very unambiguously of Judea, just as a Russian is of Russia or a Japanese person is of Japan; or a Diné of Dinétah; or an Amazigh is of Tamazgha.

Antisemitism is another term that was invented by our oppressors, and has been twisted more recently to use as another form of identity-denial. Antisemitism as an imagined form of racism against "Semites" may have made sense in the 19th Century when A.) the only real "Semites" familiar to Europeans were Judeans, and B.) "Semite" was conceived of as a "race", but in the 21st Century there is absolutely no reason to keep using a term that is routinely misunderstood to be applicable to any and all "Semites" (look no further than popular antizionists claiming the oppression of Palestinians is itself "antisemitism" because Arabs are "Semites"). It's ironic how the concept of the "Semite" was invented to oppress Israelis and Arabs alike, but once Israelis declared independence the Arab response seems to have been embracing a proud racial "Semite" identity so hard that many now actively wish to exclude Jews from it - with the side-effect that, well, "antisemitism" against Judeans might as well not exist, because we are not "real Semites" to these people. Judeophobia is a far better term for prejudice against Judeans; and it makes it seem less exotic/unique. Judeophobia is of a kind with Sinophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. It's hatred of a particular group. "Antisemitism" is an antiquated and ambiguous word whose utility to fight Judeophobia has been increasingly outweighed by its utility to the Judeophobes themselves.

They call us settlers in the land that gave us our name. The word “Jew” comes directly from Judea. The Hebrew Yehudi, a person from Yehudah, passed into Greek as Ioudaios, into Latin as Iudaeus, through Old French as Giu, and into Middle English as Iew. Britannica states it plainly: the term Jew is derived through Latin and Greek from the Hebrew word for a person from Judea. The land named the people.  The people never fully left. And two thousand years later, now that we are coming home, the world calls us settlers with a word that literally means we are from here. Make it make sense.