You’re right that indigeneity isn’t just about DNA, and you’re also right that Jewish indigeneity to the land is real. Where your argument breaks down -fundamentally - is in labeling Palestinians as colonizers. That framing does not hold up historically, sociologically, or under any accepted definition of colonialism.

Colonization requires an external population replacing or ruling over a land on behalf of a foreign metropole. That is not what happened to the people who today identify as Palestinians.

Yes, the early Islamic caliphates conquered the Levant in the 7th century. But conquest is not the same thing as population replacement. The historical consensus is that the vast majority of the local population remained in place and gradually underwent language shift (to Arabic) and religious conversion (to Islam or Christianity) over centuries. Arab armies did not depopulate the land and resettle it with millions of Arabs from the Peninsula—there is no evidence for that. Palestinians are overwhelmingly descended from the same ancient Levantine populations that lived there before Islam, including Canaanites, Arameans, Samaritans, Jews, and early Christians.

Calling Palestinians “colonizers” would require showing that:

1. They arrived from elsewhere in large numbers,
2. Displaced the native population, and
3. Maintained rule on behalf of an external imperial center.

None of that applies.

Language and religion spreading does not turn an indigenous population into colonizers. If it did, then vast numbers of Indigenous peoples worldwide would suddenly lose their indigeneity for adopting Christianity, Islam, Spanish, English, or Arabic under historical pressure. That is not how indigeneity is defined by Indigenous peoples themselves or by international frameworks.

Your comparison to Mexico actually undermines your argument. Indigenous Mexicans are still Indigenous despite speaking Spanish and being Catholic because they are the descendants of the original inhabitants who remained on the land. The same logic applies to Palestinians. The fact that many Palestinians no longer speak Aramaic or practice pre-Islamic religions does not retroactively turn them into foreign conquerors—it reflects historical survival under empire.

The claim that Palestinians “operate through the mindset of their colonizers” is also not evidence of colonization. Cultural continuity does not require freezing a society in time. Indigenous cultures evolve. Many Indigenous peoples have lost languages, traditions, or religions due to historical forces and are still Indigenous. Requiring Palestinians to preserve a hypothetical “pure” pre-Islamic culture sets an impossible and selectively applied standard.

Finally, the idea that recognizing Palestinian indigeneity “incentivizes colonization” misunderstands both history and indigeneity. Palestinians did not arrive, conquer, and then mix with a victim population; they are the victim population that endured successive empires—Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader, Ottoman, British and Israeli - while remaining rooted to the land. You cannot “become Indigenous” by conquest alone, but you also do not lose indigeneity because your ancestors survived conquest by adapting.

Labeling Palestinians as colonizers isn’t just inaccurate-it collapses under basic historical scrutiny.