Pat Johnson and Dr. Sheree Trotter at the University of Victoria on June 14, hosted by the Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island. <\/i>(photo by Janet Dirks)<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019ve seen happen in New Zealand with our indigenous movement is that Palestine has been held up as a way to fight against what\u2019s happening in our country with our indigenous people,\u201d New Zealand writer and academic Dr. Sheree Trotter told those gathered at the University of Victoria on June 14.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cSo, what we do is that we identify with the Palestinians and we see them as brown, oppressed indigenous people; we see Israel as the Western foreign colonizers.\u201d In this context, she said, the antizionist argument is reduced to one of settler colonialism, despite the differing histories of places like New Zealand, Canada and Palestine.<\/p>\n At the Victoria event, which was hosted by the Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island, Trotter, who is of Te Arawa iwi origin, spoke on the topic Indigeneity and Zionism Versus Settler Colonialism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cEach of these topics could be a whole university course,\u201d Trotter acknowledged at the outset. Before talking about Zionism, she explained its standard definition: the right of self-determination and statehood for Jews in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.<\/p>\n Trotter said there have been several streams of thought that have led to the current antizionist movement, including the views of the Nazis, who saw Jews as conspiratorial subversives, and Soviet antizionism, which depicted Zionism as a global and racist conspiracy. Added to the mix, Trotter said, are Arab nationalist and Islamic movements and, more recently, Western settler-colonial theory.<\/p>\n Settler colonialism, Trotter said, is an ideology that has developed within academia as a particular kind of colonialism. The key feature of it is an imperial power that has sent its people to a foreign land to settle permanently.<\/p>\n \u201cIn this way, you create this binary that you\u2019ve got two classes of people. You may call it the oppressor and the oppressed, the colonizer or the colonized, these sorts of ideas. This binary erases complexity. It\u2019s not accurate. It\u2019s not true to history,\u201d Trotter said.<\/p>\n Using the example of the M\u0101ori in New Zealand, Trotter explained some of the problems in the settler-colonialist argument.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no room for nuance or complexity, no room for indigenous agency \u2013 the fact that, in my case, M\u0101ori embraced many of the new things that came, new technologies, modernity, certainly literacy,\u201d she said. \u201cIn embracing Christianity, M\u0101ori turned away from tribal warfare, from cannibalism, from slavery, because they adopted a new way of thinking. Under settler colonialism, you don\u2019t get to hear any of the good things that might have happened. It\u2019s all just labeled as oppression and bad.\u201d<\/p>\n More broadly, she argued, the settler-colonialist theory does not fully consider that many of the people who arrived in places like Canada and New Zealand were poor immigrants who do not fit the settler-colonialist power paradigm.<\/p>\n Regarding Israel, the settler-colonial standpoint is a tremendous stretch, said Trotter, because Jews, with more than 3,500 years of continuous connection to the land, are not foreign to Israel.<\/p>\n \u201cIn M\u0101ori thinking, we have a concept called ahik<\/i>\u0101, which means keeping the fires burning. If a tribe wanted to keep their connection to a piece of land, it would keep a fire on that land. It\u2019s symbolic of the idea that somebody stayed on the land, even in small numbers,\u201d she said. \u201cNow, we\u2019re finding the fact that there\u2019s always been a Jewish presence in the land. Even though very small at times, they\u2019ve kept ahik\u0101, they\u2019ve kept the fires burning, they\u2019ve kept a continuous connection.\u201d<\/p>\n Trotter is the co-founder, with former member of New Zealand\u2019s House of Representatives Alfred Ngaro, of the Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem and the Indigenous Coalition for Israel, nonprofits established to provide representation in Jerusalem for\u00a0<\/span>indigenous peoples from around the world. Her latest book, Zionism at the Ends of the Earth: A Story of Humanitarianism and Identity<\/i>, chronicles the social history of the Zionist movements in New Zealand to 1948.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Following her talk, Trotter sat down for an interview and to answer audience questions with journalist Pat Johnson, a member of the Jewish Independent<\/i> editorial board and founder of Upstanders Canada, an organization working to encourage non-Jewish Canadians to take a stand against antisemitism and antizionism.<\/p>\n The event attracted some protest. According to organizers, the technician who was scheduled to work that evening walked off the job before the event started because of their objection to the subject matter. And, in the middle of Trotter\u2019s talk, a few members of the Jewish Faculty Network of Vancouver Island held up signs rejecting claims of Jewish indigeneity in the Middle East and protesting Israel\u2019s military actions; the group was escorted out of the auditorium without incident.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sam Margolis <\/b>has written for the <\/i>Globe and Mail, the <\/i>National Post, UPI and MSNBC.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pat Johnson and Dr. Sheree Trotter at the University of Victoria on June 14, hosted by the Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island. (photo by Janet Dirks) \u201cWhat we\u2019ve seen happen in New Zealand with our indigenous movement is that Palestine has been held up as a way to fight against what\u2019s happening in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49293,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[24645,23817,24937,24938,4330,2944,24939,24936,22202,1581],"class_list":["post-49292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-antizionism","tag-indigeneity","tag-indigenous-coalition-for-israel","tag-indigenous-embassy-jerusalem","tag-israel","tag-new-zealand","tag-settler-colonialism","tag-sheree-trotter","tag-upstanders-canada","tag-zionism"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}