The struggle for indigenous rights extends to Palestine

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World Reporter at ThinkProgress Justin Salhani writes about Indigenous People’s Day and Palestine quoting Yousef Munayyer:

“If you look at writings of early Zionists, they have a very different perspective and used colonialism, embraced it, and referred to Palestinians as the native people and indigenous people of the land,” Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, told ThinkProgress. “That was at a time when it wasn’t a dirty word. When it became a dirty word in modern discourse is when they backed away and pretended it wasn’t that.”

Though the struggle of the indigenous people of the American continent has lasted centuries longer than that of the Palestinians, some of the parallels are still instructive.

“I think those parallels are real, including this connection of people to the land in a very unique way that differs from colonists,” Munayyer said. “It’s hard not to think about the experience of Native Americans and Palestinians as a similar and shared experience given the histories.”