People have been moving into Palestine/Israel for thousands of years, but following the Nakba and the establishment of the Israeli state the presence in the country of people who are neither Jewish nor Arab (NJNAs) has been invisibilized. This contribution begins to imagine a decolonising project that includes NJNAs, mobilising ethical injunctions from the Jewish and Muslim traditions that valorise migration and cut against (bi-)nationalism.
If any country has historically been open to human movements, it is Palestine-Israel. Long before written history, some of the earliest migrations out of Africa passed through the country. Following the Neolithic Revolution, it became a zone of conflict and exchange between centres of agricultural civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia and developed maritime links to the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. The empires which occupied it thanks to its strategic location often exported and imported populations, from the Assyrians’ expulsion of the northern kingdom of the Israelites (Ben-Dor Benite, 2009) to the Ottoman implantation of Muslim populations in the 19th century (Abbasi, 2003; Bram, 2003).
Some of these conquests were associated with a growth in the country’s religious importance to polities based outside it, whether Christian or Muslim. But while the traumatic and spectacular migrations associated with war and occupation are better documented, there is no reason to think that more pacific movements along routes of commercial and religious exchange were any less consequential in the long term. However they got there, people of greatly diverse origins no doubt found themselves settling down in the country, and it is no surprise that Palestinians are genetically related to Egyptians, Lebanese, Iranians, Cretans, Macedonians, Sardinians, Algerians, Spaniards, French, Italians, Basques, and, of course, Jews (Arnaiz-Villena et al., 2001).