The land flows with milk and honey

A conversation with Ben M Freeman

I am indigenous to Ben Maxwell Freeman. I jest, but I am. We are deeply rooted to one another and that is a bond that will never break. Ben and I grew up in Glasgow together, and met at nursery when we were three-years-old. I am older than Ben. Ben is wiser than me. Ben and I grew up in Scotland, but went to a Jewish primary school, separate non-denominational high schools, and we both led Jewish and Zionist youth groups locally. We were both closet gays until we weren't, and we were both very excited to go the Spice Girls reunion tour at the O2 in London in 2008. Ben studied politics in Glasgow. I studied law in Manchester. When I went off to become a rock journalist in London, Ben began his own non-profit focused on Holocaust education, and we both began to publicly advocate against the risen tides of antisemitism in the past five years, with Ben becoming an acclaimed author on the subject, and building a movement around the notion of Jewish Pride. His first book titled Jewish Pride was published in 2021, with his second Reclaiming Our Story a year later. In February 2025 he is set to release the final book in his trilogy, titled The Jews: An Indigenous People.

Today is World Indigenous Peoples Day, and so it's my honor to share my platform here with an expert in all things Jews and Indigenous Rights. Over to the man in my life, Ben M Freeman.

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Ben, we never knew the word indigenous back in Glasgow. When did you first hear about “indigenous Jewish rights”, framed in that way, and why did you start talking about it?

Ben: “You're right. We didn't hear about it growing up at all. Our relationship with Israel was only spoken about through a narrow religious lens, which I would refer to as – our myths.”

You mean like Greek myths?

“Yes. A lot of our myths are based on memory. They have traces of historical fact, but there's extrapolation. So, for instance, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were likely real people but there are questions about whether they're related, and in what order they came, etc. In the last five years, I started using the descriptor of Israel as an indigenous land and we the Jews as an indigenous people but there was no rubric to demonstrate why. When I started writing the book, I had an open mind about being proven wrong about this.”

So where did you start to look for a rubric?

“The UN created a declaration for the rights of indigenous people and they have seven criteria for identifying indigineity, but not for defining it. The indigenous experience is too broad and diverse. The UN doesn't identify the Jews as indigenous per their own criteria. So in the book I'm analyzing their criteria and offering a definition of my own. And using theirs against them to argue that the UN is wrong, and that we Jews are indigenous to that land.”

How do the UN square helping to establish the state of Israel in 1948 as the Jewish state but not recognizing it as the indigenous land of the Jews?

“Excellent point. For thousands of years the Jewish relationship to Israel was uncontested. No one doubted it. In Europe we were seen as foreigners. The Mizrahim were understood as being local to the Middle East and North Africa. If you look at the mandate laid out by the League of Nations it talks about “reconstituting” the land. That word is important. They weren’t creating or imagining but reconstituting. So while the language is different, it acknowledged what we would call indigineity. We started to see an attack on Jewish peoplehood and indigineity in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, re-framing Jews as a religion in the Christian sense of the word. For the most part, people understood that we came from Israel. But the Soviet Union and the Arabs changed the perception. In an article set out by the Palestinians in 1968 they write that the Jews are a religious people who don't belong to any land. Between that and the Cold War, we saw a re-framing.”

Are the Jews one of the oldest indigenous people on the planet?

“It's a good question. I don't know. There are probably Chinese indigenous people who are older. There are the Babylonians, the Iraqis. The difficulty with the Middle East is that a lot of these people have been Arabised. So it's complicated. We're certainly very old.”

Do you think that in the progressive world, it's poking the bear to use words like “indigenous” when we're talking about Israel? Does it piss people off?

“Perhaps. But I don't care. I always say that our identity is not based on how we're treated, but on the truth. I've used the metric which exists to assess indigeneity created by the UN, and proved pretty conclusively that we are indigenous to land. So I don't care – it's not about them, it’s about us. This book is not about the Palestinians. This is about Jewish identity. I'm a Jew writing about our experience. Their indigenous identity is a different study. This is about looking inwards, and not concerning ourselves with the wider world. Post October 7, it's important that we have a developed understanding of our identity, particularly with Israel. What I'm trying to do is put words, theory and history on the table to explain how people feel.”

You just came back from a trip to Israel. How did you feel?

“I felt at home. Why is that? It's not just that we're from there, it's because of the continuity which exists, and the emotional relationship we have with the land. Jews get off the plane in Israel and kiss the ground. Undoubtedly it will piss people off to talk about our indigenous rights, and I'm not doing it to be provocative. It's important. I'm uncovering a layer of identity that already exists, and claiming it. We should define ourselves as indigenous. You have to be an active participant in your own identity.”

It's ironic that there's an obsession with the Palestinians as refugees but nobody ever talks about how the Jewish people were refugees for thousands of years…

“Yes. The non-Jewish world have seen us and defined us through their experience and ideas of the world. You're right. We developed for 1000 years in the land. Putting aside the Torah as a historical document, archaeologists date the origins of the Jewish people to 1200 BCE. We were expelled from the land in about 135 CE but prior to that we built a civilization there. Then for 2000 years we were expelled and became the wandering Jew. Even in that trope there's a recognition that we were exiled from our home. No one has any interest in understanding the Jewish experience and our identity because of the role we play in the wider world. People don't want to grapple with us. They prefer to see us as symbols. They prefer to use us to define themselves. There's a cognitive dissonance between The Jew and the Jewish people. Our situation as Jews today is unique because we now have a home to go back to. It's the truth, and the other side have lied. There's a quote from the Mufti of Jerusalem in my book where he says that after excavations it was found that the Jews have no connection to the land. That is a barefaced lie.”

The Arabs built on top of our civilization to cover up our connection to the land.

“Yes. A lot of the book is based around archaeology. There's a ton of archaeology but very little available to us, because the Arabs built on top of us. We don’t have access to the Temple Mount. We can't excavate because of the political situation. The festival of Tisha B'Av is next week. That is a symbol of our continuity. We have this history to remember. That's astonishing. We're still here. There is living history. There is proof. The continuity exists in so many different forms. One is genetic – 90% of Jews have a genetic connection to the Middle East. Then we have our festivals, our traditions, which all go back to the land. Circumcision was a practice done in the land that was codified in the Torah, and the vast majority of Jewish men are still circumcised. It's remarkable. We have been warped into seeing ourselves through a Christian idea of religion, so we haven't acknowledged all these facets of our continuity, nor where they place us – in the land. Even our names are the same: Cohen, Levi. My name is Ben – which means, son of. The names of the 12 tribes: Dan, Binyamin, Rubin, Simian. I know people with those names. We sing “L’shana Haba B’Yerushalayim”. Next year in Jerusalem. The continuity is extraordinary. Religion is just a part of it.”

People say to me all the time – you're just a white girl from Scotland, shut up. They have no understanding of the Jewish internal experience that renders you stranger than the people you grow up with in the Diaspora.

“Right, and in our specific upbringing, we were people who lived in Scotland but maintained a connection to Israel. We went to a Jewish school. We wore blue and white on Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel’s Day Of Independence). We ate Israeli food. We learned Israeli dancing. We were involved in community. We went to Israel on our gap years. We prayed. My siblings made aliyah. You have a deep connection to Israel. It doesn't matter where you are. It's our misfortune that we were expelled. Our history was interrupted. We should have been able to have developed in our land, and it had an impact on us. So our situation is different. We didn't develop in our land. Everything in Glasgow was Zionist. And not just political, but emotional.

I started writing the book before October 7, but especially after October 7 we need to know who we are so we can conceptualize why we feel the way we do. Why is it so moving to be in Israel? To see the hostage posters? To feel the connection? We're indigenous and we feel connected to our land and each other. Non-Jews don’t get to tell us who we are. I had this realization while traveling to Australia that Judaism is our indigenous religion. Secular Jews often reject the Torah and say that it's not part of our relationship with Israel, that we're not going to say it's ours because God promised us the land. That's why I got a new tattoo that reads “the land flows with milk and honey”. That's not what we're saying.

In the Torah there's an explanation about how the land came to be ours. That is supremely significant when discussing indigineity. How would anyone treat those stories when it comes to other indigenous peoples, like the Maori? We wouldn't tell them that's insignificant. Besides, the Torah is only one part of it. We have archaeology, we have genetics, we have epigraphic evidence, we have practices. And we have narrative. They say that the reason the Torah begins with God creating the world is so they can explain how Israel could be God's to give. That's sophisticated from a storytelling, identity-building perspective that dates back 3000 years. If we're rejecting the non-Jewish world's ideas we have to know our story and be literate in our history so we can explain it to the world.”

It is also important to de-politicise Zionism…

“Yes! 100%. For thousands of years, Jewish indigeneity was not political. It was just a fact. It's become political. Zionism is our indigenous rights movement, and the world recognized it, while using different language. In saying they were going to reconstitute the land, they recognized that Zionism was our indigenous movement.”

The ultimate tool that's used against us is the dual loyalty accusation - that Jews cannot be trusted because their loyalty truly lies to Israel and not the country of their birth. How do our indigenous rights relate to the dual loyalty accusation?

“Great question. I have a dual connection, not dual loyalty. It's a tainted term. I'm British. There are aspects of my personality, my value system, my cultural expression which came from the UK. I love the King and the Royals. I am also a Jew, and indigenous to the land of Israel. We don't accuse other indigenous people of having dual loyalty. A Maori person is able to be born in Europe and still be considered Maori and part of whichever society they live in. It's an accusation only targeted at Jews. And the tragedy is that the instinct in the UK is to say – No, I'm a British person. We have to find a more developed way to talk about it, and the answer is to say – I'm a British citizen and I am part of this society. I vote, I was born here, and I'm a Jew and that means I'm indigenous to the land of Israel. There isn't a conflict. When we reject or diminish our connection to Israel to combat the idea of dual loyalty it's doing ourselves a disservice and playing into their hands. We have to be strong and proud and tell our story. What is the truth? It's dual connection. There were polls done that sizeable percentages of Jews from different countries say that they have a stronger connection to Israel than they do the countries they were born. I have a stronger connection to Israel than I do to Britain but that doesn't mean I don't have a connection to Britain. We have to stop talking in black and white terms, especially when it comes to identity. It's always shifting.”

I also feel differently landing in Tel Aviv from landing in Glasgow Central Station, or indeed going on vacation to Athens or Rome or Madrid. What is the feeling in Israel for you? How can you describe it?

“It's a feeling of being at home and being with my people. I lived in Hong Kong before London and didn't see myself in the population there, and I thought I would see myself in Britain and I do but it's not the same as Israel. When I land in Israel and I walk down the street, I feel at home. The people I'm walking with are my people. It's a feeling. That's the thing about indigineity. The work I've done is academic and scholarly, but indigeneity is an emotional response, too. I feel that I can drop my shoulders. Even though I'm not fluent in Hebrew, I recognize the writing. The fact that I was in a store and someone wished me a Shabbat Shalom. We misunderstand the tension in being Diasporic. There's a beautiful poem by a Nigerian called Diaspora Blues by Ijeoma Umebinyuo

So, here you are

too foreign for home

too foreign for here

never enough for both.

It's that overall feeling of being at home. We are connected and we recognize it. It might be a question of soul. Where my soul feels the most peaceful is Israel. I feel so safe there even with an impending war. My internal clock doesn't tick in time with Hong Kong or London, but in Israel it does.”

So you're moving there?

“I would move tomorrow.”

Has writing this book made that a certainty for you?

“Yes. I also was given the language through my work to understand my own emotions and experience. I went to Israel for the first time after October 7 and I understood what I was doing there and why I felt so peaceful. Why was the Jewish world engulfed by agony after October 7? It's because we are connected to each other and to the land. Who cares what everyone else says? We don't define our identity based on others’ definitions. We're Jews. Our ancient contemporaries were the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Egyptians. And we're still here. We deserve respect and to respect ourselves.”

(Pre-order will be available soon for The Jews: An Indigenous People. You can follow Ben on Twitter and Instagram @ BenMFreeman for more information)