I think you have a typo there (both options are where your ancestors didn't live).
Assuming you meant:
> Does this mean that my descendants could “colonize” places where my ancestors never lived but could not “colonize” places where they did live?
Then yes.
The first case - moving to a new country and sending people from your own country to live there - is colonisation - see https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
In the second case, particularly if your community has been there for a few thousand years, you're just buying a house.
> Jewish people cannot colonize an area they’ve been for 3000 years.
As I understand it, Palestine used to be a majority Jewish area. Their creation myth states that they migrated there from Egypt to escape slavery and oppression. However Jewish people never mass migrated from Palestine like they mass migrated from Egypt. Some Palestinians simply gradually converted religion with during varying colonization, first to Christianity during Roman and Byzantine colonization, then to Islam during Arab and Ottoman colonization and today, most Palestinians are Muslim while Christian minority exists. Prior to 1948 there were even still Jewish Palestinians. Jesus Christ him self was even a Palestinian Jew.
While this is happening, some Jews—instead of converted—migrated from Palestine to Europe, where they were persecuted for centuries. While in Europe, they still managed to intermarry and doubtless some Europeans even converted to Judaism. These immigrants became part of Europe and European heritage, and after so many generations they became European Jews.
This is why I—and others—consider Zionism to be a specific case of the more general European colonial enterprise. Zionists are mostly European or European descendants who migrated to lands that wasn’t theirs, made it theirs, and displaced the indigenous population from it.
In my opinion this is the worst possible case of colonialism.
There was no Palestinian identity prior to 1960. One can easily confirm this for themselves - nobody "met a Palestinian man" prior to this time in any recorded media. People are free to identify however they like, but all people living in this areas were simply Jews, Arabs, or other groups.
Talk about Palestinians prior to this time is part of the same conspiracy theory as the nakba and Jews being from Europe.
> While this is happening, some Jews—instead of converted—migrated from Palestine to Europe, where they were persecuted for centuries.
Kind of? After the Bar Kochba revolt, the Romans pushed the Jews out and renamed Israel (then split into Israel and Judea) into Syria Palestinea, after the Philistines (who were Greek).
> I—and others—consider Zionism to be a specific case of the more general European colonial enterprise.
You're wrong. You can't colonise your own country. Islam converting some Jews when the arabs colonised the area in the seventh century doesn't change that.
Which also begs the question - why is arab colonisation acceptable but 'European' (but actually not Eupopean, as Jews are from Israel) colonisation not acceptable?
How so? When I search for the history of the Palestinian identity I can easily find something called Dux Palestinae on Roman maps from 400 CE on both banks of the Jordan river[1], a map of Palestine in 1482 version of Claudius Ptolemy's Cosmographia [1], a British issued passport and coins from the 1920s[1], a letter from Albert Einstein to the editors of The New York Times about happenings in Palestine and Palestine Jewish communities[2], etc.
The problem with looking for a Palestinian identity prior to 1960s is (a) there are historic artifacts, written records, etc. of one existing as early as the 1920s[*], and (b) the notion of the nation state didn’t exist (or was rather rare) prior to world war 1, and not every nation was given a state when nation states proliferated. So just because the nation state of Palestine didn’t exist before the 1920s, that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about the Palestinian people before that period, even if they never called them selves such on written records[†]. Talking about national identity in modern terms prior to the proliferation of nation states is kind of nonsensical.
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* The same applies to the Nakba, however I choice not to engage in a debate about conspiracy theories which deny the history of very real horrors experienced by very real people, of whom many are still alive.
† This reminds me of a Monty Python sketch from The Holy Grail when King Arthur refers to him self as the “King of the Britons” to the peasantry, to which the peasantry promptly reply: “The king of the who?” and “Who are the Britons?”[3]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_name_Palestine
2: https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYork...
3: http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Holy_Grail/Scene3.htm
> How so? When I search for the history of the Palestinian identity I can easily find something called Dux Palestinae on Roman maps from 400 CE on both banks of the Jordan river[1]...
It doesn't seem like you've read the comment you're replying to again. I'm leaving this conversation.
I’m not sure what that means.
I’m a person. I have ancestors who were likely [0] forced out of at least four identifiable countries. Many if not most Americans are in a similar position.
Does this mean that my descendants could “colonize” places where my ancestors never lived but could not “colonize” places where they did not live?
If I moved, permanently, to Antarctica, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, New York, England, Russia, Ukraine, Mars, or Argentina, would I be colonizing, “returning”, etc? Does the answer really depend on where my ancestors lived 50 or 100 or 3000 years ago?
I do think there’s something to be said for someone moving to where their recent ancestors live or lived, but this gets complicated very very quickly, especially when political borders move in the mean time.
I once visited the house in a foreign country where some of ancestors lived in the 1930s, from which they were quite aggressively removed. I’m pretty sure that if I moved back there by force, I would be doing something very very wrong.
[0] I say “likely” because some degree of extrapolation is needed as to what happened tens of generations ago. And the number is likely much larger than 4.