![]() Those identities are fixed, essential, eternal. In this analysis, there are two kinds of people: those who are native to a land and those who settle it, displacing the original inhabitants. And I find this kind of talk revealing of a larger trend on the left these days, emanating from important and complex theories in the academy but reflected in crude and reductive forms in the memes and slogans at pro-Palestine protests - an increasingly rigid set of ideas about the interloping colonizer and the Indigenous colonized. But even, or maybe especially, at this moment, when things are so grim, the way we talk about liberation matters. In the context of the ongoing slaughter in Gaza - more than 28,000 people dead, mostly women and children - such posturing may seem trivial. On one level, the claims about skin cancer - like similar ones about Israeli cuisine and surnames - are silly social media talking points from keyboard warriors slinging hashtags, hyped up on theories of liberation based on memes of Frantz Fanon quotes taken out of context. (They do not.) Skin cancer, these posts claimed, was proof that Israeli Jews were not native to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea but were white Europeans with no ancestral connection to the region, enactors of one of the worst crimes of the modern age: settler colonialism. ![]() ![]() “You are not Indigenous if your body cannot tolerate the area’s climate,” one such post read, highlighting outdated news coverage claiming that Israelis had unusually high rates of skin cancer. Amid the graphic images, fierce polemics and endless media criticism that have dominated my social media feeds since the war in Gaza began late last year, I noticed a seemingly bizarre subplot emerge: skin cancer in Israel. ![]()
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