The Canaanite continuity of Palestine: The ancient inhabitants of the southern Levant –including the Judahites and Judaeans whose heritage Zionism claims– and their Palestinian descendants, against the exile and «return» narrative

Abstract

This study advances a two-sided thesis, the second side resting on the first. The historical-empirical side: material continuity –demographic, genetic and linguistic– with the ancient population of the southern Levant (the Canaanite-Israelite-Judahite-Samaritan continuum, including the Judaeans) belongs principally to contemporary Palestinians, who remained on the land while gradually changing religion, and not to the majority of modern Jews, whose diaspora was formed above all through conversion and admixture. The political-ideological side: the State of Israel is not the restoration of an ancestral sovereignty but a construction of settler colonialism, and the «exile and return» narrative functions as a device of cultural hegemony serving imperialism. We distinguish what we affirm –verifiable demographic continuity– from what we do not affirm –essential identitarian continuity, which historical materialism obliges us to reject. The demonstration triangulates archaeology, historiography, paleogenomics and historical linguistics; its contribution is to systematize that convergence, update it with post-2014 genomics, and inscribe it within the Marxist critique of settler colonialism.