Zionists viewed Palestinian Arabs as degenerate descendants whose customs proved Jewish claims

Evidence

The Palestinian Arabs were seen not as the Jews’ biblical cousins, each claiming a divinely promised patrimony, but rather as ancient Palestinian Jewry’s devolved descendants, whose preservation of shards of ancient Hebrew customs and place-names bore witness to the truth of Zionism’s claim to the land. There is an obvious association between this view and the classic Christian belief that fossilized Judaic practices bore witness to the truth of Christianity. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 142

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting parallel: Zionism replicated the Christian typological habit of reading living peoples as fossilized witnesses to another group’s truth — the colonized become evidence for the colonizer’s redemption story.
• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and to the logic by which colonists read indigenous cultural remnants as evidence of their own entitlement to the land.