If you are Indigenous, you are a Zionist

Idit Shamir

Consulate General of Israel in Toronto and Western Canada  

Consul General, Idit Shamir gave the following speech at the
Building Indigenous-Jewish Friendship Symposiumon 8 June 2026.

Distinguished Elders, honoured Chiefs, Rabbi Gorman, dear friends,

Before I begin, I want to thank the people who built this day: Andria Spindel and CAEF; Daniel Koren and Allied Voices for Israel; Dr. Sheree Trotter and the Indigenous Embassy of Jerusalem; Melodie Greyeyes and Kanada House; and Michael Bloomfield and the Harmony Foundation.

Your vision was simple and radical at the same time: that Jewish and Indigenous leaders should not speak about each other from a distance. They should sit together, face to face, and build something rooted in truth, dignity, memory, and shared responsibility. That vision is sitting in this room right now.

Yesterday, 60,000 people walked for Israel in this city. The largest turnout in the Walk's 57-year history. And many of you were there, walking beside us, being counted. That meant more than you know.

And today you are here again. That tells me everything I need to know about who is in this room.

I want to talk about land.

Let me start with my name.

I am Idit. It appears in the Bible. And it means... fertile earth.

My parents gave me a name, and that name is the land itself.

Not a symbol of the land. The land.

When someone calls my name, they are invoking something ancient, soil that has known rain and drought, sun and shadow, and the footsteps of my ancestors for thousands of years.

I have carried that land in my name every single day of my life, before I could speak a word, before I knew what it meant.

I tell you this because I believe you understand it.

You know that land is not where you live. It is who you are. It lives in your language, your ceremonies, your children's names, your dreams.

The connection cannot be legislated away, negotiated away, or narrated away by someone who finds it inconvenient.

That is the Jewish connection to Israel.

Not born in 1948. Not a European invention. Not a refuge created after catastrophe. Ancient. Continuous. Unbroken.

When we speak about land, we are never speaking only about geography. We are speaking about memory. About language. About ancestors. About graves, songs, stories, ceremonies, prayers, and promises. About the places that formed us before we could ever form them.

The Jewish story begins in that land. Abraham walks its hills. Jacob dreams beneath its sky. David makes Jerusalem our capital. And the Hebrew Bible is not a travel brochure. It is the birth certificate of a people in their ancestral homeland.

The land remembers us. And we remember the land.

And even when Jews were driven out by empire after empire, we did not become strangers to that land. We became an exiled indigenous people.

Exile is not disappearance. Exile is not consent. Exile is not the cancellation of belonging.

A people can be conquered. A people can be scattered. But a people cannot be erased when memory becomes covenant.

Every Jewish wedding breaks a glass, in memory of Jerusalem.

Every Yom Kippur ends with Jerusalem.

Every Passover ends with Jerusalem.

Every day, Jews in Morocco, Poland, Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia, Russia, India, and Canada all turned in prayer toward the same direction.

Toward home.

For two thousand years, we ended every Passover Seder with the same three words: Next year in Jerusalem.

Not next year in a metaphor.

Not next year in an idea.

Next year in Jerusalem, a real city, on a real mountain, in a real land.

A few days ago we marked Jerusalem Day, celebrating the return of an indigenous people, displaced by a colonizing empire, to the city that has been the center of their identity for three thousand years.

That is not colonialism.

That is continuity.

That is not invention.

That is inheritance.

The State of Israel was founded in 1948. But the Jewish people were not born in 1948. Our story did not begin at the United Nations. It did not begin after the Holocaust. It did not begin in Europe. It began thousands of years ago in the land of Israel.

And here is what I want to say directly to you, because you are the right people to hear it:

If you support indigenous people's rights, you should also be a Zionist.

Because Zionism is the national liberation movement of an indigenous people who never truly left their land, and who finally came home.

If you are Indigenous, you are a Zionist. You just may not have known it yet.

And then came October 7th.

The most savage attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Rape. Murder. Mutilation. The abduction of grandmothers and children. Jews deserved empathy. Instead, the world unleashed a torrent of antisemitism.

Within days, before the bodies were buried, the narrative machine was already running: "Seventy-five years of colonial oppression," as though what happened deserved to happen. And then came something even more calculated: the deliberate theft of Indigenous language. The vocabulary of decolonization, of land rights, of resistance, weaponized against the world's oldest indigenous people.

Today, Jews in Canada are being pushed from government, from public life, from hospitals, from universities, from schools, and accused of being colonizers and settlers. In Canada.

You in this room know what that theft means. You know what it feels like to have your story distorted, your identity denied, your connection to land dismissed as inconvenient. You know what happens when powerful forces decide your history does not fit their narrative and simply rewrite it.

That is what is happening to the Jewish people right now. And the people doing it are actively trying to drive a wedge between our communities.

They will not succeed. Not while this room exists.

When Indigenous Elders and leaders stand beside us and say, we see you, we know what it means to fight for your land, your language, your children's future, that carries a moral authority that no government statement, no diplomatic cable, no press release can manufacture.

It lands in Ottawa. It lands in Washington. It lands in Jerusalem.

So to our Indigenous friends here today: thank you. Thank you for hearing the Jewish story not as a headline, not as a political position, but as the story of a people.

And to the Jewish community: let our rootedness make us better allies.

But friendship cannot remain only symbolic. It must build something.

Israel has almost no natural resources. It was surrounded by enemies from its first day. And it became a world leader in water technology, food security, remote healthcare, and clean energy, because it had no choice but to solve hard problems in hard places.

Those solutions belong in partnership with First Nations communities in Canada. Water. Food sovereignty. Healthcare. Education. Economic development. Nation to nation. People to people. That is what I want to build from this day forward.

Because the future must not be built on erasure. Not of Jews. Not of Indigenous peoples. Not of any people. It must be built on truth. On dignity. On memory. On friendship. And on the courage to build together.

The Psalmist wrote:

"When the Lord returned the exiles to Zion, we were like dreamers."

Today, that dream has a name. Israel.

And what we are building in this room today, may it too become a dream made real. For the generations who will inherit either the world we built together, or the division we failed to overcome. I know which one I am choosing.

Thank you. Todah. Miigwech.