I recently had the privilege of meeting Regent Xami Thomas, leader of the Khoisan people of southern Africa, at an event hosted by Aish and Indigenous Bridges, a group connecting indigenous peoples worldwide. The encounter left me slightly shaken in the best possible way.
There he stood, not in royal robes but in a simple shirt and trousers, representing 15 million people—9 million of whom live in the country of South Africa itself—and here he was in Jerusalem.
The Khoisan are among the oldest peoples on Earth, the original inhabitants of southern Africa before successive waves of Dutch, Zulu, Xhosa and British settlers arrived. Yet this leader of one of humanity’s most ancient nations turned to me, a rabbi, and said: “You are our hope.”
It’s one thing to read in our prophets about the Jewish people’s mission to the world. It’s quite another to sit across from a king who looks you in the eye and tells you that God has entrusted his people’s future, in part, to yours.
Regent (as he likes to be called) Thomas knows what apartheid truly looks like. He grew up under a system where black people couldn’t use the same park benches as whites, couldn’t attend the same universities, and where a black officer in the military had to subordinate himself to the lowest-ranking white person. When he comes to Israel and sees Jews and Arabs—both Muslim and Christian—mixing on the Supreme Court, as well as in universities, and enjoying the same restaurants and civil liberties, he doesn’t see any apartheid because it doesn’t exist here.
Rather, according to what he told those gathered at the event, he sees the opposite. He sees an indigenous people who have returned to their ancestral homeland and built a democracy that protects minority rights.
His support for Israel isn’t despite his experience with oppression; it’s because of it. He understands what indigeneity truly means: an ethno-nation that grew up in a particular land, whose culture, civilization and religion are inextricably linked to that land, whose people passed their heritage and language down through generations, and who maintained their connection to that land even in exile.
This definition exposes something remarkable: the widespread use of English reflects England’s colonization; Spanish, Spain’s colonial expansion; Arabic, Arabia’s mass colonization. None of this undermines the rights of people who have lived in these lands for centuries, but it does mean that when an indigenous people return to their homeland, their rights are at least on par with, if not supersede, those of later arrivals.
Yet here’s the bitter irony: When the United Nations issued its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, it changed the definition specifically to exclude sovereignty as a criterion for indigeneity. The reason why they did this was to ensure that Jews couldn’t be classified as indigenous people in Israel, as they are among the few, if not only, indigenous people who have returned to claim political sovereignty over their ancient homeland. However, according to this absurd logic, if the Cherokee Nation, for example, ever achieves sovereignty in its homeland in the United States, it would cease to qualify as indigenous.
The Regent spoke powerfully about this distortion. His people understand themselves as guardians of their land, maintaining a covenantal relationship with God that has been influenced by Judaic monotheism. As he puts it, he won’t call himself king because there’s only one King, God. Though he practices Christianity, he sees the Jewish return to Zion as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a source of spiritual inspiration.
What struck me most profoundly was his humility paired with his expectation. Here was a man who should be wearing royal robes, leading a proud nation with one of the longest histories on Earth, and he was telling us: Jewish people, you have a responsibility to act as agents for God in bringing dignity to all peoples. You were slaves who became free. You were exiles who returned home. You are our model, our hope.
During our conversation, Ateret Shmuel, the CEO of Indigenous Bridges, who recently joined me for an upcoming podcast episode on this very topic, spoke about the hundreds of indigenous groups worldwide looking to Israel for inspiration. Kurds, Berbers, Druze, Baha’i and countless others, many indigenous to lands where they cannot be free, see in the Jewish people and the State of Israel a spiritual center, a source of hope and inspiration.
For our part in Israel and in the Jewish Diaspora, we’ve been so focused on our own survival, so busy defending ourselves against attacks and false accusations that we’ve forgotten a crucial truth: The world is watching us not just with criticism, but with hope. Just as antisemites force us to recognize that the world won’t take its eyes off us, so, too, are people across the globe who refuse to let us turn inward because they need us.
Whether we like it or not, the world pays attention to what we say and do. Just because our accusers distort the word “indigenous” against us doesn’t mean we should abandon genuine indigeneity in ourselves and others. Just because they falsely accuse us of racism or apartheid shouldn’t stop us from fighting real racism and apartheid. Israel must continue standing as a moral voice against actual oppression anywhere in the world.
Walking away from the event, I felt awakened to a dimension of Jewish responsibility I had intellectually understood but never viscerally grasped. Keeping Torah doesn’t only mean Shabbat and kosher, essential though these may be; it also means advocating for the image of God in those from whom it’s been stripped away.
We would do well to open our doors to such groups of indigenous peoples. We would do well to support organizations like Indigenous Bridges. Because when a king looks you in the eye and calls you hope, you don’t just feel honored. You feel the weight of what God may actually be asking of us.
