Can someone explain this to me? Europeans settled the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. Their descendants have been born there for more than 350 years, built a distinct language and culture on African soil, and know no other home. They are still routinely called colonisers and told they are not African. Move from Lahore, Lagos or Kingston to Britain, acquire a passport, and the same voices insist you are British at once and, increasingly, that your children may claim to be English. Either continuous presence, birth and cultural formation create a legitimate claim to a place, or they do not. The standard cannot be inverted solely according to the ancestry of the people involved. Jews maintained a continuous presence in the Land of Israel for over 3,000 years. The Romans renamed the province of Judea “Syria Palaestina” after crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE specifically to erase the Jewish connection to the land. Arab forces conquered the region in the 7th century. Significant Arab migration continued into the late Ottoman period and under the British Mandate, drawn by economic opportunities created in part by Jewish development. A distinct “Palestinian” national identity among local Arabs is a 20th-century development, solidifying mainly in the 1920s in opposition to Zionism and later consolidated by the PLO and the Soviet KGB. Afrikaners after 350+ years in South Africa: still colonisers, not African. Jews returning to (or remaining in) their ancestral homeland after millennia: colonisers and settlers. Arabs whose ancestors arrived via 7th-century conquest or later migration: indigenous Palestinians with an ancient claim. Someone who arrived in Britain from the Subcontinent or Africa in recent decades: British, and now eligible to be English. The standard for belonging keeps changing depending on who is making the claim. #DoubleStandardIdentity #350YearsStillColoniser #JewsNeverLeft, #BelongingIsSelective #WhoseHomeCounts #IndigeneityWhenConvenient #StopTheBoats #NetMigrationCrisis #EnglishIsAncestry #IntegrationFailed #BelongingIsSelective.