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By Dr. M. Reza Behnam
How can the US authorities criticize the racist practices of Israel, when it has by no means actually confronted its personal historical past of genocide and wars of extermination in opposition to the Native tribes of North America?
“Indians and wolves are each beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in form.”
– President George Washington (1789-1797)
“The Arabs must go, however one wants an opportune second for making it occur, resembling conflict.”
– Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion (1948-54 and 1955-63)
The United Nations, for the primary time on Might 15, 2023, formally commemorated the Palestinian Al-Nakba, or “disaster,” a nationwide trauma that started in 1947-48 and continues to the current.
Member states of the Normal Meeting voted in November to approve a decision recognizing the struggling of generations of Palestinians who’ve been underneath Israeli occupation since Zionist militias forcibly drove a whole lot of 1000’s of them from their cities and villages to determine a Zionist state in Palestine. America voted in opposition to the decision and boycotted the occasion.
The Nakba and Israel’s ongoing colonization challenge is a narrative not often informed in historical past books and courses. For over 75 years, Washington has used each means at its disposal to maintain the Palestinian disaster from the American public. The query is why?
The reply has a lot to do with how comparable the 2 nations are with regard to their nationwide ideologies and histories.
How can the US authorities criticize the racist practices of Israel, when it has by no means actually confronted its personal historical past of genocide and wars of extermination in opposition to the Native tribes of North America?
Whereas the UN has taken the long-overdue step to rebut the Israeli narrative that has denied the Nakba, the US has but to cross a stand-alone decision apologizing to the Native folks of the continental US for 300 years of violence, maltreatment and neglect.
No historic analogy is ideal. However, to know why America continues to stay complicit in perpetuating the Palestinian disaster, it’s important to look at the parallels between the US and Israel in how they’ve chosen to have interaction with the Native peoples.
Each the US and Israel started with conquest and with the objective of possessing and colonizing already inhabited lands—to cleanse the land of its Native inhabitants. Each histories reveal trails of deception, damaged guarantees, asymmetrical power and indigenous populations pushed to the margins of society by the conquerors. The language of power, the rhetoric of justification, and idiom of violence used are strikingly analogous. Each, for instance, have portrayed their brutal colonization tasks as “settlement(s)” and the colonizers as “pioneers“ and “settlers.”
The Seventeenth-century Puritan ideology of divine mission set in movement the pretext for an historic land seize in North America. Early in that century, Protestant clergyman, Richard Hakluyt, referred to as for settlement within the New World, exhorting Englishmen to “lay declare to the land and take it as our personal.” He argued that so as to acquire a foothold, settlements and cities, slightly than buying and selling posts and forts (because the French had established) have to be planted.
Like Hakluyt, Israel’s leaders have all the time been intent on laying declare to all of Palestine. By conflict, false and unenforced “peace” agreements, unlawful land grabs, compelled expulsions and arbitrary legal guidelines and decrees, Israel at the moment guidelines over 78 p.c of the Palestinian homeland.
The 2 nations have used faith to legitimize their land grabs and to ethnically cleanse the indigenous populations. The driving power behind the dispossession of American Indians and Palestinians has been the myths of chosenness and exceptionalism; notions that indicate supremacy.
The writing, oratory, and political speeches of the colonists, are replete with references to the colonies because the New Canaan, the “shining metropolis upon the hill,” and a rustic blessed by God. Those self same references are expressed at the moment by US officers and politicians.
John Rolfe, one of many unique founders of the 1607 Jamestown colony, famous that the colonists are “a peculiar folks, marked and chosen by the finger of God, to own (the land), for undoubtedly He’s with us.” And within the Massachusetts Bay Colony (based in 1628), its founder, John Winthrop, spoke of the Puritan covenant with God and that “we should contemplate that we will be a metropolis upon a hill. The eyes of all individuals are upon us.” The concepts of covenant and exceptionalism had been internalized by America’s founders and are manifested in nationwide coverage to the current.
Just like the non secular sects from Europe that colonized North America on the idea that they’d reached the Promised Land and that their tradition and societies had been superior to the Native People they encountered, Israel’s European founders, its officers, politicians and plenty of of Israel’s Jewish residents have expressed comparable convictions.
In a 2014-2015 Pew Analysis ballot, 48 p.c of Israeli Jews stated Palestinians must be transferred or expelled from Israel. And in a 2018 Haaretz-Dialog ballot, when requested in the event that they consider that the Jews are a selected folks, 56 p.c of Israeli Jews stated “sure.” The determine rose to 79 p.c amongst self-identified right-wing respondents.
Although the leaders of the Zionist motion had been primarily secular males, they used biblical references to determine land claims. Israel’s leaders have harnessed non secular ideology to state energy. They’ve co-opted the thought of divine election of non secular Jews—that God had chosen and entered right into a covenant together with his favored youngsters to function a “gentle unto the nations,”—to advance their “settler” colonial motion. Jewish nationalists proceed to make use of the Ebook of Genesis as their deed to the land of Palestine, claiming the “proper” primarily based on prior residence 1000’s of years in the past.
By the nineteenth century, illness, warfare, massacres, and US removing insurance policies had emptied the Indian inhabitants within the North. The destiny of the Southeast Indian tribes was sealed when the US Congress handed the Indian Removing Act in 1830.
Because of then-President Andrew Jackson’s ethnic cleaning insurance policies, an estimated 100,000 Indians from 18 tribes had been compelled from their lands within the Southeast and transferred to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) on land thought-about undesirable for the white man. Many perished because the US military marched them westward. On one march, the Path of Tears, some 6,000 Cherokees died as they had been made to stroll 1,200 miles to Indian Territory.
Palestinians have confronted comparable hardships as Israel executes its ethnic cleaning insurance policies. Palestinians have identified many Path of Tears for the reason that Nakba. The greater than 750,000 Palestinians and their progeny who had been made refugees by the institution of the Jewish state, have by no means been allowed to return to their ancestral homeland, whereas Israel’s legislation of return, permits Jews worldwide to to migrate to Israel anytime they need. Israel continues to cowl Palestinian land with unlawful Jewish “settlements,” and the infrastructure to serve them.
By the nineteenth century, Puritan beliefs of divine covenant remodeled into the notion of Manifest Future, a time period coined by New York journalist John O’Sullivan in 1845. He wrote that nothing should intrude with the “success of our manifest future to overspread the continent allotted by Windfall for the free growth of our yearly multiplying tens of millions.” To meet their objective of nationwide growth, white People tried to bodily and culturally vanish the Native folks.
The “settler-pioneers” justified the theft of Indian land on the idea of the “vacancy idea” and nonuse; judgments primarily based on their white cultural understanding of capitalizing upon land.
By the late 1800s, nearly all Native People had been confined to reservations, surrounded by hostile “settlers” and army forts, and had turn out to be financial dependents of the US authorities. Though they fought bravely, Native tribes had been overwhelmed by the superior firepower of the US Military. Their defeat led to the lack of tens of millions of acres of land and confinement to digital prisons (reservations) unfold throughout North America.
The US Congress in 1887 handed the Dawes Normal Allotment Act which opened up communal tribal reservation land to white possession. By 1934, when the Allotment Act ended, about 90 million of 138 million acres of Indian land had turn out to be white-owned.
Jewish colonists have equally portrayed Palestine as an empty land, ripe for the choosing. Israel’s leaders declared that it was the obligation of heroic Jewish squatters to
redeem the “unused” land from the desert, eschewing the existence of thriving Palestinian farms and companies. Zionist mythmakers fostered the picture of Palestinian Arabs as backward, principally primitive nomads who had no sovereignty over the land.
In his 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall,” Zionist chief, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), argued that “Zionism is a colonizing journey and due to this fact it stands or falls by the query of armed power,” and that morality and conscience couldn’t dictate Zionist coverage.
In 1937, polish-born Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, in a letter to his son, wrote: “We should expel the Arabs and take their locations….And if we’ve got to make use of power…to ensure our personal proper to settle in these locations (Negev and Transjordan)-then we’ve got power at our disposal.”
Israel’s’ present right-wing regime, like its predecessors, is engaged in finishing up Ben-Gurion’s imaginative and prescient of claiming the Negev. Tel Aviv is at the moment demolishing the houses of Palestinian Bedouins and transferring them to additional uninhabitable lands within the Negev to make method for Jewish colonial “settlements.” The Bedouins are the one group of Palestinian residents of Israel that also maintain a large tract of land, even if Israel has, over a few years, sought to maneuver them to extra arid areas.
Like the US, Israel has carried out a coverage of containment and focus by superior army power. The imbalance of energy between the Israeli occupier and the occupied has compelled Palestinians onto two small reservation-like enclaves within the West Financial institution and Gaza Strip, about 22 p.c of their historic homeland, over which they don’t have any actual authority.
Inside these ever-shrinking noncontiguous enclaves, Palestinians are subjected to army checkpoints and patrols, widespread surveillance, arbitrary arrests, incarceration with out trial, focused assassinations, house demolitions, and each day harassment and humiliation by hostile troopers and “settlers,” in addition to different types of state-sponsored terrorism.
Palestinians who battle in opposition to occupation, which is their proper underneath worldwide legislation, are labeled terrorists and militants, whereas Israeli acts of violence in opposition to them are described as reprisals or protection.
Within the American quest to overcome the West, the same language was used. When the US cavalry received a army engagement in opposition to a tribe preventing for survival, it was described as a “battle,” however when Indians prevailed, it was a “bloodbath.” In at the moment’s parlance, Apache chief Geronimo and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce could be referred to as terrorists.
The historical past of the US and Israel raises a compelling query: What would each nations be at the moment if their forebearers had believed in working with, studying from and sharing the land with the indigenous folks? Eradicating and inflicting injustices upon them has bolstered in each the US and Israel, political cultures of imperialism and supremacy.
The lack of house, dispossession and publicity to political and bodily violence that has formed the lives of American Indians and Palestinians are crimes in opposition to humanity. However despite the hardships, trauma and makes an attempt to erase them, American Indians and Palestinians have survived and have grown stronger. Neither group has accepted overseas domination; and their tradition of resistance continues to encourage.
– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing within the historical past, politics and governments of the Center East. He contributed this text to The Palestine Chronicle.
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