Who are the savages? Parallel histories of Indigenous genocide

So clear to me is the historical parallel between Israeli settler colonization of Palestinian land and European and then American settler colonization of the land known as Turtle Island to its Indigenous peoples—that I do not understand how anyone can see it otherwise. In both instances, when indigenous people forcefully retaliated against violent invasion and suppression, colonizers called the resistance “savagery.” I ask, however, how should people respond who have their land and humanity taken away? Who are the true savages?

It took me years of research into my own family histories to learn what I now know about the extent of land theft and genocide of the people living on this continent when settlers arrived. Histories once silenced are slowly coming to light in a renaissance of Native scholarship and activism, but fewer Americans know these stories than are ignorant of them.

Similarly, most Americans also do not know the inconvenient history of Zionism and Israel’s invasion of Palestine after World War II, supported by Great Britain and the United States. The land theft and genocide committed against the Palestinian people by the nation of Israel has only escalated since Israel’s birth as a nation, decades before this past year. Little explanation is provided by the mainstream media, however, about the historical context in which Hamas’s indisputably horrific October 7 attack occurred.

How many Americans who support Israel’s current bombing of innocents know the story of the 1948 Nakba (“The Catastrophe”) when three quarters of a million Palestinians were driven by force off their ancient homeland to create a Jewish nation-state? Or that the current occupation of over 700,000 Israeli settlers in 250 settlements and outposts in Gaza and the West Bank is in violation of international law? Or that Israel practices apartheid, segregating Israelis and Palestinians, withholding rights and privileges of citizenship from Palestinians? That Israel severely restricts travel by Palestinians? That hundreds of Palestinians are put in prison every year, often without a stated cause?  That the Israeli military, even before October 7, engaged in constant incursions into Gaza and the West Bank, including home demolitions and confiscations, raids, assassinations, torture, and persecutions?

Most of what I knew about Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people before this war began, I learned over the past six years as part of my immersive study of colonization of the continent on which I live. In particular, The Red Nation podcast, and other Red Media publications are excellent sources of information about Indigenous history and ongoing political struggles.

Amid the heartbreaking news of Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza, I picked up Edward Said’s book The Question of Palestine to re-ground myself in the history of Israeli occupation of Palestine. The first printing was dated 1979, and the copy I read was a second edition, revised in 1992. His book describes how the desire of Zionist Israelis to rid the land once known as Palestine of the people living there for more than two millennia has been and is still relentless. Everything he wrote in this book about “the grim determination of official Israel to hasten the process to reduce, minimize, and ensure the absence of Palestinians as a political and human presence” was as true on October 7, 2023 as it was when first written. But now laid bare in the horror of undeniable genocide.

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Six years ago, my consciousness was altered listening to a panel discussion on the ongoing repercussions of settler theft of Indigenous land. I acquired a keener awareness of something I knew as an abstraction, but without having connected the dots of its truth to my own family story. I began an investigation into what happened to the Native people living in the places where my English, Dutch, and German ancestors settled in Virginia, New York, Iowa, and North Carolina. In each place I found complicated stories of missed opportunities for peaceful co-existence as European settlers always kept taking more than they were graciously offered, often by force, and breaking whatever treaty had been negotiated.

And in each place, the people whose land was being stolen, when pushed to the brink, fought back violently, often taking hostages. My ancestors were present when the Powhatans attacked English settlements on the Virginia coast. They also were present when the Esopus attacked the New Netherlands settlement of Wiltwyck (“savage town”). Ancestors from other lineages lived on lands already violently taken from the Cherokee people in North Carolina and the Sauk and Meskwaki in Iowa prior to their arrival.

And every time the people there before the settlers arrived fought to defend themselves, the white people called them savages and asked why they couldn’t have used more peaceful means to make their demands known. Of course, they already had done that, over and over and over and over, with no relief. These events played out almost the same way everywhere my ancestors settled. And after the October 7 attack by Hamas, I heard the same sentiments being uttered by Israelis or Americans about Palestinians, almost verbatim, that I read in the stories surrounding my ancestors’ settlements over the past four centuries.

In The Question of Palestine, written in 1979, historian Edward Said also makes explicit this connection between European colonialism and Palestinian dispossession in Israel, “I need not again indicate the common origins of Zionism and European colonialism, nor is it necessary to allude to how easily the early Jewish settlers in Palestine ignored the Arabs in exactly the same way that white Europeans in Africa, Asia and the Americas believed the natives of those places to be nonexistent and their lands uninhabited, neglected, and barren” (p.150).

America has never made formal reparations for its legacy of kidnapping and enslavement of Africans and their descendants, nor for the genocide of and land theft from Indigenous people, though there is a burgeoning consciousness that this is necessary. Individuals and small groups are beginning a process of shining a light on past injustices and working to make amends in the present.

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The agony heaped onto human lives in Gaza is excruciating to read and hear about. I keep wondering how humans have not evolved more compassion for each other. How can we not understand the grave consequences of this brutal genocide for everyone?

Even images of lush Palestinian olive orchards in Gaza callously destroyed in this war by the Israeli army are painful to see. Oglala Lakota/Northern Cheyenne activist and organizer, Krystal Two Bulls, on a recent Upstream podcast episode, observed that the Israeli annihilation of Palestinian olive orchards, begun years before the current war in Gaza, has the same purpose as the U.S. murder of millions of buffalo in the 1800s—to sever the connection between Indigenous people and the land.

Zionism began as a desire for a Jewish homeland and morphed into the desire for a particular piece of land freed of Arab people who had been living on it since about the seventh century. It was never about sharing the land with these people. To criticize Zionism and the Israeli state whose policies and military actions work to manifest Zionism, is not, however, to be anti-Semitic. Zionism and the creation of a Jewish state are not the same thing as a religion, and the idea of a Jewish state runs counter to American ideals of democracy and separation of church and state. Not all Israelis agree with their governments policies or past and current military action, and many groups are working to promote a ceasefire. It is hard for me to even imagine when anything like repair can be achieved given the current level of destruction, but that will be what is required for there to be peace.

The U.S. and Great Britain, two massively imperialistic countries, stand in self-serving solidarity with the Israeli state in the process of annihilating the Palestinian people. Israel bears gaping unhealed wounds of an ancient history of violent anti-Semitism, but particularly the genocidal atrocities of World War II. There are no adequate words to describe this tragedy, but it does not justify the Zionistic zeal to colonize Palestine and eradicate the people who lived there for millennia under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and then after World War I, Great Britain. The politics justifying protection of Israel by former Allied powers are complicated by guilt, economic, and political opportunities, including an alliance to protect our oil interests. But in the end, they are not moral justifications for Israeli citizens to have a greater right than Palestinians to be on that land they now occupy.

In The Question of Palestine, Said describes the astounding irony of “how the classic victims of years of anti-Semitic persecution and the Holocaust have in their new nation become the victimizers of another people, who have become, therefore, the victims of the victims” (p.xxi). It is as if the Palestinians are being asked to, actually deserve to, pay for the historical crimes of anti-Semitism.

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I have not kept up with the news of Israel’s War on Gaza on a daily basis. It is too hard to bear the rising numbers of deaths and injuries, and I know there is privilege in looking away. As I began finishing this essay, however, I went to look at the numbers to make this argument for compassion as concrete as possible.

The October 7 Hamas attack on Israel resulted in 1,139 deaths and at least 8,700 injuries. 237 people were kidnapped in this raid; at least 100 remain captive. All of this is awful and appalling. But, is it a justifiable response that Israeli military forces have killed nearly 35,000 civilians, at least a third of them children? That one hundred journalists have been killed?  Even if you believe in “an eye for an eye,” this is not that. This past week a mass grave was found near two Gaza hospitals with nearly 400 bodies of men, women, and children, some elderly, some doctors, some buried alive, some with signs of torture.

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After reading this, can you understand that violent resistance to violent colonization is not an unexpected turn of events? That as Americans, we still live in a world where the wounds continue to fester among descendants of Indigenous people and descendants of the settlers? Many Indigenous peoples around the world stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and understand Israel’s actions as a “last gasp” frenzy in defense of settler colonialism—and U.S. support of Israel as part of the same.

My fundamental questions remain. Why is there not a consensus of moral outrage in this country? Why is the U.S. continuing to finance this horror? Why are U.S. police showing up at peaceful anti-war protests in riot gear? Why are voices speaking out for Palestine getting censured? Why is there not a ceasefire when so much of the world is calling for it? The U.S. government is complicit in all of this pain and suffering and the logic of our support cannot be explained by other than very dark forces. I’m not sure what else there is to say.

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Where do you stand?

What do these words call into your heart? 

May all beings be free.

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Thanks to Bryce Olsen and David McLenachan, both via Unsplash, for the creative use of their photos in the artwork.