Cowboys vs. Indians and Israeli Manifest Destiny
An essential context for what’s going on in Israel-Palestine
by Mark Cramer, author of Old Man on a Green Bike: Chronicles of a Self-Serving Environmentalist
Our country was forged by settlers. The 13 colonies were not enough. We wanted the rest of Indian and Mexican territory, from sea to shining sea: our Manifest Destiny, our “West Bank.”
White settlers also occupied South Africa, eventually viewed as a pariah state. A once-reviled terrorist, Nelson Mandela, became a liberator, and today everyone agrees that apartheid was evil.
Like our John Waynes and the Afrikaner settlers, Zionists occupied Palestine. “In the late 19th century, prior to the rise of Zionism, native Jews are thought to have comprised between 2% and 5% of the population of Palestine.” (See Wikipedia, “Demographic History of Palestine”). A 1947 UN partition was supposed to divide Palestine between the increasing numbers of Jewish settlers and the Palestinians. However, right-wing Israeli extremists have escalated their own manifest destiny, “from the river to the sea,” with settlements and land annexations, even during peace negotiations!
As a result numerous UN resolutions since 1967 have declared that Israeli settlement in Palestinian territory is illegal. The most recent, 2016 Security Council Resolution 2334, is titled “Israel’s Settlements Have No Legal Validity, Constitute Flagrant Violation of International Law.”
A trigger to the current conflagration was Israeli court deliberation on yet more evictions of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, illegal according to the 1980 UN Resolution 478. With few exceptions American politicians of both parties show no empathy for the evictees. Only one side has the right to defend itself.
Increasingly, however, American citizens are turning to our own history to understand what’s happening in Israel-Palestine. Author and artist Robert Shetterly asks
“Isn’t it curious how closely the role of Manifest Destiny in US history resembles that of Zionism in Israel’s?… The U.S. government made more than 500 treaties with native people and broke them all.… The situation is almost identical in Israel/Palestine, where the Israelis keep expanding into the Occupied Territories (reservations) of the Palestinians to secure arable land, water, olive groves and development space for illegal settlements — and claiming it is done for security and self-defense.”
(See “Crimes committed in God’s name: How today’s Zionism resembles yesterday’s Manifest Destiny.”)
Anthropologist William S Abruzzi refers to, “The similarity between the situation faced by American Indians over a century ago as a result of American colonization of their land and the situation that exists today in the state of Israel as a result of Israeli occupation of what was formerly Palestinian territory.”
The entire Abruzzi documentation provides factual context for his conclusion that, “Just as the Indians resisted American colonization, so have the Palestinians fought Israeli occupation.”
Nineteenth century colonialism was politically accepted. Isolated voices of moral outrage were ineffective. Standards evolved in the 20th century, peaking when South Africa’s apartheid system was dismantled. In the 21st century vestiges of colonialism still fester, with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories as the major example.
Having witnessed the abomination of apartheid, prominent Jewish South African anti-apartheid activists like Ronnie Kasrils have condemned the Israeli occupation.
In 2004 Kasrils observed, “This is much worse than apartheid. The Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic. We never had jets attacking our townships. We never had sieges that lasted month after month. We never had tanks destroying houses. We had armoured vehicles and police using small arms to shoot people but not on this scale.”
As citizens of our own settler state, we Americans should understand the plight of the Palestinians. It hits even closer to home with Israelis advising American police departments (including Minneapolis!). See my investigative piece “Knee on Neck: From Israel to Minneapolis.”
Hundreds of Palestinian support groups have sprung up in the USA, with robust participation from Jewish American activists. Consider that Ron Dermer, the former Israeli ambassador to the US, suggested Israel should prioritize the “passionate and unequivocal” support of evangelical Christians over that of American Jews, who he said are “disproportionately among our critics.”
A natural ally of Americans who oppose the settlements are Israeli human rights organizations that demand an end to an occupation, which is largely funded by American tax dollars and military aid. We should urge major media to seek out the opinions of Israeli human rights activists rather than depending on the tired clichés of the hapless “international community” and the same American foreign policy elite that brought us the Vietnam and Iraq wars.
Just two of these Israeli human rights groups are listed here, because they have outreach in the USA:
- B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Since 1989 B’Tselem has rigorously documented and chronicled human rights abuses of all sides. “Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations. B’Tselem strives to end this regime, as that is the only way forward to a future in which human rights, democracy, liberty and equality are ensured to all people, both Palestinian and Israeli, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”
- The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) is a nonviolent direct-action group originally established to oppose and resist Israeli demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territory, dedicated to ending the occupation and achieving a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Following a demolition, they have been known to go in and rebuild the Palestinian home. ICAHD also has an outreach center in the USA.
