Steven Salaita: I write often about liberating Palestine from Israeli occupation, a habit that evokes passionate response. I have yet to encounter a response that persuades me to abandon the commitment to Palestinian liberation.
I have, however, encountered responses that I consider worthy of close assessment, particularly those that transport questions of colonization to the North American continent. You see, there is a particular defense of Zionism that precedes the existence of Israel by hundreds of years.
Here is a rough sketch of that defense: Allowing a Palestinian right of return or redressing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1947-49 is ludicrous. Look what happened to the Native Americans. Is the United States supposed to return the country to them?
Israeli historian Benny Morris puts it this way: “Even the great American democracy couldn’t come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds.”
This reasoning suggests a finality to the past, an affirmation of tragedy trapped in the immutability of linear time. Its logic is terribly cliché, a peculiar form of common sense always taken up, everywhere, by the beneficiaries of colonial power.
The problems with invoking Native American genocide to rationalize Palestinian dispossession are legion. The most noteworthy problem speaks to the unresolved detritus of American history: Natives aren’t objects of the past; they are living communities whose numbers are growing.
It’s rarely a good idea to ask rhetorical questions that have literal answers. Yes, the United States absolutely should return stolen land to the Indians. That’s precisely what its treaty obligations require it to do. [Continue reading…]
Strange how Americans can mess up the logic of an analogy, maybe it is the skin colour that causes the incorrect identification of native americans with palestinians.
The Israeli defence is that they were not colonisers, that they were in fact re-colonising their own land. And that logic was used to excuse the Irgun and the Stern gang and terrorists like Menachem Begin and Eitan Livni in their murdering palestinian and british civilians as an integral part of a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing.
If anglo-americans accept the rights of Israelis to their historic and continuing violence to remove palestinians from their ‘ancestral lands’, then they must also accept that native americans and mexicans have the right to use terrorism and ethnic cleansing to remove anglo-americans from their own ‘ancestral lands’.