Image: Bear Creek Massacre Jan. 29, 1863 Smithsonian National Postal Museum
Devastation and genocide go together. Netanyahu’s enthusiasm for Trump’s suggestion that Gaza become a real estate development for his oligarchs, makes Israeli aims obvious.
The Israelis, many of whom come from the USA, appear to have brought with them the colonial prejudices of their homeland.
Genocidal legacy of the persecuted pilgrim fathers
American colonial mythology claims foundation by the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620, refugees from religious and political persecution in England.
All European colonists not just the Puritans, like the Zionist colonists of Israel, lacked respect for the indigenous inhabitants of the land.
The Puritans were saved from starvation by the Native Americans, but the assumptions of those English colonists, a notion of the hierarchy of races, soon led to conflict. It lasted for centuries.
Literal reading of Scripture, generalisation from the curse upon Ham the son of Noah, an ancestor of the to be enslaved black Africans, justified slavery in their eyes.
The heathen Native Americans were to them, in a similar lower category.
“The Puritans saw the world as divided into two parties, themselves as the Party of God [Hezbollah in Arabic] struggling against the forces of darkness. Native Americans.
There were three pillars of Puritan ideology.
“The first was the image of the Native American as primitive, dark and of evil intent. The second was the portrayal of the Indian fighter as an agent of God and of progress, redeeming the land through righteous violence. And finally, the justification of the expropriation of Indian resources and the extinction of Indian sovereignty as security measures necessitated by their presumed savagery.” [17 April 2017, Indian Removal Act: The Genocide of Native Americans UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog]
The ideology of these Pilgrim Fathers had a profound influence on American colonial ideas for centuries and its echoes still resound amongst the present white supremacists.
Even the oft quoted Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the equality of mankind criticised the English king for unleashing “merciless savages.”
Thomas Jefferson demanded that the “savages” should be either exterminated or driven west of the Mississippi.
The vision of manifest destiny
“Throughout history, Native people have been subjected to more than 1500 wars, attacks, and raids authorized by the United States government.” [17 April 2017, UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog]
The colonists saw the opening of the West and the conquest of the continent as their manifest destiny.
The American colonists reduced the 15 million Native Americans of 1492 to a quarter of a million by 1900. [20 Sept 2019, EJI]
“The American Genocide of the Indians – and Real Evidence,” has been put online by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
One fact the Chinese put before the world was quite recent.
“In 1930, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs began sterilizing Indian women through the Indian Health Service program. Sterilization was conducted in the name of protecting the health of Indian women, …. Statistics suggest that in early 1970s, more than 42% of Indian women of childbearing age were sterilized. This resulted in the near extinction for many small tribes. By 1976, approximately 70,000 Indian women had been forcibly sterilized.”
The influence of the American genocide
We should conside whether the pattern of the American genocide, provided the blueprint for Netanyahu.
One political leader it certainly influenced was Adolf Hitler.
The Nazi German empire extending through the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia — all the way to Europe’s end at the Ural Mountains, was his dream.
Hitler was an avid reader of Karl May’s stories of the violent American West and as early as 1928 he expressed admiration for the white settlers who had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.”
The Nazi leadership routinely referred to Eastern Europe as “the German East” or the “Wild East,” and its inhabitants as “Indians.” [30 April 2018, How American Racism Influenced Hitler New Yorker]
We see in the opening of the American West, lebensraum to the East, and now the eradication of Palestinians, colonial expansion, dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants followed by genocide as part of a pattern which has yet to be expunged .
That would seem to be the task of the coming generation.
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