The genocide of the Native people of North America was a 200-year catastrophe. Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, begun over 78 years ago, has never ended.
For Palestine and Palestinians, May 14, 1948, was a fateful day in its 4,000-year history. It was also historically pivotal for the United States. Paraphrasing British author, George Orwell, it is essential to rediscover the past in order to gain control of the present and save the future.
Eleven minutes after David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, declared Israel a state in May 1948, President Harry S. Truman recognized his claim, giving legitimacy to Ben-Gurion’s bogus declaration.
In 1947, thirty-three members of the newly-created United Nations General Assembly (57 then) voted in favor of Resolution 181, recommending the partition of historic Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. Truman, undeterred by the fact that the UN Security Council had not voted on the resolution, which would have made it binding on all members, threw the full weight of the United States behind it.
Truman’s decision to position Israel as a citadel of US imperialism in the Middle East has boomeranged and has resulted in the United States being despised in much of the world. Rather than protect US interests in the region as planned, Israel has imperiled them.
As we have seen since the October 7, 2023 insurrection, there are no limits on US-Israeli brutality and on the suffering they have been willing to inflict on the Palestinians in order to preserve their imperium in the region.
Imperial arrogance on the part of American presidents is, of course, not new. It reached new heights, however, when President Donald J. Trump threatened to take over, “to own” Gaza and remove (euphemism for ethnically cleanse) Palestinians from their ancestral land to foreign destinations. The Zionist colonizing baton in Gaza would essentially be passed to American imperialists.
Trump revealed his illegal plan for Gaza during a recent (February 11) White House press conference. As humiliated King Abdullah of Jordan looked on, he said: “We’re going to hold it; we’re going to cherish it….It’s fronting on the sea. It’s going to be a great economic development job.” When asked by a reporter under what authority are you permitted to take the sovereign territory of Gaza; he smugly responded, “US authority.”
Interestingly, Trump’s claim to take over Gaza reminded me of “Manifest Destiny,” a term coined by John L. O’Sullivan in his 1845 essay in the New York Morning News. In it, he argued that the United States was within its rights to take the entire continent, including my home state of Oregon (then a territory jointly occupied by the US and Britain); he wrote: “….And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent, which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” O’Sullivan even suggested that Canada would eventually request annexation.
Manifest Destiny, the ideology of the divinely ordained right of Americans to expand westward, finds similar expression in Israel, whose leaders use the Old Testament to claim a “divine right” to all of historic Palestine. Racism, supremacy and ethnic cleansing are rooted in both expansionist gospels.
Trump’s bombast about taking Gaza, Canada, Greenland, Panama, Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico are current expressions of the imperial mindset that has resulted in decades of coups and wars across the globe.
Israel’s “from the river to the sea” expansionism is manifest in its annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, military occupation in parts of southern Syria and Lebanon, in its genocide in Gaza and continued theft of Palestinian land and property in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
It is not surprising that the United States, which has yet to confront its history of ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and horrific legacy of enslaving and lynching Black Americans, would be callously indifferent to the plight of Palestinians.
Not only are the ideologies of the US and Israel similar, their histories are comparable in many ways. Consider if you will: land theft, violent removal from ancestral land, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, forced confinement on reservations, continued and rabid hostility from squatters (“settlers”) and resistance by the oppressed to colonization.
The genocide of the Native people of North America was a 200-year catastrophe. Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, begun over 78 years ago, has never ended.
In many ways the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) and American Indian “Trail of Tears” are analogous.
During the Nakba, over 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their historic homeland by Zionist forces and made refugees to make way for a Jewish state in 1947-1949. During the ensuing Arab-Israeli War (1948-49), 78 percent of historic Palestine was seized and occupied by Israel. The remaining 22 percent came under Arab control until the 1967 War.
Between 1830 and 1850, during the “Trail of Tears,” an estimated 100,000 southeastern Native Americans were forcefully removed from their ancestral homeland and made refugees in “Indian Territory” (now Oklahoma).
Both peoples lost millions of acres of ancestral land to European “settlers.” Approximately 4,244,776 acres of Palestinian land was stolen by Israel during and immediately after the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. Indigenous people across the contiguous United States lost 98.9 percent of their historical lands.
Manifest Destiny in North America meant that by the late 1800s, in the interest of white settlement and exploitation, virtually all Native Americans had been killed or restricted to reservations surrounded by hostile “settlers” and military forts.
Although many tribes resisted occupation, they were overwhelmed by the superior firepower of the US Army.
The Israeli regime, using the Old Testament as a deed to all of Palestine, continues to build illegal “settlements” (at least 250) in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, land captured in the 1967 War. Over 700,000 hostile Jewish Israeli “settlers” surround ever-shrinking Palestinian towns and villages. Settler aggression against Palestinians is tolerated and often encouraged by Israeli occupation forces. Movement is severely restricted, hindered by hundreds of checkpoints, roadblocks, and barriers.
Since its forced intrusion into the Middle East, Israel, with Washington’s steadfast support, has had no reluctance about dropping bombs indiscriminately on Palestinian civilians and their Arab neighbors to kill and traumatize.
Recent revelations regarding the former regime of President Joe Biden in planning the air attacks on Gaza has revealed the depth of American cruelty and disdain for Palestinian lives, which all US regimes have shared.
In addition to providing Tel Aviv with weapons of mass destruction, for example, including bunker-busting bombs, the United States coordinated closely with Israel on massive strikes on residential buildings. They did so knowing that more than 100 civilians would be killed in order to kill a single Palestinian resistance commander.
Entire residential blocks were leveled to crush tunnel passages and to flood them with deadly carbon monoxide gas, which is released by bunker-buster bombs. In some cases, the gas killed Israeli captives–three of whom were killed by asphyxiation as a result of such bombing on November 10, 2023.
In addition, it appears that Israel has implemented its deadly Dahiya Doctrine in Gaza—a military strategy that involves the large-scale destruction of civilians, civilian infrastructure and property in order to avoid protracted guerrilla war and to inflict immense suffering so that the population will ultimately turn against the resistance.
After 15 months of daily bombardment, 200,000 survivors of the genocide returned to northern Gaza to claim what was left of their homes.
It is difficult to imagine the US-Israeli imperium taking a different path after decades of racism and exploitation. American poet, Robert Frost, in his 1915 poem, “The Road Not Taken,” might offer direction:
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
From Truman to Trump, Palestine is America’s fork in the road.
– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
