The United States was founded, and continues to exist, on lands stolen from indigenous people, taken during an ongoing “national” genocide. Israel was also founded, and continues to exist, on stolen Palestinian land, extracted during an ongoing “national” genocide. In both countries, genocides are a structural part of settler colonialism.
As will be seen later, historian and professor of American studies at the prestigious Cornell University, Eric Chaifetz, argues that the ideology of establishing settler colonialism in America and Israel stems from the same source, which contributes to the consolidation of a long-term relationship between Israel and the United States.
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Settler colonialism is the takeover of another country by one country to settle the population of the invading country by eradicating the indigenous population and stealing their lands. Colonialism exploits indigenous people’s labor and lands. Settler colonialism always seeks to exterminate or eliminate indigenous people in order to seize their lands. That is, settler colonialism usually involves genocide. Here genocide is defined in two ways.
The first, as defined by international law in Article II of the 1948 Treaty, means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing group members;
- Causing serious physical or psychological harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately imposing living conditions on a group with the aim of physically exterminating it, in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures aimed at preventing births within the community;
- Forcibly transferring the children of the group to another group.
The term genocide was coined by legal jurist Raphael Lemkin in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, and is usually understood as a catastrophic crime of massive intent and scale, as in the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis, or the killing of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis by the Hutus in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
But Lemkin’s definition, although referring to a catastrophic physical crime, defines genocide in another way: it is an everyday process of social and political destruction of a national group:
“In general, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation or group, unless it is achieved through mass killing of all its members. Rather, genocide is intended to denote a coordinated plan of various actions aimed at destroying the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating these groups themselves.”
Structural genocide
While Lemkin refers to the traditional definition of the Convention, he also refers to a gradual, bottom-up form of genocide, which Patrick Wolfe calls “structural genocide” in his seminal, generative essay “Settler Colonialism and the Eradication of Indigenous Peoples” (2006).
This was also addressed by Mark Levine and Eric Chivitz in their book: “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide: A Reconsideration.” In this context, Wolff defines a “logic of eradication” that forms the basis of a society that imposes, over the course of its existence, institutional conditions that result in indigenous people not thriving.
Chivitz’s interest in settler colonialism in the United States began as a researcher in American studies, necessarily interested in how the United States was settled and the continuation of this settlement affected its course as a nation. Demographer Russell Thornton estimated the indigenous population, in 1492, at five million in what would later become the lower 48 states. By the end of the century, only a quarter of a million people remained as a result of the genocide, corresponding to both types of genocide mentioned above, and their lands were occupied by immigrants from various European countries.
Of the 1.894 billion acres that make up the area of the lower 48 states, which are lands that were inhabited by indigenous people in 1492 and were available to them, today they occupy only 68.5 million acres, or only 3.46% of the land originally available to them.
These lands are governed by the Federal Indian Law, an early nineteenth-century colonial body of “legal” intended not to achieve justice but rather to contain the indigenous population. For example, the responsibility for prosecuting all major crimes on reservations lies with the federal government, whose withholding of necessary resources and lack of incentives contributes significantly to high crime rates in indigenous areas.
Continuing the history of genocide structurally
One consequence of this structurally continuing “genocidal” history is that indigenous peoples—including American Indians (the legal indigenous designation in the 48 states), Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians—are the poorest of the poor in the United States; Poverty, which could have been alleviated by the government, causes them severe harm. American Indians and Alaska Natives have the highest death rates in the United States and the lowest life expectancy. The incarceration rate of this population in state and federal prisons is twice the national average.
While the idea of fatalism reached its peak in nineteenth-century America, it is now embedded as an integral part of its imperial reach.
“Determined Destiny” and “Chosen People”
Occupied Palestine is the other area of settler colonialism that Eric Civitz focuses on in his teaching and research, for academic, political and personal reasons, including his personal heritage: he is Jewish, and one of his four daughters and three sons (his grandchildren) are Israeli citizens.
His academic reasons, which he detailed in his writings, relate to his understanding of the precise ideological and historical agenda that motivated the settlement of both the United States and the Zionist entity, namely the idea or concept of the American “inevitable destiny,” which has its counterpart in the Jewish concept of the chosen people, and is interpreted in Zionist ideology, and not in traditional Judaism, as an interpretation that indicates a special relationship with a “Jewish” God, as a claim to the land of Palestine for all Jews of the world.
Paradoxically, most of them are not Zionists (in fact, a large number of Jews and Jewish organizations oppose Zionism), just as the majority of Americans do not believe in the idea of “inevitable destiny” and have not even heard of it. However, both ideas have been used, and continue to be used, in one form or another by ruling powers to justify the uprooting of indigenous peoples from their lands through colonial settlement.
The Zionist entity in Palestine is currently going through a stage of settler colonialism similar to what the United States was in in the nineteenth century.
While the idea of “destiny” reached its peak in nineteenth-century America, and is now included as an integral part of its imperial reach (as “the greatest power on earth”), Zionism has, explicitly, fueled Zionist expansion from 1917 until now, as it manifests itself in a distinctly racist image in its hostility to the Palestinians (for example, in the Gaza genocide, the Israeli government used to classify Palestinians as “terrorists” or “human animals”).
Indigenous concentration camps
Looking at Zionism and “inevitability” comparatively in the context of settler colonialism, Chaivitz argues that the Zionist entity in Palestine is currently going through a phase of settler colonialism similar to what the United States was in the nineteenth century: a military zone of indigenous concentration camps, which the United States called and continues to call “Indian reservations.”
The Palestinian Authority became more like a subcontractor to Israel, thus partly contributing to concealing the reality of Israeli military occupation
Historian Rashid Khalidi refers to the now occupied Palestinian territories as “an archipelago of great open prisons” (The Book of Palestinian Identity). In this archipelago, Gaza, now witnessing an ongoing catastrophic genocide at the hands of Israel, is widely known as “the largest open-air prison in the world.” Thus, the West Bank and East Jerusalem constitute fragmented territories under Israeli military rule, with the support of a cooperative Palestinian Authority. “The situation regarding the two-state solution is made worse by illusions fueled by the fantasy of a Palestinian Authority created under the 1993 Oslo Accords. It is in fact a virtual body with no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no ultimate control. In other words, an authority with no real authority over anything… The Palestinian Authority has become something of a subcontractor for Israel, and thus has partly contributed “In concealing the reality of an Israeli military occupation that has complete security control over all of these lands, and has complete control over the land and all other resources in the West Bank occupied since 1967.”
The US strategic reasons in the Middle East, which justify its close relations with Israel as the “sole democracy” in the region, are related to the ideological and historical rapprochement between the two countries, which was reinforced by the financial and ideological power of the Israel lobby in the United States.
“Exceptional” American and Israeli
A comparative study of settler colonialism in Palestine and North America helps us understand why the two countries are so intimately and destructively involved, to understand how American and Israeli “exceptionalism” are intertwined.
Civitz understands “exceptionalism” as the way in which the United States and Israel portray their histories as exceptions to the colonial-imperial history that guided the course of Western Europe, when in fact they are extensions of that history. In the book “The Jewish State” or (in German, “The State of the Jews,” 1896), which is considered the “sacred” book of Zionism in its vision of a national homeland for the “Jewish people,” Theodor Herzl presents this extension clearly: “Palestine is our unforgettable historical homeland… In it we must form part of the fortress of Europe facing Asia, a bastion of civilization in the face of barbarism.”
Civitz puts the phrase “the Jewish people” in quotation marks, because all national groupings are essentially “imaginations,” that is, they are merely structures that present a narrative about a common origin, or a myth, of the unity of a conflicting or culturally, socially, and politically diverse people, united by a single law.
In his book The Invention of the Jewish People, Israeli historian at Tel Aviv University, Shlomo Sand, points out that the Old Testament presents a nationalist homogeneity myth for the Zionist movement and Israel as a symbol of its national deification; “When some archaeological discoveries threatened the image of linear, connected Jewish history, they were rarely cited; when they did appear, they were quickly forgotten. Nationalist imperatives created an iron grip that prevented any departure from the prevailing narratives.”
Jabotinsky compares Zionist settlement in Palestine to European settlement in the Americas and, as might be expected, gives them an aura of idealism
Iron wall
Ironically, the fascist Zionist leader, Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky (1880-1940), acknowledged the similarity between Native Americans and Palestinian Arabs, albeit in a completely racist way. In his seminal essay “The Iron Wall” (1923), which has largely become enduring Israeli policy—for example, Israel’s current program of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is called “Operation Iron Wall,” and the West Bank apartheid wall is a literal embodiment of the idea—while Jabotinsky expresses his desire to live in peace with the Arabs of Palestine, despite his insistence on a Jewish-majority state, by contrast, He sees no way to achieve this peaceful coexistence except through war.
In his defense of the Iron Wall, Jabotinsky compares Zionist settlement in Palestine to European settlement in the Americas and, predictably, gives them an aura of idealism: “But those ‘great explorers’, the English, Scots and Dutch who were the first true pioneers of North America, were people of the highest moral standard; people who not only wished to let the Indians live in peace, but even had pity for the flies; The natives resisted savage and civilized settlers alike with equal cruelty.”
At the same time, Jabotinsky displays a typical settler ambivalence towards the indigenous people, praising their spirit of resistance while at the same time pointing out their inherent inferiority: “Culturally, the Arabs are 500 years behind us; spiritually, they have neither our stamina nor our willpower, but this exhausts all internal differences.” In the settler imagination, Arabs could simply be considered the local equivalent of the indigenous people of the Americas.
Denial of settler history
Here, then, at the beginning of the Zionist project in Palestine, we see the product of militarism and racism since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which paved the way for the Gaza genocide and Israeli expansionism, with the full support of the United States government. Jabotinsky’s words erase the genocide of the indigenous population of America, which after the end of the Holocaust of the indigenous population at the end of the nineteenth century, is still continuing structurally, just as the genocide in Palestine, in its structural form since 1917, has now taken an explicitly catastrophic form since 1948.
Jabotinsky’s early recognition that Jews are settlers and Arabs are indigenous (but does not recognize the potential national status of “Palestinians”) contradicts the early Zionist slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land.” But with Zionism building its iron wall in Palestine, and its forced transfer in 1948 of the Palestinian territories to “Israel,” this slogan that the Israelis chanted meant to erase the true history of settler colonialism, and provided an example for later Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to say in 1969: “There was no such thing as Palestinians… they never existed,” when the Jews began settling in Palestine under the banner of Zionism.
Thus, in denial of their ongoing settler history, the vast majority of Israelis today claim to be the original inhabitants of Palestine, and to have an exclusive relationship with the land, as the “chosen people,” concludes Chaivitz. This claim, whether in North America or Palestine, is used to justify genocide.
- The opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera Network.
