Epistle to the Zionists

From a descendant of American settler-colonialists

Dear Zionists,

Before I start preaching to you, you need to know who I am, and to understand that you need to know who my people are. I’m an American of 98% western European descent. I know their names going back to 1638 to a man named Francois on one side, and my most recent immigrant ancestor was a man named Philip, who was born in Staffordshire in England in 1715.

Francois was in the first group of French settlers in Trois Riviers, Quebec, New France. One of his great-or-so granddaughters married another Francois who was one of this guy’s officers

That is Henry Knox, George Washington’s commander of artillery during the American Revolution and the first Secretary of War. That ancestor was not only with Knox and Washington during the war, but with George Rogers Clark at Kaskaskia. His family settled in Missouri, and one of his descendants once sold a black slave named Jose’ in Napoleonic New Orleans in 1801.

Other ancestors of mine came with, or on the heels of, Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap into what was not yet Kentucky and West Virginia before the Revolution.

Themselves descended from Highlanders once loyal to the Stewarts, Scots relocated by the English to northern Ireland to first fight the Irish and then to become Irish themselves, or proud and stubborn Welsh, all had one thing in common—they were determined to live on land they could call their own without a by-your-leave from any goddamned aristocrat or banker.

As for the people who were already there—Cherokee, Shawnee, Creek and dozens of others whose name usually translates as The People or the Human Beings—well, they could serve, move elsewhere, die, whatever, but they were going to get out of the way one way or the other.

My ancestors knew in their bones that if one wanted better land and a better life for oneself and one’s family, a life free of servitude to a hereditary or financial elite, then one had to move beyond their power onto land they had not yet reached, and take it for oneself.

This is the way it was, and were the Indians really people anyway from my ancestors’ perspective? After all, they weren’t even nominally Christian and they lived so differently, and it’s just emotionally easier to displace someone if you don’t think of them as being quite human. It would be arrogant presumption of me to think that my ancestors would not have justified what they did in their own minds. It’s an unpleasant, uncomfortable thought, but it’s also true.

Some of you should be nodding your heads about now. Zionists themselves, including an Israeli consul, have told me that the Jewish settlement of the former British Mandate of Palestine is no different morally, spiritually, or culturally from the European settlement of the US and Canada, without which I would not be where I am today.

If you believe that, then I am here to inform you that you are fundamentally, and potentially tragically, mistaken. Hearken to me, O Zionists, and heed my words so that that Israeli Jews and their descendants can live and prosper in the land of Palestine! Ignore me at your peril!

I studied the history of my ancestors not only because I found it fascinating, and not only to honor their courage and tenacity, as any Native American worth her salt would tell me I should do, but to learn from them, and from those they fought, so that I and my descendants can just maybe do better.

In order to understand the era of American settlement at all, one must understand the early capitalist system that was the driving force of those times. It was young, energetic, fiendishly inventive, ruthless in its pursuit of profit, and could only keep growing by expansion. And whaddaya know? There was a whole world of “new” lands and peoples out there who just could not compete with European technology, organization, and sheer weight of numbers, those numbers resulting from improvements in everything from sanitation to cooking techniques.

The Native American population had been reduced by as much as 90% by the time the first Englishman set foot at Jamestown by smallpox, measles, mumps, and other diseases that developed in the Old World long after the Indians’ ancestors came from Siberia, and to which they had no hereditary, natural resistance.

There just weren’t that many of them, and in days before electricity or instant news or fast cars, their numbers were whittled down in skirmish after skirmish, relocation after relocation, epidemic after epidemic, year after year for centuries. If the Native Americans had been as resistant to those diseases as the early settlers were, then history would have been very different indeed.

Zionists, the native population when you came to Palestine had not undergone anything like a population reduction of 90%, the result of which you are very much aware. In fact, you have told me that lawns must be mowed and the Arab population kept down or they would breed so fast they would overwhelm the Jews in just a few generations. The American settlers never had that problem. Ever.

(postcard of Jaffa, c. 1875)

I trust I’ve made my point that the material, historical circumstances of my ancestors in America were fundamentally different from those that prevailed in Palestine during the period of Zionist settlement from the 1890s through the current day. Now, I know many of you are chomping at the bit to get to moral equivalencies, and your patience will now be rewarded.

It’s quite simple: There are no moral equivalencies between myself and my ancestors. Even if I unreservedly accept a premise that I’ve heard from many liberals, that they ethnically cleansed or deliberately committed a genocide on the Native Americans, that does not obligate me to support you doing the same thing to another people now.

In fact, if anything I am morally compelled to do the exact opposite, am I not? If what my ancestors did was a crime, and I’m supposed to be ashamed of them for it, then I should also be opposed to you forcing the Arabs to leave Palestine so you can have a nice, clean theocratic ethno-state of your very own. This, BTW, is why 2/3rds of Democrats say they support the Palestinians right now.

Lucky for you Zionists, I’m neither a liberal nor a Democrat and I’m not ashamed of my ancestors. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help you win me over to your cause, either.

The Palestinian Arabs are still alive and I see that thousands of women and children are being deliberately and systematically murdered in job lots on the orders of the Zionist government in Jerusalem. That is what matters, not a past about which I can do nothing. I am not obligated to support this. I am obligated to pay for it by a government that does not care what its people want, and that pisses me right off.

In fact, it seems that my ancestors ultimately failed to escape living under another’s by-your-leave. I sure haven’t because I’ve got a mortgage to pay. There’s a banker holding the Sword of Homelessness over my head to make sure I keep on paying it, too. And there’s an Infernal Revenue Service making damned sure some of the fruits of my own labor go to support Israel, too, but I digress. Sorry not sorry.

For that matter, Germans in 2023 are not obligated to support the Israeli slaughter of Gaza just because their grandparents had something to do with the Holocaust in 1943. I’m sure a lot of them are thinking, just like I and about 200 million other Americans are thinking, that the whole point of the slogan Never Again was to prevent any ethnic group from being subjected to a genocide or ethnic murder campaign ever again, by anyone.

Right? Right. Of course that’s right.

Zionists, I might not be able to stop Israel from massacring tens of thousands of more Palestinians and driving hundreds of thousands of others from their land in the next few months. But I am an American citizen. I think that genocide and ethnic murder are things to be avoided, and I strongly object to myself and my fellow Americans being required to damned well pay for it.

And that, my few patient Zionist readers who have had the honor, courtesy and courage to still be reading this, is something that I can do something about. We the American people have done it before, and not all that long ago.

We were instrumental in ending the apartheid regime in South Africa. We will be even more instrumental in ending the apartheid regime in Israel, because Israel is much more dependent American funding than South Africa ever was.

Zionists, be warned! An American BDS movement is coming for you. It is unavoidable. It is inevitable, and it will succeed. You cannot stop it because the simple fact of the matter is that the American people, including American Jews, have more power than both you and Israel combined. It is the destiny which your ideology has earned.

How you handle it is up to you. I suggest you take a long, hard look at the white South Africans for inspiration. Israeli Jews can continue to live and prosper in Palestine, but they will not, cannot, continue to do so as masters.

I was always told that Jews in general were smart, and personal experience has never done anything to convince me I was misinformed. Jews have lived side by side with Arab Muslims for centuries, and many still do. They can do so again, and as equals, in a majority ruled, secular state of Palestine. They can prosper as millions of white South Africans still do.

But the years of a Jewish State in Palestine are numbered, for the simple reason that the days of American support for the thing are numbered. The price required of us to support it, namely a genocide, is simply too much for us. We Americans may not be able to go back in time and make a much more pleasant history for ourselves, but we can and we will put a stop to paying for the murder and expulsion of women and children in Palestine.

Morally, it’s literally the least we can do. Zionists, do yourselves a favor and go study Judaic theology. Learn about your own religion. It doesn’t condone ethnic murder or genocide, either, and it’s something to be proud of. Your current course really is not, and you won’t be allowed to carry on like this indefinitely so you may as well change course now.

Thank you for your time.

Yours truly,

An American citizen