Why the Gaza Genocide is a Very Different Thing from American Westward Expansion
And why my American settler ancestors were better people than today's Zionists
I’ve heard the argument since 1978, the very first time I publicly questioned Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian Arabs. You did the same thing to the Indians, the Zionists said, and still do. You have no right to criticize us. If you do, you are a hypocrite. Since 10/7/2023, they’ve really cranked up the volume.
Balderdash. What my ancestors did is not comparable to what the Zionists are doing in Gaza and the West Bank now. In fact, it’s not even comparable to what they did just after World War II. Let us count the ways.
I’ll define the term first. For practical purposes in 2024, I will use the definition provided by the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, to which both the United States and Israel are signatories:
“In the present Convention, genocide 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 members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Did American settlers, and soldiers, do all of those things to the Native Americans(to whom I will henceforth refer as Indians, because the indigenous people use that term today to describe themselves, because it’s no sillier than anything else the whites came up with, no less inaccurate according to the Seneca Nation and all the others as far as I know, and, importantly to both them and me, easier to type)? Why yes, yes they did at different times and places.
Does that make it genocide? In a few instances, yes. Overall, from Jamestown to the surrender of Geronimo? No. Why not? The simplest reason is that one little word, “intent,” did not apply to most of the settlement process, but it’s far from the only one, and perhaps not even the most important.
The first mass extinction of the Indians came not from any intent of the Spaniards who conquered the Aztec Empire in the 1520s, but from something they didn’t understand themselves—infectious diseases and basic immunology.
Smallpox, mumps, and measles had been unknown in the New World before the Spanish showed up, the native population had no resistance, and at least 90% of them were dead no later than 1588, when Francis Drake was fighting the Spanish Armada in the English Channel and the only English in North America had vanished from a doomed colony named Roanoke.
Those two or three generations of Indians after 1519 saw more death than all of the later ones combined, long before the first English set foot at Jamestown or Plymouth. Had these deadly epidemics not happened, history would have been very different indeed, but they did happen.
What followed was a long, slow process of settlement, expansion, trade, shifting alliances between different groups of Europeans and Indian nations, and lots of short, sharp fights between very small numbers of people on the different sides.
Unlike the entire country of Israel/Palestine, which is about the size of Maryland, the future United States would span a continent. IOW, the North America of my settler ancestors was vast, mostly unknown to them, and much more sparsely populated by anyone when compared to the British Mandate of Palestine in the interwar years.
Some of the bloodiest and nastiest wars between settlers and Indians happened very early on. The worst one was probably the Pequot War of 1637, which began with the Pequot controlling most of Connecticut and Long Island, and ended with 400 of them being burned alive in their fortified village of Mistick.
It is pretty clear that the English intended to wipe the Pequot out, and so the genocide label applies here, HOWEVER, the fact that several other Indian nations fought alongside them against the Pequot clearly demonstrates there was no intent by the colonists to destroy all Indians, even then.
The settlers wanted land for farming and towns. Many genuinely believed that the Indians would be far better off if they would just convert to Christianity, settle down, learn to farm, and accept assimilation. IOW, the old pagan and hunter-gatherer Indian ways would just have to give way to what most whites believed was a superior, and manifestly inevitable, way of life.
What followed was two and a half centuries of first British and then American incremental settlement, punctuated by short, sharp “wars” that consisted mostly of skirmishes between anywhere from a few individuals to a few hundred on each side, followed by periods of mostly peace and trade, then followed by another wave of settlement as the white population on the Eastern Seaboard grew and pressed slowly, sporadically, and persistently westward on a 2000 mile long front. Below is a painting of one of the largest of these, Tippecanoe, in 1811;
One must also remember that the technology was completely different. There were no cars, no tanks, no warplanes, no missiles, no long range artillery, no precision-guided bombs. There was no internet, no livestreaming, no instant communication, no food that wasn’t grown in the area or imported as a luxury.
The Transcontinental Railroad wasn’t completed until 1869. Before then, Indian nations that lived in the old ways on land which the whites didn’t want to settle were mostly left alone.
It was only in early 1876, after the Panic of 1873 and a run on gold reserves that President Grant, who thought both blacks and Indians had been treated poorly and deserved better, reluctantly authorized Phil Sheridan to label all tribes which had not moved to reservations as “hostile.” The fact it took him over two years to do it in the face of pressure from both the public and his own administration demonstrates his reluctance was genuine.
The news of what happened to a narcissistic, cocky lieutenant colonel a few months later only confirmed to Grant that his first instinct was the correct one. (Point of family legend: Some distant relatives of mine sold Winchester repeating rifles to Crazy Horse, were wanted by the Feds, moved to Colorado and never got caught. Their last descendant there died in the 1980s. Some of their handiwork is illustrated below)
Within 25 years of that presidential decision, there were no “hostile” Indians left. Where did they go? A few died in battle, some died of disease and malnutrition on reservations because government Indian Agents were notoriously corrupt, but most lived on reservations, and a few used the white world for their own fame and fortune.
All adapted to the rise of a new civilization against which they had neither the means nor the numbers to resist, all became Americans; American citizens, American soldiers, sailors and Marines, American business people, American landowners.
Some Indian nations did better than others. The Ottawa, for example, figured out that if they legally owned their land by the white man’s laws, they were more likely to keep it, and they still own a fair chunk of northern Michigan, both on and off the Rez. The Seneca did something similar in western New York. The Blackfeet are still strong in Montana, and the Seminole can proudly claim to have never formally surrendered to American authority. (below: Seneca Resort & Casino, Salamanca NY)
The Apache, OTOH, didn’t fare so well, as anyone who has driven through their reservations in southern Arizona and New Mexico can testify.
My point is, the American Indians are still here, they have rights, they have well-earned pride, and the memory of their ancestors is honored and respected both by themselves and by the descendants of their enemies, who know that honor and respect was earned, and that none can take it away from them, not even Zionists.
Now, given what’s happening in Palestine, we must ask the question, why weren’t the Indians simply exterminated or driven into Mexico or Canada? They could not have prevented it any more than that Palestinian girl a few days ago could prevent herself from being dismembered by an American-made bomb fired by an Israeli which exploded in her room.
The uncomfortable answers for both postmodernist historians and Zionists are first, Christianity, and second, just plain basic human decency on the part of most of the white population of the United States at the time.
(Indian Mission School. Compare to what you just saw of Gaza)
They didn’t want to exterminate the Indians because they thought it was wrong. Most Americans wanted to convert the Indians to Christianity, or to assimilate them into the larger society, but they didn’t want to exterminate them, or to drive them from the country because they were the wrong ethnic group.
Both Zionist and imperialist propagandists do so love to moralize, don’t they? I’m a materialist historian, and so not normally prone to doing that, but I can when I’ve been sufficiently challenged or just plain enraged at the audacity of the lies spewed to justify a genocide that’s being livestreamed before my eyes.
Unlike a baseball fan in New England in 1876, who had to wait a few days to learn of Custer’s defeat in the newspaper, I can watch the Gaza Genocide live on a big screen. And, just like my ancestors would have been right alongside the Indians, I am horrified, repulsed, disgusted, and enraged by what I am seeing.
My settler-colonial ancestors never forced most of the indigenous population in the country to move into Philadelphia, walled them in for years, systematically bombed the shit out of them for months, told them to move to South Philly or else, destroyed every building in Philly, then told the natives to move back to Philly because they were going to come into South Philly and either kill or drive everyone out.
The closest Americans ever came to driving an ethnic group out of the country due to their ethnicity was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, when there was no more use for Chinese workers imported to build railroads. That was wrong then and it’s wrong now, but even that injustice doesn’t come anywhere close to what is happening in Gaza.
So no, Zionists, my ancestors did not do the same thing to the Indians as you are doing to the Palestinians. In fact, one thing I am sure of is that they definitely would have been every bit as outraged as I at having to pay for a genocide in the Holy Land, much less be expected to cheer it on or risk being slandered or unemployed.
One can only imagine what Mark Twain would say about that.
In short, Zionists, my white colonial settler ancestors were better people than you are now. I realize that’s a low bar, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone tell me it does not exist.
Thank you for reading, good day, and good luck.
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I adore you, Barbarian, but no - you're wrong on this one.
Excellent break down. I agree completely. People have no idea. About anything really unless it's their personal hobby. I happen to know because autistic obsession for the arc of history. The label of "evil" has fostered the very ignorance that gave the real genocide coverage. We kept expecting the villain to dress the part, we defined evil as an aesthetic not as qualities of action. The Zionists of today are a technological production. An integrated product of generational indoctrination. Humanity simply couldn't produce the level of mind control on display in the modern state of Israel. It's staggering. We'll be taking it apart for generations. How did they manage to get children to live stream war crimes proudly, and in such numbers. It simply wasn't possible for early Americans to be similar. The craft didn't exist, if it had, one of the religions would have taken over earth by then. I doubt even North Korea has produced such zealots in such large numbers as a ratio of the country. They wouldn't be so terrified of the Internet and movies otherwise. Truly, nothing like this has ever been seen before. People who think so are simply ignorant of the scope and densities involved.