Settler Colonial Violence, Here and There
on Israeli apartheid and the American "frontier"
“Hamas is part of the axis of evil of Iran, Hezbollah and their minions. They seek to destroy the State of Israel and murder us all. They want to return the Middle East to the abyss of the barbaric fanaticism of the Middle Ages, whereas we want to take the Middle East forward to the heights of progress of the 21st century.
This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this on Oct. 16 before Israel’s house of representatives. Light versus dark, progress versus barbarism, humanity versus the wilderness. The civilized white man versus the savage Other.
While every Indigenous group’s experience of land theft, occupation and extermination is unique, communities all over the U.S. (and world) have lifted their voices in solidarity with Palestine. In mid-October I bought The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean, a new and very timely book by Tariq D. Khan on “how settler colonial violence shaped antileft repression.” Though the book is focused on the U.S., the parallels between the genocide of Native American peoples and Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people have leapt off the page.
One of the things that blew my mind while reading The Republic was the continuity in the use of “terrorism” language. I used to think of “terrorism” as a contemporary term: I was 5 years old when 9/11 happened, so to my young (and vulnerable to propaganda) mind, the “conflict in the Middle East” that has been a constant presence for most of my life seemed to begin all of a sudden, out of nowhere, in 2001.
The references to 9/11 were plentiful following Oct. 7. White people love a standalone date — Nov. 5, Jan. 6, Black Friday. President Joe Biden said the attack on Israel was “like 15 9/11s.” The vulgarity of such a comparison aside, Biden said this as an invitation for Israel to step into a space of righteous victimhood that the U.S. leveraged in its violent military campaigns after 2001.
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Fort Dearborn. A U.S. army fort built next to the Chicago river in 1803 “as a base of operations for genocide against the Indigenous peoples who lived in the region,” Khan writes in The Republic.
“As the myth went, in the summer of 1812, savage and bloodthirsty tomahawk-wielding Natives massacred the good and defenseless God-fearing pioneers of Fort Dearborn, who became Chicago’s first martyrs in the cause of civilization,” Khan writes. In reality, the “Fort Dearborn Massacre,” as it became known, was not a massacre but a battle, a battle in a war that the U.S. waged against Britain and its Native allies, a battle that the Potawatomis and their allies won. The fort, a legitimate military target, was successfully attacked in response to a U.S. massacre, a massacre and not a battle, in which William Henry Harrison’s men killed more than two hundred Indigenous people, destroyed crops and buildings, and desecrated graves and bodies.
An organized and capable military force, resisting genocide and occupation, dealt a stunning blow to the colonizing military force, but the resulting spin cast the resistance fighters as evil murderers and the colonizers as innocent victims.
The above video and many others like it mourn the losses of pretty young Israelis killed while serving in the Israel Defense Forces. The caption says this 20-year-old “border police officer” was killed in a “brutal, senseless terror attack at her military base in Jerusalem.” Loss of life is always tragic, especially the loss of young life, but I struggle to accept that an attack on a military base is either senseless or terrorism. Terrorism, according to a quick Google search, is “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” When the IDF kills civilians by the thousands in Gaza, they consider it war, not terrorism. Light versus dark, I suppose.
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In a print article in Yedioth Ahronoth titled “Let’s not be intimidated by the world,” retired IDF Major General Giora Eiland writes that, though the international community warns about the spread of waste and water-borne disease in besieged southern Gaza, Israel should not be deterred, as “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer…”
Eiland, who currently serves as an advisor to Israel’s Defense Minister, justifies the genocide of the Gazan people by conflating civilians with combatants. He argues that the idea that Gaza is split into two groups — “Hamas fighters, who are brutal terrorists and must, therefore, die,” and “innocent civilians who suffer for no fault of their own”— is not true, but rather, since Gaza is under Hamas leadership and is generally supportive of Hamas, Israel can wage war against all its inhabitants:
“When senior Israeli figures tell the media, ‘It’s either us or them,’ we should clarify the question of who is ‘them.’ ‘They’ are not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the ‘civilian’ officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population that enthusiastically supported Hamas and cheered on its atrocities on October 7th.”
Even the women of Gaza are legitimate military targets because, Eiland writes, “They are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers.” This sentiment is reminiscent of former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s horrifying 2014 suggestion that Israel’s enemy is the entire Palestinian people:
“Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
Collective punishment is a war crime. And what’s more, no modern military power would consider the mothers of soldiers as legitimate military targets. Unless, of course, the colonizing state sees its enemy not as a military force composed of soldiers, but as a primitive band of savages bent on senseless violence.
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“After the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel, several Hamas militants were reportedly found to be high on the illegal drug Captagon, which surely fueled their murderous rampage.” This is the first sentence of an opinion piece by Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, who is for some reason allowed to write about foreign policy and national security for the publication on a regular basis.
In that whopper of a lede, Rogin links to a Nov. 1 Semafor piece penned by Jay Solomon, a former Wall Street Journal foreign affairs correspondent who was fired in 2017 for discussing commercial deals, including one involving arms sales to foreign governments, with a businessman who he was simultaneously cultivating as a source for his reporting on the Middle East. …Anyway. According to Solomon’s Semafor article, U.S. and Israeli officials believe the synthetic amphetamine Captagon was used by Hamas militants to “suppress fear and anxiety during the rampage and stimulate their willingness to attack, kill and, in some cases, torture, civilians.”
Solomon connects Hamas to ISIS, noting that U.S. officials claim members of the Islamic State group also distributed Captagon to its members to “lower their inhibitions during attacks and terrorist operations.” Pro-Israel media coverage following Oct. 7 of course ran with the Captagon story, using it to paint Hamas as a band of savage, senseless terrorists as opposed to the disciplined, civilized IDF. On Nov. 21, Israeli newspaper Haaretz was still flogging the story: “High on Captagon and Antisemitism: Everything About ‘The ISIS Drug’ Used by Hamas.” Whew.
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The central argument of The Republic is that the practices and language of genocide used against Indigenous populations on the American “frontier” were turned inward to repress leftist movements in American cities, as well as Black enfranchisement after the Civil War. Essentially, fascism is the violence of colonialism coming home.
Khan cites Chicago police captain Michael Schaack, who published a book in 1889 called Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror and the Social Revolution in American and Europe. Schaack relied heavily on “anti-Indian” language to describe anarchists, Khan argues.
Schaack describes a meeting of the International Carpenters Union in Chicago as though the carpenters were an army of Native warriors preparing to attack a white settlement: “They refused to be quieted, and, like Comanche Indians about to take to the war-path, they examined their revolvers and brandished their guns… In anticipation of blood, they screwed up their courage by frequent libations.”
Separately, describing a group of anarchists plotting to bomb a police station, Schaack wrote, “The cut-throats skulked around the station like so many Indians around the cabin of a helpless settler… these Chicago reds could not do without their beer while awake, and they made frequent trips to the neighboring beer saloons.”
All this talk of terrorists getting drunk and high to arouse their thirst for blood rhymes with the “drunken Indian” trope, a harmful stereotype that has existed since white colonizers’ first contact with Indigenous peoples and still exists today. In “wild west” fantasy stories borne of the American “frontier” as well as supposedly legitimate historical texts documenting dealings with Native groups, the idea that Indigenous peoples were helpless to resist the lure of alcohol, that they were genetically weak and more susceptible to it, are pervasive, playing into the notion of their supposed inferiority or barbarism.
Early American state militias, the federal army, extra-military groups of settler “vigilantes,” which later became police forces and lynch mobs, all fashioned themselves as civilized, upstanding white men, in contrast to the savage hordes of “reds” both on the frontier and in the working class. Drunkenness was a trope that drew a clean line connecting every enemy of the white ruling class.
Claiming Palestinian resistance fighters were high has the same effect as claiming Comanche warriors or communist revolutionaries were drunk. Spreading false claims that Hamas resistance fighters tortured Israeli civilians, raped Israeli women and beheaded Israeli babies has the same effect as convincing a whole generation of white Americans that “allahu akbar” means “death to America.” More fear, more hate, more death.
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To close, an excerpt from an open letter published on The Red Nation and signed by 132 Indigenous activists, artists and intellectuals in solidarity with Palestine’s struggle to be free:
“It has been heartbreaking and unsurprising to see the colonial powers in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe line up behind this genocide. Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, and occupation are only possible because of international support.
The settler states that dispossess and occupy our lands support Israel in dispossessing and occupying Palestine.
We see and feel the strength of Palestinian families in the face of the quotidian violence of the Israeli apartheid regime. Colonized peoples have the right to defend themselves and to resist colonial violence. We support Palestinian liberation and their right as an oppressed people to resist colonialism and genocide.”
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A few things we can do:
If you look at the presence of memory today and see the world from different lenses, chances are, they will be skewed to a liking that may harden with the passage of time, and it can prove to be vital no matter what side people want to take (which in your case is about life and death). The question people should really be thinking about is this: “How can we stop this madness of hate, beginning today, that has progressed to a state of diverging division?”
A person who was once considered a terrorist - according to some - named Nelson Mandela once wrote, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” That weapon has since been weakened. The growth of a collective society is one of the essential hallmarks of face-to-face communication; in the case of homo-sapiens, including myself, humans naturally gravitate to people with kind and open arms, but how wide these arms can be in one’s best capacity stem down to the basic understanding of history. Today’s volatile rhyme comes with rapid change where now the most rudimentary talking points don’t want to bring the light to yellow; even if it does, the writings of the headlines may have been obtained from a lesson in marketing school. A book I recommend that all people should read to address this critical issue was something I read during my first year of college called Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Professor Neal Postman. The late professor’s book is one of the best foundational tools I believe that can be used to restore collective memory in everyone around the world today.