Yes, I have to agree with President Biden that the Hamas attacks on Israel last weekend were "sheer evil." These were horrific and vicious acts of callous mass murder of mostly civilians, and we need to condemn them in absolutely unambiguous terms. As a Christian I must stand with the victims of cruelty and violence, no matter their nation or religion. That is the example Jesus gives us and even takes on himself.
At the same time, when the media presents these attacks as "unprovoked" or somehow occurring out of nowhere, they continue a long tradition of ignoring or down-playing the continuing, daily indignities and atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestinians, which have intensified in the last few months. The capricious home invasions and demolitions, the theft of ancestral land, the kidnapping and torture of children, the murders, the disappearances, the mass incarceration, the use of chemical weapons against civilian populations, the attacks on Christian and Muslim holy places, the constant harassment of check-points, and so on and on, do not justify Hamas' atrocities, but they may somewhat explain them.
On Monday we celebrated Indigenous Peoples' Day in the US, a day reclaimed from a celebration of Christopher Columbus, whom we now know committed some extremely evil acts himself, in addition to being the spearhead of European colonization of the Western Hemisphere. I read a little book on the history of the Native tribes where I now live (in the Finger Lakes region of New York), and heard the author speak last night about that story, which continues today.
For over two centuries, the American media depicted Indigenous peoples in the same biased way they now report on the Palestinians: by framing them as at best backward and at worst evil "savages," perpetrating violence against innocent settlers. I learned about US General Sullivan's ethnic cleansing operation in 1779, systematically burning crops and villages, causing the survivors to walk to British Fort Niagara for shelter and relief. The old people and babies all died on the trip, and the winter killed many more. Yet Sullivan got a county named after him, and his expedition has been celebrated by white people ever since. And this is just one local incident in a systematic genocide that in many ways continues.
The other day someone griped about how the Palestinians were ungrateful because, after all, the Israelis "gave them Gaza." I replied that this is like asking the Indians to be grateful because the Americans "gave them" Pine Ridge. Palestinians have been in Gaza for thousands of years! Yet our media and government often treat them like invaders!
A few summers ago I served as part of a church delegation to listen to the Shinnecock people on eastern Long Island. A few hundred Native people live on a small reservation on a peninsula in the Hamptons. The local white people do not understand why they don't just sell their property and move elsewhere. After all they could probably get a billion dollars for it, easy. That's over a million dollars for every person on the reservation. But they do not want to leave for any price. They have stewarded that land for over five-thousand years. Their ancestors' bones lie under that soil. They know every tree. White people, who boast about arriving all the way back in 1629, have no comprehension of this kind of connection to land.
When I visited Palestine I spoke to farmers the title to whose land has stayed in their family for over 900 years. And yet the Israelis worked bureaucratically and by encroachment and sheer violence to appropriate it for another one of their illegal settlements. We planted olive trees. Settlers would come at night and pull them up.
The difference between what we see happening there now and what has taken place here for 300 years escapes me. We see in both cases people taking by force territory that does not belong to them, and in the process displacing or harassing the people who have lived there for many generations.
And I think this explains why the American media and government choose to frame Middle East conflicts with a bias in favor of the Israelis. If we recognize the suffering of the Palestinians, we may have to address our own behavior as a civilization based on land theft and genocide. We might have to stop thinking that only white lives -- and agendas, projects, profits, and power -- matter, and we can't have that. (We also bear a lot of guilt about the way Europeans treated the Jews over the centuries, and sometimes continue to treat them.)
The more we learn about the history of colonialism, the more repelled we have to feel about the nauseating violence, arrogance, and terror applied as white people took over this continent. We fortunately have managed to change our collective minds about Columbus. We have begun to recognize the original inhabitants of the land, and to rename things. The entertainment industry depicts Indians much more favorably than they used to. Some churches make strong statements against the Doctrine of Discovery, the thin 16th century legal/theological cover for colonialism in this hemisphere. Again, admirable. But these initiatives don't threaten us or cost us anything. They don't change the situation on the ground or in people's lives.
When I went to Standing Rock in 2019 to join in the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, I saw flags representing many Native peoples, around the world. Among them I noticed a Palestinian flag. Palestinians are also Indigenous People.
The war on Indigenous Peoples is a major and necessary feature of Modernity. It expresses the racism, expansionism, militarism, and predatory economic philosophy that has dominated the way Europeans think and act for 500 years, and which now threatens the very ability of the planet to sustain human civilization at all. We see perhaps the most active and violent front in that war in Israel/Palestine. And it just got worse, and will continue to deteriorate with a tsunami of bloodshed ahead of us. The Palestinians will bear the brunt of this.
In the meantime we pray with and for the Israelis who lost loved ones so horribly last weekend, and for the security of their communities. And we pray for the people of Gaza as they once again have to endure intense bombing, compounded by being cut-off from needed resources. We contribute what we can to alleviate the suffering and heal people. We hope the leaders on all sides act with compassion and reason, and use this tragedy to figure out a better solution to this long-festering crisis.
And perhaps we will come to our senses and realize together in this conflict -- the one in Israel/Palestine and the ongoing consequences of colonialism around the world, including here -- that we need to live together in respect and harmony, learning from and celebrating each other in peace.
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