Genocide By Any Other Name
15 05 2008
It is really difficult for me to write about Palestine without relating it to my own people’s history. I am what is commonly called a Native American Indian. When I hear the stories from my elders, or read accounts of what happened to my people and all indigenous people of the Americas, and continues to happen today, I am overwhelmed.
Christopher Columbus is generally the one credited for reaching the Americas in 1492 and beginning our slow annihilation. That was almost 600 years ago and with no signs of changing yet. Today marks 60 years since the Nakba of Palestine, when a new nation was created by destroying the existing nation and relegating the people to reservations (refugee camps, reservations, they are all the same thing). Will the Palestinian people have to suffer for their 60 years multiplied by 10, as my people have, before anyone takes notice of them and questions what is going on?
We look back on 1492 and think of it as a barbaric time, when civilization and mores were not quite up to our standards of today. How many of us look back to 1948 and think the same thing? No, for many 1948 was a time of great hope and it is remembered with nostalgia as a time period when people had values, morals, decency. Before all of the “ills” of our current society; before Rock-&-Roll had a firm grip on our youth and certainly before Hip Hop had taken over, before kids ran our households and parents could go to jail for spanking, before the hippie movement, the Black Power Movement, the Red Power Movement, before Chicanos called themselves Chicanos proudly, before Gay Pride festivals and free love and birth control pills and a day-after pill. In 1948, we say, people knew their neighbors by name, doctors made house calls, and you could rely on a complete stranger to help you out in any difficulty.
The 1948 era is often looked back on as our best days. Our brightest, most promising, scrubbed-face-goodness, hopeful days. When “Western” civilization believed that we had defeated the monsters (Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini) and we were on a brave new frontier of greatness.
That the “brave new frontier” included the subjugation of the Palestinian people, the theft of homes, lands and crops that had been passed down for generations, and women and children and the elderly were being indiscriminately killed to get them out of the way, did not sully our image of ourselves. That at that same time Native Americans were dying on the reservations of starvation and preventable illnesses, while their children were stolen and sent off to boarding schools to be sexually abused, mutilated, beaten, starved and turned into forced labor did not sully our image of ourselves.
We would like to convince ourselves that we are committed to humanity, that we are about justice and freedom and self-determination and “democracy”. But where have those values ever been applied to the Palestinians? It has been 60 years since they have had those rights and we barely bat an eye. Instead, people actually talk about Israel’s right to self-defense. While they are the aggressors. People complain about the “martyr culture” that they link to Islam and Arabs, when in fact it is simply the last dying struggle of desperation of people. People make light of the pictures of children and women who have been brutally killed by bombs, guns, having their houses raided and say these are sensationalist, when their use is merely an attempt to show us that these are human beings who have been killed.
This is a test. And right now we are failing. It is up to us to get it together sooner on behalf of the Palestinian people than we have done for my people. May Allah have mercy on us all.
Related Posts:
Everyone Is Crying Out For Peace, Yes, None Is Crying Out For Justice
Categories : Activism, Human Rights, Media Justice, Native Stuff, Politics&World Issues, Race Issues
- AH
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