Genocide

Do we call it genocide, land-grab, racism, or political maneuver? Whatever of these or similar terms we use, such action was the essence of the inception of a country called the United States of America. What the US government is doing in Palestine, aiding the Zionist government in destroying Palestinian communities, is nothing but repeating what culminated the inception of this country. The United States of America was established by European settlers on the graves of indigenous people. It is important to read the history of the United States, especially from the time when white European settles invaded this land.

History says that the time very first Americans arrived in this land was 30,000 years ago. The first Europeans arriving at the new world were Vikings, who arrived in around the 10th century. At the ending decade of the fifteenth century, Pope Alexander VI claimed the new world as a part of Spain. For a dozen years, beginning with the year 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed to the newly found continent four times. The first time his crew arrived in this land, they were welcomed by the indigenous people. The sailors were tired, thirsty, and hungry. Natives welcomed those strange looking people who spoke in a different language. Realizing the exhaustion of those sailors, natives provided them with a place to rest, in addition to water to drink and food to eat. Thinking they arrived in India, newcomers called natives Indians, and as a result, they have been known as Indians since. Newcomers didn’t bring anything for native people, but hostilities and diseases. Some of these diseases, such as smallpox, killed majority of the natives, which plummeted their population by about 80%!

The following ideas were settlers’ principles with regards to their supremacy in their colonialism:

·       White lives were more valuable than other races, and darker colored skinned people, such as indigenous natives of America, had to submit to the white race.

·       African slaves were under white people’s command, and in addition to their inferior race, they needed to serve their masters, the colonizers.

·       Regarding the native people of Americas, their land belonged to the white victor.

·       Genocide for land grab and living among immigrants on occupied land was the daily affair. According to the United Nations, a genocide is killing of natives, causing physical and mental harm, inflicting conditions on the native which would bring about physical destructions or harm in whole or in part, imposing measures which would affect their birth rate, and forcefully transferring children of one group to another.

·       Today, an estimated ten percent of the hidden energy in this country, such as oil, coal, uranium, natural gas, are in indigenous land. However, indigenous people occupy about five percent of the country’s total landmass. As a result, and as recently as a decade ago, natives had to fight for their right of use of their land, in the event of Dakota Access Pipeline. Meaning that natives (or as they are called Indians) have to constantly fight with the occupiers in order to keep their small five percent, the ground untouched by the big brother.

Number of indigenous people of America exceeded number of settlers until the first decade of the nineteenth century. Through time, settlers created militias who attacked various native people’s communities. They also created another group of invaders who ranged between forts and settlements attacking natives, called rangers. As a result of declining number of natives due to disease and genocide, and arriving more settlers from Europe and other continents, from the second decade of the nineteenth century, number of settlers exceeded number of natives.

Looking at the history of a country called Isreal, we will notice the similarities between the two landgrab nations. The earliest recorded history of Jews is around thirteenth century BCE in the kingdom of Judah (present lands belonging to Palestinians and Syrians), capital of which was Jerusalem. About five and seven centuries later they were deported by the Assyrian Empire. They were allowed to return to their homeland after the region was conquered by Persian Achaemenid Empire. However, continuing wars with Romans decreased Jewish population. Jews had to migrate and settle in various  countries. Depending on the emperors and kings running those countries where Jewish people were living, they were put under political pressures such as pogroms, because of their religious beliefs. More than two million Jews migrated to the United States within half a century, between the last two decades of the nineteenth and the first two decades of twentieth centuries. In the final years of the nineteenth century, Zionism, with the aim of conquering Palestine and making it a Jewish state, was established. With the rise of Nazi party in Germany and invading and occupying the great majority of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, genocide of Jewish people with a program called Holocaust began, when six million Jews were killed. At this time Jews began migrating to Palestine in an accelerating number. In 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the state of Israel. Since then, wars have been ignited by the Jewish state against its Palestinian neighbors, in order to increase their land. Migration of Jewish people to Palestine, and calling it their homeland due to its historical significance, does not match that of American pioneers, but their landgrab attitude matches their predecessors.

 

Presently, European countries supporting Israel are all EU members, with Germany providing the greatest number of arms and ammunitions to Israelis. Arab countries presently supporting Israel are Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, and United Arab Emirates. United States government, due to the similarity of its history with that of the Israelis, and as the country  with the largest producer of war machines by far, supports the state of Israel in murdering inhabitants and conquering Palestinian lands, projecting the faith of Palestinians as those of American natives. However, this is a different time when the whole world is witnessing Israeli genocide, and as a result, sympathizing with Palestinians. Fortunately, a ceasefire deal is progressing between the Israeli government and Hamas, and the ongoing genocide may be halted soon. Whatever the case might be, it is obvious that what happened to American natives cannot be repeated in the land of Palestine.