Understanding the shared ideology behind settler colonialism in Native America and Palestine

 

Both the United States and Israel were founded and exist on land taken during ongoing genocides. Settler colonialism drives these genocides, and both nations share an ideology that justifies the theft and rationalizes the killing.

The United States was founded and exists on stolen Native American land, taken in the course of an ongoing national genocide. Israel was founded and exists on stolen Palestinian land, taken in the course of an ongoing national genocide. In both nations, these genocides are a structural part of settler colonialism. And as I will argue in what follows, the ideology grounding settler colonialism in both nations comes from the same source, helping to cement a long-standing relationship between Israel and the United States.

Settler colonialism is a variation of colonialism. Colonialism is the takeover of one country by another to exploit its resources, material and human. Settler colonialism is the takeover of one country by another to settle it with the invading country’s population through the elimination of the Indigenous population and the theft of Indigenous land. Colonialism exploits the Indigenous population’s labor and land. Settler colonialism eliminates or seeks to eliminate the Indigenous population to take its land. That is, settler colonialism typically involves genocide. I am defining genocide in two ways: first, as it is defined in international law in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

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.

The term genocide was coined by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin in the wake of the Holocaust and is typically understood to entail a cataclysmic crime whose intent and enormous scale is manifest as was the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis or the hundreds of thousands of Tutsis murdered by the Hutus in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. But Lemkin’s definition, while pointing to a cataclysmic physical crime, also defines genocide as a daily process of the social and political destruction of a national group:  

Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. (Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79)  (more...)

Understanding the shared ideology behind settler colonialism in Native America and Palestine