Gaza Is Turning Into an Endless Vietnam War

In last Monday’s news from Palestine, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Hamas is “willing to discuss a hostage deal only due to the fear that we intend to invade Gaza,” adding that “conquering Gaza City will lead to Hamas’ surrender.” On Wednesday, Prime Minister Netanyahu scoffed at the latest Gaza cease-fire plan and called up 60,000 reservists for a large-scale invasion of Gaza City, apparently the last piece of Gaza real estate relatively intact.

It’s not the first time we have heard about imminent Hamas surrender and the forces that will bring it about. We are now in Vietnam territory, with Katz — and more importantly Prime Minister Netanyahu — seeing the “light at the end of the tunnel” that General Westmoreland kept seeing as he sent more and more American troops to slaughter and be slaughtered.

The parallels with Vietnam grow by the day. Comparing the use of starvation as a tool of war in Gaza, I reached back to Americans burning Native cornfields and killing horses and buffalo as the settler colonialists moved across the country. When I propounded this theory to a friend who is close to my age, old enough to remember the ups and downs, the stories and the lies that led to the death of 50,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese in that war, he immediately remarked, “What about Agent Orange?”

Vietnam was a war that would not end. We kept looking for a way out — chemical defoliation, intense bombing in North Vietnam and Laos, assassinating village leaders accused of being Viet Cong, and even “negotiating.” Many historians now say that Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor, purposefully stalled Paris Peace negotiations, which had begun in 1968, until Nixon was reelected in 1972. The Paris Accords were signed in 1973, after the election and after thousands of additional Americans and Vietnamese were killed.

Talk of negotiations and their failure has been a frequent Gaza story. Netanyahu, like Nixon, sees extending the war as a personal benefit, more important than lives of innocent Gazans or innocent Israeli hostages. In this he is aided by hard core extremists who see the displacement of all Gazans with extended Israeli settlements as the “opportunity” in this war.

In this, we are back to indigenous America and settler colonialism, to parallels about displacement of American Indians and displacement of Palestinian Arabs. Early Zionists pointed to the American story as a guidebook in their intrusion and displacement of Arabs in the Holy Land.

There is solace in the fact that we are finally, finally, getting true stories of colonial displacement of America’s first peoples. We are acknowledging failed and brutal boarding schools, the evils of Indian Removal, and the misuse of the world we call “natural.” It’s not all easy. It might take years or decades but, after centuries of denial and of struggle to maintain Indian lands and promote the truth in American history, a flurry of books, programs, and court cases in the last 20 years has changed the way all Americans look at Native America.

There is solace too in the cordial relations now, 50 years after the killings, between the Vietnamese and Americans. Military veterans who once labored to kill each other now visit and talk. Trade between our two countries is robust. Younger generations might not forget, but seem to be moving past previous horrors.

It took years for the “fog or war” in Vietnam to be pierced. But it must begin. We must continue to seek true stories of Gaza, to applaud the large numbers of current Israeli protestors, and the reservists who are refusing to serve. Most of all, we must applaud and amplify the true coverage of what is happening on the ground in Gaza. It seems finally to be creeping past censorship and denial of journalists’ access into the broader world. And into the streets of Israel.