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.
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Rich: I so appreciate you making the connection between Palestinians and indigenous Americans. (The Vietnam connection is less clear to me, except as a description of an interventionist “quagmire” …) The earliest Zionists, including Herzel and Jabotinsky, described their cause as colonial. They thought they were bringing “civilization” to the Levant.
Nonsense and ignorance.
And I won’t go any further since I know where you’re coming from, Walter.
But he’s right, David.
Surely everyone reading this also knows that even though there may be similarities, there are also great differences between the creation of Israel and the creation of the United States…
Yes, indeed. While both Israel and the U.S,
are settler-colonial regimes, they are quite different, too. Unlike the Europeans who settled in the Americas, Jews have a distant link to the Levant. The best scholars on settler-colonialism (like Rashid Khalidi) recognize this difference, even as they note similarities.
I’d say the link is more than distant, given the existence of Mizrahim. There have always been SOME Jews in Israel (though the numbers did get very low), and there have CERTAINLY always been Jews in the Levant.
Jews made up a tiny sliver (maybe 4 or 5%) of Palestine’s population in 1897, when Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland. (There were far more Christians than Jews in Palestine at that time, and of course WAY more Muslims than both combined.) Early Zionists like Herzl targeted European Jews (Ashkenazim), who emigrated to the area in large numbers (especially in the 1920s, after the Brits promised to turn a mostly Arab space into a Jewish homeland). By 1948, when Israel was founded, Ashkenazim made up about 80% of the Jewish population in Israel — and these European Jews dominated the leadership of Israel for many years, until the Mizrahim began emigrating from nearby Arab states, where (after the Nakba and the first Arab-Israel war) they suddenly faced discrimination. Please forgive me if you already know this demographic history; most Americans don’t.
I do, but you’re right, Walter, most don’t.
I don’t see the parallel, really. Vietnam was a viable country with a long history, artificially divided after a failed French colonial struggle. The south we were defending was poor and lacking basis for robust democratic civil society. The united country has been apparently fairly lucky in its leadership, and here we are, with a Vietnam that can work with other nations.
It could have been different. See Laos. Which way would Gaza go? It has no history of being a viable country, just fair game for whatever armed regime can hold it. Where’s the basis for building something from this? With Lebanon, a real country, teetering on the brink of failed state, what’s the prognosis for Gaza?
Lebanon is like what a binational state for Jews and Arabs covering all of the former British Mandate would be like.
The only way forward for Gaza is as an independent State of Palestine along with the West Bank, next to an independent State of Israel. Anything else is liable to end in failure of one sort or another.
If Egypt and Jordan wanted Gaza and the West Bank back (and the Palestinians wanted to be part of those countries) that could work, too. But I think that ship has sailed.
The only reason we can’t observe that the West Bank ship has sailed, is that the West Bank is still under Israel’s thumb and not in a position to form a state. If that were offered to them, they wouldn’t be any more interested in dealing with Gaza than Egypt is, would be my guess.