"A comparative reading of ethnic cleansing against Native Americans and Palestinians, from the fabrication of pretexts to massacres and the question of destiny."In deconstructing the historical US-Israeli relationship and the unlimited and endless support from Washington for Zionist gangs before 1948 and subsequently for Israeli governments of various political colors in their war against the Palestinian presence on their historical land, it is essential to foresee what the history of the extermination of indigenous peoples in America says about the future of Palestine and its people. Especially since both cases are closely similar: settlers came from across the seas and the ends of the earth to slaughter and expel a people living on land inherited generation after generation.In America, all projects of extermination, displacement, and cultural killing did not fully succeed in erasing the original identity of North America: after nearly two and a half centuries of attempts at obliteration, more than five hundred federally recognized indigenous nations in the United States today are still fighting legal battles to reclaim lands, water rights, and sacred sites, and are witnessing a clear linguistic and cultural revival. In recent decades, they have received official recognition and belated government apologies, proving that the collective spirit of resistance cannot be erased by force alone. However, the price paid was immeasurable, including the loss of more than ninety percent of the indigenous population during the first four centuries of colonization, according to most historical estimates, and the transformation of entire peoples from owners of a continent into a marginalized minority living on the fringes of geography and politics in their original lands. This is precisely the fate that a segment of the right-wing settler movement in Israel today is trying to impose on Palestinians, through forced displacement plans sometimes openly declared by Israeli officials, through escalating settlement expansion in the West Bank, and through the policy of "gradual emptying" of Gaza of its inhabitants under the pretext of "reconstruction" or "humanitarian areas."Perhaps the fundamental difference that gives Palestinians a margin not available to indigenous peoples in America is that their battle has not yet been decided. International law, despite all its inability to deter, still recognizes the right to self-determination for the Palestinian people, and global public opinion—especially among younger generations in the West itself—is gradually shifting in favor of the Palestinian cause after recent years of war, and Palestinian steadfastness on the land (a "sumud" that parallels the insistence of Native American nations to survive against all odds) remains a daily tool of resistance no less important than any armed resistance.The lesson offered by the experience of Native Americans is twofold: a warning that settler colonialism, when left without a real international brake, and at the same time a testament that peoples targeted for annihilation never completely disappear, and that narrative, identity, and belonging to the land can survive even the cruelest attempts at extermination, to return and demand—even if belatedly and with enormous sacrifices—their right to justice, recognition, and land.The question posed to the world today is not whether the comparison between the two experiences is "accurate" in every detail, but whether the world is ready this time, unlike two centuries ago, to intervene before it is too late, instead of merely offering a belated apology decades and centuries after the crime has occurred.Historical Approaches Between Two ColonialismsIn the summer of 1890, about three hundred Lakota Indians, mostly unarmed women, children, and elders, surrendered at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota to the United States Army. Within an hour, soldiers emptied their machine guns into the crowd. This was not an isolated incident, but a logical conclusion to a project that lasted nearly four centuries: replacing one people with another, and transforming an inhabited land into an empty "promised land" waiting to be settled.A little over a century later, in another part of the world, the same vocabulary is repeated: "settlement," "evacuation," "security," and "a land without a people for a people without a land." Palestine is not America, and the time is not the same, but the colonial structure upon which both projects are based is almost an exact replica: an indigenous people to be uprooted, a religious narrative mobilized to justify the uprooting, massacres creating "facts on the ground," and institutions reshaping geography and memory simultaneously.Institutionalized Religious Myth... A Cover for Bloody TerrorThe colonization of North America was not merely an economic adventure. The early settlers who landed on the shores of New England in the seventeenth century saw themselves as the "new Israelites" escaping the bondage of Europe to the American "promised land," and their speeches and documents were filled with biblical metaphors about "Canaanites" from whom the land must be cleared. In the nineteenth century, the concept was formulated in the phrase "Manifest Destiny," which presented settler expansion as a divine will, not merely a state policy. The "Doctrine of Discovery," issued by the papacy in 1493, granted Christian kingdoms the "legitimacy" to seize any land inhabited by non-Christians, and this principle remained a legal basis relied upon by American courts until the nineteenth century to justify the confiscation of indigenous lands.The same religious pretext, though its doctrinal details differed, was present in the Zionist project. The founding discourse, from the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 and from the "Balfour Declaration" in 1917 until today, blended a secular European-born nationalism with a selective invocation of religious text to justify settlement. This blend was particularly solidified in settler movements such as Gush Emunim, which emerged after the 1967 war and saw the West Bank as a "promised land" that should not be relinquished. The result in both cases is the same: transforming a purely political-military operation, the seizure of inhabited land from its people, into a "sacred mission" that transcends moral and legal debate.Institutionalization and Framing of Ethnic CleansingColonialism in North America did not stop at settlement but was based on a series of massacres and forced displacement projects that became state policy. The "Indian Removal Act" of 1830 led to the "Trail of Tears," when tens of thousands of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek people were uprooted from their lands east of the Mississippi River and marched in forced marches during which thousands died from hunger, cold, and epidemics. In California in the mid-nineteenth century, the local government funded "bounties" for the scalp of every Indian killed, as part of an organized extermination campaign that wiped out the majority of the state's indigenous population within two decades. Then came the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 and the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, closing a chapter of armed resistance with direct mass killing.The scene in Palestine was no less brutal. During the Nakba in 1948, Zionist gangs uprooted most of the Palestinian people from their homes, and more than 531 towns, villages, and communities were erased from the map, either by demolition or by renaming and colonial settlement over their ruins. The displacement process was not "peaceful" as the official Israeli narrative tries to portray it; rather, it was accompanied by direct massacres, the most famous of which were the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948, the Tantura massacre, and the death march from the cities of Lydda and Ramle, where residents were forced to walk long distances under the summer heat without water, and many died along the way. Since then, massacres have continued: Kafr Qasim 1956, Sabra and Shatila 1982, Ibrahimi Mosque 1994, leading to the ongoing aggression on the Gaza Strip since October 2023. Despite a ceasefire agreement coming into effect in October 2025, the Israeli killing machine continues to claim lives in a pattern reminiscent of the "minor wars of extermination" that continued against Native American nations for decades after the major wars officially "ended."Post-Physical Extermination - Erasing Culture and MemorySettler colonialism does not stop at land and body but extends to language, name, and memory. In America, since the late nineteenth century, "boarding schools" were established for indigenous children, where they were forcibly removed from their families and forbidden to speak their languages or practice their rituals, under the explicit official slogan: "Kill the Indian, save the man." Thousands of children died in these schools from hunger, disease, and neglect, and the American government officially acknowledged this fact more than a century after it occurred. The goal was openly declared: to liquidate the collective identity of indigenous peoples, not just their physical existence.In Palestine, the erasure of memory takes different forms but leads to the same path: renaming villages and streets with Hebrew names, confiscating and smuggling Palestinian archives, restricting education and curricula in Jerusalem and the occupied interior, criminalizing the commemoration of the Nakba and even raising the Palestinian flag and wearing the keffiyeh, in addition to a continuous siege of Palestinian cultural institutions in Jerusalem, and systematic destruction of universities, libraries, and archaeological sites in Gaza during the recent war. The goal in both cases is not only to empty the land of its people but to empty the collective memory of its narrative, so that the "absent" becomes without a trace proving that it was once "present."Geographical Control EngineeringAfter the suppression of armed resistance by Native Americans, the United States resorted to confining indigenous populations to sovereign-free "reservations," geographically divided and scattered without communication, under direct administrative guardianship of the federal government, and their natural resources were subjected to the needs of settlers, not their indigenous inhabitants. The result was economically isolated communities, still suffering today from the highest rates of poverty, unemployment, and health and psychological problems among all groups in the United States.In the West Bank, Gaza, and even the territories occupied in 1948, the pattern is repeated with contemporary tools: dividing the West Bank into areas "A," "B," and "C" devoid of geographical connection, a network of checkpoints, bypass roads, and a separation wall that keeps Palestinian communities as scattered enclaves, and a suffocating siege on the Gaza Strip that controls the entry of food, medicine, and fuel. Settlement in the West Bank, where the settler population has exceeded 700,000, continues to expand over the very land that is supposed to be the focus of any political solution, just as Indian "reservations" shrank year after year whenever wealth was discovered there or settlers needed it.Why is the term "genocide" invoked?Many in the West, and in Israel specifically, reject comparing the two experiences, arguing differences in historical context, scale, and time, and consider describing what happened and is happening in Gaza as "genocide" to be a political, not legal, description. This is a real and ongoing dispute: while international human rights organizations, UN officials, and a preliminary ruling by the International Court of Justice in January 2024 speak of a "plausible risk" of genocide in Gaza, Israel and the United States officially reject this description, describing military operations as "self-defense" against armed organizations. Similarly, American historians have debated for decades the description of the fate of Native American nations: was it an intentional "genocide," or a "catastrophe" primarily resulting from epidemics against which no one had immunity? Most historians today suggest that epidemic and organized violence combined: settler policies, wars, and forced displacement were what transformed epidemic vulnerability into a near-complete demographic collapse, rather than mitigating it.This debate between the two experiences does not negate the argument that the American official establishment's fear of applying the comparison domestically underlies the US position supporting the Israeli entity, even though the matter for Palestine is clearer and more mature. Native American nations did not have an internationally recognized state or regional allies, while the Palestinian cause enjoys international recognition of the right to self-determination and support from dozens of countries. Moreover, contemporary media and digital documentation make what is happening in Palestine today visible to the entire world in real-time, unlike what happened to indigenous peoples, which remained out of sight for many long decades.
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Deconstructing the US-Israeli Colonial Relationship