Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native
Patrick Wolfe
Pages 387-409 | Published online: 21 Dec 2006
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623520601056240
The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be—indeed, often are—contests for life. Yet this is not to say that settler colonialism is simply a form of genocide. In some settler-colonial sites (one thinks, for instance, of Fiji), native society was able to accommodate—though hardly unscathed—the invaders and the transformative socioeconomic system that they introduced. Even in sites of wholesale expropriation such as Australia or North America, settler colonialism’s genocidal outcomes have not manifested evenly across time or space. Native Title in Australia or Indian sovereignty in the US may have deleterious features, but these are hardly equivalent to the impact of frontier homicide. Moreover, there can be genocide in the absence of settler colonialism. The best known of all genocides was internal to Europe, while genocides that have been perpetrated in, for example, Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda or (one fears) Darfur do not seem to be assignable to settler colonialism. In this article, I shall begin to explore, in comparative fashion, the relationship between genocide and the settler-colonial tendency that I term the logic of elimination.Footnote1 I contend that, though the two have converged—which is to say, the settler-colonial logic of elimination has manifested as genocidal—they should be distinguished. Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal.
As practised by Europeans, both genocide and settler colonialism have typically employed the organizing grammar of race. European xenophobic traditions such as anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or Negrophobia are considerably older than race, which, as many have shown, became discursively consolidated fairly late in the eighteenth century.Footnote2 But the mere fact that race is a social construct does not of itself tell us very much. As I have argued, different racial regimes encode and reproduce the unequal relationships into which Europeans coerced the populations concerned. For instance, Indians and Black people in the US have been racialized in opposing ways that reflect their antithetical roles in the formation of US society. Black people’s enslavement produced an inclusive taxonomy that automatically enslaved the offspring of a slave and any other parent. In the wake of slavery, this taxonomy became fully racialized in the “one-drop rule,” whereby any amount of African ancestry, no matter how remote, and regardless of phenotypical appearance, makes a person Black. For Indians, in stark contrast, non-Indian ancestry compromised their indigeneity, producing “half-breeds,” a regime that persists in the form of blood quantum regulations. As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners’ wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlers’ access to land, so their increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination. Thus we cannot simply say that settler colonialism or genocide have been targeted at particular races, since a race cannot be taken as given. It is made in the targeting.Footnote3 Black people were racialized as slaves; slavery constituted their blackness. Correspondingly, Indigenous North Americans were not killed, driven away, romanticized, assimilated, fenced in, bred White, and otherwise eliminated as the original owners of the land but as Indians. Roger Smith has missed this point in seeking to distinguish between victims murdered for where they are and victims murdered for who they are.Footnote4 So far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is who they are, and not only by their own reckoning. As Deborah Bird Rose has pointed out, to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home.Footnote5 Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.
The logic of elimination not only refers to the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In common with genocide as Raphaël Lemkin characterized it,Footnote6 settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.Footnote7 In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence. The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation, the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism. Some of them are more controversial in genocide studies than others.
Settler colonialism destroys to replace. As Theodor Herzl, founding father of Zionism, observed in his allegorical manifesto/novel, “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.”Footnote8 In a kind of realization that took place half a century later, one-time deputy-mayor of West Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti recalled, “As a member of a pioneering youth movement, I myself ‘made the desert bloom’ by uprooting the ancient olive trees of al-Bassa to clear the ground for a banana grove, as required by the ‘planned farming’ principles of my kibbutz, Rosh Haniqra.”Footnote9 Renaming is central to the cadastral effacement/replacement of the Palestinian Arab presence that Benvenisti poignantly recounts.Footnote10 Comparably, though with reference to Australia, Tony Birch has charted the contradictory process whereby White residents sought to frustrate the (re-) renaming of Gariwerd back from the derivative “Grampians” that these hills had become in the wake of their original owners’ forcible dispossession in the nineteenth century.Footnote11 Ideologically, however, there is a major difference between the Australian and Israeli cases. The prospect of Israeli authorities changing the Hebrew place-names whose invention Benvenisti has described back to their Arabic counterparts is almost unimaginable. In Australia, by contrast (as in many other settler societies), the erasure of indigeneity conflicts with the assertion of settler nationalism. On the one hand, settler society required the practical elimination of the natives in order to establish itself on their territory. On the symbolic level, however, settler society subsequently sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference—and, accordingly, its independence—from the mother country. Hence it is not surprising that a progressive Australian state government should wish to attach an indigenous aura to a geographical feature that bore the second-hand name of a British mountain range. Australian public buildings and official symbolism, along with the national airlines, film industry, sports teams and the like, are distinguished by the ostentatious borrowing of Aboriginal motifs. For nationalist purposes, it is hard to see an alternative to this contradictory reappropriation of a foundationally disavowed Aboriginality. The ideological justification for the dispossession of Aborigines was that “we” could use the land better than they could, not that we had been on the land primordially and were merely returning home. One cannot imagine the Al-Quds/Jerusalem suburb of Kfar Sha’ul being renamed Deir Yasin. Despite this major ideological difference, however, Zionism still betrays a need to distance itself from its European origins that recalls the settler anxieties that characterize Australian national discourse. Yiddish, for instance, was decisively rejected in favour of Hebrew—a Hebrew inflected, what is more, with the accents of the otherwise derided Yemeni mizrachim. Analogously, as Mark LeVine has noted, though the Zionist modernization of the Arab city of Jaffa was intended to have a certain site specificity, “in fact Jaffa has had to be emptied of its Arab past and Arab inhabitants in order for architects to be able to reenvision the region as a ‘typical Middle Eastern city’.”Footnote12
In its positive aspect, therefore, settler colonialism does not simply replace native society tout court. Rather, the process of replacement maintains the refractory imprint of the native counter-claim. This phenomenon is not confined to the realm of symbolism. In the Zionist case, for instance, as Gershon Shafir has cogently shown, the core doctrine of the conquest of labour, which produced the kibbutzim and Histadrut, central institutions of the Israeli state, emerged out of the local confrontation with Arab Palestinians in a form fundamentally different from the pristine doctrine of productivization that had originally been coined in Europe. The concept of productivization was developed in response to the self-loathing that discriminatory exclusions from productive industry encouraged in Eastern European Jewry (in this sense, as Shafir acutely observes, Zionism mirrored the persecutors’ anti-SemitismFootnote13). In its European enunciation, productivization was not designed to disempower anyone else. It was rather designed, autarkically as it were, to inculcate productive self-sufficiency in a Jewish population that had been relegated to urban (principally financial) occupations that were stigmatized as parasitic by the surrounding gentile population—a prejudice that those who sought to build the “new Jew” endorsed insofar as they resisted its internalization. On its importation into Palestine, however, the doctrine evolved into a tool of ethnic conflict, as Jewish industries were actively discouraged from employing non-Jewish labour, even though Arabs worked for lower wages and, in many cases, more efficiently:
“Hebrew labor,” or “conquest of labor” … was born of Palestinian circumstances, and advocated a struggle against Palestinian Arab workers. This fundamental difference demonstrates the confusion created by referring “Hebrew labor” back to the productivization movement and anachronistically describing it as evolving in a direct line from Eastern European origins.Footnote14
As it developed on the colonial ground, the conquest of labour subordinated economic efficiency to the demands of building a self-sufficient proto-national Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) at the expense of the surrounding Arab population. This situated struggle produced the new Jew as subject of the labour that it conquered. In the words of Zionist architect Julius Posner, reprising a folk song, “We have come to the homeland to build and be rebuilt in it … the creation of the new Jew … [is also] the creator of that Jew.”Footnote15 As such, the conquest of labour was central both to the institutional imagining of a goyim-rein (gentile-free) zone and to the continued stigmatization of Jews who remained unredeemed in the galut (diaspora). The positive force that animated the Jewish nation and its individual new-Jewish subjects issued from the negative process of excluding Palestine’s Indigenous owners.
In short, elimination refers to more than the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In its positive aspect, the logic of elimination marks a return whereby the native repressed continues to structure settler-colonial society. It is both as complex social formation and as continuity through time that I term settler colonization a structure rather than an event, and it is on this basis that I shall consider its relationship to genocide.
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To start at the top, with the European sovereigns who laid claim to the territories of non-Christian (or, in later secularized versions, uncivilized) inhabitants of the rest of the world: justifications for this claim were derived from a disputatious arena of scholarly controversy that had been prompted by European conquests in the Americas and is misleadingly referred to, in the singular, as the doctrine of discovery.Footnote16 Though a thoroughgoing diminution of native entitlement was axiomatic to discovery, the discourse was primarily addressed to relations between European sovereigns rather than to relations between Europeans and natives.Footnote17 Competing theoretical formulas were designed to restrain the endless rounds of war-making over claims to colonial territory that European sovereigns were prone to indulge in. The rights accorded to natives tended to reflect the balance between European powers in any given theatre of colonial settlement. In Australia, for instance, where British dominion was effectively unchallenged by other European powers, Aborigines were accorded no rights to their territory, informal variants on the theme of terra nullius being taken for granted in settler culture. In North America, by contrast, treaties between Indian and European nations were premised on a sovereignty that reflected Indians’ capacity to permute local alliance networks from among the rival Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Swedish and Russian presences.Footnote18 Even where native sovereignty was recognized, however, ultimate dominion over the territory in question was held to inhere in the European sovereign in whose name it had been “discovered.” Through all the diversity among the theorists of discovery, a constant theme is the clear distinction between dominion, which inhered in European sovereigns alone, and natives’ right of occupancy, also expressed in terms of possession or usufruct, which entitled natives to pragmatic use (understood as hunting and gathering rather than agriculture)Footnote19 of a territory that Europeans had discovered. The distinction between dominion and occupancy illuminates the settler-colonial project’s reliance on the elimination of native societies.
Through being the first European to visit and properly claim a given territory, a discoverer acquired the right, on behalf of his sovereign and vis-à-vis other Europeans who came after him, to buy land from the natives. This right, known as preemption, gave the discovering power (or, in the US case, its successors) a monopoly over land transactions with the natives, who were prevented from disposing of their land to any other European power. On the face of it, this would seem to pose little threat to people who did not wish to dispose of their land to anyone. Indeed, this semblance of native voluntarism has provided scope for some limited judicial magnanimity in regard to Indian sovereignty.Footnote20 In practice, however, the corollary did not apply. Preemption sanctioned European priority but not Indigenous freedom of choice. As Harvey Rosenthal observed of the concept’s extension into the US constitutional environment, “The American right to buy always superseded the Indian right not to sell.”Footnote21 The mechanisms of this priority are crucial. Why should ostensibly sovereign nations, residing in territory solemnly guaranteed to them by treaties, decide that they are willing, after all, to surrender their ancestral homelands? More often than not (and nearly always up to the wars with the Plains Indians, which did not take place until after the civil war), the agency which reduced Indian peoples to this abjection was not some state instrumentality but irregular, greed-crazed invaders who had no intention of allowing the formalities of federal law to impede their access to the riches available in, under, and on Indian soil.Footnote22 If the government notionally held itself aloof from such disreputable proceedings, however, it was never far away. Consider, for instance, the complicity between bayonet-wielding troops and the “lawless rabble” in this account of events immediately preceding the eastern Cherokee’s catastrophic “Trail of Tears,” one of many comparable 1830s removals whereby Indians from the South East were displaced west of the Mississippi to make way for the development of the slave-plantation economy in the Deep South:
Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary miles of trail that led to the stockade [where they were held prior to the removal itself.] Men were seized in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their wheels and children from their play. In many cases, on turning for one last look as they crossed the ridge, they saw their homes in flames, fired by the lawless rabble that followed on the heels of the soldiers to loot and pillage. So keen were these outlaws on the scent that in some instances they were driving off the cattle and other stock of the Indians almost before the soldiers had fairly started their owners in the other direction. Systematic hunts were made by the same men for Indian graves, to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables deposited with the dead. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”Footnote23
On the basis of this passage alone, the structural complexity of settler colonialism could sustain libraries of elaboration. A global dimension to the frenzy for native land is reflected in the fact that, as economic immigrants, the rabble were generally drawn from the ranks of Europe’s landless. The cattle and other stock were not only being driven off Cherokee land; they were being driven into private ownership. Once evacuated, the Red man’s land would be mixed with Black labour to produce cotton, the white gold of the Deep South. To this end, the international slave trade and the highest echelons of the formal state apparatus converged across three continents with the disorderly pillaging of a nomadic horde who may or may not have been “lawless” but who were categorically White. Moreover, in their indiscriminate lust for any value that could be extracted from the Cherokee’s homeland, these racialized grave-robbers are unlikely to have stopped at the pendants. The burgeoning science of craniology, which provided a distinctively post-eighteenth-century validation for their claim to a racial superiority that entitled them to other people’s lands, made Cherokee skulls too marketable a commodity to be overlooked.Footnote24 In its endless multidimensionality, there was nothing singular about this one sorry removal, which all of modernity attended.
Rather than something separate from or running counter to the colonial state, the murderous activities of the frontier rabble constitute its principal means of expansion. These have occurred “behind the screen of the frontier, in the wake of which, once the dust has settled, the irregular acts that took place have been regularized and the boundaries of White settlement extended. Characteristically, officials express regret at the lawlessness of this process while resigning themselves to its inevitability.”Footnote25 In this light, we are in a position to understand the pragmatics of the doctrine of discovery more clearly. Understood as an assertion of Indigenous entitlement, the distinction between dominion and occupancy dissolves into incoherence. Understood processually, however, as a stage in the formation of the settler-colonial state (specifically, the stage linking the theory and the realization of territorial acquisition), the distinction is only too consistent. As observed, preemption provided that natives could transfer their right of occupancy to the discovering sovereign and to no one else. They could not transfer dominion because it was not theirs to transfer; that inhered in the European sovereign and had done so from the moment of discovery. Dominion without conquest constitutes the theoretical (or “inchoate”) stage of territorial sovereignty.Footnote26 In US Chief Justice John Marshall’s words, it remained to be “consummated by possession.”Footnote27 This delicately phrased “consummation” is precisely what the rabble were achieving at Cherokee New Echota in 1838. In other words, the right of occupancy was not an assertion of native rights. Rather, it was a pragmatic acknowledgment of the lethal interlude that would intervene between the conceit of discovery, when navigators proclaimed European dominion over whole continents to trees or deserted beaches, and the practical realization of that conceit in the final securing of European settlement, formally consummated in the extinguishment of native title. Thus it is not surprising that Native Title had hardly been asserted in Australian law than Mr Justice Olney was echoing Marshall’s formula, Olney’s twenty-first-century version of consummation being the “tide of history” that provided the pretext for his notorious judgment in the Yorta Yorta case.Footnote28 As observed, the logic of elimination continues into the present.
The tide of history canonizes the fait accompli, harnessing the diplomatic niceties of the law of nations to the maverick rapine of the squatters’ posse within a cohesive project that implicates individual and nation-state, official and unofficial alike. Over the Green Line today, Ammana, the settler advance-guard of the fundamentalist Gush Emunim movement, hastens apace with the construction of its facts on the ground. In this regard, the settlers are maintaining a tried and tested Zionist strategy—Israel’s 1949 campaign to seize the Negev before the impending armistice was codenamed Uvda, Hebrew for “fact.”Footnote29 As Bernard Avishai lamented of the country he had volunteered to defend, “settlements were made in the territories beyond the Green Line so effortlessly after 1967 because the Zionist institutions that built them and the laws that drove them … had all been going full throttle within the Green Line before 1967. To focus merely on West Bank settlers was always to beg the question.”Footnote30 In sum, then, settler colonialism is an inclusive, land-centred project that coordinates a comprehensive range of agencies, from the metropolitan centre to the frontier encampment, with a view to eliminating Indigenous societies. Its operations are not dependent on the presence or absence of formal state institutions or functionaries. Accordingly—to begin to move toward the issue of genocide—the occasions on or the extent to which settler colonialism conduces to genocide are not a matter of the presence or absence of the formal apparatus of the state.
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While it is clearly the case, as Isabel Hull argues, that the pace, scale and intensity of certain forms of modern genocide require the centralized technological, logistical and administrative capacities of the modern state,Footnote31 this does not mean that settler-colonial discourse should be regarded as pre- (or less than) modern. Rather, as a range of thinkers—including, in this connection, W. E. B. Dubois, Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire—have argued, some of the core features of modernity were pioneered in the colonies.Footnote32 It is a commonplace that the Holocaust gathered together the instrumental, technological and bureaucratic constituents of Western modernity. Accordingly, despite the historiographical energy that has already been devoted to the Holocaust, the genealogical field available to its historian remains apparently inexhaustible. Thus we have recently been informed that its historical ingredients included the guillotine and, for the industry-scale processing of human bodies, the techniques of Chicago cattle-yards.Footnote33 Yet the image of the dispassionate genocidal technocrat that the Holocaust spawned is by no means the whole story. Rather, as Dieter Pohl, Jürgen Zimmerer and others have pointed out, a substantial number of the Nazis’ victims, including Jewish and Gypsy (Sinti and Rom) ones, were not murdered in camps but in deranged shooting sprees that were more reminiscent of sixteenth-century Spanish behaviour in the Americas than of Fordism, while millions of Slav civilians and Soviet soldiers were simply starved to death in circumstances that could well have struck a chord with late-eighteenth-century Bengalis or mid-nineteenth-century Irish people.Footnote34 This is not to suggest a partition of the Holocaust into, say, modern and atavistic elements. It is to stress the modernity of colonialism.
Settler colonialism was foundational to modernity. Frontier individuals’ endless appeals for state protection not only presupposed a commonality between the private and official realms. In most cases (Queensland was a partial exception), it also presupposed a global chain of command linking remote colonial frontiers to the metropolis.Footnote35 Behind it all lay the driving engine of international market forces, which linked Australian wool to Yorkshire mills and, complementarily, to cotton produced under different colonial conditions in India, Egypt, and the slave states of the Deep South. As Cole Harris observed in relation to the dispossession of Indians in British Columbia, “Combine capital’s interest in uncluttered access to land and settlers’ interest in land as livelihood, and the principal momentum of settler colonialism comes into focus.”Footnote36 The Industrial Revolution, misleadingly figuring in popular consciousness as an autochthonous metropolitan phenomenon, required colonial land and labour to produce its raw materials just as centrally as it required metropolitan factories and an industrial proletariat to process them, whereupon the colonies were again required as a market. The expropriated Aboriginal, enslaved African American, or indentured Asian is as thoroughly modern as the factory worker, bureaucrat, or flâneur of the metropolitan centre. The fact that the slave may be in chains does not make him or her medieval. By the same token, the fact that the genocidal Hutus of Rwanda often employed agricultural implements to murder their Tutsi neighbours en masse does not license the racist assumption that, because neither Europeans nor the latest technology were involved, this was a primordial (read “savage”) blood-letting. Rwanda and Burundi are colonial creations—not only so far as the obvious factor of their geographical borders is concerned, but, more intimately, in the very racial boundaries that marked and reproduced the Hutu/Tutsi division. As Robert Melson has observed in his sharp secondary synopsis of it, “The Rwandan genocide was the product of a postcolonial state, a racialist ideology, a revolution claiming democratic legitimation, and war—all manifestations of the modern world.”Footnote37 The mutual Hutu/Tutsi racialization on which this “post”colonial ideology was based was itself an artifice of colonialism. In classic Foucauldian style, the German and, above all, Belgian overlords who succeeded each other in modern Rwanda had imposed a racial grid on the complex native social order, co-opting the pastoral Tutsi aristocracy as a comprador elite who facilitated their exploitation of the agriculturalist Hutu and lower-order Tutsis. This racial difference was elaborated “by Belgian administrators and anthropologists who argued—in what came to be known as the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’—that the Tutsi were conquerors who had originated in Ethiopia (closer to Europe!) and that the Hutu were a conquered inferior tribe of local provenance.”Footnote38 Shades of the Franks and the Gauls. In their inculcation with racial discourse, Rwandans were integrally modern. Even the notorious hoes with which some Hutus murdered their Tutsi compatriots symbolized the agriculture that not only encapsulated their difference from their victims. As such, these hoes were also the instruments of the Hutus’ involvement in the global market.
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Of itself, however, modernity cannot explain the insatiable dynamic whereby settler colonialism always needs more land. The answer that springs most readily to mind is agriculture, though it is not necessarily the only one. The whole range of primary sectors can motivate the project. In addition to agriculture, therefore, we should think in terms of forestry, fishing, pastoralism and mining (the last straw for the Cherokee was the discovery of gold on their land). With the exception of agriculture, however (and, for some peoples, pastoralism), none of these is sufficient in itself. You cannot eat lumber or gold; fishing for the world market requires canneries. Moreover, sooner or later, miners move on, while forests and fish become exhausted or need to be farmed. Agriculture not only supports the other sectors. It is inherently sedentary and, therefore, permanent. In contrast to extractive industries, which rely on what just happens to be there, agriculture is a rational means/end calculus that is geared to vouchsafing its own reproduction, generating capital that projects into a future where it repeats itself (hence the farmer’s dread of being reduced to eating seed stock). Moreover, as John Locke never tired of pointing out, agriculture supports a larger population than non-sedentary modes of production.Footnote39 In settler-colonial terms, this enables a population to be expanded by continuing immigration at the expense of native lands and livelihoods. The inequities, contradictions and pogroms of metropolitan society ensure a recurrent supply of fresh immigrants—especially, as noted, from among the landless. In this way, individual motivations dovetail with the global market’s imperative for expansion. Through its ceaseless expansion, agriculture (including, for this purpose, commercial pastoralism) progressively eats into Indigenous territory, a primitive accumulation that turns native flora and fauna into a dwindling resource and curtails the reproduction of Indigenous modes of production. In the event, Indigenous people are either rendered dependent on the introduced economy or reduced to the stock-raids that provide the classic pretext for colonial death-squads.
None of this means that Indigenous people are by definition non-agricultural. Whether or not they actually do practise agriculture, however (as in the case of the Indians who taught Whites to grow corn and tobacco), natives are typically represented as unsettled, nomadic, rootless, etc., in settler-colonial discourse. In addition to its objective economic centrality to the project, agriculture, with its life-sustaining connectedness to land, is a potent symbol of settler-colonial identity. Accordingly, settler-colonial discourse is resolutely impervious to glaring inconsistencies such as sedentary natives or the fact that the settlers themselves have come from somewhere else. Thus it is significant that the feminized, finance-oriented (or, for that matter, wandering) Jew of European anti-Semitism should assert an aggressively masculine agricultural self-identification in Palestine.Footnote40 The new Jew’s formative Other was the nomadic Bedouin rather than the fellaheen farmer. The reproach of nomadism renders the native removable. Moreover, if the natives are not already nomadic, then the reproach can be turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy through the burning of corn or the uprooting of fruit trees.
But if the natives are already agriculturalists, then why not simply incorporate their productivity into the colonial economy? At this point, we begin to get closer to the question of just who it is (or, more to the point, who they are) that settler colonialism strives to eliminate—and, accordingly, closer to an understanding of the relationship between settler colonialism and genocide. To stay with the Cherokee removal: when it came to it, the factor that most antagonized the Georgia state government (with the at-least-tacit support of Andrew Jackson’s federal administration) was not actually the recalcitrant savagery of which Indians were routinely accused, but the Cherokee’s unmistakable aptitude for civilization. Indeed, they and their Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole neighbours, who were also targeted for removal, figured revealingly as the “Five Civilized Tribes” in Euroamerican parlance. In the Cherokee’s case, two dimensions of their civility were particularly salient. They had become successful agriculturalists on the White model, with a number of them owning substantial holdings of Black slaves, and they had introduced a written national constitution that bore more than a passing resemblance to the US one.Footnote41 Why should genteel Georgians wish to rid themselves of such cultivated neighbours? The reason why the Cherokee’s constitution and their agricultural prowess stood out as such singular provocations to the officials and legislators of the state of Georgia—and this is attested over and over again in their public statements and correspondence—is that the Cherokee’s farms, plantations, slaves and written constitution all signified permanence.Footnote42 The first thing the rabble did, let us remember, was burn their houses.
Brutal and murderous though the removals of the Five Civilized Tribes generally were, they did not affect each member equally. This was not simply a matter of wealth or status. Principal Cherokee chief John Ross, for example, lost not only his plantation after setting off on the Trail of Tears. On that trail, one deathly cold Little Rock, Arkansas day in February 1839, he also lost his wife, Qatie, who died after giving her blanket to a freezing child.Footnote43 Ross’s fortunes differed sharply from those of the principal Choctaw chief Greenwood LeFlore, who, unlike Ross, signed a removal treaty on behalf of his people, only to stay behind himself, accept US citizenship, and go on to a distinguished career in Mississippi politics.Footnote44 But it was not just his chiefly rank that enabled LeFlore to stay behind. Indeed, he was by no means the only one to do so. As Ronald Satz has commented, Andrew Jackson was taken by surprise when “thousands of Choctaws decided to take advantage of the allotment provisions [in the treaty LeFlore had signed] and become homesteaders and American citizens in Mississippi.”Footnote45 In addition to being principal chiefs, Ross and LeFlore both had White fathers and light skin. Both were wealthy, educated and well connected in Euroamerican society. Many of the thousands of compatriots who stayed behind with LeFlore lacked any of these qualifications. There was nothing special about the Choctaw to make them particularly congenial to White society—most of them got removed like Ross and the Cherokee. The reason that the remaining Choctaw were acceptable had nothing to do with their being Choctaw. On the contrary, it had to do with their not (or, at least, no longer) being Choctaw. They had become “homesteaders and American citizens.” In a word, they had become individuals.
What distinguished Ross and the removing Choctaw from those who stayed behind was collectivity.Footnote46 Tribal land was tribally owned—tribes and private property did not mix. Indians were the original communist menace. As homesteaders, by contrast, the Choctaw who stayed became individual proprietors, each to his own, of separately allotted fragments of what had previously been the tribal estate, theirs to sell to White people if they chose to. Without the tribe, though, for all practical purposes they were no longer Indians (this is the citizenship part). Here, in essence, is assimilation’s Faustian bargain—have our settler world, but lose your Indigenous soul. Beyond any doubt, this is a kind of death. Assimilationists recognized this very clearly. On the face of it, one might not expect there to be much in common between Captain Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle boarding school for Indian youth and leading light of the philanthropic “Friends of the Indian” group, and General Phil Sheridan, scourge of the Plains and author of the deathless maxim, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Given the training in individualism that Pratt provided at his school, however, the tribe could disappear while its members stayed behind, a metaphysical variant on the Choctaw scenario. This would offer a solution to reformers’ disquiet over the national discredit attaching to the Vanishing Indian. In a paper for the 1892 Charities and Correction Conference held in Denver, Pratt explicitly endorsed Sheridan’s maxim, “but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”Footnote47
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But just what kind of death is it that is involved in assimilation? The term “homicide,” for instance, combines the senses of killing and of humanity. So far as I know, when it comes to killing a human individual, there is no alternative to terminating their somatic career. Yet, when Orestes was arraigned before the Furies for the murder of his mother Clytemnestra, whom he had killed to avenge her murder of his father Agamemnon, he was acquitted on the ground that, in a patrilineal society, he belonged to his father rather than to his mother, so the charge of matricide could not stand. Now, without taking this legend too seriously, it nonetheless illustrates (as legends are presumably meant to) an important point. Orestes’ beating the charge did not mean that he had not actually killed Clytemnestra. It meant that he had been brought before the wrong court (the Furies dealt with intra-family matters that could not be resolved by the mechanism of feud). Thus Orestes may not have been guilty of matricide, but that did not mean he was innocent. It meant that he might be guilty of some other form of illegal killing—one that could be dealt with by the blood-feud or other appropriate sanction (where his plea of obligatory revenge may or may not have succeeded). As in those languages where a verb is inflected by its object, the nature of a justiciable killing depends on its victim. There are seemingly absolute differences between, say, suicide, insecticide, and infanticide. The etymology of “genocide” combines the senses of killing and of grouphood. “Group” is more than a purely numerical designation. Genos refers to a denominate group with a membership that persists through time (Raphaël Lemkin translated it as “tribe”). It is not simply a random collectivity (such as, say, the passengers on a bus). Accordingly, with respect to Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (concerning both the subtitle of their excellent collection and their reference, in this context, to 9/11), the strike on the World Trade Center is an example of mass murder but not, in my view, of genocide. Certainly, the bulk of the victims were US citizens. On the scale of the whole, however, not only was it an infinitesimal part of the group “Americans” (which, strictly, is not a consideration), but it was a one-off event.Footnote48 This does not mean that the perpetrators of 9/11 are not guilty. It means that a genocide tribunal is the wrong court to bring them before. Mass murders are not the same thing as genocide, though the one action can be both. Thus genocide has been achieved by means of summary mass murder (to cite examples already used) in the frontier massacring of Indigenous peoples, in the Holocaust, and in Rwanda. But there can be summary mass murder without genocide, as in the case of 9/11, and there can be genocide without summary mass murder, as in the case of the continuing post-frontier destruction, in whole and in part, of Indigenous genoi. Lemkin knew what he was doing when he used the word “tribe.”Footnote49 Richard Pratt and Phillip Sheridan were both practitioners of genocide. The question of degree is not the definitional issue.
Vital though it is, definitional discussion can seem insensitively abstract. In the preceding paragraph, part of what I have had in mind has, obviously, been the term (which Lemkin favoured) “cultural genocide.” My reason for not favouring the term is that it confuses definition with degree. Moreover, though this objection holds in its own right (or so I think), the practical hazards that can ensue once an abstract concept like “cultural genocide” falls into the wrong hands are legion. In particular, in an elementary category error, “either/or” can be substituted for “both/and,” from which genocide emerges as either biological (read “the real thing”) or cultural—and thus, it follows, not real. In practice, it should go without saying that the imposition on a people of the procedures and techniques that are generally glossed as “cultural genocide” is certainly going to have a direct impact on that people’s capacity to stay alive (even apart from their qualitative immiseration while they do so). At the height of the Dawes-era assimilation programme, for instance, in the decade after Richard Pratt penned his Denver paper, Indian numbers hit the lowest level they would ever register.Footnote50 Even in contemporary, post-Native Title Australia, Aboriginal life expectancy clings to a level some 25% below that enjoyed by mainstream society, with infant mortality rates that are even worse.Footnote51 What species of sophistry does it take to separate a quarter “part” of the life of a group from the history of their elimination?
Clearly, we are not talking about an isolated event here. Thus we can shift from settler colonialism’s structural complexity to its positivity as a structuring principle of settler-colonial society across time.
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The Cherokee Trail of Tears, which took place over the winter of 1838–1839, presupposed the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, when Thomas Jefferson had bought approximately one-third of the present-day continental United States at a knockdown price from Napoleon.Footnote52 The greatest real estate deal in history provided the territory west of the Mississippi that successive US governments would exchange for the homelands of the eastern tribes whom they were bent on removing. For various reasons, these removals, which turned eastern tribes into proxy invaders of Indian territory across the Mississippi, were a crude and unsatisfactory form of elimination. In particular, they were temporary, it being only a matter of time before the frontier rabble caught up with them.Footnote53 When that happened, as Annie Abel resignedly observed in concluding her classic account of the removals, “Titles given in the West proved less substantial than those in the East, for they had no foundation in antiquity.”Footnote54 Repeat removals, excisions from reservations, grants of the same land to different tribes, all conducted against a background of endless pressure for new or revised treaties, were the symptoms of removal’s temporariness, which kept time with the westward march of the nation. In the end, though, the western frontier met the one moving back in from the Pacific, and there was simply no space left for removal. The frontier had become coterminal with reservation boundaries. At this point, when the crude technique of removal declined in favour of a range of strategies for assimilating Indian people now that they had been contained within Euroamerican society, we can more clearly see the logic of elimination’s positivity as a continuing feature of Euroamerican settler society.
With the demise of the frontier, elimination turned inwards, seeking to penetrate through the tribal surface to the individual Indian below, who was to be co-opted out of the tribe, which would be depleted accordingly, and into White society. The Greenwood LeFlore situation was to be generalized to all Indians. The first major expression of this shift was the discontinuation of treaty-making, which came about in 1871.Footnote55 Over the following three decades, an avalanche of assimilationist legislation, accompanied by draconian Supreme Court judgments which notionally dismantled tribal sovereignty and provided for the abrogation of existing treaties,Footnote56 relentlessly sought the breakdown of the tribe and the absorption into White society of individual Indians and their tribal land, only separately. John Wunder has termed this policy framework “the New Colonialism,” a discursive formation based on reservations and boarding schools that “attacked every aspect of Native American life—religion, speech, political freedoms, economic liberty, and cultural diversity.”Footnote57 The centrepiece of this campaign was the allotment programme, first generalized as Indian policy in the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 and subsequently intensified and extended, whereby tribal land was to be broken down into individual allotments whose proprietors could eventually sell them to White people.Footnote58 Ostensibly, this programme provided for a cultural transformation whereby the magic of private property ownership would propel Indians from the collective inertia of tribal membership into the progressive individualism of the American dream. In practice, not only did Indian numbers rapidly hit the lowest level they would ever record, but this cultural procedure turned out to yield a faster method of land transference than the US Cavalry had previously provided. In the half-century from 1881, the total acreage held by Indians in the United States fell by two thirds, from just over 155 million acres to just over 52 million.Footnote59 Needless to say, the coincidence between the demographic statistics and the land-ownership ones was no coincidence. Throughout this process, reformers’ justifications for it (saving the Indian from the tribe, giving him the same opportunities as the White man, etc.) repeatedly included the express intention to destroy the tribe in whole.Footnote60 With their land base thus attenuated, US citizenship was extended to all Indians in 1924. In 1934, under the New Deal Indian Reform Act, allotment was abandoned in favour of a policy of admitting the tribe itself into the US polity, only on condition that its constitution be rewritten into structural harmony with its US civic environment. A distinctive feature of the model constitutions that the Secretary of the Interior approved for tribes that registered under the 1934 Act was blood quantum requirements, originally introduced by Dawes Act commissioners to determine which tribal members would be eligible for what kind of allotments.Footnote61 Under the blood quantum regime, one’s Indianness progressively declines in accordance with a “biological” calculus that is a construct of Euroamerican culture.Footnote62 Juaneño/Jaqi scholar Annette Jaimes has termed this procedure “statistical extermination.”Footnote63 In sum, the containment of Indian groups within Euroamerican society that culminated in the end of the frontier produced a range of ongoing complementary strategies whose common intention was the destruction of heterodox forms of Indian grouphood. In the post-World War II climate of civil rights, these strategies were reinforced by the policies of termination and relocation, held out as liberating individual Indians from the thralldom of the tribe, whose compound effects rivalled the disasters of allotment.Footnote64 A major difference between this and the generality of non-colonial genocides is its sustained duration.
For comparative purposes, it is significant that the full radicalization of assimilation policies in both the US and Australia coincided with the closure of the frontier, which forestalled spatial stop-gaps such as removal. In infra-continental societies like those of mainland Europe, the frontier designates a national boundary as opposed to a mobile index of expansion. Israel’s borders partake of both qualities. Despite Zionism’s chronic addiction to territorial expansion, Israel’s borders do not preclude the option of removal (in this connection, it is hardly surprising that a nation that has driven so many of its original inhabitants into the sand should express an abiding fear of itself being driven into the sea). As the logic of elimination has taken on a variety of forms in other settler-colonial situations, so, in Israel, the continuing tendency to Palestinian expulsion has not been limited to the unelaborated exercise of force. As Baruch Kimmerling and Joel Migdal have observed, for instance, Israeli officials have only permitted family unions “in one direction—out of Israel.”Footnote65 The Law of Return commits the Jewish state to numerically unlimited but ethnically exclusive immigration, a factor that, formalities of citizenship notwithstanding, militates against the assimilation of gentile natives. Thus assimilation should not be seen as an invariable concomitant of settler colonialism. Rather, assimilation is one of a range of strategies of elimination that become favoured in particular historical circumstances. Moreover, assimilation itself can take on a variety of forms. In the Australian context, for instance, various scholars have recognized that “the genetic and cultural codes recapitulated each other.”Footnote66 Though “softer” than the recourse to simple violence, however, these strategies are not necessarily less eliminatory. To take an example from genocide’s definitional core, Article II (d) of the UN Convention on Genocide, which seems to have been relatively overlooked in Australian discussions, includes among the acts that constitute genocide (assuming they are committed with intent to destroy a target group in whole or in part) the imposition of “measures intended to prevent births within the group.” Given that the Australian practice of abducting Aboriginal children, assuming its “success,” would bring about a situation in which second-generation offspring were born into a group that was different from the one from which the child/parent had originally been abducted, there is abundant evidence of genocide being practised in post-war Australia on the basis of Article II (d) alone. It is impossible to draw simple either/or lines between culture and biology in cases such as these. Though a child was physically abducted, the eventual outcome is as much a matter of a social classification as it is of a body count. Nonetheless, the intentional contribution to the demographic destruction of the “relinquishing” group is unequivocal.
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Why, then, logic of elimination rather than genocide? As stated at the outset, settler colonialism is a specific social formation and it is desirable to retain that specificity. So far as I can tell, an understanding of settler colonialism would not be particularly helpful for understanding the mass killings of, say, witches in medieval Europe, Tutsis in Rwanda, enemies of the people in Cambodia, or Jews in the Nazi fatherland (the Lebensraum is, of course, another matter). By the same token, with the possible exception of the witches (whose murders appear to have been built into a great social transition), these mass killings would seem to have little to tell us about the long-run structural consistency of settler colonizers’ attempts to eliminate native societies. In contrast to the Holocaust, which was endemic to Nazism rather than to Germany (which was by no means the only—or even, historically, the most—anti-Semitic society in Europe), settler colonialism is relatively impervious to regime change. The genocide of American Indians or of Aboriginal people in Australia has not been subject to election results. So why not a special kind of genocide?—Raymond Evans’ and Bill Thorpe’s etymologically deft “indigenocide,” for instance,Footnote67 or one of the hyphenated genocides (“cultural genocide,” “ethnocide,” “politicide,” etc.)Footnote68 that have variously been proposed? The apparently insurmountable problem with the qualified genocides is that, in their very defensiveness, they threaten to undo themselves. They are never quite the real thing, just as patronizingly hyphenated ethnics are not fully Australian or fully American. Apart from this categorical problem, there is a historical basis to the relative diminution of the qualified genocides. This basis is, of course, the Holocaust, the non-paradigmatic paradigm that, being the indispensable example, can never merely exemplify. Keeping one eye on the Holocaust, which is always the unqualified referent of the qualified genocides, can only disadvantage Indigenous people because it discursively reinforces the figure of lack at the heart of the non-Western. Moreover, whereas the Holocaust exonerates anti-Semitic Western nations who were on the side opposing the Nazis, those same nations have nothing to gain from their liability for colonial genocides. On historical as well as categorical grounds, therefore, the hyphenated genocides devalue Indigenous attrition. No such problem bedevils analysis of the logic of elimination, which, in its specificity to settler colonialism, is premised on the securing—the obtaining and the maintaining—of territory.Footnote69 This logic certainly requires the elimination of the owners of that territory, but not in any particular way. To this extent, it is a larger category than genocide. For instance, the style of romantic stereotyping that I have termed “repressive authenticity,” which is a feature of settler-colonial discourse in many countries, is not genocidal in itself, though it eliminates large numbers of empirical natives from official reckonings and, as such, is often concomitant with genocidal practice.Footnote70 Indeed, depending on the historical conjuncture, assimilation can be a more effective mode of elimination than conventional forms of killing, since it does not involve such a disruptive affront to the rule of law that is ideologically central to the cohesion of settler society. When invasion is recognized as a structure rather than an event, its history does not stop—or, more to the point, become relatively trivial—when it moves on from the era of frontier homicide. Rather, narrating that history involves charting the continuities, discontinuities, adjustments, and departures whereby a logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different modalities, discourses and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical development and complexification of settler society. This is not a hierarchical procedure.
How, then, when elimination manifests as genocide, are we to retain the specificity of settler colonialism without downplaying its impact by resorting to a qualified genocide? I suggest that the term “structural genocide” avoids the questions of degree—and, therefore, of hierarchy among victims—that are entailed in qualified genocides, while retaining settler colonialism’s structural induration (it also lets in the witches—whose destruction, as Charles Zika has shown, was closely linked to the coeval transatlantic destruction of Native AmericansFootnote71). Given a historical perspective on structural genocide, we can recognize its being in abeyance (as, mercifully, it seems to be in contemporary Australia) rather than being a thing of the past—which is to say, we should guard against the recurrence of what Dirk Moses terms “genocidal moments” (social workers continue to take Aboriginal children in disproportionate numbers, for example.Footnote72) Focusing on structural genocide also enables us to appreciate some of the concrete empirical relationships between spatial removal, mass killings and biocultural assimilation. For instance, where there is no space left for removal (as occurred on the closure of the frontier in the US and Australia, or on the Soviet victory on Nazi Germany’s eastern front), mass killings or assimilation become the only eliminatory options available. Under these circumstances, the resort to mass killings can reflect the proclaimed inassimilability of the victim group, as in the case of Jews in relation to the “Aryan” blood stock.Footnote73 Correspondingly, assimilation programmes can reflect the ideological requirements of settler-colonial societies, which characteristically cite native advancement to establish their egalitarian credentials to potentially fractious groups of immigrants.Footnote74
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How, then, might any of this help to predict and prevent genocide?
In the first place, it shows us that settler colonialism is an indicator. Unpalatable though it is (to speak as a member of a settler society), this conclusion has a positive aspect, which is a corollary to settler colonialism’s temporal dimension. Since settler colonialism persists over extended periods of time, structural genocide should be easier to interrupt than short-term genocides. For instance, it seems reasonable to credit the belated UN/Australian intervention in East Timor with warding off the likelihood of a continued or renewed genocidal programme. Realpolitik is a factor, however. Thus the Timorese miracle would not seem to hold out a great deal of hope for, say, Tibet.
Since settler colonialism is an indicator, it follows that we should monitor situations in which settler colonialism intensifies or in which societies that are not yet, or not fully, settler-colonial take on more of its characteristics. Israel’s progressive dispensing with its reliance on Palestinian labour would seem to present an ominous case in point.Footnote75 Colin Tatz has argued, conclusively in my view, that, while Turkish behaviour in Armenia, Nazi behaviour in Europe, and Australian behaviour towards Aborigines (among other examples) constitute genocide, the apartheid regime in South Africa does not. His basic reason is that African labour was indispensable to apartheid South Africa, so it would have been counterproductive to destroy it. The same can be said of African American slavery. In both cases, the genocide tribunal is the wrong court.
The US parallel is significant because, unlike the South African case, the formal apparatus of oppression (slavery) was overcome but Whites remained in power.Footnote76 On emancipation, Blacks became surplus to some requirements and, to that extent, more like Indians. Thus it is highly significant that the barbarities of lynching and the Jim Crow reign of terror should be a post-emancipation phenomenon.Footnote77 As valuable commodities, slaves had only been destroyed in extremis. Even after slavery, Black people continued to have value as a source of super-cheap labour (providing an incitement to poor Whites), so their dispensability was tempered.Footnote78 Today in the US, the blatant racial zoning of large cities and the penal system suggests that, once colonized people outlive their utility, settler societies can fall back on the repertoire of strategies (in this case, spatial sequestration) whereby they have also dealt with the native surplus. There could hardly be a more concrete expression of spatial sequestration than the West Bank barrier. There again, apartheid also relied on sequestration. Perhaps Colin Tatz, who insists that Israel is not genocidal,Footnote79 finds it politic to allow an association between the Zionist and apartheid regimes as the price of preempting the charge of genocide. It is hard to imagine that a scholar of his perspicacity can have failed to recognize the Palestinian resonances of his statement, made in relation to Biko youth, that: “They threw rocks and died for their efforts.”Footnote80 Nonetheless, as Palestinians become more and more dispensable, Gaza and the West Bank become less and less like Bantustans and more and more like reservations (or, for that matter, like the Warsaw Ghetto). Porous borders do not offer a way out.
Notes
1 Patrick Wolfe, “Nation and miscegeNation: discursive continuity in the post-Mabo era,” Social Analysis, Vol 36, 1994, pp 93–152; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell 1999).
2 See e.g. Collette Guillaumin, “The idea of race and its elevation to autonomous scientific and legal status,” in her Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology (London: Routledge 1995), pp 61–98; Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P. 1996); Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (London: Macmillan 1996). For discussion, see my “Race and racialisation: some thoughts,” Postcolonial Studies, Vol 5, No 1, 2002, pp 51–62.
3 Robert Manne has missed this point. Responding to a question posed in 1937 by Western Australian Aboriginal affairs functionary A. O. Neville (“Are we going to have a population of 1,000,000 blacks in the [Australian] Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there ever were any aborigines in Australia?”), Manne suggests that, in order to “grasp the genocidal implications” of the question, “we need only replace the words ‘blacks’ and ‘Aborigine’ [sic] with the word ‘Jew’” and locate the posing of the question in Berlin rather than Canberra. Manne, “Aboriginal child removal and the question of genocide,” in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society (Berghahn, New York, 2005), pp 219–220. Apart from its contrivance, this analogy fails because the Nazi racialization of Jews did not conduce to their assimilation. Rather, the reverse was the case. As Robert Gellately has observed, “Although we can point to some similarities in Nazi plans and actions for Jews and Slavs, there was, and remains one crucial difference: in principle Jews could never be saved, never convert, nor be assimilated.” Gellately, “The Third Reich, the Holocaust, and visions of serial genocide,” in Gellately and Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide: mass murder in historical perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 2003), pp 241–263, at p 262.
4 Roger W. Smith, “Human destructiveness and politics: the twentieth century as an age of genocide,” in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds, Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (New York: Greenwood Press. 1987), pp 21–39, at p 31.
5 Rose, Hidden Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press 1991), p 46.
6 “[O]ne, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.” Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1944), p 79.
7 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, p 2; “Nation and miscegeNation,” p 96.
8 Theodor Herzl, Old–New Land [Altneuland, 1902], Lotta Levensohn, trans. (New York: M. Wiener 1941), p 38.
9 Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape. The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Berkeley, CA: California U.P. 2000), p 2.
10 Walid Khalidi and his team memorialized the obsessively erased Arab past in their undespairing All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies 1992).
11 Tony Birch, “‘Nothing has changed’: the ‘making and unmaking’ of Koori Culture,” in Michèle Grossman, ed., Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians (Melbourne: Melbourne U.P. 2003), pp 145–158.
12 Mark LeVine, Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880–1949 (Berkeley, CA: California U.P. 2005), p 227.
13 Gershon Shafir, Land, labor, and the origins of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 1989), p 81.
14 Ibid, pp 81–82.
15 Quoted in LeVine, Overthrowing Geography, p 167.
16 For varying analyses and discussions of the principal formulations of the doctrine of discovery, see e.g. Anthony Anghie, “Francisco de Vitoria and the colonial origins of international law,” in Eve Darian-Smith and Peter Fitzpatrick, eds, Laws of the Postcolonial (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan U.P. 1999), pp 89–107; Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 2003); David Kennedy, “Primitive legal scholarship,” Harvard International Law Journal, Vol 27, 1986, pp 1–98; Mark F. Lindley, The Acquisition and Government of Backward Territory in International Law (London: Longmans, Green. 1926); Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (Oxford: Oxford U.P. 1990), esp. pp 233–286.
17 This observation unites almost all commentators, whatever their political inclination. Cf. e.g. Anthony Anghie, “Finding the peripheries: sovereignty and colonialism in nineteenth-century international law,” Harvard International Law Journal, Vol 40, 1999, pp 1–80, at p 69; L. C. Green, “Claims to territory in colonial America,” in L. C. Green and Olive P. Dickason, The Law of Nations and the New World (Alberta: Alberta U.P. 1989), p 125.
18 See e.g. Wilcomb E. Washburn, ed., History of Indian–White Relations (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution 1988), William C. Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, Vol 4 (Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution, 1978), pp 5–39.
19 As Mr Justice Johnson put it in his concurrence with Chief Justice Marshall’s judgment in Cherokee v. Georgia, “The hunter state bore within itself the promise of vacating the territory, because when game ceased, the hunter would go elsewhere to seek it. But a more fixed state of society would amount to a permanent destruction of the hope, and, of consequence, of the beneficial character of the pre-emptive right.” Cherokee v. Georgia, 30 US (5 Peters) 1, 1831, p 23.
20 The judgments most often cited in this connection are Worcester v. Georgia, 31 US (6 Peters) 515, 1832, Crow Dog, 109 US 556, 1883, and Williams v. Lee, 358 US 217, 1959. I am currently preparing a critique of the limitations of these judgments, and of the limitations of US-style Indian sovereignty as a whole, in an article provisionally entitled “Against the intentional fallacy: marking the gap between rhetoric and outcome in US Indian law and policy.”
21 Harvey D. Rosenthal, “Indian claims and the American conscience: a brief history of the Indian Claims Commission,” in Imre Sutton, ed., Irredeemable America: The Indians’ Estate and Land Claims (Albuquerque: New Mexico U.P. 1985), pp 35–70, at p 36.
22 The classic accounts from a well-established literature include: Annie H. Abel, “The history of events resulting in Indian consolidation west of the Mississippi River,” in American Historical Association Annual Report for 1906, 2 vols (Washington, DC: American Historical Association 1906), Vol 2, pp 233–450; Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (Norman, OK: Pimlico 1970); Grant Foreman, Indian Removal (Norman, OK: Oklahoma U.P. 1932).
23 James M. Mooney, Historical Sketch of the Cherokee (Chicago: Aldine Transaction 1975 [1900]), p 124.
24 The most lively source on the ghoulish enterprise of craniology/craniometry remains Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Harmondsworth: Norton 1981). For a superbly written account with an Australian focus, see Helen MacDonald, Human Remains: Episodes in Human Dissection (Melbourne: Melbourne U.P. 2005).
25 Wolfe, “Limits of native title,” p 144.
26 Williams, American Indian in Western Legal Thought, p 269.
27 Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 US (8 Wheaton), 543, 1823, p 573.
28 For discussion of Olney’s “tide of history” concept, see Jackie Delpero, “‘The tide of history’: Australian native title discourse in global context,” MA thesis, Victoria University, Australia, 2003; David Rittter, “The judgement of the world: the Yorta Yorta case and the “tide of history,’” Australian Historical Studies, Vol 123, 2004, pp 106–121.
29 Ilan Pappé, The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951 (London: I.B. Tauris 2001), p 187. “[I]n order to justify the inclusion of the Negev in the future Jewish state, eleven new kibbutzim were simultaneously installed in that desert region on October 6th, 1946, in addition to the ten settlements already established there during the War for the same purpose.” Nathan Weinstock, Zionism, False Messiah, Alan Adler, trans. (London: Ink Links 1979), p 249.
30 Bernard Avishai, “Saving Israel from itself: a secular future for the Jewish state,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2005, pp 33–43, at p 37.
31 Isabel V. Hull, “Military culture and the production of ‘Final Solutions’ in the colonies: the example of Wilhelminian Germany,” in Gellately and Kiernan, The Specter of Genocide, pp 141–162.
32 In 1902, the renowned English liberal J. A. Hobson was expressing the fear “that the arts and crafts of tyranny, acquired and exercised in our unfree Empire, should be turned against our liberties at home.” Hobson, Imperialism. A Study (London: Allen & Unwin 1902), p 160.
33 Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, Janet Lloyd, trans. (New York: New Press 2003); Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books 2002).
34 “The [Central Government region Jewish] ghetto clearings amounted to wild, day-long shooting sprees in particular sections of cities, at the end of which bodies were lying in the main streets leading to train stations.” Pohl, “The murder of Jews in the general government,” in Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghahn Books 2000), pp 83–103, at p 99. See also Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: towards an archaeology of genocide,” Andrew H. Beattie, trans., in Moses, Genocide and Settler Society, pp 48–76. On colonial starvations and the “New Imperialism,” see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso 2001).
35 Israel is also, of course, a partial exception here, though not so substantial an exception as is asserted by those who claim that Israel cannot be a colonial formation because it lacks a single commissioning metropolis. From the outset, the Yishuv co-opted Ottoman, British and US imperialism to its own advantage, a reciprocated opportunism involving what Maxime Rodinson neatly glossed as “the collective mother country.” Rodinson, Israel. A Settler-Colonial State? David Thorstad, trans. (New York: Monad 1973), p 76.
36 Cole Harris, “How did colonialism dispossess? Comments from an edge of empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol 94, 2004, p 179.
37 Robert Melson, “Modern genocide in Rwanda: ideology, revolution, war, and mass murder in an African state,” in Gellately and Kiernan, The Specter of Genocide, pp 325–338, at p 326.
38 Melson, “Modern genocide in Rwanda,” pp 327–328.
39 “For the provisions serving to the support of humane life, produced by one acre of inclosed and cultivated land, are (to speak much within compasse) ten times more, than those, which are yeilded [sic] by an acre of Land, of an equal richnesse, lyeing wast in common.” John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 1963 [1698]), p 312.
40 The new Jew is an enduring Zionist theme. In introducing his terrorist memoir, future Israeli prime minister Menachim Begin announced that, in addition to his Jewish readers, he had also written the book for gentiles: “lest they be unwilling to realise, or all too ready to overlook, the fact that out of blood and fire and tears and ashes a new specimen of human being was born, a specimen completely unknown to the world for over eighteen hundred years, ‘the FIGHTING JEW’.” Begin, The Revolt, Samuel Katz, trans. (London: W.H. Allen 1979), p xxv, capitals in original. For a more recent diasporan example, see, for instance, the Adi Nes photograph used as publicity for the Jewish Museum of New York’s 1998–1999 “After Rabin: new art from Israel” show, at http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/site/pages/content/exhibitions/special/rabin/rabin_zoom/rabinL1.html
41 “[John] Ross—the successful self-made Cherokee entrepreneur—was really what white Georgians feared. Their biggest obstacle to acquiring the Cherokee lands was the cultivator’s plow and overseer’s whip—not the war club, bow, and scalping knife.” Sean M. O’Brien, In Bitterness and in Tears: Andrew Jackson’s Destruction of the Creeks and Seminoles (Westport, CT: Praeger 2003), p 229. For the Constitution of the Cherokee Nation, see the Cherokee Phoenix, February 28, 1828.
42 The capacity to achieve permanence was typically put down to European ancestry, as in Andrew Jackson’s exasperated disparagement of the “designing half-breeds and renegade white men” who had encouraged Chickasaw reluctance to cede land. Theda Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens, GA: Georgia U.P. 2003), pp 70, 95–96.
43 Foreman, Indian Removal, p 310.
44 Perdue, “Mixed Blood” Indians, p 68.
45 Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska U.P. 1975), p 83.
46 European anti-Semitism could produce similar results: “What centuries of deprivation and persecution had failed to do, the dazzling light of [Jewish] emancipation [in France] achieved. Yet the choice was limited. The words of Clermont-Tonnère, a liberal deputy in the French national assembly: ‘Aux Juifs comme nation nous ne donnons rien; aux Juifs comme individuels nous donnons tout’ [to Jews as national collectivity we give nothing; to Jews as individuals we give everything] … reveal how restricted was the application of liberty.” Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 1914–1918: British–Jewish–Arab Relations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1973), p 26.
47 From Richard H. Pratt, “The advantages of mingling Indians with whites” (1892), selection in Francis P. Prucha, ed., Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P. 1973), pp 260–271, at p 261. Ward Churchill’s Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City Lights 2004) illuminates the genocidal consequences of Friends of the Indian-style total institutions with dreadful and systematic clarity.
48 So far, at least. If Al-Qaeda were to repeat the procedure a sufficient number of times, then 9/11 could emerge as the onset of a genocide. Definitionally, in other words, as in the case of other patterned or cumulative phenomena, genocide can obtain retrospectively.
49 He had alternatives. Liddell and Scott give “race, stock, family” as primary meanings of genos, with secondary meanings including offspring, nation, caste, breed, gender(!) and “class, sort, kind.” “Tribe” is listed as a subdivision of ethnos (“a number of people living together, a company, body of men … a race, family, tribe”). Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon 1869), pp 314, 426. Cf. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p 79.
50 Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman, OK: Oklahoma U.P 1987), p 133.
51 “In 1998–2000, life expectancy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was shorter by 21 years for males and 20 years for females, compared with the total population … In 1998–2000, the death rate for Indigenous infants was around four times the rate in the total population.” Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Social Trends: Health—Mortality and Morbidity: Mortality of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2002), p 1. See also: House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs, Health is Life: Report on the Inquiry into Indigenous Health (Canberra: House of Representatives, 2000); Neil Thomson, “Trends in Aboriginal infant mortality,” in Alan Gray, ed., A Matter of Life and Death: Contemporary Aboriginal Infant Mortality (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press 1990), pp 1–8.
52 What Jefferson bought was French dominion. The rawly unsettled nature of the Purchase territory (at least, outside New Orleans and its environs and outpost settlements such as Detroit and St Louis) was illustrated by the rapid commissioning of Lewis and Clark’s 1803 expedition to chart it.
53 This was the reality behind the mushrooming frontier demographies. “In the decade before 1820, the population of the new state of Alabama increased by a startling 1,000 per cent.” O’Brien, In Bitterness and in Tears, p 221. For an illuminating catalogue of Creek responses to this invasion, see Richard S. Lackey, comp., Frontier Claims in the Lower South. Records of Claims Filed by Citizens of the Alabama and Tombigbee River Settlements in the Mississippi Territory for Depradations by the Creek Indians During the War of 1812 (New Orleans: Polyanthos 1977).
54 Abel, “Indian consolidation west of the Mississippi River,” p 412.
55 “No Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.” 16 Stat., 566 (Act of March 3, 1871), c 120, s 1. For discussion, see Vine Deloria, Jr. and David E. Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, & Constitutional Tribulations (Austin, TX: Texas U.P. 1999), pp 60–61; Francis P. Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (abridged ed., Lincoln, NE: Nebraska U.P. 1986), p 165.
56 In particular, US v. Kagama, 118 US 1886, p 375; Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 US 1903, p 553.
57 John R. Wunder, “Retained by the People”: A History of American Indians and the Bill of Rights (New York: Oxford U.P. 1994), pp 17, 39.
58 The best source on this campaign remains the authoritative report that found its way into the House hearings preceding the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934: D. S. Otis, The Dawes Act and the Allotment of Indian Lands, Francis P. Prucha, ed. (Norman, OK: Oklahoma U.P. 1973 [1934]).
59 Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, DC: US Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, 1955), p 180.
60 See e.g. Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise. The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Nebraska U.P. 1989); Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians, passim.
61 Thomas J. Morgan, “What is an Indian?,” in Sixty-Fifth Annual Report of the Commissioner for Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office 1892), pp 31–37.
62 “Thus the key factor in colonial and ‘post’-colonial race relations is not, as some have argued, simple demographic numbers, since populations have to be differentiated before they can be counted. Difference, it cannot be stressed enough, is not simply given. It is the outcome of differentiation, which is an intensely conflictual process.” Patrick Wolfe, “Land, labor, and difference: elementary structures of race,” American Historical Review, Vol 106, 2001, pp 865–905, at p 894.
63 M. Annette Jaimes, “Federal Indian identification policy: a usurpation of Indigenous sovereignty in North America,” in her, ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press 1992), pp 123–138, at p 137. Patricia Limerick is almost as succinct: “Set the blood quantum at one quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed as it has for centuries, and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens, the federal government will finally be freed from its persistent ‘Indian problem’.” Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton 1987), p 338.
64 Donald L. Fixico, Termination and Relocation. Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960 (Albuquerque: New Mexico U.P. 1986); Charles F. Wilkinson and Eric R. Biggs, “The evolution of the termination policy,” American Indian Law Review, Vol 5, 1977, pp 139–184.
65 Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People. A History (rev. ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P. 2003), p 172.
66 Wolfe, “Nation and miscegeNation,” p 111; Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, p 180. Scholars who have made this point after me are too numerous to mention. Among those who made it before I did, see e.g. Jeremy Beckett, “The past in the present, the present in the past: constructing a national Aboriginality,” in his, ed., Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press 1988), pp 191–217; Gillian Cowlishaw, “Colour, culture and the Aboriginalists,” Man, Vol 22, 1988, pp 221–237; Andrew Lattas, “Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism: primordiality and the cultural politics of otherness,” in Julie Marcus, ed., Writing Australian Culture (Social Analysis special issue no. 27, pp 50–69.
67 Evans and Thorpe, “The massacre of Aboriginal history,” Overland, Vol 163, 2001, pp 21–39, at p 36.
68 For examples (some of which are actually hyphenated), see Katherine Bischoping and Natalie Fingerhut, “Border lines: Indigenous peoples in genocide studies,” Canadian Review of Social Anthropology, Vol 33, 1996, pp 481–505, at pp 484–485; Robert K. Hitchcock and Tara M. Twedt, “Physical and cultural genocide of various Indigenous peoples,” in Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons and Israel W. Charny, eds, Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: Garland Press 1995), pp 483–514, at pp 498–501. For “politicide” (“a process that covers a wide range of social, political, and military activities whose goal is to destroy the political and national viability of a whole community of people”), see Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide. Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians (rev. ed., London: Verso 2006).
69 Ever alert to the damaging implications in this connection of Israel’s invasion of Palestinian territory, Colin Tatz belittles the significance of “a contest for land and what the land held” as merely “explain[ing] away” colonial ethnocide. Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London: Verso 2003), p 180. Lower down the page, however, he observes that “We need to remember that Aboriginal Australians were deemed expendable not just because they were considered ‘vermin’, or because they sometimes speared cattle or settlers, but because they failed the Lockean test of being a people capable of a polity and a civility, to wit, they couldn’t or wouldn’t exploit the land they held, at least not in the European sense.”
70 Wolfe, “Nation and miscegeNation,” pp 110–118; Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, pp 168–190. For US examples, see e.g. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian. Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books 1979); Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon 1975). For responses to the phenomenon, see e.g. Fergus M. Bordewich, Killing the White Man’s Indian. Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York: Anchor Books 1996); Ward Churchill, Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press 1994).
71 Zika, “Fashioning new worlds from old fathers: reflections on Saturn, Amerindians and witches in a sixteenth-century print,” in Donna Merwick, ed., Dangerous Liaisons: Essays in Honour of Greg Dening (Melbourne: History Department, University of Melbourne 1994), pp 249–281; Zika, “Cannibalism and witchcraft in early-modern Europe: reading the visual images,” History Workshop Journal, Vol 44, 1997, pp 77–105.
72 “At June 2002, 22% (4,200) of children in out-of-home care were Aboriginal or Torres Straight [sic] Islander children. This represented a much higher rate of children in out-of-home care among Indigenous children than non-Indigenous children (20.1 per 1,000 compared with 3.2 per 1,000).” “Children in out-of-home care,” in Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia Now (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004), s. 2, “Australian social trends, 2003: family and community-services: child protection.” An indication of the progress that Indigenous people in Australia have achieved since the darkest days of the assimilation policy is contained in the sentence that follows this excerpt: “In all jurisdictions, the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle outlines a preference for Indigenous children to be placed with other Aboriginal or Torres Straight [sic] Islander peoples, preferably within the child’s extended family or community.”
73 Given the matrilineal transmission of—and relative difficulty of conversion to—Judaism, this factor indicates vigilance in relation to Palestine.
74 “Assimilated natives would be proof positive that America was an open society, where obedience and accommodation to the wishes of the majority would be rewarded with social equality.” Hoxie, Final Promise, p 34. See also George P. Castile, “Indian sign: hegemony and symbolism in federal Indian policy,” in his and Robert L. Bee, eds, State and Reservation. New Perspectives on Federal Indian Policy (Tucson, AZ: Arizona U.P. 1992), pp 165–186, at pp 176–183.
75 A drive to replace Palestinian labour with cheap immigrant labour was begun in the early 1990s in response to the first Intifada. Though this policy was officially abandoned as it generated its own problems, around 8% of Israel’s population continues to be made up of illegal immigrants (who are, by definition, non-Jewish). See Shmuel Amir, “Overseas foreign workers in Israel: policy aims and labor market outcomes,” International Migration Review, Vol 36, 2002, pp 41–58; Eric Beachemin, “Illegal in Israel,” Radio Netherlands broadcast, September 15, 2004, at http://www2.rnw.nl/rnw/en/features/humanrights/tornlives/ilegalinisrael?view = Standard; Leila Farsakh, “An occupation that creates children willing to die. Israel: an apartheid state?,” Monde Diplomatique, English language edition, November 4, 2003, at http://mondediplo.com/2003/11/04apartheid
76 Though formal legislative power was, for a time, exercised by Blacks in Black-majority Southern states during Reconstruction. See Thomas C. Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, IL: Illinois U.P. 1977).
77 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana, IL: Illinois U.P. 1993); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf 1998); Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black–White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford U.P. 1984), pp 180–223.
78 “Slave labor could be analyzed in economic, social, and political terms [in traditional histories,] but free labor was often defined as simply the ending of coercion, not as a structure of labor control that needed to be analyzed in its own way.” Thomas C. Holt, Rebecca J. Scott and Frederick Cooper, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina U.P. 2000), pp 2–3.
79 Though he is too scrupulous a scholar not to acknowledge that “Israeli actions may become near-genocidal.” Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, p 181.
80 “[C]apital punishment now being an unquestioned, routine penalty for chucking stones at Israelis.” Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: Fourth Estate 2005), p 546. Quote in text from Tatz, With Intent to Destroy, p 117. I have chosen not to patronize Professor Tatz by quoting approvingly from his otherwise very useful book, from which I have learned a lot, on account of our fundamental divergence over the issue of contemporary Zionism, which I wholeheartedly oppose, and, in particular, of my disdain for his attempts to confuse contemporary anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism (e.g. pp 19, 27, 127). Apart from anything else, these attempts do grave injustice to the real victims of anti-Semitism.
‘In an endless war on terror, we are all doomed to become Palestinians’
Halper’s new book sheds light on the arms industry, arguing that Israel is now the go-to nation for armies and police forces around the world
By Jonathan Cook
Published date: 1 September 2015 15:44 BST | Last update: 8 years 4 months ago
https://www.middleeasteye.net/features/endless-war-terror-we-are-all-doomed-become-palestinians
For 18 years Jeff Halper has been on the front lines of the Israel-Palestine conflict, helping to rebuild Palestinian homes in the occupied territories demolished by Israel. As he prepares to step down as head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), he is publishing a new book on Israel.
Halper’s main conclusion is disturbing. Israel, he says, is globalising Palestine.
The former anthropology professor’s wide-ranging research has forced him into an expertise he is not entirely comfortable with: the global arms industry.
Halper argues that Israel is cashing in – both financially and diplomatically – on systems of control it has developed in the occupied territories. It is exporting its know-how to global elites keen to protect their privileges from both external and internal challengers.
In a world supposedly mired in an endless war on terror, we may all be facing a future as Palestinians.
Halper’s book, entitled War Against the People, due out next month, suggests that Israel provides a unique window on some of the most important recent developments in what he terms “securocratic warfare”.
The book’s central thesis emerged as he tried to understand why tiny Israel hits way beyond its weight economically, politically and militarily. How does Israel have so much clout – not only in the US and Europe but, more surprisingly in countries as diverse as India, Brazil and China?
None of the usual explanations – Holocaust guilt, the power of lobbies, even the growth in Christian fundamentalism – seemed to provide a complete answer.
Global pacification
Zeev Maoz, an Israeli political science professor based in California, set Halper on a different track. “He has observed that one of the Zionist movement’s fundamental tenets was to tie its wagon to a hegemon, serving it,” Halper says.
The Zionists did that early on by cultivating British support in Palestine. Once established as a state, Israel helped the French and British at Suez in 1956, and after 1967 Israel served as a US surrogate in the Middle East during the Cold War.
Today, Israel’s growing influence, Halper claims, reflects its positioning of itself at the heart of the rapidly burgeoning “global pacification” industry, advising and assisting militaries, police forces and homeland security agencies around the world.
In the post-9/11 world, Israel is security king – or “securityland”, as a leading Israeli analyst recently described it.
And significantly, Israel is starting to parlay this usefulness into wider political and diplomatic support, says Halper, even as the international community grows exasperated by nearly 50 years of occupation. Such backing, including from much of the Arab world, often remains hidden from view.
US president Dwight Eisenhower’s grim warning from the 1950s that a rampant “military-industrial complex” was threatening to become the real power behind the façade of popular democracy needs updating, says Halper.
He describes the emergence of what he calls the MISSILE complex: full-spectrum dominance by the US and its allies through the joint activity of the military, internal security, surveillance, intelligence and law enforcement.
After decades of controlling Palestinians under occupation, he notes, Israel is unrivalled in all these spheres. It uses the occupied territories as a giant laboratory for developing and testing new ideas, technology, tactics and weaponry.
An arms superpower
As we meet at his home in West Jerusalem, Halper is keen to stress that he is only sketching the outlines of the new US-led global pacification industry. He has entered largely uncharted waters. Journalists, analysts and academics have shied away from the necessary research, he claims, preferring to keep within their narrow specialisations.
Halper is interested in “big-picture” analysis, joining up the dots. And doing so has forced him to explore unfamiliar territory, reading up on key texts in security studies, poring over the works of terrorism experts, and meeting decorated generals.
Halper points out that Israel spends about 8 percent of its GDP a year on the military, about twice the per capita expenditure of the United States. Despite its size, Israel has more military aircraft than any European country.
Israel has four of the world’s top 100 arms manufacturers, and is ranked among the top 10 arms dealing countries, in some assessments as high as fourth place. The Global Militarisation Index has crowned Israel the most militarised nation on the planet every year since 2007.
In May Israel won a new accolade, becoming a “cyber superpower”, its companies selling about a tenth of the world’s computer and network security technology.
That focus on the military and weapons systems has led Israel into official military relations with 130 countries, many of them dictatorships known for their human rights violations. Reports suggest that Israel engages in more dubious and secretive deals with additional regimes.
This month the United Nations disclosed that Israel was breaking a Western arms embargo on selling weapons to South Sudan, fuelling the civil war there. Critics have suggested that Israel also has advisers and trainers operating clandestinely in South Sudan.
End of conventional wars
But Israel’s real talent, says Halper, has been to exploit a new emphasis on “securocratic warfare”.
“Wars between states are largely a thing of the past,” he observes. “In the new kind of warfare, F-35 jets and nuclear weapons are far less useful. What is needed now are the skills Israel has developed after a century of ‘counter-insurgency’ against the Palestinians. Israel is the go-to country when it comes to securocratic warfare.”
The need for this kind of warfare was highlighted following the US attack on Iraq in 2003, he notes. Conventional wars between states have traditionally involved three phases: operational preparations, the actual attack, and the outcome.
But Iraq – as well as Afghanistan before it – showed a fourth stage: the need for stabilisation and peace-keeping following regime change.
The pacification industry that has boomed post-9/11, Halper notes, is spreading back to the West. As the military takes on many of the duties of a police force in external wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, back home the police become ever more militarised. Police in Ferguson look indistinguishable from their compatriots in the US army in Iraq.
“What we are seeing is the rise of the human-security state – endless ‘war on terror’, the world in a permanent state of emergency. The traditional hard walls between the police and the military, between domestic and overseas intelligence agencies – between the FBI and the CIA, if you like – crumble.”
Warrior cops
For elites who see danger lurking around every corner, Israel has the answer: what he calls the “warrior cop”. For decades Israel has been operating paramilitary forces like the Border Police, as well as intelligence services like the Shin Bet, whose area of operational responsibility is not constrained by distinctions between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
“Israel created the model long ago of the military and police working together, and now it is well-placed to train the world,” Halper concludes.
That point was underscored this week when the Israeli government announced that a long-time army officer, Gal Hirsch, would become the head of Israel’s national police force.
What is at stake? Are the US and Europe not trying to defend themselves against real terror threats?
Halper believes it is important to examine these developments within a larger framework: the capitalist world system.
It is no coincidence, he believes, that the US is talking up global terror threats at the same time as wealth and power have de-territorialised, creating an archipelago of elite interests that stretch from parts of the US and Europe to Singapore and the Virgin Islands.
Transnational corporations need secure corridors for the flow of capital and labour, he argues, as much of the rest of the world turns into wastelands or slums.
The concern is how to maintain a social order conducive to capitalism as great swathes of the globe are impoverished and migrants try to escape their desperate plight.
This is where Israel has stepped in. The place where Israel has developed its ideas and tested them is the occupied territories, says Halper.
The control of Gaza, for example, offers a blueprint for other states concerned about domestic surveillance, border security, urban warfare, migration threats, and much more.
“The Palestinians, in this sense, are an important resource for Israel. Without the occupied territories, Israel would be New Zealand. It would be a tourist destination, not a regional hegemon.”
A place at NATO’s table
Israel’s arms industry isn’t just aimed at making money. “It puts Israel at the table with NATO countries.” Israel conducts military exercises with NATO, and helps develop Watchkeeper drones for the Europeans.
It also has increasingly close ties, says Halper, with regimes that are ostensibly its enemy, such as Saudi Arabia. “The Saudis are funding ISIS [Islamic State], so how does one explain their alliance with Israel? The common denominator is ‘security politics’. No two countries have interests more alike than Israel and Saudi Arabia.”
When the Saudis unveiled the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, Halper argues, they offered, in return for an end to the occupation, the Arab world’s recognition of Israel as the regional hegemon.
Is Israel’s usefulness paying off diplomatically?
There are indications that increasingly it is. The Economist recently noted that India, which has long track record of supporting the Palestinians, was among five countries abstaining at the UN Human Rights Council last month on a resolution criticising Israel for its conduct in Gaza last summer in a 51-day attack that killed more than 500 children.
The magazine added that Israeli officials believe the international community’s growing dependence on its arms will reduce its vulnerability over the long term to the boycott (BDS) movement.
Halper points out that Nigeria, another country that has become reliant on Israeli arms, recently also betrayed its traditional support for the Palestinians.
Nigeria saved Israel and the US great embarrassment last December when it voted in the UN Security Council against a Palestinian resolution demanding an end to the occupation. The US had feared that it would have to cast its veto.
Halper emphasises that the US is still the world’s largest arms dealer by some margin. But in its scramble to fill the niches, Israel helps shine a light on the arms industry’s true purpose: not security, but pacification.
“When you call it ‘security’, you shut down the debate. Who doesn’t want security? But when you reframe it is as ‘pacification’, the real goals become much clearer.”
‘Are we the baddies?’ Western support for genocide in Gaza means the answer is yes
The desperate smear campaign to defend Israel’s crimes highlights the toxic brew of lies that’s been underpinning the liberal democratic order for decades
Jonathan Cook
Published date: 27 December 2023 12:57 GMT | Last update: 6 days 6 hours ago
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-war-baddies-western-support-genocide-gaza-yes
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/
In a popular British comedy sketch set during the Second World War, a Nazi officer near the front lines turns to a fellow officer and, in a moment of sudden – and comic – self-doubt, asks: “Are we the baddies?”
For many of us, it has felt like we are living through the same moment, extended for nearly three months – though there has been nothing to laugh about.
Western leaders have not only backed rhetorically a genocidal war by Israel on Gaza, but they have provided diplomatic cover, weapons and other military assistance.
The West is fully complicit in the ethnic cleansing of some two million Palestinians from their homes, as well as the killing of more than 20,000 and the injuring of many tens of thousands more, a majority of them women and children.
Western politicians have insisted on Israel’s “right to defend itself” as it has levelled critical infrastructure in Gaza, including government buildings, and collapsed the health sector. Starvation and disease are starting to pick off the rest of the population.
The Palestinians of Gaza have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from Israel’s US-supplied bombs. If they are ultimately allowed to escape, it will be into neighbouring Egypt. After decades of displacement, they will be finally exiled permanently from their homeland.
And as western capitals try to justify these obscenities by blaming Hamas, Israeli leaders allow their soldiers and settler militias, backed by the state, to rampage across the West Bank, where there is no Hamas, attacking and killing Palestinians.
In defending Gaza’s destruction, Israeli leaders have reached readily for an analogy with the allies’ firebombing of German cities like Dresden – apparently unembarrassed by the fact that these were long ago acknowledged as some of the worst crimes of the Second World War.
Israel is waging an old-style, unabashed colonial war against the native population – of the kind that predates international humanitarian law. And western leaders are cheering them on.
Are we sure we are not the baddies?
Slave revolt
Israel’s attack on Gaza provokes revulsion from so many because it seems impossible to rationalise it. It feels like a reversion. It lays bare something primitive and ugly about the West’s behaviour that has been obscured for more than 70 years by a veneer of “progress”, by talk about the primacy of human rights, by the development of international institutions, by the rules of war, by claims of humanitarianism.
Yes, these claims were invariably bogus. Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine were all sold based on lies. The true goal of the US, and its Nato sidekicks, was plundering the resources of others, maintaining Washington as the global top dog, and enriching a western elite.
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But importantly, the deception was sustained by an overarching narrative that dragged along many westerners in its wake. Wars were to counter the threat of Soviet communism, or Islamic “terror”, or a renewed Russian imperialism. And as a positive corollary, these wars claimed to be liberating oppressed women, protecting human rights, and fostering democracy.
None of that narrative overlay works this time.
There is nothing humanitarian about bombing trapped civilians in Gaza, turning their tiny prison enclave into rubble, reminiscent of earthquake disaster zones but this time an entirely man-made catastrophe.
Hamas cannot send any kind of warhead into Europe, let alone in 45 minutes. Their prison camp was never the plausible heart of some Islamist empire ready to overrun the West
Even Israel does not have the gall to claim to be liberating the women and girls of Gaza from Hamas as it kills and starves them. Nor does it pretend to be interested in democracy promotion. Rather, Gaza is full of “human animals” and must be “flattened”.
And it has been all but impossible to make Hamas, a group of a few thousand fighters penned into Gaza, appear a credible threat to the West’s way of life.
Hamas cannot send any kind of warhead into Europe, let alone in 45 minutes. Their prison camp, even before its destruction, was never the plausible heart of some Islamist empire ready to overrun the West and subject it to “sharia law”.
In fact, it has been barely feasible to refer to these past weeks as a war. Gaza is not a state, it has no army. It has been under occupation for decades and under siege for 16 years – a blockade in which Israel has counted the calories allowed in to maintain low-level malnutrition amongst Palestinians.
As the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein has noted, Hamas’ breakout on 7 October is better understood not as a war but as a slave revolt. And like slave rebellions throughout history – from Spartacus’ against the Romans to Nat Turner’s in Virginia in 1831 – it was inevitably going to turn brutal and bloody.
Are we on the side of the murderous prison guards? Are we arming the plantation owners?
Mass gaslighting
In the absence of a persuasive justification for assisting Israel in its genocidal campaign in Gaza, our leaders are having to wage a parallel war on the western public – or at least on their minds.
To question Israel’s right to exterminate Palestinians in Gaza, to chant a slogan calling for Palestinians to be free of occupation and siege, to want equal rights for all in the region – these are now all treated as the equivalent of antisemitism.
To demand a ceasefire to stop Palestinians dying under the bombs is to hate Jews.
The extent to which these narrative manipulations are not only abhorrent but themselves constitute antisemitism should be obvious, were we not being so relentlessly and thoroughly gaslit by our ruling class.
Those defending Israel’s genocide suggest that it is not just Israel’s ultra-right government and military but all Jews who will the destruction of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of its population, and the murder of thousands of Palestinian children.
That is the real Jew hatred.
But the path to this mass gaslighting operation has been paved for a while. It began long before Israel’s levelling of Gaza.
When Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015, he brought for the first time a meaningful anti-imperialist agenda to the heart of British politics. And as a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, he was viewed by the establishment as a threat to Israel, a critically important US client state and the lynchpin of the West’s projection of military might into the oil-rich Middle East.
Western elites were bound to respond with unprecedented hostility to this challenge to their forever war machine. This appears to have been duly noted by Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, who has since made sure to present Labour as Nato’s number one cheerleader.
During Corbyn’s tenure, little time was lost by the establishment in working out the best strategy for putting the Labour leader permanently on the back foot and undermining his well-established anti-racist credentials. He was recast as an antisemite.
The campaign of smears not only damaged Corbyn personally but tore the Labour Party apart, turning it into a rabble of feuding factions, eating up all the party’s energy and making it unelectable.
Smear campaign
That same playbook has now been rolled out against much of the British and US public.
This month the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution equating anti-Zionism – in this case, opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza – with antisemitism.
In a complete inversion of reality, opposition to genocide has been reframed by US politicians as genocidal
Protesters who have turned out to demand a ceasefire to end the massacres in Gaza are characterised as “rioters”, while their chant of “from the river to the sea” calling for equal rights between Israeli Jews and Palestinians is denounced as a “rallying cry for the eradication of the state of Israel and the Jewish people”.
Tellingly again, this is an inadvertent admission by the western ruling class that Israel – constituted as a Jewish chauvinist, settler-colonial state – can never allow Palestinians equality or meaningful freedoms any more than apartheid South Africa could for the native Black population.
In a complete inversion of reality, opposition to genocide has been reframed by US politicians as genocidal.
This mass smear campaign is so unmoored that western elites are even turning on their own to shut down freedoms of speech and thought in the institutions where they are supposed to be heavily protected.
The heads of three top US universities – from which the next members of the ruling class will emerge – were grilled by Congress about the threat of antisemitism to Jewish students from campus protests calling for an end to the killing in Gaza.
The West’s order of priorities was laid bare: protecting the ideological sensitivities of a section of Jewish students who fervently support Israel’s right to kill Palestinians was more important than either protecting Palestinians from genocide or defending basic democratic freedoms in the West to oppose genocide.
The reticence of the three university presidents to cave in to the politicians’ demands for the snuffing out of free speech and thought on campus led to a campaign to defund their colleges as well as calls for their heads.
One, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, has already been forced out of office.
Crisis on all fronts
These developments are not the outcome of some strange, temporary, collective psychosis overtaking western establishments. They are yet more evidence of a desperate failure to stop the West’s long-term trajectory towards crises on multiple fronts.
They are a sign, first, that the ruling class understands it is again visible to the public as a ruling class, and that its interests are beginning to be seen as completely divorced from those of ordinary people. The scales are falling from our eyes.
The simple fact that one can again use the language of “establishments”, a “ruling class” and “class war” without sounding unhinged or like a throwback to the 1950s is an indication of how perception management – and narrative manipulation – so central to upholding the western political project since the end of the Second World War is failing.
Claims about the triumph of the liberal democratic order declared so loudly in the late 1980s by intellectuals such as Francis Fukuyama – or “the end of history”, as he grandly termed it – now look patently absurd.
And that is because, second, western elites clearly have no answers for the biggest challenges of our era. They are floundering around trying to deal with the inherent paradoxes in the capitalist order that liberal democracy was there to obscure.
Reality is breaking through the ideological cladding.
The most catastrophic is the climate crisis. Capitalism’s model of mass consumption and competition for the sake of competition is proving suicidal.
Limited resources – especially in our oil-addicted economies – mean growth is proving an ever-more costly extravagance. Those raised from birth to aspire to a better standard of living than their parents are growing not richer, but more disillusioned and bitter.
And the promise of progress – of kinder, more nurturing and equal societies – now sounds like a sick joke to most westerners under the age of 45.
Brew of lies
The claim that the West is best is starting to look like it rests on shaky foundations, even to western audiences.
But that idea crumbled long ago abroad, in the countries either devastated by the West’s war machine or waiting for their turn. The liberal democratic order offers them nothing except threats: it demands fealty or punishment.
Which is the context for the current genocide in Gaza.
As it claims, Israel is on the front lines – but not of a clash of civilisations. It is an exposed, precarious outpost of the liberal democratic order, where the brew of lies about democracy and liberalism are at their most toxic and unconvincing.
Israel-Palestine war: How Gaza changed global politics
Israel is an apartheid state masquerading as “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Its brutal occupation forces masquerade as “the most moral army in the world”. And now Israel’s genocide in Gaza masquerades as “the elimination of Hamas”.
Israel has always had to obscure these lies through intimidation. Anyone daring to call out the deceptions is smeared as an antisemite.
But that playbook has sounded grossly offensive – inhuman even – when the matter at hand is stopping genocide in Gaza.
Where does this ultimately lead?
Nearly a decade ago, the Israeli scholar and peace activist Jeff Halper wrote a book, War Against the People, warning: “In an endless war on terror, we are all doomed to become Palestinians.”
Not just the West’s “enemies”, but its populations would come to be seen as a threat to the interests of a capitalist ruling class bent on its permanent privilege and enrichment, whatever the costs to the rest of us.
That argument – which sounded hyperbolic when he first aired it – is beginning to seem prescient.
Gaza is not just the front line of Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people. It is also a front line in the western elite’s war on our ability to think critically, to develop sustainable ways to live, and to demand that others be treated with the dignity and humanity we expect for ourselves.
Yes, the battle lines are drawn. And anyone who refuses to side with the baddies is the enemy.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at https://www.jonathan-cook.net/
Richard Boyd Barrett: Meet the Irish politician and activist fighting for Palestinians
Anam Alam
Published date: 22 December, 2023
https://www.newarab.com/features/richard-boyd-barrett-why-ireland-must-stand-palestine
In late 1987, an 18-year-old Richard Boyd Barrett arrived from Ireland in the southern part of historic Palestine to work as a labourer.
Shortly after arriving, a series of protests spread from Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp to the occupied West Bank and other Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and Israel – known as the first Intifada.
Richard found himself working alongside Palestinians who came as day labourers from refugee camps in Al-Khalil/Hebron, many of whom were also participating in the uprising.
He visited their refugee camp and learned the history of the Palestinian people and the oppression they have suffered since 1948.
“I think it’s in all of our interests to stand with the Palestinians and oppose all forms of racism and oppression”
After being “horrified” at the brutality he witnessed perpetrated against young Palestinian people and identifying with the Palestinian cause and their plight, Richard felt he had to get involved in advocating for Palestine.
When he returned to Ireland, Richard began advocating for the Palestinian cause and becoming involved with the Anti-War Movement and socialist politics.
Today, Richard is a member of the Irish Parliament for People Before Profit and is still fighting for Palestinian rights.
“I always say I went to Israel and came back from Palestine,” Richard tells The New Arab. Ireland is one of the few countries in the West to support Palestine and was the first EU state to endorse Palestinian statehood in 1980. The country also banned and criminalised trading goods and services from lands occupied by Israel in 2018.
Richard Boyd Barrett: Ireland’s shared struggle with Palestine
“I think there’s a very close parallel between the Palestinian struggle and the Irish struggle,” Richard explains while discussing Ireland’s support for Palestine.
The politician details how Ireland was the first British colony, and there was constant resistance by the people of Ireland against British colonialism.
Similar to the apartheid system that Israel has imposed on the Palestinians, Richard says the forerunner for that was a system called the Penal Laws, a system of apartheid that British colonialism imposed in Ireland, religiously segregating the population and discriminating against the majority Catholic population. A system that contributed to one of the first modern famines, the Irish famine, which led to almost 50 percent of the Irish population being either wiped out or forced out of the country.
“Even when the Irish revolution happened between 1916 and 1921, there was a very, very brutal suppression of that by British forces,” Richard explains.
“A lot of the commanders, the political leaders, and even some of the military personnel, that were used to try and crush the Irish revolution, were also deeply implicated in promoting Zionism and later going to Palestine and helping establish what was to become the Israeli state.
“There was direct overlap in terms of policy and personnel in the subjugation of Ireland and the subjugation of Palestine,” he adds. “These are very close analogies and so there’s always been a recognition and awareness in Ireland of those parallels.”
Richard has been very vocal about Western leaders’ reluctance and hypocrisy to support Palestine.
Western nations like the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and France have come out in support of Israel and have been backing its rights to defend itself.
Most recently, in a vote to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the United States, along with Israel and eight other countries, voted against it, while the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Germany and 20 other countries abstained.
“I think the big Western imperial/colonial powers, what their agenda is, is to dominate the world,” says Richard. “They’re involved in a constant competition between the big imperial blocks to try and develop spheres of influence and to control markets, to control resources around the world to the benefit of those big powers.”
Richard explains Israel has been a key element of this, particularly after the discovery of oil at the beginning of the 20th century. He thinks the big imperial powers, most notably Britain at the time, understood that control of what was to become the most important resource in the history of capitalism, oil, would require them to have ways of exercising their influence in the Middle East.
The activist thinks it was in that context that they supported the Zionist project – to have a colonial outpost in a strategically important area.
“It’s also why they have sought to collaborate with very brutal and dictatorial regimes elsewhere in the Middle East because I think the thing that those colonial powers fear most is democracy and self-determination in the Middle East because it would challenge their influence,” says Richard.
“I think it’s sort of strategic, colonial self-interest, and the Palestinians have become victims of that. But I think, actually, all of the people of the region are victims in one way or another of that colonial project.”
When asked what he thinks the West should do, Richard believes the nations should have principles instead of operating purely on their own perceived self-interest and promoting the interests of big businesses and corporations.
“We’re supposed to believe in kind of universal principles of human rights, of equality, of freedom, of self-determination, of democracy, but in fact, they’re [the West] very selective about these things,” Richard says.
“I think often they just use them as a sort of rhetorical cover for pursuing much more selfish objectives.
“What I’d like to see is a sort of ethical foreign policy that is based on universal principles and values applying equally to everybody regardless of their colour, their religion, their race, or cultural background. That’s what’s necessary,” he adds.
“It’s what they preach, but they don’t practise.”
Richard believes it is in everybody’s interest to support the Palestinians, not just because of the suffering and oppression that they have endured for decades since 1948.
The politician adds that one of the slogans that rose from the horrors of the second world war and the Holocaust was the idea of “Never Again”, which Richard believes came from a recognition that the same horrors can be done to any group of people as it was done to the Jewish people and even travellers and the LGBTQIA+ by the Nazi regime.
“Of course, we see instances of genocidal oppression and brutal racism and discrimination in many parts of the world,” Richard says. “I think it’s in all of our interests to stand with the Palestinians and oppose all forms of racism and oppression.
“If we don’t stand with the oppressed, then we might find ourselves one day the victims of the same sort of forces of oppression.”
—
The Gospel: Israel’s controversial AI used in the Gaza war
Jonathan Fenton-Harvey
Published date: 13 December, 2023
https://www.newarab.com/analysis/gospel-israels-controversial-ai-used-gaza-war
Israel’s implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in Gaza marks another significant shift in the landscape of modern warfare.
However, the widespread destruction of homes and infrastructure in Gaza – along with the alarming death toll surpassing 18,400 – have raised concerns about the use of automation and robotics in operations labelled as counter-insurgencies.
As highlighted in a recent groundbreaking investigation by Israeli outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call, at the forefront of Israel’s offensive is a system called “haBsora” (“the Gospel”).
This AI platform reportedly allows accelerated target selection in Gaza for bombing, as well as faster tracking of Hamas positions, while providing an estimate of likely deaths in advance of an attack.
“The Gospel’s ability to select targets to bomb is so profound that one former Israeli intelligence official called it a ‘mass assassination factory’”
Indeed, while older systems could have produced 50 targets in a day, the Gospel system now enables the Israeli army to produce 100 targets.
But how exactly does this system work? In short, it creates targets using a method called ‘probabilistic inference,’ a key feature of machine learning algorithms. Essentially, these algorithms analyse large amounts of data to identify patterns.
The effectiveness of these algorithms largely depends on both the quality and the amount of data they process. The algorithms use these patterns to make predictions or suggestions based on likelihood.
If an individual shares sufficient characteristics with others identified as enemy combatants, the system might also label that individual as a combatant. This process is based on the likelihood or probability that they share the same status, not on absolute certainty.
Israel’s significant data collection and information gathering has been a core component which has enabled this new strategy.
“Over the years, Israel has amassed a vast amount of intelligence using surveillance equipment, drones, and spies within Hamas, as well as from Palestinians crossing the border,” Antony Loewenstein, independent journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory, told The New Arab.
“This massive intelligence gathering has enabled Israel to generate and pump out this vast number of targets,” he added.
The Gospel’s ability to select targets to bomb is so profound that one former Israeli intelligence official called it a “mass assassination factory”.
While older systems could have produced 50 targets in a day, the Gospel system now enables the Israeli army to produce 100 targets, leading to a dramatic increase in deadly airstrikes during the war.
According to the investigation, it allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes, where a single Hamas member lives, on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives.
Yet Palestinian testimonies have indicated that airstrikes have targeted numerous residential buildings where no known member of Hamas resided.
“The use of the new AI targeting system called ‘haBsora’ is partly responsible for such a high rate of Israeli strikes in Gaza throughout this war,” Dr Rob Geist Pinfold, Lecturer in Peace and Security at Durham University, told The New Arab.
“Israel has long had the capacity to conduct this many strikes but has lacked the intel to do so in a relatively accurate way, so the use of AI bolsters Israel’s intelligence and therefore warfighting capabilities,” he added.
“Israel and its allies argue that AI enhances the precision and accuracy of their operations, therefore limiting civilian casualties. Yet there’s scant evidence to substantiate this claim”
“This AI uses existing intelligence to pinpoint potential targets in Gaza and to map the number of theoretical civilian casualties that a strike on those targets would cause. This is all classified by a ‘traffic light’ system: red would mean that there would be too many Palestinian casualties to justify an attack, whereas green would suggest the opposite.”
Aiding this, Israel has also disclosed the implementation of another AI system, alongside the Gospel, known as the ‘Fire Factory’. This system utilises data on military-approved targets to calculate munition loads, prioritise and allocate thousands of targets to aircraft and drones, and propose a schedule for subsequent raids.
Israel’s venture into AI-assisted warfare is not new. The Israeli army claimed to have fought the “first AI war” during the 11-day war in Gaza in May 2021, underlining the country’s ongoing push towards integrating advanced technology and supercomputing into its military strategy. Meanwhile, Israeli forces had started using AI for target selection in air strikes and logistical planning as of July 2023.
Israel is actively seeking to increase its usage of autonomous warfare, as announced by Israeli Defence Ministry’s Director General Eyal Zamir in May 2023. This integration includes the formation of a dedicated military robotics division and a substantial increase in funding for AI research and development.
Key focuses of this initiative were the development of AI-driven swarming strike platforms and autonomous combat systems. As it possesses a small military in numbers while prioritising technological advancements, Israel is also looking to fill the gaps, with the stated ambition of becoming an “AI powerhouse,” in the words of Zamir.
On the one hand, AI can make militaries more efficient and lethal, as militaries can use remote and autonomous systems to select and hit targets.
“The risk here is that this system is generating so many targets that it makes human oversight much harder, suggesting that more ad-hoc decisions are being made, which may partially explain the high civilian death toll,” Dr Rob Geist Pinfold added.
The potential for Israeli AI to generate more targets at a quicker speed is thought to be at least partially responsible for the huge civilian death toll in Gaza.
And while advocates of AI in warfare have praised it for enabling militaries to do ‘more with less’ and for enabling more precise targeting that limits civilian casualties, there are profound ethical concerns. Not to mention that there are difficulties in regulating machine learning-based military systems.
“Israel and its allies argue that AI enhances the precision and accuracy of their operations, therefore limiting civilian casualties. Yet there’s scant evidence to substantiate this claim,” said Loewenstein.
“Based on what we’ve seen, the primary objective of Israel’s strategy is more about inflicting substantial damage rather than precision, making Gaza unliveable and forcing people to overthrow Hamas,” he added.
Indeed, according to the +972 investigation, top Israeli intelligence officers instructed their operatives to “kill as many Hamas operatives as possible,” while relaxing any restrictions around harming Palestinian civilians.
This strategy, involving broad cellular pinpointing, often trades accuracy for speed, leading to potential collateral damage and igniting debates over the ethics of AI in warfare.
“Based on what we’ve seen, the primary objective of Israel’s strategy is more about inflicting substantial damage rather than precision, making Gaza unliveable”
Implications for the future of warfare
Israel’s use of the Gospel and similar strategies represents a further advancement in the integration of AI into warfare, a leap with historical precedents. From the Vietnam War, marking the initial foray into testing out laser-guided missiles, to the Iraq War, which witnessed the advancement into biometric systems for insurgent identification, along with more advanced guided munitions, the progression of ‘adopting and enhancing’ AI equipment in warfare is evident.
Governments across the globe are constantly in fervent pursuit of fresh AI advancements to enhance their militaries. Emphasising the role that the Gaza war may play in this trend, a former White House official, quoted by The Guardian, argued that “other states are going to be watching and learning” from Israel’s application of AI in its war.
“Israel has published numerous videos of its airstrikes, and this isn’t done to address just a domestic audience or influencing international public opinion,” said Antony Loewenstein.
“The primary aim is to showcase their capabilities to other governments, essentially attracting foreign buyers.”
Israel’s arms exports are expanding, having doubled in value in the last decade, according to the defence ministry. Among its key customers are states like India, nations in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Arab states that have normalised ties with Israel since the 2020 Abraham Accords.
“Israel is actively marketing its equipment and methods, setting a precedent that is likely to be emulated by other nations in the future, particularly those that say they’re engaged in counter-insurgency operations” added Loewenstein.
“The exact countries that will follow suit may be unknown for now, but the trend is clear.”
LETTER TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, 2002.
This article is more than 20 years old
This article was published in November 2002
Online document: the full text of Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American People”, reported in today’s Observer. The letter first appeared on the internet in Arabic and has since been translated and circulated by Islamists in Britain.
Also published on the Director of National Intelligence web site, U.S.A., but not the full text: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ubl2016/english/To%20the%20American%20people.pdf
Observer Worldview
Sun 24 Nov 2002 07.07 EST
In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful,
“Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory” [Quran 22:39]
“Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble is indeed the plot of Satan.”[Quran 4:76]
Some American writers have published articles under the title ‘On what basis are we fighting?’ These articles have generated a number of responses, some of which adhered to the truth and were based on Islamic Law, and others which have not. Here we wanted to outline the truth – as an explanation and warning – hoping for Allah’s reward, seeking success and support from Him.
While seeking Allah’s help, we form our reply based on two questions directed at the Americans:
(Q1) Why are we fighting and opposing you?
(Q2) What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?
As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.
a) You attacked us in Palestine:
(i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its*price, and pay for it heavily.
(ii) It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah. Anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact is accused of anti-semitism. This is one of the most fallacious, widely-circulated fabrications in history. The people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites. It is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be upon him) and the inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed. Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all. If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.
When the Muslims conquered Palestine and drove out the Romans, Palestine and Jerusalem returned to Islaam, the religion of all the Prophets peace be upon them. Therefore, the call to a historical right to Palestine cannot be raised against the Islamic Ummah that believes in all the Prophets of Allah (peace and blessings be upon them) – and we make no distinction between them.
(iii) The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.
(b) You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon.
(c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis;
(i) These governments prevent our people from establishing the Islamic Shariah, using violence and lies to do so.
(ii) These governments give us a taste of humiliation, and places us in a large prison of fear and subdual.
(iii) These governments steal our Ummah’s wealth and sell them to you at a paltry price.
(iv) These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people.
(v) The removal of these governments is an obligation upon us, and a necessary step to free the Ummah, to make the Shariah the supreme law and to regain Palestine. And our fight against these governments is not separate from out fight against you.
(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of you international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.
(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.
(f) You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down.
(g) You have supported the Jews in their idea that Jerusalem is their eternal capital, and agreed to move your embassy there. With your help and under your protection, the Israelis are planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. Under the protection of your weapons, Sharon entered the Al-Aqsa mosque, to pollute it as a preparation to capture and destroy it.
(2) These tragedies and calamities are only a few examples of your oppression and aggression against us. It is commanded by our religion and intellect that the oppressed have a right to return the aggression. Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge. Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will then leave her to live in security and peace?!!
(3) You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:
(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
(b) The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands. So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.
(c) Also the American army is part of the American people. It is this very same people who are shamelessly helping the Jews fight against us.
(d) The American people are the ones who employ both their men and their women in the American Forces which attack us.
(e) This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.
(f) Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge. Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back. Whoever has destroyed our villages and towns, then we have the right to destroy their villages and towns. Whoever has stolen our wealth, then we have the right to destroy their economy. And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.
The American Government and press still refuses to answer the question:
Why did they attack us in New York and Washington?
If Sharon is a man of peace in the eyes of Bush, then we are also men of peace!!! America does not understand the language of manners and principles, so we are addressing it using the language it understands.
(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?
(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.
(a) The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them – peace be upon them all.
It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions. It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honour, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their colour, sex, or language.
(b) It is the religion whose book – the Quran – will remained preserved and unchanged, after the other Divine books and messages have been changed. The Quran is the miracle until the Day of Judgment. Allah has challenged anyone to bring a book like the Quran or even ten verses like it.
(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.
(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.
We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.
(b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:
(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?
(ii) You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.
(iii) You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.
(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.
Who can forget your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he ‘made a mistake’, after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?
(v) You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.
(vi) You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of women.
(vii) You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.
(viii) And because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention.
(xi) You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and*industries.
(x) Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.
(xi) That which you are singled out for in the history of mankind, is that you have used your force to destroy mankind more than any other nation in history; not to defend principles and values, but to hasten to secure your interests and profits. You who dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war. How many acts of oppression, tyranny and injustice have you carried out, O callers to freedom?
(xii) Let us not forget one of your major characteristics: your duality in both manners and values; your hypocrisy in manners and principles. All*manners, principles and values have two scales: one for you and one for the others.
(a)The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only; as for the rest of the world, you impose upon them your monstrous, destructive policies and Governments, which you call the ‘American friends’. Yet you prevent them from establishing democracies. When the Islamic party in Algeria wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you unleashed your agents in the Algerian army onto them, and to attack them with tanks and guns, to imprison them and torture them – a new lesson from the ‘American book of democracy’!!!
(b)Your policy on prohibiting and forcibly removing weapons of mass destruction to ensure world peace: it only applies to those countries which you do not permit to possess such weapons. As for the countries you consent to, such as Israel, then they are allowed to keep and use such weapons to defend their security. Anyone else who you suspect might be manufacturing or keeping these kinds of weapons, you call them criminals and you take military action against them.
(c)You are the last ones to respect the resolutions and policies of International Law, yet you claim to want to selectively punish anyone else who does the same. Israel has for more than 50 years been pushing UN resolutions and rules against the wall with the full support of America.
(d)As for the war criminals which you censure and form criminal courts for – you shamelessly ask that your own are granted immunity!! However, history will not forget the war crimes that you committed against the Muslims and the rest of the world; those you have killed in Japan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq will remain a shame that you will never be able to escape. It will suffice to remind you of your latest war crimes in Afghanistan, in which densely populated innocent civilian villages were destroyed, bombs were dropped on mosques causing the roof of the mosque to come crashing down on the heads of the Muslims praying inside. You are the ones who broke the agreement with the Mujahideen when they left Qunduz, bombing them in Jangi fort, and killing more than 1,000 of your prisoners through suffocation and thirst. Allah alone knows how many people have died by torture at the hands of you and your agents. Your planes remain in the Afghan skies, looking for anyone remotely suspicious.
(e)You have claimed to be the vanguards of Human Rights, and your Ministry of Foreign affairs issues annual reports containing statistics of those countries that violate any Human Rights. However, all these things vanished when the Mujahideen hit you, and you then implemented the methods of the same documented governments that you used to curse. In America, you captured thousands the Muslims and Arabs, took them into custody with neither reason, court trial, nor even disclosing their names. You issued newer, harsher laws.
What happens in Guatanamo is a historical embarrassment to America and its values, and it screams into your faces – you hypocrites, “What is the value of your signature on any agreement or treaty?”
(3) What we call you to thirdly is to take an honest stance with yourselves – and I doubt you will do so – to discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that the values and principles to you are something which you merely demand from others, not that which you yourself must adhere to.
(4) We also advise you to stop supporting Israel, and to end your support of the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens and to also cease supporting the Manila Government against the Muslims in Southern Philippines.
(5) We also advise you to pack your luggage and get out of our lands. We desire for your goodness, guidance, and righteousness, so do not force us to send you back as cargo in coffins.
(6) Sixthly, we call upon you to end your support of the corrupt leaders in our countries. Do not interfere in our politics and method of education. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington.
(7) We also call you to deal with us and interact with us on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of sub dual, theft and occupation, and not to continue your policy of supporting the Jews because this will result in more disasters for you.
If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation. The Nation of Monotheism, that puts complete trust on Allah and fears none other than Him. The Nation which is addressed by its Quran with the words: “Do you fear them? Allah has more right that you should fear Him if you are believers. Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of believing people. And remove the anger of their (believers’) hearts. Allah accepts the repentance of whom He wills. Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise.” [Quran9:13-1]
The Nation of honour and respect:
“But honour, power and glory belong to Allah, and to His Messenger (Muhammad- peace be upon him) and to the believers.” [Quran 63:8]
“So do not become weak (against your enemy), nor be sad, and you will be*superior ( in victory )if you are indeed (true) believers” [Quran 3:139]
The Nation of Martyrdom; the Nation that desires death more than you desire life:
“Think not of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are alive with their Lord, and they are being provided for. They rejoice in what Allah has bestowed upon them from His bounty and rejoice for the sake of those who have not yet joined them, but are left behind (not yet martyred) that on them no fear shall come, nor shall they grieve. They rejoice in a grace and a bounty from Allah, and that Allah will not waste the reward of the believers.” [Quran 3:169-171]
The Nation of victory and success that Allah has promised:
“It is He Who has sent His Messenger (Muhammad peace be upon him) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam), to make it victorious over all other religions even though the Polytheists hate it.” [Quran 61:9]
“Allah has decreed that ‘Verily it is I and My Messengers who shall be victorious.’ Verily Allah is All-Powerful, All-Mighty.” [Quran 58:21]
The Islamic Nation that was able to dismiss and destroy the previous evil Empires like yourself; the Nation that rejects your attacks, wishes to remove your evils, and is prepared to fight you. You are well aware that the Islamic Nation, from the very core of its soul, despises your haughtiness and arrogance.
If the Americans refuse to listen to our advice and the goodness, guidance and righteousness that we call them to, then be aware that you will lose this Crusade Bush began, just like the other previous Crusades in which you were humiliated by the hands of the Mujahideen, fleeing to your home in great silence and disgrace. If the Americans do not respond, then their fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall, and economic bankruptcy.
This is our message to the Americans, as an answer to theirs. Do they now know why we fight them and over which form of ignorance, by the permission of Allah, we shall be victorious?
THE WAR AGAINST THE PEOPLES AND THE NATIONS 