Yesterday, I listened to an Instagram Live interview by Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber with the Palestinian Lutheran theologian and pastor The Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb , a native of Bethlehem and for twenty years, pastor of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem. He spoke with utter clarity about the situation unfolding in Israel/Palestine right now. It is, he said, settler colonialism, a form of imperialism driven by the modern state of Israel to increase their land through driving Palestinians off their historic lands and placing Jewish settlers on the land.
I relate to those Jewish settlers, and what they are doing. It is, in its type of government policy, exactly what the United States did in relationship to the Native peoples. My family benefited and cooperated with this—we came on the Mayflower to found British colonies on the land of the Wampanoag, we moved west to Wisconsin on the land of the Chippewa, we were the settlers on Osage and Dakota land, occupied it and cheered the removal and killing of the “savages.” That is MY story, and Before I condemn Israel for its actions, which I absolutely do, I feel a moral obligation to admit my culpability in the same unfolding horror of settler colonialism they now perpetuate. “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye…” (Matthew 7:5)
Of course, there are differences between the two histories. Of course, both are complex stories in many respects. Yet, as Native American historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes, this is a state-sponsored policy, a policy of genocide and land theft. She writes, “US policies and actions related to indigenous peoples, though often termed ‘racist’ or ‘discriminatory,’ are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism — settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, ‘The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life — or, at least, land is necessary for life.’ The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism — the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft.” Interestingly, and tellingly, the British Empire and its own imperialism played a key role in settler colonialism in the United States and in Israel. And not surprisingly, the US government supports and subsidizes the the state of Israel with billions, explicitly supporting a pattern it knows so well.
And so humanity reaps the harvest of inhumanity: the horrible consequences—including the murder of children—depicted here by the photo of 6-year-old Palestinian girl, Rahaf Al-Masri, killed in Gaza this week
and a sketch of the murder of Nez Perce women and children in Idaho after the discovery of gold in Idaho. The caption on the New York paper, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated for August 22, 1868 says “Enlightened and Christian Warfare in the Nineteenth Century-Massacre of Indian Women and Children in Idaho by White Scouts and their Red Allies.”
Thank you for this!