I was out last night with some friends at a bar, playing bar trivia. Somehow, the topic of conversation swerved towards the discovery of America. There were the requisite jokes about Columbus being a late-comer (three of us are at least part Scandinavian). We then moved on to some of the more disputed claims of discovery. The Chinese, the Greeks, a Welsh price, a English monk, and the wholly substantiated Leif Erikson. In the middle of the hurried back and forth that bar conversations tend to take on, our friend Josh piped up, “Well, I say that my people discovered you.”
See, Josh is part Native American, so he has a very good point. Most of the time, the Anglo amongst us take for granted that this continent was in need of discovery, when it was in fact discovered thousands of years ago when some hunter-gatherers crossed the land bridge between Russia and Alaska. We tend to forget that they had complex societies consisting of millions of people, in total. Also, they were here first, so they had dibs.
But, unless you’ve all totally forgotten our country’s history, you know that we divided and conquered the Natives, destroying their societies and cultures from coast to coast, sequestering them on reservations which were constantly made smaller and smaller. Treaties were a hoax, peace talks were abandoned and cease-fires were broken. Piece by piece, we robbed these people of their land and livelihood.
This got me thinking. History has that habit of repeating itself. Too often, it’s our ignorance of what has come before that leads to huge mistakes in our modern lives. I posit that just one historic example of the situation we see in Israel today is Americans persecution of Native Americans. Think about it.
Israel, modern Israel, is an artificially created state. It was created by dividing up what was Palestine into two separate states. Almost immediately after becoming a state, Israel went to war. After the partition in 1947, Israel declared it’s independence and went to war with the surrounding states. Similarly, almost immediately after the first pilgrims landed in America, they began conflicts with surrounding Natives. Israel has pushed the Palestinians into smaller and smaller quarters over the years, just as we pushed the Natives into smaller and smaller reservations. I’m not saying that the two situations are mirror images of each other, since there was a historic claim for Jews in Israel and there wasn’t one for Anglos in America, but the aftermath is strikingly similar.
I don’t want to get into too many more specifics, since I don’t know as much as most and I’m bound to end up saying something that doesn’t jive with other people’s point of view or something that’s just plain stupid. To be frank, I really don’t give a shit about the specifics of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Don’t care. At all.
Why? Because none of it makes any sense to me. Seriously. I understand both sides claims to Jerusalem and the other disputed areas. I understand that there is enmity between the two groups going back thousands of years. Still, I simply don’t care. At some point, both sides have to grow up and realize that what they’re doing is stupid and counter-productive, not only to their states, but to their people, to their children. Generations of Palestinians and Israelis have had their options whittled down and their chances at fruitful lives ruined because of this conflict.
What angers me more is our government’s nearly universal support of everything Israel. It’s not helping. It’s not productive. It doesn’t help. It reminds me of over-protective parents who can’t bear to come to terms with the fact that their child is an asshole. That’s right, we’re that parent who blames our child’s (Israel’s) bad behavior on everything but the child. Some of this has to be Israel’s fault.
My wife had a good point the other night. After hearing a report that only one civilian casualty had been reported on the Israel side of the conflict, she compared their strikes on Gaza and Hamas to attacking lightning. See, the probability of being struck by lightning is over one in a million. Hamas has supposedly been firing thousands of rockets randomly at Israel and has only killed one person. Meanwhile, Israel has struck back by killing over 500 Palestinians and wounding nearly 3000, many of them women and children and innocents. A bit of a disproportionate response, don’t you think? So, if a member of your family was struck by lightning, would you retaliate with a series of surgical strikes on regular old clouds who just happened to be idly floating in the vicinity of storm clouds?
In any case, the whole thing is bullshit. Israel, Gaza, I say this with utmost seriousness- GROW THE FUCK UP AND START ACTING LIKE ADULTS. WE’RE SICK OF YOUR SHIT.
