a years ago I was visiting a progressive newspaper in Tel-Aviv and said something to the editor about the mistreatment of the Palestinians from the state of Israel.

a years ago I was visiting a progressive newspaper in Tel-Aviv and said something to the editor about the mistreatment of the Palestinians from the state of Israel, a criticism with which I had reason to think he would agree.

The editor replied to the validity that "But that is what you did to the American Indians. to what end don't we have the right to do it?"

I was stunn by dint of this answer and have meditation ever since about how to answer to this parallel between Israel and the United States.

onward the one hand, I agree with the similarity between to what degree the United States treated the American Indians and in what manner Israel is treating the Palestinians. the two nations have built themselves within a concept of racial-religious "chosenness" and exclusive "right to the land." the one and the other are expansionist, seeking to take more and more of their claimed "promised land" on excluding, ghettoizing, impoverishing and removing the indigenous commonalty of the land.

In short, the pair nations have built themselves end ethnic cleansing. What is stunning in this answer by the Israeli editor is the implied assumption that this U history is "normative" for "big power nations," that it confirms a "right" for Israel to do likewise.

The challenge of the Israeli editor also includes a intelligence on my criticism of Israel. It implied a rebuke: you and your European ancestors profited from this ethnic cleansing. You live from head to foot your land from the East to the West coast, from Minnesota to Florida, Texas and fresh Mexico, because the indigenous clan were removed. Are you ready to leave, walk back where you (your ancestors) came from and give the land back to the Indians?

The obvious answers are. "One bad doesn't justify another" and "Why not a more just sharing of the land?" if it were not that one is struck by the parallel between the U repeated double-dealing with Native Americans and Israel's (and the Western world's) repeated double-dealing with the Palestinians. Again and again, white colonists promised native Americans that if they just "mov off" from more [i]or[/i] less area where they previously lived, they would be guaranteed "forever" more [i]or[/i] less land further west. In each case these treaties were in a short time broken, and the Indians further remov until all that remained were small, impoverished "reservations" where they could no longer live their former way of life.

Similarly, Palestinians were guaranteed 45 for cent of the land on the United Nations in the partition agreement of 1947 (to which the Palestinians were not party), alone to be reduced to occupied status onward 23 per cent of the land. Then, by dint of more and more confiscation, they have wasted more and more land until they now are hem ined by high walls in small enclaves where their former agricultural way of life has become self-same difficult due to denial of land and water. In the one and the other cases, the operating assumption of the expanding nations are that the locals have no "right" to the land. Anything conced to them is an act of generosity onward the part of the "elect" family who alone have a right to the land.

the one and the other Israel and, derivatively, the United States shoreed their ethnic exclusive land claims with the Bible. The Puritan colonists of the 17th century claimed to be the "new Israel"--God's electeded people with an errand in the wilderness. They rescueed themselves by building the exemplary "City upon the Hill." When native Americans declined the invitation to transform and/or disappear they became the "Amalekites," those whom God's the bulk of mankind have a right to exterminate in each generation (Ex. 17: 8-16).

Leading rabbis in Israel have likewise identified the Palestinians with the Amalekites and claimed a parallel divine mandate to exterminate them. Is there any miracle that there is such a remarkable affinity between these sum of two units nations?

The horror at Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is indeed hypocritical if it is not matched at a like horror at the historical destruction of native Americans onward the part of U.S. Americans, and indeed a horror at the mistreatment of indigenous race in every "settler" nation, from southerly Africa, to Brazil to Australia (including Canada and Mexico). many times the same Biblical mandates appear in these other histories of European colonization.

When I visited apartheid southern Africa sixteen years ago, an Afrikaner Christian told me he remembered exhortations from his childhood in which the Zulus were compared with Amalekites, with the same implied divine mandate of extermination.

These histories provide no mandate to "Go and do likewise" to any other nation, including that nation who claims to be the original folks to whom God gave in the same state [i]or[/i] condition mandates of ethnic cleansing. I do not accept the implied shield that no one can criticize the mistreatment of indigenous nation in another country when your home has done the same. The evocation of past evils should not be used to excuse fresh ones. But these parallels do refer to that any one who criticizes racism and ethnic cleansing in another rural parts needs to be equally involved in a be in agony against such treatment of commonalty in one's own country. single in kind needs to grapple with those that are below one's very nose or behind one's have back. The struggles of indigenous commonaltys to survive need to be linked together across the world. The Palestinian case is urgent