For several months, a large field on the university campus that I live near has featured a plethora of tents and signs, with people here occupying the space in support of people who live in Gaza. (The university recently adopted a policy that will disallow tents or other activities that administrators deem disruptive unless they’ve been approved ten days in advance, so the signage is likely to be removed soon.)
As I biked past this field on my way to volunteer at the county jail last Sunday, I saw a sign with the words “Founders of Israel, Founders of Genocide” in large print, and, smaller – too little for me to read, even though I bike rather slowly – was a list of misdeeds by three people involved in the creation of the Israeli state.
But the Jewish Zionists who participated in the founding of Israel were not the genesis of the problem.
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I am writing this essay from inside a beautiful university library in southern Indiana. Outside the window next to me is a grassy field, a charming grove of trees.
And there is a discomfort, which I acknowledge too rarely: I have come to live here only after the communities of people who cared for and lived upon this land were savagely displaced. My government openly pursued a policy of genocide. And, even when verbal acknowledgements are given about the provenance of this land – such as at the beginning of academic talks or poetry readings – few people have undertaken a concomitant effort to care for or compensate the contemporary descendants of those communities, who often live in poverty far from their ancestors’ homelands.
For many thousands of years, there has been no “unclaimed frontier.” People have traveled, explored, and settled, but the places they’ve reached were already in use. For some twenty thousand years, perhaps, humans were living in North America. Even before their arrival, this land was inhabited by a variety of now-extinct megafauna. (Please note that I’m not trying to blame the ancient humans who migrated to here for their role in those extinctions – I have children too, and so I too would likely kill a Smilodon if I worried it would hurt my kids, or a giant sloth if meat from its body were the only way to feed them.)
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By 1917, when there was serious discussion about the creation of a Zionist state, there were no habitable places that were empty or unclaimed.
And that was a time of pretty horrific antisemitism, even among the nations that “won” the second world war. Russia had engaged in repeated persecutions of people who were Jewish. In France, the Dreyfus affair had made clear how many thought that people who were Jewish were not really French citizens. In the United States, many elite universities – which are often more politically liberal than the country at large – imposed strict quotas against admitting people who were Jewish, and these quotas did not end until the 1960s.
The creation of a Zionist state was made possible through the military violence of the colonial British Empire, with tacit military support from the United States. And, notably, these nations did not support the creation of a Jewish state with the land of, say, Delaware or Rhode Island.
Obviously, the specific lands in the Middle East have an important role in the texts that underpin Jewish identity, but a more significant impetus underlying the Zionist movement was a desire to be safe. Christian communities throughout Europe had persecuted people who were Jewish for over a thousand of years. If there was a drought, or a viral outbreak, or an incident from poor sanitation contaminating the local water supply, Medieval people rarely responded with a public works project to construct more healthful sanitation; instead, they’d murder someone who was Jewish, with the malign hope that this would make their water clean.
Independent of their religious faith, it seems reasonable that some Zionists would desire an independent government committed to their protection. By the end of the second world war, that desire seemed so incontestable that even the British and United States governments finally lent their full support.
But there was no offer of desirable, productive land in a place where White people lived.1 The Zionists would not be offered space inside the United States, England, or even Germany. The British government, through years of colonial rule, had already made clear their policy of treating the people of Palestine as having no right to personal sovereignty, no protection against being displaced.
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With coordinated help from the U.S. Department of State, and an Indiana-based nonprofit, and the efforts of local community members, a number of refugees have recently settled in my hometown. They’ve come here from many places; some speak Spanish, Arabic, Kituba, or other languages; they’re fleeing political violence and persecution that’s often been exacerbated by U.S. policies, or by climate change that our fuel usage and consumption has made more severe.
And there are definite flaws with our current refugee resettlement programs. People settling here are given a brief stipend to help them start a new life, but the stipend is barely more than the current cost of housing in this town.
It’s expensive to provide homes for people in desirable areas. But also, that is where we should provide housing.
How should we do it?
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Biking past that “Founders of Israel, Founders of Genocide” protest sign, I couldn’t help but think that the list of names was oddly truncated.
Yes, the actions of those three Jewish leaders contributed to the current predicament of the people in Gaza.
But what about Edmund Allenby, who led the 1917 military campaign that claimed Palestine as a British territory, during which thousands of people died? Or Richard Coeur de Lion, who sent crusaders there in the twelfth century, hoping to expel the people of Palestine? Or the long line of Catholic popes whose anti-Jewish screeds had incited the centuries of anti-Jewish murder and violence that propelled the Zionist dream?
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I believe in restorative justice. I don’t think that past misdeeds justify further misdeeds. I disagree with the way the United States criminal justice system treats people who have done bad things.
I don’t think that all those centuries of anti-Jewish murder justify what’s happening.
Children born in Gaza deserve to grow up feeling like the sanctity of their lives will be respected. They deserve to be safe.
At the moment, they are not.
But also, we’d have to look far, far into the past if we feel the compulsion to assign blame.
And assigning blame will not fix things.
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Photograph of the pro-Palestinian protest at Indiana University by Talix Wx.
- For instance, before the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, the British government had proposed a Jewish state in Uganda in 1903. A homeland was offered, but not one in a location where White people would have had to make any sacrifices for its creation. ↩︎
Frank Brown Cloud 
