We were stunned when we learned that some had entered onto the home ground of settlers and killed hundreds of women and children, taking captives to serve as pawns in an ensuing battle. History again repeats itself in a cycle of violence that sets one group of people against another—colonizer versus conquered, white against colored, chosen against gentile.
They lashed out to their oppressors. Forced from their homelands, they had been repatriated into a small strip of land where they would be packed into a concentrated and dense area.
Many would be severed from their families and removed to far foreign lands. Children would be raised with a deep-rooted hatred for those that had killed their families, robbed them of ancestral lands and subjected them to the cruel practices of apartheid.
As a historical whirlwind, the raiders ignited the underlying hatred of the current settlers. They had traditionally justified their dominance based on race and religion, which now would be manifested as rage and as an insatiable thirst for vengeance.
There would be no moral equivalent, only an unyielding desire to engage in the genocide of an entire people—an eye for an eye. After all, they were God’s chosen people, and bestowed with the right to extend their reach to the seas, and become “the shining city on the hill.” They were divinely predestined and empowered as the new Israel.
The retaliation resulted in the mass killing of thousands per day, including a large number of women and children—the numbers so high, they are beyond one’s imagination. Such carnage is rationalized as being inevitable and condoned under the “rules of war”—ancient rules that justify the death of multitudes in a conflict and written on Roman parchment.
Several millions of native inhabitants in North America were eventually reduced to about 100,000 via ethnic cleansing through identical scenarios. In California, they would be reduced from 300,000 to 15,000. A process facilitated by widespread forcible displacement from native lands, mass killing, disease and starvation.
While many of the indigenous fought back, they were no match for the prevailing forces sanctioned by the overseers of Christianity. In the end, those who survived were concentrated into small strips of land (reservations), a ploy learned by the Irish and Scottish after conquest by the English. Choctaw, Cheyenne, Sioux, Apache and numerous others became victims of a premeditated and willful intent to annihilate an entire people.
Palestinians have been confronted with an identical situation that subjects them to the boundless will of those who hold that they are anointed as God’s chosen people, a scenario that has transversed history, and that too often contradicts the very essence of humanity. This continued struggle also gives rise to such groups as Hamas that value becoming martyrs for their God.
As with the Native Americans, the original conqueror now attempts to erase any memory of the history of the conquered by eradicating any reference to having once existed from the river to the sea. Similarly, we now oppose references to “Manifest Destiny,” the claim that we were predestined to possess the land from sea to sea, now contested as critical race theory.
Our contempt of the indigenous people is most notably revealed in the popular saying of the time “the only good Injun is a dead Injun.”
Although we are no longer threatened and downplay such demeaning language, our actions are even more revealing in our continued willingness to condone the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of a whole generation of people whether Native American or Palestinians. We confront the truth by holding that it is “critical race theory.”
In the fulcrum of the media, you can hear the same innate hatred implied as “the only good Palestin-un is a dead Palestin-un!” Israel has been given the license to annihilate an entire people with arms supplied by the United States while we impose an unprecedented crackdown on human rights protests for daring to speak up against human rights violations.
Are we trapped in an endless cycle of preservation history, where societies can only exist by resorting to predatory instincts and violent dominance of others based on racial, ethnic or religious distinctions? These distinctions are social constructs, yet we continue to make real life decisions regarding others based on them, determining how, when and where others will survive.
In a civilized society, violence should not beget violence against the innocent. We must break from failed paradigms of the past and seek to safeguard human rights and find solutions in equal treatment and justice. This is the first step in embracing God’s providence to truly become his chosen people.
