AS the Israel-Hamas war drags into its fourth week, America and its allies continue to show blatant disregard for world opinions and iron-clad support for Israel to continue its barbaric assault on Gaza,  which has claimed 9,237 Palestinian lives as of November 4. 

When we study the United States own sordid history of dealing with its own indigenous population, we can find many parallels with the occupation of Palestine.

In a 2019 study, researchers from the University College of London estimated that when Christopher Columbus arrived in America in 1492, there were about 62 million indigenous people residing in South, Central and North America. Over a period of about 100 years, European settlers killed about 56 million, or 90%, of the native population in the Americas.  

In particular, the number of Native American people in North America was estimated to have been five to 10 million. Yet by 1800, the number plummeted had to 600,000. According to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1900, only about  237,000 Native Americans remained. 

More than a dozen tribes, including the Pequot, Mohegan and Massachusetts, were exterminated. They subjected to forced sterilisation, forced assimilation and even killed for their scalps for which rewards were offered by the government.  

In a January article entitled “The United States’ Treatment of Native Americans: A Sad, Cruel Legacy of Control and Neglect in the United States”, Michael Kryzanek of Bridgewater State University USA wrote that “the history of United States government treatment of Native Americans is full of broken promises, forced removal from tribal lands, murderous conflicts bordering on genocide and an adamant refusal to respect basic human rights”. 

Since the 1970s, American academics have begun to use the term “genocide” to denounce US policies for American Indians. Books such as  “American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard, a professor at the University of Hawaii, and “A Little Matter of Genocide” by Ward L. Churchill, a former professor at the University of Colorado, sent shockwaves across the academic community.

“Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur” by Ben Kiernan, a professor at Yale University, gave a brief account of genocides the United States committed against American Indians at different historical stages.  “An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873” by Benjamin Madley unearthed the massacres of Native Americans by the US. government during the California gold rush. 

Examples of such atrocities abound. For example, in 1830-1850, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was enforced. Tribes were forcibly removed from the southern regions to the land west of the Mississippi.

These tribes were confined to makeshift reservations that were basically internment camps and were not allowed to return to their ancestral homelands. 

The indigenous population opposed those measures, leading to wars, for example, the Great Sioux War. Those led to battles such as Custer’s Last Stand and culminated in 1890, when the military gathered the Lakota tribe to disarm them and which led to the brutal slaughter of 250 Indian men, women and children at Wounded Knee in Eastern Montana.

In his 1756 declaration of war on the Lenni Lenape tribe, Pennsylvania governor Robert Hunter Morris said, “For the scalp of every male Indian enemy above the age of 12 years, produced as evidence of their being killed, the sum of 130 pieces of eight”.

Today there are 324 Indian reservations with 574 recognised tribes. The land occupied by these tribes has shrunk to 2% of the total land area of the United States.

Ironically, although these indigenous people were the first to settle in America, US citizenship was not granted to them until 1924, 148 years after the declaration of independence from Britain in 1776. Worse still, it was only in 1965 that they were given the right to vote. 

According to Professor Emerson Baker, a Salem State University history professor,  “Most people do not realise that Native Americans were here first and that the colonists did their best to remove them from the land. They just have no idea of the extremes that it took.” 

Notice the parallels on the fate inflicted upon the Native Americans with that of the Palestinians? Settlers coming from afar to a land already occupied by indigenous population, colonisation through force of arms, displacement from traditional homelands, broken promises of peace, wars and famine, pitiful living conditions, settler occupiers claiming the land as their own and lecturing others about democracy, freedom and human rights.

So forget about the slogan of America being the “land of the free”, about the Statue of Liberty being the symbol of true American values, and that Americans value justice and eschew injustice of any sort. Its history with respect to its own treatment of the indigenous population belies this narrative.  Israel proudly claims that it is the only democratic state in the Middle East. What an abhorrent statement from an apartheid regime.

Indeed, one can say Israel is using the same playbook as its American benefactor, confident that America will indeed cover, protect and justify its excesses and injustices perpetrated upon the Palestinian people. 

So next time you hear President Joe Biden talk about “America as the champion of democracy and defender of the freedom of the world,” remember what his own country did to its own native population. – November 8, 2023.

* Awaluddin Mohamed Shaharoun reads The Malaysian Insight.