Looking Away: Manifest Destiny, Gaza, and God

Rashid Khalidi points out in his history of modern Palestine that the repatriation of the Holy Land by European Jews was a euro-style colonial project from the get-go. Though it wasn't freely broadcast, the plan early on was to dispossess and remove the indigenous population, as Theodor Herzl made clear in a diary entry in 1895:

We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.*

Never mind that before he even stepped foot on Palestinian soil Herzl was already talking about "our own country." And never mind that indigenous Palestinians were mainly poor by European standards. A half-century after Herzl wrote, by 1949, all plans for discretion and circumspection had been jettisoned, not to mention any notion of employment of the poor or comity with landowners; what remained instead was the naked intention to expropriate and remove, made all too real in the Nakba, or Catastrophe. In that one event 750,000 Palestinians, or 80% of the population, were dispossessed, and up to sixteen thousands were killed. Where were they pushed? To refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, but many were squeezed into Gaza, a dry, sandy spit of inhospitable land on the coast.

Like Caliban on the fictional island in Shakespeare's Tempest, the indigenous population retained a living memory of times before their land was stolen and they were basically made prisoners on their own turf, one on which they had coexisted with Christians and Mizrahim, or Native Jews, for hundreds of years. It was only with the arrival of the Europeans that the idea of purity and authenticity––the chauvinism of modern-day nationalism––caused things to take a terrible turn.

The Jewish will for a homeland well apart from the European continent certainly made sense, especially in 1895 and in light of the centuries-long traditions of antisemitism there, enacted, among other ways, in medieval laws targeting Jews; the expulsions of Jews in 1492; the Inquisition; countless pogroms; herding Jews into the Pale of Settlement; the Judengasse; and other forms of scapegoating that ended in the horrors of the Holocaust. The desire to be rid of Europe isn't surprising; the million dollar question would always be the nature of relations in the new land once they arrived.

How it went down shouldn't surprise us given the American example. Europeans came to this country––they weren't just Anglos, as historians as early as Thomas Paine have pointed out––and enacted a vision of manifest destiny similar to what we see in Israel today. Live and let live was never part of the plan; peaceful co-existence; or pluralism. The vision was macho, aggressive, punishing, and deadly, ultimately. Though the Supreme Court ruled against the dispossession of "the five civilized tribes," for example, Andrew Jackson went through with it anyway, forcing about 100,000 Native Americans in the 1830s from land they had inhabited for thousands of years.  As with the Nakba, up to 16,000 died in that ordeal as well; many starved to death or died of exposure.

Those events were repeated often in the nineteenth century as the principle of manifest destiny became turbo-charged. The Long Walk uprooted 10,000 Navajos from their ancestral lands, leading to the deaths of a fifth of the population, also from famine and exposure. And in the so-called "Bloodless Invasion" on the part of the U.S. in what is today New Mexico, 90% of the Mexican population was dispossessed of their land within a decade of the take-over, which wasn't bloodless in the least. There was the Sand-Creek Massacre; the swindling of the Osage Nation by whites in the early 1900s; and many more examples.

What's at the root of both colonial enterprises? The notion that god had ordained them. It was a tenet of protestant ideology, going back to the Mayflower pilgrims, that America was gifted to them by the divine; that it was there for the taking: all of it. As though the Judeo-Christian god had a nasty, predatory side when it comes to real estate; as though he were uncaring with regard to the suffering and deaths of non-Christians and -Jews.

That explains much of the sympathy of white evangelicals today for the Jewish war in Gaza; their ability to blithely look away from a living hell; a humanitarian disaster. It explains why the history of slavery is being quashed in schools in this country; the campaign against DEI. As though the Judeo-Christian god were a white guy––Anglo-European like the colonizers––and "he" mainly looks out for his own. To a tribal god, widespread famine; the flattening and destruction of millions of homes; exposure to the elements, you name it––the pro-colonial, Judeo-Christian god, but by no means all Christians and Jews, many of whom are appalled by what is happening and say so––the god of manifest destiny is not only unbothered by any of it but even deems it just.

One way I disagree with many pro-Palestinian activists today is I think Hamas fighters are equally culpable in what's happening in Gaza. While the rise of Hamas may be explained in part by the Nakba and what came after, it in no way excuses what they are willing to tolerate for everyday Gazans. Gandhi and MLK represent examples of other forms of resistance, but Hamas, funded from abroad and equally nationalistic has no interest or motivation in lessening the suffering of its own people. In peaceful co-existence. Otherwise October 7th would have never happened. 

Gaza is the perfect storm. It's what you get when the most radical, right-wing, masculinist, and nationalist factions of religions collide. It's what you get when manifest destiny confronts manifest destiny, when the god of one––or three––self-righteous religions go toe to toe. As in the Hundred Years War and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the result is suffering and death, and it paints an unflattering image of the divine as one who tolerates and even condones genocide. It's the very reason secularism was born in the eighteenth century, that thing MAGA America and religious fanatics in this country and around the world are trying to destroy. Their mantra isn't a democracy of varying ideals but my way or the highway.

Despite the Israeli government's media blackout of the horrors, word and imagery of the hell Gazans are suffering have leaked out. They give me nightmares at night. Were I not a student of history they'd make me embarrassed for humanity, which I am anyway. How can we allow this to happen––again? How can victims become perpetrators? How can we tolerate such a tragedy in Gaza and other places, and so often in the name of a bigotted and fanatical god? It seems too much, the weight of our own foolishness. So we look away.

*Khalidi, Rashid, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, New York: Henry Holt, 2020, p. 4.