| Number 408 | June 5, 2008 |
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This Week: Minnesota and Israel and the Right to Exist
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Greetings, Long-time readers know that Nygaard Notes is usually a collection of shorter pieces that may or may not connect to each other. This issue is essentially one long piece—and it's a "double issue," to boot! These things happen sometimes, but new readers should know that it's unusual. I also said in the last issue that I would be putting out the Notes more often than I have been recently, yet it's been two weeks since the last issue. My apologies. I'll keep trying. This week's issue was stimulated by last month's coincidental anniversaries of the founding of the state of Israel and the founding of the state of Minnesota, two events which happened just three days apart. I couldn't stop thinking about it, and I finally realized why. It's because I believe that United Statesians wishing to understand the turmoil in the Middle East would do well to understand the turmoil surrounding the settlement of our own country. The two birthdays give us a good opportunity to connect the two situations and to learn from the connections. That's what's in store for you in this issue of the Notes. In solidarity, Nygaard |
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"If we get in your way, will you kill us again?" Those were the words on a sign held on May 10, 2008 by a protestor—either a Dakota person or sympathizer—at Minnesota's Historic Fort Snelling. The protesters were "getting in the way" of a "wagon train" procession that was passing through the fort as part of a celebration in honor of the 150th anniversary of Minnesota becoming a state. As a report in the Twin Cities Daily Planet put it, "The wagon train and fort are powerful symbols for many Native people, symbols of oppression and injustice." Here's a related "Quote" that gives a hint of the meaning of Fort Snelling. This one is from a group called "Historynet.com," which is a project of the Weider History Group, which claims to be "the world's largest publisher of history magazines." Speaking of the 1850s in what is now Minnesota, they said: "The Dakota had existed for generations on the land surrounding the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers, site of the present-day cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Translated roughly into English, Dakota means ‘the allies,' and they were a group of seven Indian bands that lived mostly in harmony in the region's bountiful river valleys. Their only enemy was the Chippewa to the north. The first European explorers there had done little to alter the Indians' way of life, although the French dubbed them the Sioux—a mutation of the Chippewa word for ‘snake.' Real change began after 1819, when federal soldiers built Fort Snelling, a sprawling outpost above the mouth of the Minnesota River. After that the stream of white traders and settlers became a flood; land treaties in 1837 and 1851 and Minnesota statehood in 1858 pushed the Dakota off their native lands westward to a narrow, 100-mile-long reservation on the harsh prairie along the Minnesota River. The exodus also forced the Dakota to change their way of life." |
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The month of May marked the "birthdays" of two political entities that may not seem related, but really have a lot in common: Israel and the state of Minnesota. Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948. Almost exactly ninety years earlier—on May 11th, 1858—Minnesota became one of the United States of America, meaning that this year we celebrate Minnesota's Sesquicentennial, or 150th "birthday." How are these two birthdays related? In both cases, a primarily European population established a nation—for Minnesota was but one state in the American nation—on a land that already had people living on it. And, in both cases, the dispossession of the existing inhabitants was not complete, and there are consequences that are still being paid by both the colonizers and the colonized. Manifest Destiny and The Promised Land: Minnesota From the very beginning, settlers in what was to become the United States of America saw parallels between what they considered their destiny—to colonize a "new world"—and the Biblical idea of a "Promised Land." In the book "Joshua and the Promised Land," by Roy H. May, Jr. (published by the United Methodist Church, 1997), May says that, "Promised Land imagery figured prominently in shaping English colonial thought. The pilgrims identified themselves with the ancient Hebrews. They viewed the New World as the New Canaan. They were God's chosen people headed for the Promised Land. Other colonists believed they, too, had been divinely called. The settlers in Virginia were, John Rolf said, ‘a peculiar people, marked and chosen by the finger of God.'" Right up to the declaration of Minnesota as a State, and beyond, the European settlers used an odd combination of religious belief and mystical thinking to justify their banishment of the original inhabitants of the continent as they pushed the borders of the new nation "from sea to shining sea." Here's May again: "Warfare against Native Americans continued until the end of the nineteenth century as the United States moved westward. This expansion was inspired by the nation's ‘manifest destiny.' Manifest destiny was the belief that the United States was destined or chosen to occupy all the geographical territory between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This idea was very popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Native Americans were viewed as obstacles to ‘manifest destiny.'" As May says, the warfare continued until "the end of the nineteenth century," and even then it didn't stop, but expanded beyond the borders. After Spain "ceded" the Philippines to the United States in 1898, a debate ensued in the U.S. about "the Philippine Question." That is, about "whether or not to take the Philippines" being offered by Spain. President William McKinley decided to "take" them, after he went "down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance," telling a group of visiting ministers that "it came to me...that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died." Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge also weighed in on the matter, addressing the Senate on January 9, 1900, saying, "[T]his question is deeper than any question of party politics: deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world's progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: ‘Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many things.'" Now, one hundred years later, such bald statements of the colonial mindset are not fashionable, so such messages must be encoded in the language of "promoting democracy." One of the current "master organizers of the world," George W. Bush, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Egypt on May 18th used the following code: The United States has "made our mark by advancing ideals as old as the pyramids," said Mr. Bush, including "a democratic system of government, which is the only fair and just ordering of society and the only way to guarantee the God-given rights of all people." So, again and still, "God" is on our side, and let us pray for our soldiers to prevail against "savages and senile peoples," wherever they may be found. A representative of the "savage and senile peoples" of North America, scholar Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, wrote an opinion piece for the Star Tribune on December 2, 2007, and brought the Minnesota connection to all of this into focus with these words: "Once Gov. Alexander Ramsey made his infamous declaration on Sept. 9, 1862, that ‘the Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state,' his genocidal agenda was widely and wildly supported by white Minnesotans. His call was very clearly a demand for what we would today identify as ethnic cleansing. Everything that followed fit into this larger agenda, an extraordinarily successful genocidal effort from which Dakota people have never recovered. "The hangings, the concentration camps and forced imprisonments, the forced gender segregation, the punitive campaigns into Dakota Territory to hunt down and terrorize those trying to flee, the bounties on Dakota scalps—all are examples of how Ramsey's plan was successfully implemented. In addition, Dakota people suffered the consequences of similarly genocidal policies carried out nationally against all indigenous peoples. What this means is that genocide in Minnesota and the United States was systematic and that it was carried out and supported in different forms by regular people throughout the 19th and 20th centuries." Reading the above, I think anyone—even those whose schooling placed the interests and welfare of the European settlers at the center of U.S. history to the exclusion of the indigenous inhabitants—might be able to understand why the 150th anniversary of Minnesota becoming a state is not something that everyone wishes to "celebrate." And, looking at the other "birthday" last month, the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, I think we might be able to see the same thing, for the same reasons. Manifest Destiny and The Promised Land: Israel The Jewish people have been persecuted, banished, and murdered for centuries, and the late 19th century saw "a marked increase in anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe," in which "persecutions, killings and burnings were widespread and Jews were forced to live in closed ghettos, particularly in the Russian Empire..." It was in this context that the ideology of Zionism, which "holds that the Jews have the right to self-determination in their own national home, and the right to develop their national culture," was formalized into a political movement at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The national home that was created in 1948 is the state we now call Israel, which exists on land that previously had been called Palestine. And, as the group Jews for Justice in the Middle East points out, "The vast majority of the population of Palestine... had been Arabic since the seventh century A.D. (Over 1200 years)" Just as was the case with the founding of Minnesota, the establishment of Israel thus involved a major clash between the existing inhabitants of the land and those who wished to establish their new home on the same spot. And, just as was the case with Minnesota, religious belief played a large role in motivating the Zionist enterprise. As the Middle East Research and Information Project puts it in their primer on the Arab-Israeli Conflict, "Jewish claims to this land are based on the biblical promise to Abraham and his descendants, on the fact that this was the historical site of the Jewish kingdom of Israel (which was destroyed by the Roman Empire)..." Plans to "facilitate" the "establishment of a national homeland in Palestine for the Jewish People" had been explicitly expressed since 1917 by the British government, which had a "mandate" over Palestine as a result of World War I. Jewish immigration to Palestine reached a peak in the mid-1930s and, as Jews for Justice puts it, "The Arab community... strenuously opposed further Jewish immigration and land buying because it posed a real and imminent danger to the very existence of Arab society in Palestine." The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, speaking at a meeting in 1938 on the subject of the ongoing revolt by Palestinians against the increasing immigration of Zionist Jews into Palestine, said, "Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they [the Palestinians] defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country." And here the parallels to the history of my homeland are apparent. In the case of Minnesota, it was European settlers, including my grandparents who migrated from Norway, who "wanted to come here and settle down," despite the fact that there was an already-resident population who did not support the colonial dreams of the settlers from Norway. Hindsight makes this connection easy for me to see. But it did not require the passage of several decades to make evident to some the parallels between indigenous resistance to the European settlement of Minnesota and indigenous Palestinian resistance to the settlement of soon-to-be Israel by (primarily) European Jews. It was in 1923 that the Zionist (Revisionist Movement) Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote: "[T]here has never been an indigenous inhabitant anywhere or at any time who has ever accepted the settlement of others in his country. Any native people—it's all the same whether they are civilized or savage—views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. ... They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile." All of these reasons explain why the British journalist Jonathan Cook would write about this year's Israeli Independence Day celebrations, "The images of joy and celebration seen by the world failed to acknowledge the reality of a deeply divided Israel, shared by two peoples with conflicting memories and claims to the land." The desire for a similar "acknowledgment of reality" is what led Dakota protesters to lie down in front of the Minnesota Sesquicentennial "wagon train" at Fort Snelling last month (see this week's "Quote" of the Week). The Fact of Existence vs. the "Right to Exist" I was born and raised in this land of the northern Mississippi watershed—in what is now called "Minnesota"—and I consider it my home. I love it dearly. Yet, although no one has ever asked me, I do not accept Minnesota's "right to exist," nor do I accept the "right to exist" of the greater United States. To do so would be to accept the right of one people to claim another peoples' land by use of treachery and force. I do accept the fact of their existences, which is a completely different thing. My refusal to accept my state's "right to exist" does not reflect a bias against European settlers or their descendants—either my grandparents or myself or anyone else. What's done is done. What it does reflect is my belief that all of the settlers and their descendants have major responsibilities toward the original inhabitants of this land who were dispossessed so that the settlers could have the land and could live in a "democracy" that was designed to exclude the previous inhabitants. Which brings us back to Israel. When I do an Internet search for the
phrase "Minnesota's right to exist," the search engine returns
exactly ZERO citations. In contrast, a search for the phrase One reason is that there has been, and still is, a long-standing demand by Israeli leaders and their allies that any possible negotiating partner in the so-called peace process must accept "Israel's right to exist" as a precondition for negotiations. In Minnesota, in contrast, there is no longer an ongoing war between settlers and indigenous people, so there are no "demands" to be discussed at this point, at least none that make it into the media or into mainstream political discussions. For most people, the issue by now is "settled," meaning that there are no negotiations, and that most people have accepted the fact of Minnesota's existence. It does not mean that there is a consensus on Minnesota's "right to exist." Such a consensus would not include me, obviously, and I'm not aware of any formal statement to this effect by any organized group of the indigenous dispossessed. I can't imagine one has ever been made. International lawyer John V. Whitbeck addressed the issue of Israel's demand in an article in the Christian Science Monitor last year entitled "What ‘Israel's Right to Exist' Means to Palestinians." He said, in part: "There is an enormous difference between ‘recognizing Israel's existence' and ‘recognizing Israel's right to exist.' From a Palestinian perspective, the difference is in the same league as the difference between asking a Jew to acknowledge that the Holocaust happened and asking him to concede that the Holocaust was morally justified. For Palestinians to acknowledge the occurrence of the Nakba—the expulsion of the great majority of Palestinians from their homeland between 1947 and 1949—is one thing. For them to publicly concede that it was ‘right' for the Nakba to have happened would be something else entirely. For the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, the Holocaust and the Nakba, respectively, represent catastrophes and injustices on an unimaginable scale that can neither be forgotten nor forgiven." [Note: "Nakba" is the Arabic word for "catastrophe." Nygaard] A second reason why there is no ongoing major debate about Minnesota's "right to exist" has to do with the nature of the entity. Despite the history of genocide against the indigenous people and the disenfranchisement (and worse) of women and "non-white" people throughout its history, modern Minnesota does not now identify itself as an exclusive state. That is, it is not officially a "white" state, or a "men's" state, or a "Christian" state. Therefore the possibility remains of extending full human and civil rights to anyone who lives here, whatever their heritage or condition in life. And the struggle to do just that is ongoing and inspirational. The case of Israel is different, as Israel does, in fact, identify itself as an exclusionary state. Specifically, as a "Jewish state" in a land that historically has included Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The precise meaning of "Jewish state" is open to interpretation but the fact remains that many people who are not Jewish also claim that land as their homeland. In 1948, after the UN had sanctioned the state of Israel, the German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt predicted that "even if the Jews were to win the war [of independence], its end would find the . . . achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed . . . The ‘victorious' Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities." Her prediction appears, to a large extent, to have been borne out. While the European settler state known as Minnesota is no longer surrounded by an entirely hostile population, nonetheless costs are still being paid for the actions associated with the establishment of the State. The journalist Michael Gillespie recently wrote an article about what he calls "Promised Land/Chosen People theology," which he says "has informed the march of European and American-European conquest for centuries." I agree with Gillespie when he says that "Colonization schemes and ideologies based on Promised Land/Chosen People theology tend to corrupt and demoralize [the] colonists almost as effectively as they damage, displace, and destroy communities and unhinge those unfortunate enough to have their lands, homes, and families targeted by [the] colonizers." Minnesota exists, and Israel exists. The original inhabitants of both states are still here and cannot reasonably be expected to accept the "right to exist" of the political entities whose births demanded their dispossession. Until the "winners" of the historical battles for the land can bring themselves to see—and come to terms with—the suffering and legitimate grievances of the losers, things can be expected to continue as they are. In the case of Minnesota, that means the continuing corruption and demoralization that comes with denial of historical reality. In the case of Israel, it means all of that, and continuing violence as well. The descendants of the colonists who founded my state—and the state of Israel—need to come to terms with the mixed legacy of our respective homes. Only then can we begin to understand our modern-day responsibilities, responsibilities not only to ourselves, but also to the descendants of those who paid, and continue to pay, the price for the establishment of the States that now exist, and that we call home. |
