Hamas, Israel, George Washington, October 7, and Sullivan's Campaign

By Steve Halpern

During the course of my 72 years of living in the world, the so-called news media in this country has been consistent. They've worked diligently in tailoring their coverage to support wars made possible by the United States government. 

In the year I was born, the media argued that young people needed to go across the Pacific Ocean and go to war against Korea. In my teenage years, the media argued that young people needed to go across the Pacific Ocean again in a war against the people of Vietnam. Then, they made up more stories arguing that we needed to go around the world in wars against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Closer to home, they supported the wars against Panama and the tiny island of Grenada.

Nowhere in all these stories do we find even one editorial that makes the following argument. If the United States government used a tiny fraction of the human and material resources to give genuine assistance to the nations it went to war with, this would be a profoundly better world. 

Since October 7, 2023 the U.S. news media has come up with a new story. For the past 76 years, the nation of Israel has forced Palestinians out of their homeland, murdered thousands, and denied Palestinians living the the occupied territories equal rights. Palestinians worked diligently demanding that the state of Israel grant them basic human rights in their homeland. The Israeli government responded to those appeals with indifference and bloodshed.

Faced with this reality, the Israeli government used a carrot and a stick to deal with the Palestinian organization Hamas. On the one hand, they gave support to Hamas since its founding in 1987, and allowed a billion dollars in aid to the group coming from Qatar. However, Israel also regulated everything and everyone going in and out of the Gaza Strip. This meant that Palestinians living in Gaza would be trapped in what many have called an "open air prison."

The contradiction for Hamas is that on the one hand it is the repressive police force in Gaza, while arguing that it is in the leadership of the Palestinian liberation movement. We might consider that the African National Congress of South Africa never worked as a police force before they took power. This contradiction prompted Hamas to organize the October 7 raid that has had unimaginably horrendous consequences. 

The news media, as well as the governments of the United States and Israel labelled the October 7 raid as a "pogrom" and the worst anti-Semitic act since the Nazi organized Holocaust. Following this flawed logic, the U.S. government increased its aid to Israel from $3.8 billion per year, to $18 billion. Without that aid, the Israeli organized genocide against Palestinians would not have been possible.

We might consider that the word pogrom came from the racist raids against Jews organized by the Russian terrorist organization the Black Hundreds. Those raids were similar to the raids on the Black community in this country organized by the Ku Klux Klan. However, all those murderous raids took place in the context of a systematic discrimination against Jews and Black people. 

Palestinians have not been the perpetrators of discrimination. They have been the clear victims of systematic discrimination in the nation of Israel for 76 years. Therefore, just as with other arguments the news media disseminates, the argument that Hamas carried out a pogrom on October 7 has no merit.   

I identify as a member of the working class of the world. In my opinion, an injury to any worker in the world is an injury to me. It is from that perspective that I look at the vicious mythology that the mainstream news media routinely disseminates.

George Washington and the revolution of the thirteen colonies 

I begin my critique of the mainstream news in an unlikely place. This is with the revolution of the thirteen colonies that the United States memorializes on the national holiday of July 4. This commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

For me, the Declaration of Independence gives us a glimmer into the thinking of the leaders of the revolution in the thirteen colonies. This document contains a list of grievances the colonists had against the British. 

In one section, the DOI labelled Native Americans with the racist term "savages" which means less than human. The DOI criticized the British for limiting the aid given to the colonists in their genocidal war against the indigenous people of this part of the world.

Understanding this sentiment, most Native American nations supported the British who they viewed as a lesser evil colonist. Given this relationship of forces, George Washington, gave the following order to General John Sullivan.

"The Expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians (Iroquois—Haudenosaunee) with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more."

Sullivan's forces destroyed about 41 Iroquois villages, murdered about 200 people, and destroyed their means to live. The estimate is that about 1,000 Iroquois would eventually die resulting from famine and exposure to an extremely cold winter. 

So, this number is almost exactly the same as the number of people murdered in the October 7 Hamas organized raid. Many of those who lost their lives in that raid might have been killed by Israeli air strikes that incinerated its victims. However, the so-called media analysis of these two events couldn't be more divergent. 

The capital of the United States is named for George Washington, as well as an entire state. His portrait is on the one dollar bill in your wallet. However, the so-called news media has consistently argued that the genocide against Palestinians was necessary because Israel needed to defend itself. The only problem some media outlets had with the Israeli organized genocide was that it might have been too excessive.       

So, how do we compare General George Washington's orders for Sullivan's Campaign to the Hamas organized raid on Israel? Washington was clear in that he wanted "total destruction and devastation of their settlements and capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible." The Hamas organized raid ultimately cost the lives of a similar number of people as the Sullivan Campaign. In my opinion, both these raids were wrong in that they both targeted civilians. The question remains: Why is the life of George Washington celebrated, while the organization Hamas is demonized?

One reason for this has to do with the fact that the thirteen colonies won the Revolution. However, one of the reasons for the victory of the Revolution had to do with the aid it received from France. France was one of the most powerful nations in the world at that time. 

As far as I know, no nation in the world has given armed support to Palestinian liberation. The consequence of the Hamas raid was an unimaginable repression.

Clearly Sullivan's raid took place in the context of the revolution of the thirteen colonies. However, this raid wasn't aimed at the British, but was a continuation of the war to rob Native Americans of their homeland. The Declaration of Independence outlined the reasons for that revolution. There is no question that Palestinians have legitimate grievances that have simmered for over 100 years. 

We can also say that the United States government has been highly repressive since its founding. I'm talking about over 100 years of genocidal war against Native Americans. Then there were the decades of the unimaginable horrors of chattel slavery. After the revolution, there were the Shays and and Whisky rebellions that protested the insidious policies of the new government. 

However, the news media, the educational system, as well as the government argue that the United States is the greatest democracy the world has ever known. We were all asked to pledge allegiance to the flag they argued represents "liberty and justice for all."

In school, our teachers to view history with the view of formal logic. Either events had positive or negative results. 

I view history from the perspective of dialectical materialism. In other words, history unfolds as a result of contending forces. The results of this conflict can have positive and negative results. However, the clash between these contending forces continues and this explains why our environment is constantly changing. 

Saying all of that, there were legitimate reasons why masses of people rose up in revolution to expel forces loyal to Britain from this part of the world. Caroline Elkins wrote extensively about the history of the British Empire in her book Legacy of Violence. Without the revolution of the thirteen colonies, we can speculate that the interests of this country would have continued to be subordinate to the British royal family.

Another outgrowth of the revolution and the Civil War was the emergence of the capitalist system. On the one hand, from its infancy, capitalism has been an extremely repressive system. On the other hand, the only reason why capitalists and bankers make investments is because they feel that the system will grow continually.

Thinking about that, the colonists living in the thirteen colonies could not have imagined the world we are living in today. Back in the 1700s, most people lived on farms where they needed to provide for many of their necessities. Today, most people in the United States have direct access to electricity, running water, education, health care, and cell phones. In my opinion, most people prefer to have these goods and services rather than living without them. 

Another outgrowth of the revolution of the thirteen colonies and the Civil War was the creation of the working class. The feudal system was ruled by royal families. In capitalism, there is the idea that people can elect their representatives in government. Clearly, capitalist governments routinely represent the interests of the most affluent.

However, in the course of the history of this country many social movements erupted. These included movements of labor, civil rights, women's rights, support for immigrants, LBGT, and against wars. Currently, there is a mass movement demanding a ceasefire in the Middle East. These movements might have been impossible or much more difficult to organize in the feudal epoch. 

There is another clear analogy to the Sullivan Campaign. Rashid Khalidi is probably the most highly respected historian of the Palestinian experience. He argues that if people are critical of the October 7 raid, the Israeli organized genocide that took place over the past year was much more devastating.

In fact, just as in the Sullivan Campaign, the miss-named Israeli Defense Force murdered at least 47,000 Palestinians, destroyed their homes, schools, and hospitals, and denied about 2.3 million Palestinians the necessary food to sustain their lives. These genocidal policies could not have been made possible without massive aid from the United States government. 

There is another clear difference between Sullivan's Campaign and the Israeli organized genocide. The United States government has been extremely repressive since it's founding. We can say the same about the nation of Israel. However, as I've said there were several progressive reforms since the founding of the United States. The nation of Israel began with a highly developed economy that was made possible by Palestinians. So, there were no real progressive reforms that came about because of the 76 year Israeli history. 

When we compare the reality of the Sullivan Campaign to the Israeli organized genocide, there are real parallels. In both these events, the motivating force for Washington and Netanyahu were to remove the indigenous people from their ancestral homeland. The Zionists have been clear about their goals for over 100 years. They want an exclusively Jewish homeland where Palestinians have lived for centuries. The goal of Hamas was to free Palestinians who live in Israeli jails. 

Abraham Lincoln and the 38 nooses

Many historians have labelled President Abraham Lincoln, "The Great Emancipator." There is some truth in that statement. When Lincoln became President, chattel slavery was the law of the land. 

Upon his election, the slave states seceded from the union and attacked the United States at Fort Sumpter. Their goal was to take control of the United States government and make it completely subservient to the interests of slave owners. 

Many in the U.S. government at that time favored a negotiated peace with the slave owners. Although Lincoln wasn't an advocate of abolition of slavery, he mobilized the Union Army in an unimaginably arduous campaign to destroy the interests of slavery in this country. 

This is why many have called Lincoln, "The Great Emancipator." However, just as with the revolution of the thirteen colonies, positive and negative things happened during the same years. 

Scott W. Berg wrote his book titled, "38 Nooses—Lincoln, Little Crow, and the beginning of the frontier's end." There is a problem with Berg's usage of the word "frontier" in his otherwise important book.

This is my dictionary definition of the word frontier. "The extreme limit of settled land beyond which lies wilderness, especially referring to the western U.S. before Pacific settlement." So we see that even this definition has problems.

Native Americans have lived in this part of the world for thousands of years. So, there may have been a frontier and a wilderness here thousands of years ago. However, when the Europeans came here there might have been upwards of 100 million people living in what is now the Americas. So much for the ideas that settlers in this country ever lived in on a frontier or in a wilderness.

The Zionist movement made a similar claim. They argued that Palestine was, "a land without a people for a people without a land." The early Jewish settlers who came from Europe would have liked to imagine that the millions of Palestinians who lived in their homeland for thousands of years, simply were not there. Like the early settlers in this country, since the Jewish settlers believed Palestine was a barren landscape, they felt they were justified in forcing the original inhabitants from their homeland.  

Aside from that limitation, Berg reported on the environment where the Dakota lived in what is now the state of Minnesota (Minnesota is a Native American name). As with about 400 Native American nations, the United States government violated its treaty with the Dakota. 

The Dakota were a self-sufficient people who hunted, fished, and farmed to provide for themselves. When settlers arrived in Minnesota, they took much of that land, making it impossible for the Dakota to continue being self-sufficient. So, the U.S. government agreed to provide the Dakota with all the food they needed. However, during the Civil War, this wasn't happening. 

Little Crow (Taoyateduta) was the leader of the Dakota at that time. This is what he said to the Indian agent, Andrew Myrick, who represented the United States government.

“We have no food, but here are these stores filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving.”

Myrick responded to these rational words saying that Little Crow and the Dakota could, "eat grass." That statement violated the treaty between the U.S. government and the Dakota. Violating a treaty isn't like breaking a law where a judgement is made in a civil court. Violating a treaty is an act of war.

So, the Dakota people had a decision to make. They could either starve to death, or they could take the food they needed by force. They fully understood that if the Dakota people took what they needed by force, the response by the U.S. government would be relentless.  

In all, the Dakota murdered about 94 soldiers and between 400 and 600 civilians. The military eventually apprehended the Dakota. The government put the captured Dakota on trials that lasted a mere ten minutes. Those trials were not translated into the Dakota language so many of the accused had no idea of what was going on. In fact, since the U.S. government caused the uprising of the Dakota by violating an agreement. Those who had been accused of murder were actually political prisoners. 

President Abraham Lincoln signed the order to execute 38 of the captured Dakota by hanging. This was the largest mass execution in the history of the United States. One of the reasons for this order had to do with Lincoln's desire to win the electoral votes in Minnesota in an upcoming election.

Conclusion

In this blog, I attempted to show some of the parallels between the genocidal policies of the United States and Israel with respect to Native Americans and Palestinians. The mainstream press in this country denies that genocide ever took place in either this country or Israel. In my opinion, the facts tell another story.

The United States government brutalized Native American children in special schools, so the children would be coerced to forget their history. Over the course of more than 76 years Zionists had the goal of removing Palestinians from their homeland in order to make Israel an exclusively Jewish nation.

Today, the capitalist system in the world appears to be falling apart. Hundreds of millions of people in the world do not have enough food to eat. As a result about 30,000 children die every day.

Because of the gross inequality in the world, most workers in this country haven't experienced that level of exploitation. However, today tens of millions of people in the United States don't have enough food to eat. Yet, prices are skyrocketing and wages have remained essentially flat for the past 50 years.

These conditions have led millions to doubt if future generations will ever experience economic security. So, thinking about this reality, in my opinion there is only one way for the working class of the world to escape this crisis.

This is to organize and put in place a workers government that makes fundamental changes.  Those changes can be summarized in the slogan human needs before profits.

The facts are that the resources have been available for a long time to eliminate poverty in the world. The reason why this hasn't happened is because the capitalist system routinely organizes to enrich billionaires at the expense of the working class of the world.

I say all of this to say that no working class movement can be successful without taking an international approach to politics. Another requirement for the working class is to support the unconditional liberation of all oppressed nationalities and this includes Black people, women, LBGT, and immigrants. Today many workers from around the world are discovering the centrality of the demand Palestine Lives. 

  

 

  

       

Not a Nation of Immigrants—Settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the history of erasure and exclusion

 

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

There have been many books that attempted to demystify the history we were taught in school. One was James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me. Then there was Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. Recently Jon Jeter wrote his Class War in America. 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz continued this tradition with her book Not a Nation of Immigrants. I also read her book An Indigenous People's History of the United States.

In her new book Ortiz destroys one myth we were raised with. This is the idea that the United States is a nation of immigrants. That argument has obvious problems because Native Americans have lived in this part of the world for thousands of years. Few people would argue that the millions of Native Americans came here as immigrants.

However this argument has several other problems. First, slave traders forced African Americans to come here from Africa under unimaginably horrendous conditions. Many Europeans came here as indentured servants or slaves. Of the first settlers to what became the United States, they weren't immigrants, but settlers. 

Dunbar-Ortiz demystified much of this with her analysis of the lives we know as Christopher Columbus and Alexander Hamilton. It may come as s surprise to most people, but during his life, the person we have called Christopher Columbus, never used that name. The Spanish called him Cristóbal Colón. We don't know what his Italian name was.

Colón—Columbus

Why did people feel the need to anglicize his name? Colón (Columbus) never set foot in what is now considered the United States. However, the educational system teaches us that Columbus "discovered America." This argument ignores the fact that hundreds of Native American nations lived in North and South America for thousands of years.

The argument of the so-called "discovery" of America by Columbus has other problems. This was not just a discovery by Europeans, but the beginning of a genocidal war against Native Americans that lasted hundreds of years. From the beginning, this war was about extracting vast amounts of wealth from the land and labor of people who lived here.

People who lived here felt uncomfortable using the name Colón for someone they argued "discovered America." The United States was an English speaking country. The Knights of Columbus popularized his name. At that time, the United States was a largely Protestant country. Since most members of the Knights of Columbus were Irish, their promotion of the name Columbus legitimized the Catholic religion. 

Another reason for promoting the myth of Colón (Columbus) was that he was white. By arguing that "Columbus discovered America" we ignore the African and Native American populations and influences to this country. The hot war against Native Americans that lasted for over 100 years in the United States isn't something most people think about. 

We are aware of aspects of the long history of slavery and discrimination against African Americans. However, the educational system portrays this history as separated from our present reality. According to this portrayal, there is no need to correct the crimes committed against Black people throughout the history of this country. 

The falsification of the life of Alexander Hamilton

Dunbar-Ortiz also destroys the myth of Alexander Hamilton portrayed in a recent play by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Miranda says that he identified with Hamilton, arguing that they were both immigrants. The problem with this argument is that Miranda's father was born in Puerto Rico which is a colony of the United States. 

Hamilton was born on the British controlled island of Nevis. So, when Hamilton arrived in New York City he was a British subject, like all residents of NYC at that time. While the play Hamilton portrays his life as someone who supported abolition of slavery, Dunbar-Ortiz gives the evidence that Hamilton was a supporter and profiteer of slavery. 

The goals of those who promote the myths of both Hamilton and Colón (Columbus) were about the simplistic idea that the United States has a rich, glorious, and Eurocentric history. This mythology ignores the African, Native American, and working class history of this country. 

James Baldwin and the Price of the Ticket

Dunbar-Ortiz quoted James Baldwin who wrote about the so-called "immigrant" experience. Baldwin argued that there was a "price of the ticket" for the Europeans who came to the United States. He continued arguing that "White people are not white; part of the price of the ticket is to delude themselves into believing that they are." By identifying that people of European descent were "white" they debased Black people and Native Americans. 

In turn, Baldwin argued that white people "debased and defamed themselves." "No one was white before he/she came to America." Dunbar-Ortiz elaborated that "European immigrants were Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, English, French, Swiss, Norwegian" etc.

This idea of identifying as "white" had real consequences for all working people throughout the history of this country. While I believe that Dunbar-Ortiz' book is well worth reading, there is one limitation. There is no doubt that the United States has a persistent racist history. However, this country is also divided into the capitalist and working classes. Those classes have antagonistic interests. 

In this country, people who have power have consistently worked to exacerbate the divisions between white, Black, and Native American workers. They also promote the devision between men and women. Today, the new Presidential Administration of Donald Trump is working to exacerbate the divisions between workers born in this country and those who were born elsewhere. Trump continues the policies of Democratic and Republican Party Presidents who have consistently deported millions of immigrants.

In the past, the government adopted the Fugitive Slave Act that required all state governments to apprehend escaped slaves. When the Union Army defeated the slave owners in the Civil War, the government effectively abolished that law. However, with the defeat of radical reconstruction the federal government, in effect, gave political power to the Ku Klux Klan, and Black people effectively lost all citizenship rights. Today the Trump Administration claims it will escalate the racist policies aimed at denying immigrants many of the same rights Black people had been denied during the Jim Crow era. 

The history of Chinese immigration

Before the construction of the transcontinental railroad, it took two to three months to travel from New York to California. At that time the easiest way to make that journey was by ship going around the entire continent of South America. After the construction of this railroad it took six days to make this same journey. This tremendous advance in transportation allowed for the beginning of the massive development of California and the West Coast.

Thousands of Chinese workers participated in the construction of this rail line. In order for that to happen, these workers needed to routinely work in seemingly impossible conditions. One of the most challenging obstacles was to blast through about a dozen granite mountains to make way for tunnels.

Chinese laborers invented the method used to accomplish this task. They wove large baskets capable of carrying the weight of two workers. Chinese workers lowered these baskets to the level of the tunnels. Then the workers in those baskets used a sledge hammer and a steel pipe to bore a hole into the granite. They placed dynamite in those holes and then frantically worked to escape the effects of the blast. This was how the transcontinental railroad became a reality.

Ghosts of Gold Mountain by Gordon H. Chang

While Chinese workers did essential work in building the railroad, Chinese people also indirectly financed this rail-line. During the 1800s one of the most lucrative ways to make money in the United States was in the Chinese opium trade. The Chinese government made this trade illegal. However, the British organized the Opium Wars to force opium on the Chinese people. 

Many of the Chinese who came here, left China to escape the horror of the Taiping Rebellion that was sparked by the opium wars. Some of the financing of the transcontinental railroad came from the profits U.S. capitalists took from the opium trade in China.

After the completion of this rail line, there were racist pogroms against the Chinese community. The U.S. government then adopted the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 that prohibited Chinese workers from entering the United States. So, when we look at the idea of the United States being a "nation of immigrants," we can make another argument. This is how there is a long history of the United States government's long and tenacious war against both immigrants, as well as the indigenous people of this part of the world.     

So, Dunbar-Ortiz effectively destroyed the myth that the United States is a nation of immigrants. The first European residents of this part of the world engaged in genocidal wars to remove the native people from their homeland. The wealth of this country also came from the enslavement and systematic discrimination of Black people. Today, workers born in other countries create huge amounts of wealth, while the government is obsessed with throwing them out of the country, or stripping them of any rights they might have. 

I believe this history gives us a clear path to work for a profoundly better future world. We need to break through all the barriers that splintered the working class in the past. Ultimately the overwhelming majority of humanity is a part of the international working class. When we begin to understand this, we can begin to unleash a force that the capitalists of the world will be powerless to restrain.