Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
—Arundhati Roy
Lakota Sioux along the Brule River
Wounded Knee, December 29, 1990
The medicine man
Ibrahem Shatali
Palestinian men bury the body of 4-year-old Lama Hamdan at Beit Hanoun cemetery in the northern Gaza Strip December 30, 2008. Lama and her sister were reportedly riding a donkey cart Tuesday near a rocket-launching site that was targeted by Israel. (MOHAMMED SALEM/Reuters)
INTRODUCTION
The Lakota Sioux Indian people, those massacred at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890 (that anniversary came just two days after the beginning of the massacre, December 27, 2008] had lived on the Plains for more than 100 years, long before white people settled there. And their roots on the North American continent continue back for perhaps 15,000 years. They were long-term residents. Whites entered the region in the early 1800s, mainly in wagon trains heading further west—to settle, they were settlers, they built settlements. Many of these whites believed god was on their side, that they had rights to the land because of their superior culture and because of their affinity with god.
Are there significant parallels between the massacre at Wounded Knee and the current massacre in Gaza?
OUTLINE
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SET THE STAGE
For most of the 19th century the US army had forced American Indians from their ancestral areas into confined zones, mostly reservations with few natural resources. The Lakota Sioux people, a vigorous and hearty group of Plains Indians with roots on the east coast, were first “transferred” onto the Great Sioux Reservation (GSR), a large area in what is now South and North Dakota and Wyoming. This region shrank dramatically when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, originally a part of the GSR and for at least 2 centuries a sacred site for Lakota. By 1890 the remaining lands were minuscule compared with what Lakota roamed over in the late 18th century.
General Sherman and other government officials with Lakota Sioux meeting about the treaty forming the Great Sioux Reservation in 1867
For good reason many Lakota resisted this imprisonment, notably Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Whites orchestrated the murder of Crazy Horse by his own people, and then in December 22, 1890, Sitting Bull, also by his own Lakota. A band led by the peace chief, Big Foot, fled south. They were trapped along the Wounded Knee creek in the Pine Ridge Reservation. Next morning, surrounded by elements of Custer’s old unit, the 7th Calvary, they were massacred. Some 300 died, most of them women and children and elderly. Warriors offered little resistance, since they lacked effective weapons. (Incidentally, early road signs erected by the state of South Dakota called the massacre a “battle” until many opposed this misnaming and the state agreed to change the wording to “massacre” at Wounded Knee.)
Chief Big Foot propped up in death for a photograph
Prior to the massacre, whites had been settling in the area. Observing the Ghost Dance of the Lakota people, a failed attempt to non-violently resist white incursion, local whites mistook this for a war dance. They feared; they demanded army protection. Using newly developed weaponry which had not been fully field tested, mostly the Hotchkiss rapid firing cannon, the soldiers, some of them reportedly drunk, many of them recalling the debacle of their once heralded leader, General George Custer at the Battle of Greasy Grass or Little Big Horn, fired on everyone in the camp. Chief Big Foot, already sick from pneumonia, was one of the first killed.
People in the East noticed; there was an outcry against the massacre, leading to a hearing that questioned the officers. They were cleared, and many officers and soldiers awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
POSSIBLE PARALLELS
Now, what might be parallels with the current killings in Gaza? Is it fair to call the Israeli attack on Gaza a massacre? Is it a battle? Is it the proper and legal exercise of Israel to defend itself? Is it justified killing?
A wounded Palestinian girl is carried into the Al-Shifa hospital on December 28, 2008 in Gaza City, Gaza. (Abid Katib/Getty Images)
As of this writing, January 9, 2009, at least 795 Palestinians are now dead (martyred in in the language of many Palestinians—a word I concur with), upwards of 3300 are injured (400 of them dangerously), at least 10 Israeli soldiers and 5 Israeli civilians are dead, some soldiers by friendly fire, some by militants shooting rockets and perhaps using other weapons. An unknown number of casualties lie beneath rubble. Among the dead—230 are children, 92 women, 60 elderly men, 6 medical assistants, 2 journalists, and 3 foreigners. (statistics based on UN and Red Cross figures) Estimates of the proportion of civilian causalities ranges from 20% to more than 60%, that percentage rising with the ground campaign now underway. The carnage continues as I write this.
Many bodies lie outside the Hamas police headquarters following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City on December 27, 2008. (MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images)
Most media and most governments in the western world state, “Israel has a right to defend itself. The attacks will stop when Hamas stops firing rockets. Hamas broke the truce with their rockets.” However, numerous observers counter this and declare, “Back up a few steps. Israel has kept the Gazans under siege for nearly 2 years, ever since Hamas was elected in an open, fair, democratic election. Gazans have been suffering food, water, medical, and educational deprivations during this period, on top of the occupation that dates back to at least 1967. During the recent 6-month truce, ending on December 19th, Israel did nothing to end the siege. Palestinian rocket fire decreased dramatically.
Samera Baalusha (34) (right) sits with her daughter Eman (15) and surviving son Mohamad (15 months) while waiting to see the body of her 4-year-old daughter Jawaher Baalusha during the funeral held for Jawher and her four other sisters who were all killed in an Israeli missile strike, on December 29, 2008 in the Jebaliya refugee camp, in the northern Gaza Strip. Jawher Baalusha and her sisters were killed during an Israeli air raid while they were sleeping together in their bedroom. Medics stated that the raid had targeted a mosque near their home in Jabalia. (Abid Katib/Getty Images)
Until recently the US either blocked the UN Security Council from issuing a cease-fire demand or abstained from voting. In addition, the US Senate voted unanimously for an unqualified declaration of support for Israel. Should Israel be found to be committing war crimes, the US Senate is complicit. Not only that but the US supplies most of the weapons used by Israel, including helicopters, fighter jets, heavy artillery and communication equipment.
In early November Israel broke the truce by attacking tunnels and homes at the ends of those tunnels that they claimed were used by militants to bring in weapons. They killed some 5 Palestinians. Only then did Hamas and other armed groups significantly increase launching their home made, poorly targeted rockets and mortars on Israeli civilians. They also deployed for the first time longer-range rockets. Indeed, Israel’s attack did nothing to stop the rocket fire, it exacerbated it. These rocket attacks on civilians are deplorable and constitute war crimes. I and many others oppose them. Do they justify the disproportionate Israeli attacks?
A medic crouches over the body of an Israeli man after he was killed in a rocket attack launched from the Gaza Strip and hit the southern Israeli town of Netivot on December 27, 2008 following Israeli bombardment on the Palestinian costal strip. The rocket attack killed one man and wounded four others, according to the Magen David Adom, Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross. (HAIM HORENSTEIN/AFP/Getty Images)
During the late 1800s, whites claimed Indians had few rights to the lands they’d inhabited for centuries, and that Indian attacks on setters were grounds for retaliation. North American rulers left out the prior history—American Indian domination of the entire continent. And the fact that Indians never invited whites into their lands. Whites invaded and called it the equivalent of “Manifest Destiny,” or god’s will. They did not recognize the Indians rights to defend themselves, violently if necessary. Instead Indians were termed bloodthirsty savages, the 19th century equivalent of “terrorists.”
Rosemary Jumping Eagle, town of Wounded Knee, 1982
Moreover: overwhelming white firepower against the Lakota matches Israel’s overwhelming force. World opinion, at least the western world, then and now, match. Resisting honest negotiation matches. Source of weapons matches for the most part: cannon, rifles, revolvers and ammunition used at Wounded Knee, and Apache helicopters, F-16 fighter jets, 155 mm artillery rounds, artillery firing those rounds, missiles, rockets, bombs, all or mostly all USA made, and communication equipment made at least in part by Motorola, bulldozers if used manufactured by Caterpillar. Motives match: wipe out the Indians, wipe out the Palestinians, whether with the velvet glove, making conditions of survival so dismal that most, if allowed, would flee (as is happening in the west bank), or under cover of the “right to defend itself” commit outright murder—the Hanukah Massacres.
An Israeli F15 fighter made in the United States flies over the northern Israeli-Gaza Strip border on December 28, 2008. (JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
OUTCOMES
Will results match? American Indians, altho surviving, are much diminished. What will become of the Palestinians? How will the Gazan nation—and the equivalent of a small nation it is—rebuild itself? Till now Israel prevents all building materials and most chemicals, experts, and money from entering. Unless the world community, thru the United Nations and the international court system, applies significant pressure, I’m afraid Israel will maintain its course of impunity. One possibility, as might be happening now in the US: self-destruction. A suicidal course. The minor empire in the Middle East, the “only democracy in the Middle East with its “army of pure means,” might founder. Israel, like the US, struggles with a hopelessly contradictory set of founding principles, more dishonored than honored. Can a nation hope to survive with such cognitive dissonance? Perhaps Marx will be right after all, not about the imminent implosion of capitalism, but of certain western nations whose war making boomerangs on them.
PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT
I am personally involved in both themes, American Indians and Palestinians. I’ve visited Wounded Knee several times, most recently for the Big Foot Memorial Ride to Wounded Knee in 1990, commemorating the centennial of the massacre. Inspired by Black Elk who prophesied that the seventh generation of Lakota would be the last generation able to “Wipe Away the Tears” and “Mend the Sacred Hoop,” i.e., end the mourning period and rebuild the nation, for two weeks the ride traversed the same path at the same time of the year used by Big Foot and his people. I’ve camped near Wounded Knee, summer and winter, and have felt the powerful negative—and positive—force fields emanating from the earth. I grieve for the Lakota people and all native peoples who have been dispossessed. However, I do not feel their cause is hopeless.
Big Foot Memorial Ride to Wounded Knee, December 1990
Big Foot Memorial Ride to Wounded Knee, December 1990
Big Foot Memorial Ride to Wounded Knee, December 1990
Similarly I’ve been 3 times to Gaza since 2004, most recently just one year ago, January 2008. I’ve lived under the siege, suffering the loss of electrical power, the sealed borders, the lack of food, the buzz of the drone that might target me at any moment, the nearness of death—and the presence of resilience, sumud, in Arabic, steadfastness. I’ve met young men volunteering in their communities to serve the poor, I’ve met members of the Palestinian Initiative, a group dedicated to nonviolently ending the fighting between rival political parties, I’ve worked with the Gaza Community Mental Health Program watching as psychologists assessed the psychic damages of the siege on children (their offices suffered indirect attacks recently and are closed), and the American Friends Service Committee’s youth programs training in community building and leadership skills. And I’m in close daily contact—if electricity and Internet work—with friends in Gaza. I also hope to return in summer 2009. What and who will greet me then?
I was not able to be present during the Wounded Knee of 1890. I’m unsure what I’d have done if knowing about the impending massacre, or what I’d call for once I’d learned its results. I am sure about Gaza: the occupation of Palestine is apartheid, the attack on Gaza is a massacre, several parties are committing war crimes, and all must be held accountable, as is true for all those governments supporting Israel’s occupation, siege, and ruination of Gaza. Which includes me, as a citizen of the United States. Especially if I pay income tax. I can act, you can act. Now.
Some are guilty but all are responsible.
—Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
The body of a Palestinian security force officer lays in the rubble after an Israeli missile strike on a building in Gaza City, Sunday, Dec. 28, 2008. (AP Photo/Fadi Adwan)
Eli Azran father of Irit Shitrit (39), a mother of four, leans over her dead body as he mourns during her funeral on December 30, 2008 in Ashdod, Israel. Shitrit was killed yesterday by a Hamas rocket in Ashdod, Israel, after hearing a warning siren and taking shelter in a roadside bus stop. (Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)
Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2009
Links:
Truly horrible photos from inside Gaza
“Too much to mourn in Gaza”
By Eva Bartlett, Live from Palestine, 8 January 2009
HI Skip,
That is a powerful presentation of the parallels between Wounded Knee and the siege on Gaza. I appreciate your encouragement to act immediately and, as you know, because of your influence I wrote two letters in response – one to the Prez and one which was distrubuted to my two Congress-people and my State Rep.
Today I am digesting these words of Daisaku Ikeda, president of the Soka Gakkai International, the lay organization of Buddhists that I belong to:
“One tragedy of our times is the willingness of realists, in spite of impending crises, to criticize and obstruct people who expend their energy toward finding solutions. Their judgments, however, are superficial and conventional, and their attitude distances them from the essential quality of reality – change. Often the wisest realists cannot escape this trap. The challenge, then, is to create a new kind of reality that offers hope for changing the world.”
Buddhism identifies “three poisons” inherent in human life. They are arrogance, greed and ignorance. The parallels you make clear show these attitudes enduring over a 120 year period. In this case we can see arrogance in the sense of entitlement to take over another people’s land. Greed here is the investment in one’s own comfort at the expense of others’. It is ignorance of the sanctity of all life that allows people to exhibit arrogant and greedy attitudes – to harm or kill in the name of “god” or justice, for example.
Creating “a new kind of reality” means cultivating a global consciousness that is based in an inner-directed motivation to clean up (within) while embracing a practice of talking things through. Buddhism teaches that every human being contains the seeds of enlightenment and that the purpose of life is to express our enlightened nature – the benefit of doing so being the resultant harmonious reality we experience. My hope and prayer is that the causes I make in my daily life contribute to the creation of a new consciousness that will ripple out to all those I touch.
With gratitude for the opportunity to grow toward a vision of a lasting peace.
Maddy
Maddy,
Thanks for your comment. I can see you put some energy into it.
I’m especially grateful for the reiteration and application of the Buddhist teaching you quote—arrogance, greed, and ignorance. My training in Buddhist phrases that slightly differently, but is essentially the same: aversion or anger, greed or acquisitiveness, and ignorance or confusion. The teaching goes a long way to explaining many of the catastrophes, historic and contemporary, human beings have dropped on themselves and others.
And Mr. Ikeda’s teaching about change, pivotal to all Buddhist teaching, and creating “a new kind of reality that offers hope for changing the world.” Yes, but I wonder if you’re commenting that maybe I could have put more emphasis on change and hope. Was that your intention?
Creating a new consciousness, part of reaching enlightenment, is certainly a goal of my work. Thus, I drew the parallel.
If I were to self criticize I’d admit my writing was hasty, scattershot rather than concentrated, but hey, it’s out there—to be revised.
I intend to let it settle awhile, gather comments from folks like you, maybe wait a week or so (I need to concentrate on my upcoming photo exhibit about Gaza), and then revise for publication. I’m looking for on line and print publications like Common Dreams, Electronic Intifada, Color Lines, Progressive magazine, Mother Jones, etc. So if you have suggestions, shoot them my way please.
–Skip
Very good and powerful post. I’ve thought about the similarities between the present Israeli expansion and American expansionism in the nineteenth century in more general terms before, and your maps of the change in Israeli and Palestinian lands over time seem to show the same kind of frontier situation, with military advancement, that happened as the United States continued taking over Indian land, and forcing them onto reservations. It is completely terrible how history is repeating itself. I wish you the best at getting this piece available in another print publication–it is definitely something that people should know about.
I am just curious. It sounds like you are saying that the state of Israel should not exist. As such, what do you think the Jews who are now there and have taken shelter there for generations now should do? Where do you suggest they go? This argument you are showing here presents a view point that is not shown much in the mainstream media and in that it has great value. I have a small child who looks much like some of the children killed and it pains me greatly to see what seems like senseless violence. I feel like dying when I think about the pain these mothers in Palestine must be going through (and there mothers, and fathers, and children, and other loved ones). But I just haven’t seen any solutions here presented that seem to address the needs of both Israelis and Palestinians.
I find the comparison a bit broad and unfair also, though interesting- the presumption is that the jews have no right to the land.
Especially since there are wild camps within the Palestinian world that refuse to follow any of what the governing body promises after a treaty.
I know it seems silly, they don’t have big powerful bombs yet. And I have been there, the people are poor and I found them to be quite lovely and pious. It freaks me out that more simple people get railroaded and overcome. But I still dont see a real solution. Just another side of the yin yang so to speak.
I hope that one day there will be a world where people can respect the needs of ‘the other’ and take it as seriously as their own needs… that jews and muslims could treat each other as family and care for each other as much as they care for their own children, even while respecting that their practices differ.
To me that seems like it can happen only through the awakening of a true spiritual consciousness- a very real state of mind, where the bodily and cultural differences are not as important as the sense of oneness we share as a global spiritual family.
peace,
ananda
Thanks Ananda for your thoughtful comment. I do not wish Jewish people not to exist, I do not wish a homeland for Jewish people not to exist, I do support a transformation of Israel so that all people resident there have truly equal rights. I do support a solution to the conflict that shares the land between the Jordan and the Sea fairly.
I agree that this requires awakenment, the awakening you write about, a spiritual consciousness, and also an evolution of the planetary global community so that all of us are held accountable to international law and standards. I believe Israel and some elements in Palestine, Hamas notably, have committed war crimes, not only recently in the assault on Gaza but for years, decades, since the formation of the Israeli state, the beginning of the Palestinian catastrophe, the nakba.
Finally, in retrospect, we might wonder what Zionism means for the future of Jews. Will it create more anti Semitism—and ultimate ruination of the entire Israeli state? Is it suicidal?
great work!
Ananda misses the point, entirely. It’s not a conflict between equal forces, or even between two countries. It is a struggle for justice against a brutal, racist, colonial regime bent on eradication of the Palestinian people.
This is a gem: “Especially since there are wild camps within the Palestinian world that refuse to follow any of what the governing body promises after a treaty.” Pretty ambiguous statement. Show me one “treaty” that Israel has respected. The “peace process” has only brought more suffering and more loss of land for the Palestinian people. Israel is an Apartheid state – it’s the state that has no legitimacy, not “the Jews.”
It’s also not about Muslims and Jews; it’s about a Jewish state with special rights for Jews and limited or zero rights for non-Jews.
We can’t wait for “awakening.” In my experience, the people who talk like this are those who are not on the losing end of things. They can afford to wait, because the bombs are not falling on them. Unfortunately, the less fortunate majority of the world’s population doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for a global love-fest; they need JUSTICE NOW.
[...] major epiphany during the Allied Media Conference workshops yesterday: the parallel between the Wounded Knee massacre and the Nakba . Both were pivotal events in the history of the peoples affected, both were deeply meaningful to [...]
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