American historian, writer, professor and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz uses her studies on indigenous peoples’ history and her work with Palestinian diplomats and the United Nations to show how historic “settler colonialism” like in the United States relates to Gaza today. Dunbar-Ortiz makes the case, on this Thanksgiving edition of the Scheer Intelligence podcast, that inherent in that settler colonialism are the various definitions of genocide.
“Inherent in settler colonialism is genocide because it wants to destroy or completely control every aspect of life of the people they push off. The United States was the most effective settler colonial state ever in terms of the genocide of the reducing the native population hugely,” Dunbar-Ortiz said.
The plight of the Native Americans in what is now the United States serves as a base for understanding the motivations, actions and justifications for settler colonialism by the West. The war in Palestine, Dunbar-Ortiz argues, contains many similar elements employed, where the core objective of the occupying force isn’t even to necessarily kill everyone—although a strong argument can be made that this is ongoing too—but to see a group of people have their identity obliterated.
The hard resistance to seeing this situation as it is in the eyes of some Americans, Dunbar-Ortiz reasons, comes from a justification for America’s history of the same crimes:
“[T]here's a lot of resonance, I think, in the U.S. white population, especially descendants of old settlers, which most presidents are. They feel a resonance with Israel because of settler colonialism, because it is the geographical imprint on U.S. people that settler colonialism is a good thing.”