• The colonist makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is invested with the very beginning: “We made this land.” He is the guarantor of its existence: “If we leave all will be lost, and this land will return to the Dark Ages.”

– Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Though ages have passed since the forcible displacement of entire peoples, there remains in the land itself traces of memory. Israel, like North and South America, like Australia and New Zealand, has carved out its existence as a nation by violating the rights of the indigenous population that lived there for centuries. Given the parallels between American history and Israeli history, it behooves us to try to discover the history not of the Europeans who proclaim to have ‘discovered’ America or the Israelis, but the people they supplanted, the Native Americans and the Palestinians.

In 1830, U.S. President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, a law that would legalize ethnic cleansing. But the process itself had started long before Andrew Jackson. As white settlers moved farther into America’s interior, they took up more and more land and used up more resources, forcing Native Americans to move westward. However far they moved, they were never free from the encroachment of the white man.

By 1838, the Cherokee, designated by white Americans as one of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ because they had begun to adopt certain European customs, such as a written constitution, were given an ultimatum — abandon ancestral lands in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina or die. Under the command of George Winfield Scott, 16,000 Cherokee men, women, and children were forced at gunpoint into stockades. Families slept on the cold ground, their belongings looted by white soldiers. And then came the march: 1,200 miles west to Oklahoma, through blizzards and sickness, with no food, no shelters, no mercy.

For the Cherokee this was Nunna daul Tsuny, ‘The Trail Where They Cried.’ As temperatures plunged, babies froze to death in their mothers’ arms. Elders were lynched for pausing to bury their dead. Young women, their shoes worn to shreds, left bloody footprints in the snow. One of the survivors, Samuel Cloud, recalled, “We come to a big river, bigger than I have ever seen before. It is flowing with ice. We set up camp and wait. We are all cold, and the snow and ice seem to hound us, claiming our people one by one. North is the color of blue, defeat, and trouble. From there, a chill wind blows for us as we wait by a frozen river. We wait to die.”

By spring, more than 4,000 Cherokee lay dead along the Trail of Tears. Those who survived arrived in Oklahoma, severed from the land on which they had flourished, their wealth stolen, and their culture on the precipice of extinction. For the U.S., this was Manifest Destiny, but for the Cherokee it was genocide.

What has since become well known as the ‘Trail of Tears,’ was but one of several land grabs perpetrated against indigenous Americans both after and before the Indian Removal Act became law.

The Cherokee were not the only nation to be affected by the Indian Removal Act. Nations across the South, including the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles (all of whom ironically, along with the Cherokee, comprise the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’) — and even in the North — were evicted from their lands. Between the 1830s and the 1840s, northern tribes, including the Delawares (Lenapes) Haudenosaunees, Ho-Chunks, Kickapoos, Miamis, Ojibwes, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Sauks, Meskwakis, Shawnies, and Wyandots were all compelled to leave their lands.

A century later, the same script played out in Palestine. In 1948, David Ben-Gurion, who was to become the first prime minister of Israel, commanded that Plan Dalet (also known as Plan D) be put into effect. Plan Dalet was a military campaign designed to depopulate Palestinian villages and seize land for a Jewish state. Ben-Gurion’s plan, it has been argued, was buttressed by the 1947 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), wherein Palestine was to be divided into two states.  That the U.N. General Assembly utterly failed to even begin to address any legal objections to this resolution raised by the Arab delegations, including putting the question of the so-called Palestine problem, to the International Court of Justice, seems to remain conveniently overlooked.

The partition already gave to the Jewish minority more than half of the country. However, with the success of Plan Dalet in 1948, Israel gained even more of the land. Most Palestinians became refugees, and Israeli settlers were free to move into the houses of the people they had driven out and to profit from the sale of olive oil from groves planted and cultivated for centuries by Palestinian families.

The Plan stated that operations could be carried out thus: “Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.”

In the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, at least 100 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, were massacred by forces of the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang (or Lehi).  The total number of those killed by Israelis in Deir Yassin is contested. Some say it was a hundred; contemporary accounts say it was about 250. At the time, news of the atrocities at Deir Yassin, including reports of rape, spread from village to village.

Israeli bombing and forced marches affected the neighboring towns of Lydda and Ramle (or Ramla), between 50,000 and 70,000 Palestinians were forced to march in the heat of the July sun. Their throats parched, their feet blistered, many collapsed on the way and were shot. Israel bulldozed some 530 villages.  Their homes turned to rubble, their olive trees burning, many Palestinians fled with nothing but their house keys, believing that one day they would return. So many died on the way that the march has come to be known as the Lydda death march.

The Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe ) of 1948 displaced some 700,000 to 800,000 Palestinians. Of that number, about 250,000 became refugees in the Gaza Strip, meaning that a substantial number of Gazans are the descendants of refugees. The Nakba, in fact, continues unabated. And, according to PBS reportage, as of May 2024, “More than twice that [700,000] number have been displaced within Gaza since the start of the latest war.” The “latest war” refers of course to what is generally known as the Israel-Hamas war; the name itself is surely one of the highest achievements in the art of doublespeak.

The state of Israel, lying on historical Palestine, has scrubbed away Palestinian existence from maps, from textbooks, and from memory. Palestinian villages carrying Arabic names have been given Hebrew names. Native trees have been replaced with European pine. But pine does not do well in the Near Eastern climate, and when they wither and die, olive trees begin to sprout.

Still in the West Bank, the bulldozers come like clockwork. Medicinal plants like Za’atar,  once part of the everyday cuisine of Palestine, are crushed underfoot by Israeli soldiers. According to Israeli rights groups Peace Now and Kerem Navot, settlers use Palestinian shepherding outposts to seize around 78,600 hectares of land, which amounts to 14 percent of the total area of the West Bank.

The world calls this displacement, but displacement does not smell like burning mattresses or taste like dust from dynamited water tanks. Can displacement capture what it means to be an ER pediatrician forced to attend to the charred bodies of nine of her 10 murdered children?

Colonizers reuse the same old lies. For the European settlers in America, Cherokee territory was “unsettled wilderness.” For Israelis, Palestine was “a land without a people.” Both invoked a civilizing mission. Jackson claimed that removal would save Native Americans from savagery. Zionists said they would make the desert bloom. Today the lie often used is security. Palestinians are terrorists. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

But memory resurfaces like olive trees. Like 193 of 197 living languages in the United States,  Tsalagi, the language of the Cherokee, is on its deathbed, and yet the people know that it is precious and that when it goes something irreplaceable will be lost. Whenever Cherokee immersion language programs are set up, whenever a child is taught a Tsalagi word by her grandmother, there stirs the memory of another time. Sometimes memory is an act of resistance. In Gaza, where bombs have shattered hospitals and schools, children still draw home on scraps of paper, their crayon strokes defiant.

We are told to move on. But how do you move on when the past still lingers? How do you move on when the trail where they cried is not a path that has been left behind but the rut on which the world’s wheels still turn? How do you move on while the Palestinian people are still being butchered?