I recently read with interest a polemical essay by Bret Stephens, a Times opinion writer, responding to the frequent charge that Israel is a “settler colonial” state and therefore by implication an illegitimate state. The term is used in some left-wing circles to denote territory in which a native or “indigenous” population has been replaced or overwhelmed by invaders or immigrants. It is not my purpose to re-enter the discussion about the War in Gaza from a particular point of view, nor do I wish to endorse or refute the larger political drift of Mr. Stephens’s essay; but I do want to say a word or two about “settler colonialism,” the process that is in actuality the principal dynamic force in recorded history.
Among European historians there is still in use a German term—Volkswanderung, or the “migration of peoples,” used to describe the gradual demographic construction of what we now call “Europe.” This word is translated in one standard dictionary of American English as “the migration of nations especially the movement into southern and western Europe of the Teutonic peoples, Huns, and Slavs from the 2d century a.d. to about the 11th century reaching the peak in the 5th and 6th centuries and closing with the settling of Norsemen in England and France.”
About twenty-five miles north of the ancient city of York and about one hundred and twenty five miles south of Berwick-upon-Tweed on the border with Scotland is one my favorite British archaeological sites, the ruins of the magnificent Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx. The Cistercians, whose name derive derives from the Order’s mother house at Cîteaux, about fifteen miles south of Dijon in Burgundy, was a major source of spiritual renewal in the twelfth century. The ruined abbey is spectacular, and its larger geographical context one of subtle and changing beauty. In his fine little book Medieval England 1066-1485* the great British medievalist Professor Sir Maurice Powicke invoked this modest stretch of land in the North Riding of Yorkshire, the Vale of Pickering from Rievaulx eastward, as an historical summary of “the curiosity, the invasions of men and things which we call the history of England.” In this one small area there is to be found evidence of prehistoric cromlechs erected by human beings of unknown ethnicity, of multiple Viking raids and permanent settlements, of Pictish slaughter, and Saxon conflict. There are dozens of ancient stone enclosures from many periods in the hundred-mile stretch between Rievaulx and Hadrian’s Wall. Scandinavian influence on the vocabulary of northern English dialects is profound. The history of ancient strife, of invasion, expulsion, resistance and the growth of new communities is written upon the landscape in stone. It is thus in miniature a model for the larger human history of the world, which is the history of “settler colonialism”. The best guess of the population of today’s Europe in the time of Emperor Augustus was about forty-five million. Today it is about eight hundred million. The processes by which this vast increment in human population came about are of course many and complex, but the Volkswanderung has not ceased, nor ceased to have an agonistic dimension, whether on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa or in Eagle Pass, TX.
The
dictionary definition of colonialism is “control by one power over a
dependent area or population.” Broad as it is, this definition is inadequate
to describe the “Arab-Israeli problem.”
If we apply to the situation in the Gaza Strip the normal economic
explanation of colonialism—the desire to exploit for financial gain—the
inadequacy of the definition becomes yet more apparent. The origins of the catastrophe of the "Arab-Israeli" problem are to be found in a series of earlier catastrophes beginning no later than the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius and extending down to and beyond Hitler's Holocaust.
I long ago became dubious about grand historical theories, yet it does seem that in its long development history exhibits certain broad principles. These include at times the ruthless Darwinian principle of the survival of the fittest. It is thus that homo sapiens the species has survived, developed, and adapted over aeons. Is it really true, as Marx and Engels maintained, that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”? John Ball, the egalitarian priest prominent in the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 is credited with the potent distych: “When Adam delved and Eva span/ Who was then the gentle-man?” William Morris and other early Socialists claimed him as an ancestor.
Relatively small advantages in technology could have huge political and social results. How could fifty rough adventurers from Extremadura in an astonishingly brief period of time overcome the mighty Aztec Empire with its thousands of ferocious warriors? How could the Empire of which the conquistadors were a spearhead decay into political debility over a couple of centuries, yet leaving behind around half a billion native speakers of their language? And how could that vast number yet be only roughly a half the number of the native speakers of Chinese?
On the whole the history of the treatment of many American Indians by the European immigrants who eventually overwhelmed them is the history of crimes against humanity. Less well-known, because largely unrecorded, is the widespread ferocious warfare among American tribal groups before they were overwhelmed by European immigrants. I do wish more of our citizens would read our early, now classical historians, William Prescott and especially Francis Parkman. Particularly mind-opening is the second volume of Parkman’s England and France in North America , entitled The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century. Parkman’s principal sources were the eye-witness accounts of Jesuit missionaries intimately familiar with the cultures of and genocidal warfare and barbarous cruelty among various groups of Indian tribes in what is now Québec, Ontario and the contiguous tier of bordering states in this country. The “story” that emerges is often terrible indeed, but it defies the simplism of “land-stealers” and noble savages alike. The annoying complexity of historical reality is what makes “Black Robe” a film of comparative historical integrity and ambition and “Dances with Wolves” a romantic idyll in the lineage of “savage” Romanticism found in Chateaubriand’s Atala or Les Natchez or for that matter Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans.
The high school graduation ceremony of one of my granddaughters, which took place al fresco on a Hudson River venue in lower Manhattan, began with the familiar prohemium recited by the headmaster, that we were gathered on stolen land, the despoiled in this instance being Lenape Indians. This statement of course conflicts with the clear visual evidence of the event in 1626, admittedly recorded some years later by an artist who knew what really happened. The Dutchman Peter Minuit actually bought the island for a handful of bling from an all-purpose treasure chest he never traveled without. As closing on such a choice property was a ceremonial occasion, the seventeenth-century sellers thought it best to wear their nineteenth-century Comanche warrior best. To discern the facetiousness in grave matters is different from taking them lightly. When we accept legend as “history”—whether the legend be the predisposition of the contemporary politically correct or of the nineteenth-century romantic—we are unlikely to be much the wiser.
The “Arab-Israeli conflict” might actually be more tractable were it primarily an issue of “settler colonialism.” In fact, it is of a different and in some ways unique character. Two groups of people lay claim to the same fairly small piece of land which for differing reasons—history, religious conviction, the approbation or disapprobation of the world community, or the principle of the Caucasian Chalk Circle—they believe is theirs by right. The certainty and passion with which such beliefs are acted upon lie behind the absolutely unconscionable barbarity of the Hamas attack of October 7 and the unconscionable “collateral” slaughter attendant upon the Israeli military response. There are by now perhaps twenty thousand or more killed, mostly women and children, among the Gazan population. And this “episode” is but one—albeit a sensational one--of many in the course of my own lifetime. And, alas, the bitterness of this conflict, its continuing incubation of long invested hatreds, its recurrently sanguinary episodes, and the apparent ineffectiveness of the international community, have themselves become perpetuating motives for its continuation. But the simplistic phrase “settler colonialism” does little to explain, and nothing to resolve. Pray for more plowshares, fewer spears.
BEFORE AND AFTER IN PALESTINE
Beit Hanoun, Gaza (BBC photo)
*London 1948, in the popular series “Home University Library” intended for a general audience, with several later reprintings.
