Israel’s behavior is an evergreen source of interest to the United Nations and lately the two organizations have been in the news. My Hillary-supporting Facebook friends have been out in front of this, praising Obama and criticizing Israel for building houses on land won during the 68-year war that has followed the Arab rejection of the UN’s proposed 1947 borders. I respond with “Let me know to which Indian tribe you’re going to be giving your house, and please do send me your new address in Manhattan, which I understand was legally purchased.”
How did we actually behave in our own Occupied Territories when the occupation was fresh? The Pulitzer Prize-winning Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People answers this question to some extent:
Ancestral Mandans appeared in what is now South Dakota around 1000 C.E.17 Their arrival in the Missouri River valley coincided with a major climatic shift: a trend toward warmer, wetter conditions in the years from 900 to 1250. The trend extended far beyond the grasslands of North America. In Europe, these centuries coincide with the Medieval Warm Period, an era in which painters depicted bountiful harvest feasts, Norse settlers built colonies in Greenland and America, and peasants expanded their fields onto lands formerly too cold, high, or dry to plant crops.
CROW CREEK VILLAGE, SOUTH DAKOTA, MID-1400s The site of this ancient village overlooks the Missouri River in south-central South Dakota, eleven miles north of the modern town of Chamberlain. The land today belongs to the Crow Creek Sioux, but during much of the 1300s and 1400s its occupants were Caddoan-speaking newcomers—refugees or descendants of refugees from the drought on the central plains. And at some point in the mid-fifteenth century, something terrible happened here.* The community was fortified by location and design. Naturally protected by the river and two smaller waterways, the town also had defenses constructed by its residents. Keen eyes still can discern the low-lying trace of two dry moats the townspeople dug for protection. The inner moat was bastioned and backed up with a palisade. The outer moat may not have had a palisade, but its ten bastions are still visible if you follow its course across the ground. At one time, this trench was six feet deep and twelve or more feet wide.27 These concentric fortifications indicate that the community went through a period of growth. Archaeologists think the settlers created the inner ditch and its palisade first. But twelve house sites in the gap between the two trenches suggest that the population eventually became too big to fit inside the first ditch. When this happened, residents dug the second one beyond it, enlarging the fortified area of their village. One calculation puts the town’s population at 831. The defense system clearly indicates that Crow Creek’s residents felt threatened from outside. And indeed they must have been, because at some point their town came under attack. The identity of the assailants is not known, but their actions were ferocious. In 1978, archaeologists unearthed at least 486 jumbled sets of human remains from the northwest end of the outer fortification ditch. If the ancient town’s population was 831, those bones represented the remains of nearly 60 percent of its residents. The end has to have been gruesome. Mutilated craniums indicate that the attackers scalped 90 percent of their victims and dealt skull-fracturing blows to 40 percent. They decapitated nearly one-quarter. A number of townspeople had limbs hacked off. Cut marks on jawbones indicate that some had their tongues cut from their mouths.
… warfare and hunting took a toll on Mandan men. When the anthropologist Alfred Bowers polled the Mandans in 1870–72, he found that women outnumbered men nearly two to one. The painter-ethnographer George Catlin estimated “two and sometimes three women to a man” when he visited the upper Missouri in 1832.
Life was kind of tough before the White Man showed up, but we brought rats to eat their corn supplies and smallpox:
The rats multiplied at a rate hard for human beings to comprehend. Some wild rats live as long as three years, but one year is average. Brief though it may be, that twelve-month life span is sufficient for a female brown rat to accomplish impressive reproductive feats. She reaches sexual maturity at three to four months and then is virtually sure to conceive each time she is fertile, for during a single six-hour fertile period she might mate as many as five hundred times. After she has mated successfully, pregnancy lasts about twenty-three days, and she can breed again less than twenty-four hours after delivering. A normal litter yields six to eight pups, and a typical female has seven litters a year, or roughly fifty offspring.
For the Mandans, the proportion of losses [from smallpox] was highest of all. Chardon estimated seven-eighths of them were dead. Joshua Pilcher reported that just 31 of 1,600 survived. The Jesuit father Pierre-Jean de Smet, who traveled to Council Bluffs in 1838 and then to the Rockies in 1840, heard that the scourge had reduced the Mandans “to thirty-two, others say to nineteen only!”
Lack of recent exposure [to smallpox] was not the only reason that Mandans were so vulnerable. When Catlin had taken the Yellow Stone upriver to the Mandans five years earlier, two physicians—participants in a new federal effort to vaccinate Native Americans against smallpox—had joined the passengers at Fort Leavenworth. With the help of military personnel, they immunized many of the nations below the Arikaras. Some individuals chose not to submit to the strange procedure, developed in England by Edward Jenner in 1796. But those who were vaccinated included 2,081 Omahas, Otoes, Sioux, and Pawnees. By February 1833, more than seventeen thousand had been vaccinated nationwide. The Mandans and Hidatsas were not among them, nor were the Crows, Blackfeet, Crees, or Assiniboines. Why? The immunization effort had gotten off to a late start in 1832, with winter closing in while the vaccinators were still in South Dakota. “Many individuals were not vaccinated owing to lack of time,” writes the historian Michael Trimble. The physicians asked to continue their work among the more northerly nations the next year, but the commissioner of Indian affairs turned them down. In fact, federal authorities intentionally excluded the northern tribes from the vaccination campaign. They deemed the villagers peripheral, and expendable as well. “Under any circumstances, no effort will be made to send a Surgeon higher up the Missouri than the Mandans, and I think not higher than the Arikaras,” wrote Secretary of War Lewis Cass to the Indian agent John Dougherty on May 9, 1832. The Mandans had lost their economic clout. The fur trade was fading, and their association with the Arikaras had tainted the Mandans as hostile. In an observation shaped by these changes in circumstance and perception, Cass proclaimed that the Indians of the upper Missouri were now “far beyond the operation of any causes, primary or secondary, which can be traced to civilised man.”
The Mandans do survive today (Wikipedia), with roughly 365 “full-blood” members.
More: read Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People.
Even if we accept the argument that opposing West Bank settlement building today while indirectly benefiting from crimes committed during the U.S. settlement of North America is a pernicious hypocrisy, this argument does not explain why it is acceptable for Israel to build settlements on private land taken by force during military occupation.
Neal: To which tribe are you giving your house?
philg: Why it is acceptable for Israel to build settlements on private land taken by force during military occupation?
Neal: Let’s assume that it is not acceptable for Israelis to make use of land won following the military conflict that was started in 1947-1948. You live in North America, right? Nearly all of the land here was won via military conflict with various Indian tribes. So if it is not acceptable for Israelis it should not be acceptable for us? Instead of busying yourself condemning Israelis, why not instead work on giving your own house back to the rightful owners?
Philip: I think we all the point you’re making. We get it dude: many of the same people complaining about Israel are annoying liberals, and you wish they’d just stop complaining about Israel.
But, I think you can also reasonably delineate between: something that happened in ‘the modern era’, 70 years ago; and something that happened ‘in the distant past’, i.e. 150 years ago.
History is replete with people doing horrible things to other people. Every major empire basically conquered its subject peoples, forced them to do things they didn’t want to do, took their land, mineral resources, enslaved them, etc. That’s pretty much the story of humanity. This doesn’t mean that these people are wholly contemptible. You can read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and respect the Stoic philosophy while also acknowledging that the Romans were a pretty harsh, brutal people. You can delight in the writings of Jefferson while also acknowledging that he owned slaves. Actions have context! Someone owning slaves 200 years ago is very different than someone owning slaves today.
I believe that moral progress is possible.
So, what does this have to do with the Israeli occupation? Some folks think that such occupations are illegal, and that the status quo is sort of grandfathered in, but no new conquering or annexation should be permitted. I think that’s a valid way to think about the world — there was bad thing which happened in the past, we won’t do it any more in the future, but finding a way to unravel all the bad is such a pain that we’re going to just move on. Sometimes societies do this (see the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa as a relatively productive way to move beyond Apartheid).
Personally, I think Israel is right on the fringe here. I personally support the only island of democracy and normalcy in the middle east, and am incredibly impressed by the accomplishments of modern Israel. That said, I can acknowledge that there are legitimate reasons to disapprove of a country conquering territory in this manner, even if the other side started the war first.
philg: Looking back on my comments I don’t find anything which could be remotely characterized as “busying yourself condemning israelis”. I was, in fact, addressing what I thought was an argument implied by your blog post. If we are to assume that Israeli settlement building is not acceptable then I misunderstood and withdraw my argument. It seems that we actually agree that both Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and (at least some of) what occurred during the U.S. settlement of North America was not acceptable. As to your argument that me “giving your own house back to the rightful owners” is the only possible way to address both of these injustices, I think it is fairly obvious that there are other potential solutions. If you can provide a decent argument that me giving my “house back to the rightful owners” is in fact better for all concerned than any possible alternative, then I will accept your condemnation as a hypocrite for resisting it.
PN: If you want to adjust for whether the land was won in a 70-year-old war or a 150-year-old war, why not also adjust for the quantity of improperly appropriated territory? If we give any weight to the acreage we might find that present-day North Americans are more deserving of criticism than present-day Israelis. All of the American Indians whom I have met are reasonable people. If we gave them back their land and the structures we’ve illegally built on that land, I am pretty sure that they would rent it back to us at a fair price.
philg: PN also said “but no new conquering or annexation should be permitted”. What about territory for which improper appropriation is currently in progress or being planned?
That’s a great standard, Neal, for people who live in improperly appropriated real estate. It is certainly a happy coincidence that the only misappropriation worth looking at is ongoing and/or future! (Though by that standard the Israelis may well be covered because their military victory over the territory in question was in 1967.)
philg: No injustice can be corrected until every injustice is corrected. That is a happy standard for anyone who is intent on committing new injustices or avoiding accountability for old ones. The same logic would apply in both directions: We can’t look at Israelis living on misappropriated land because there are Americans are living on misappropriated land and we can’t look at Americans living on misappropriated land because there are Israelis living on misappropriated land. This sounds absurd on its face, have I missed something?
>It is certainly a happy coincidence
>that the only misappropriation
>worth looking at is ongoing and/or future!
That would certainly be a ridiculous assertion, I’m glad I didn’t make it.
>Though by that standard the Israelis
>may well be covered because their
>military victory over the territory
>in question was in 1967.
Acquisition of the private land used for settlement building (by force) has been a continuous process which is ongoing today.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/ban-ki-moon-united-nations-disproportionate-israel-focus-resolutions-palestinians-human-rights-danny-a7481961.html
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said the organisation has a “disproportionate” volume of resolutions against Israel, which he believes has “foiled the ability of the UN to fulfill its role effectively”.
During this time the UN passed 223 resolutions condemning Israel, while only eight resolutions condemning the Syrian regime as it has massacred its citizens over the past six years.
I think it is interesting that none of the comments are about the main subject of the original posting, i.e., the Mandan Indians and their interactions with Europeans. Everyone wants to talk about Jews 5000 miles away instead!
Is “by right of conquest” not a thing anymore? It worked pretty well in 1066.
When did the “modem era” begin? Was it before or after 14 million Germans were evacuated and expelled from what is now Poland? Or does the statute of limitations only take effect 20 minutes before the start of the Arab-Israeli wars?
Phil I am with you. Let’s stop worrying about the Israelis and start giving our houses back to their rightful owners. Do you think I could get a refund on the property taxes I have paid to the US government for many years? And also how do I find the appropriate Tongva Indian to give my house to they do not seem to have a website! This is really great!
The past is here to learn from it, not to be stuck in it.
The Middle East is stuck in the past, this is why there wasn’t and never will be peace in the Middle East.
E.g.: don’t blame me about my grand, grand, grand, … grandfather for insulting, et. al., your, grand, grand, grand, … grandfather, or preach me how they invented mathematics, et. al. Those are good “stories”, period. Lecture me about what you and your kids are achieving today.
My take: set up a fund to buy properties from settlers. If you pay at market (or above) value, I bet many if not most would sell, leaving the charitable trust owning the place to give it to whomever. Before anybody says “that’s rewarding whatever behaviour/moral stance”, do you want to keep carping or do you want to solve the issue?
(I do know a lot of religious nutjobs would not sell, but once the sane settlers are gone (the ones stuck because the cannot buy a house in Israel proper) you can increase the offer, until settlers are so few that it is utterly uneconomical for Israel to keep Tzahal to defend the few hard core mentals. Then the Israeli taxpayers will dismantle the settlements themselves).
toucan sam: I think you actually would have to give the Indians cash, not take some from them, to make the property tax issue fair. If you consider property tax as payment for government services, such as police, fire, and schools, then you’ve been underpaying due to the fact that pension obligations were not fully funded. If the Indians are on the hook to pay for $100k+/year pensions for retired government workers then the returned houses should come with a cash fund as well.
Would it more lucrative for a young Native American woman to accept a free house given to them by a rich American male wanting to make amends for having the ill-gotten house or to have a one-night stand with the rich American male?
What are the laws in South Dakota?
http://www.realworlddivorce.com/SouthDakota says that it tough for a child support plaintiff to get more than $25,212 per year. That’s about 5X the current level of profit available in Germany, but much less than in some other U.S. states.
This is a pretty dumb comparison. The Levant was thickly settled with modern farming operations and taken through military conquest.
A sparse American Indian population was mostly absorbed into a vastly larger and rapidly growing white population, not expelled or murdered. Land was also very frequently purchased. This is not to deny there were brutal indian wars of conquest and a massacre here and there, but that’s not characteristic of what happened across the north american continent. The abbos were subsumed.
For the histories to be comparable the zionist would have high intermarriage rates with the palestinians and for the most part they would have bought or settled the land they’re on now without forcing anyone off.
Personally, I don’t care whom the Israelis kill and I wish them well in their project. I just don’t want a single cent of American money or diplomatic capital involved in it. We have zero strategic interests in the levant. Why Americans hand Israel billions annually and go to bat for them at the UN and in the region is a mystery to me. Well, actually it’s not a mystery, but I look forward to seeing the agents who make it happen defenestrated. It’s coming pretty soon, I think.
We get to be concerned about settlement building in Israel because we are giving them 36 billion dollars over the next 10 years. If we were serious about stopping the settlements, we would “fine them” for each settlement, the fines to be taken out of the 36 billion. As it is, everybody seems to be happy but us. The Israelis get our money, the Palestinians get U.N. money, everybody talks about the peace process, and nothing ever changes.
@Phil: this Israeli would like to thank you for expressing your view of the issue.
To everyone (justly) complaining about the US giving money to Israel: 75 cents of every dollar taken from the US taxpayer are pocketed by US corporations who charge the IDF 4x the market price for their goods purchased with aid dollars, and plenty of Israelis would very much like this to stop; do realize however that this is due to the US corporations bribing your politicians so as to steal your money, and our politicians helping them doing this in exchange for stealing another 1/3rd of the amount stolen by the corporations.
Yossi: It is all logically consistent. When the U.S. buys a fighter jet for the USAF it is 90-percent waste and the transaction happens because of the military contractor’s lobbyists plus bribing the right senators and representatives with campaign donations, jobs in their districts, etc. When the U.S. buys the same fighter jet for the IDF, the boost to the Israeli economy accounts for nearly all of Israel’s GDP growth.
I recently finished a biography of Ulysses S. Grant and it describes the spectacular scale of land thievery that the U.S. engaged in circa 1848 via our war against Mexico. I haven’t heard anyone suggesting giving back California or Texas, though!