Palestinians as Native Americans, The Dispossessed Natives Canard, an unfounded analogy

A reoccurring lie regarding the Israeli Palestinian conflict is the false analogy between Palestinians and Native Americans and Australian Aborigines. This analogy claims that the Palestinians are like the Native Americans, an indigenous population dispossessed by people who came to their land by ships. In fact there is not a single comparable point between the Palestinian story and that of the Native Americans and the Australian Aborigines.

To begin with Native Americans and Australian Aborigines never kept white Europeans in ghettos like quarters and taxed them for having a different religion then they had. On the contrary, they welcomed the new arrivals, and helped them adjust to their new surroundings.

However some of those new arrivals did not acknowledge the humanity of their new neighbors and preformed horrific mass murder attacks on them, such as pogroms and massacres.

This kind of behavior is something they brought from Europe. There the ruling/dominant religion or nationality oppressed violently other religions and nationalities. In this Europe the perpetrators and the victims were diverse. Protestants persecuted Catholics and Jews, Catholics persecuted Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Eastern Orthodox, and Eastern Orthodox persecuted Jews, Catholics, and Muslims.

The Muslim world, which ruled parts of Europe for the greater part of the last 1300 years, was no different. It treated minorities and conquered population in the same manner, subjecting Christian, Jews and other branches of Islam, to intolerance, backed on more than one occasion by brutal violence. Violence that was no different then the brutal violence Europeans inflicted on the native populations of the Americas, Africa, and Australia.

Both the Christian world and the Muslim world had produced kingdoms and empires that were authoritarian theocracies, and therefore intolerant and brutal towards those who were different. When nation states emerged from those kingdoms and empires, many of them inherited this conduct, implementing it on neighboring nationalities and conquered nations. Europe’s first colonies were in Europe. And the Ottoman Empire had its colonies in the Balkans, as well as in the Middle East.

Zionism, as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, took the Jews from this vulnerable position, and gave them national sovereignty in their national homeland. There, Jews are able to protect themselves from such violence. In doing so Zionism was a part a world wide anti imperialist effort. One, which included the liberated nations of Europe, de-colonialism, and civil rights movements across the world.
Like all liberation movements, Zionism faced its enemies, as it does today; Enemies that are not much different than past repressors, as the hallmark of deliberately targeting and killing civilians, men, women, and children, repeatedly testifies.