Shared History, Shared Defiance

[Violet_Crumble]

by Ramzy Baroud
June 18, 2005

They say that if you don't learn from history, you will be condemned to repeat it. This could not be truer when one contrasts the destinies of the Native Americans and the Palestinian people. The determination and defiance of both groups, under dire circumstances, cannot be matched. Likewise, the mistreatment and the commonality in tactics and principals implemented by their invaders seem uncanny.

Lets take a brief look into history:

Few can be as blunt regarding the legacy of the United States toward the native people of this land as the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. In his narrative, "The Winning of the West," Roosevelt spoke about the "spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world's wasted spaces." He wrote: "The European settlers moved into an uninhabited waste...the land is really owned by no one.... The settler ousts no one from the land. The truth is, the Indians never had any real title to the soil."

In an interview with the British Sunday Times, on June 15, 1969, former Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir made similar claims, stating, "There was no such thing as Palestinians. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist."

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"The people of Jenin do not hate Israelis because their names are different, or because their language is different. Nor do they hate them because they have anything against the Jewish religion, but because they are occupiers, and as long as they are occupiers, the resistance will go on. The Palestinian resistance shall live as long as the occupation lives."

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=8105