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American historian, writer, professor and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz uses her studies on indigenous peoples’ history and her work with Palestinian diplomats and the United Nations to show how historic “settler colonialism” like in the United States relates to Gaza today. Dunbar-Ortiz makes the case, on this Thanksgiving edition of the Scheer Intelligence podcast, that inherent in that settler colonialism are the various definitions of genocide.
“Inherent in settler colonialism is genocide because it wants to destroy or completely control every aspect of life of the people they push off. The United States was the most effective settler colonial state ever in terms of the genocide of the reducing the native population hugely,” Dunbar-Ortiz said.
The plight of the Native Americans in what is now the United States serves as a base for understanding the motivations, actions and justifications for settler colonialism by the West. The war in Palestine, Dunbar-Ortiz argues, contains many similar elements employed, where the core objective of the occupying force isn’t even to necessarily kill everyone—although a strong argument can be made that this is ongoing too—but to see a group of people have their identity obliterated.
The hard resistance to seeing this situation as it is in the eyes of some Americans, Dunbar-Ortiz reasons, comes from a justification for America’s history of the same crimes:
“[T]here’s a lot of resonance, I think, in the U.S. white population, especially descendants of old settlers, which most presidents are. They feel a resonance with Israel because of settler colonialism, because it is the geographical imprint on U.S. people that settler colonialism is a good thing.”
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This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.
Robert Scheer Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guest, and this time someone whose work I know well and actually know personally, a former and retired professor at Cal State Hayward, sorry, it’s still early for me, who has written maybe some the most important, certainly among the most important books about Native American culture, life and oppression in the United States, it’s long list. And we’ve done podcasts before, but I want to talk to you now and I want to interrogate—that’s the word they use in the communications field where I teach—the concept of settler colonialism. And when I first encountered this, I thought, well, that’s a pretty accurate description of what happened in the United States and in other parts of the world where, you know, a powerful external population enters the situation, takes it over and forms a colonial rule.
And when it was applied to Native Americans most people seem to accept that as an accurate description, it wasn’t a source of controversy. However, when it got applied, by a significant number of scholars, to Israel’s occupation of where Palestinians had long lived in the West Bank and Gaza and actually parts of Israel, current Israel, certainly it became associated with the anti-Semitism, people could be fired over it. So the reason I wanted to talk to you is, yes, it’s Thanksgiving and we should make comments and analyze what happened to our native population but really, I would like to also… Why don’t you tell us about this idea of settler colonialism? Where did it come from in the academic world and how do you feel about it and finally how do you apply it to what’s going on right now with Israel and the Palestinian people?
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Thanks. You know, actually, I learned about settler colonialism before I had applied it to the United States. And I learned from two people, one a Palestinian that I met at the University of Oklahoma, and two, [inaudible], a South African, Anglo, white, South African born and raised there for generations, I think. And he was one of the main anti-apartheid academics and we went to UCLA together. And it was interesting because I didn’t immediately apply it at all to the United States until much later when I became a full fledged historian. And because of what was happening in Israel, just the behavior was very much like a settler state. It’s inherently violent, it has to be because it has to oppress the usually majority population, that the idea is to do away with them completely. And this was practiced, of course, in the United States 100 year war in the 19th century, I call it the 100 year war from founding to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, when Indian resistance no longer possible because they were locked up into reservations with armies around them.
So they began, of course, in the 20th century, resisting by legal means, as we’ve seen the Palestinians tried to do. And, of course, the Palestinians have had access to the U.N. And I’ve done a lot of work at the UN as a non-governmental human rights volunteer, you know, never paid job, but starting in 1977 when the International Indian Treaty Council took the Sioux Treaty to the United Nations and we built… many, many parts of the U.N. now have these meetings. And there’s a general assembly of native people that brings about 20,000 people annually, the largest meeting in the United Nations headquarters. So we always, at the U.N. working with the Treaty Council and with other organizations, were in support of Palestine. And statehood, you know, that this was, you know, still the agreement of statehood, establishing statehood. So we kept learning, the first representative we met from the PLO was the [inaudible] who was older, he was probably, I think, going on 70 back in 1977 when we met him. He was an emigre leaving, his family was pushed out in 1948 and they settled in Brazil. So he was also Portuguese speaking. Very wonderful man. He was so good about, I mean, they had their, of course, their serious problems, but so patiently sitting down with all of us and teaching us how to use the U.N. instruments at the U.N. They were very practiced by then. So I learned so much just on a 1 to 1 basis with the diplomats. And then when I spent a year in Geneva, the UN, all of the European Palestinian diplomats, who at that time in the 1980s, I don’t know if you remember, the assassinations that Israel ordered to kill every Palestinian diplomat.
And they killed, I don’t know, a dozen or so. They were great, effective diplomats and I knew some of them. So when the Palestinian delegate, the PLO would not allow him to ride busses, only taxis, that where he knew the taxi driver to come back and forth in Geneva and he had to walk alone so that if he was shot at it wouldn’t, you know, kill anyone else. And I walked with him because I said, I’m ready to die with you, you know. So I often accompanied him, walking to his, after the U.N. and listening to his experiences and stories. I think his family were refugees in Germany and France, he is French speaking. So that, you know, my own experience has just been very personal and up front from 1956 when I met [inaudible] at Oklahoma University. So I read “What Price Isreal?” which was published during that time and is still one of the best books on them. [Alfred] Lilienthal, a Jewish academic, who predicted everything that’s happened now in that book.
Scheer You were there then, a year before the so-called Six-Day War, which was a preemptive war. I think the record is pretty clear now or claimed to be a preemptive war by Israel facing what they said was an army of Egypt and Jordan. They had state power and they had some backing from other Arab countries who had the Golan Heights and so forth. And the irony of that—and I do want to ask you about this assassination business, because actually I’m not familiar with that—but the irony of the current situation is that Israel’s justification of the Six-Day War was that they faced an existential threat from Egypt, Jordan, Syria and other Arab countries. The Palestinian population, the part that existed in what was then Israel. I went there right after the Six-Day War, and a number of those people that I interviewed had actually given their blood to the Israeli army, and they basically supported the government.
And they actually thought that their compatriots living in Egyptian occupied the Gaza Strip and Jordanian occupied West Bank might actually fare better with the Labor government of Israel, it’s a far cry from Netanyahu, that was an illusion. And the irony is that the Palestinians had not fought against Israel. They were, in effect, an occupied people in the sense that they had no statehood and they are the only people that were held accountable by Israel, which made a peace with Egypt, made a peace to Jordan. So it’s such a distorted history. But again, there are pieces of it that I think I followed this closely, tell me, you were saying that when you were working there at the UN, there was an active Israeli program to assassinate the Palestinian leadership?
Dunbar-Ortiz Yeah, actually a movie was made about it, which was a pro-Israeli movie. I can’t remember what the name of it. It was a kind of blockbuster movie back in probably the late 80s that was bragging on it, that these were terrorists. Of course, the Israeli governments always referred to Palestinians as terrorists and almost subhuman. It’s very much like settler colonialism in the United States. Inherent in settler colonialism is genocide because it wants to destroy or completely control every aspect of life of the people they push off. The United States was the most effective settler colonial state ever in terms of the genocide of the reducing the native population hugely. But if you really look at it, I’m not very good at mathematics, but I was actually looking at percentages, the percentage of the Palestinian population that is being extinguished is not that far off, you know, from the native population.
It’s not so much death always, but simply people having to leave to live, to exist. So moving out to the US and Europe and various places, so there are so many people in the diaspora who all work for Palestine, you know, favor Palestine, are activists, but they’re not there on the ground. And I think that’s what Israel’s goal was, to make it so difficult to live there, they would just leave. And that is the goal of settler colonialism. I’ve also studied, I actually got a diploma in International Human Rights and Humanitarian law and one of the things in Strasbourg, it’s a special program that you get a diploma in it and one of the things I learn about very deeply is the genocide convention. And it’s so much applies to what’s happening there right now. We are on television watching a genocide being played out. And you go look at the many, many movies made about European genocide, Nazi genocide, it resonates. What you see and the language of people, you know, of government officials have been genocidal in this since October 7th.
They just outright say they want them to leave, too. They want to clean out Gaza, not let people come back, I think, so that they have to go somewhere else. So it’s very serious and I don’t use genocide as lightly as as a description of something. I think there have been very few actual genocides. Some people think there was genocide in Cambodia but actually, the only genocide charges by the International Tribunal for Genocide were the ethnic minorities, because it has to be a group that is persecuted by another group. So the Cambodians were in a civil war among themselves, actually one sided.
Scheer You’re talking about the Pol Pot massacre.
Dunbar-Ortiz Yes and they were punished for war crimes, these were war crimes, but not genocide, because genocide is exactly what Israel is doing, exactly what United States did, exactly what the British did in Northern Ireland. And, you know, initially back in the 16th century of bringing Scots and Welsh and English settlers to simply tell them they can just push out the Irish farmers, small farmers and take their land. And then the Irish, the indigenous Irish, were working as sharecroppers and no longer had land. And that’s why Northern Ireland today, it’s still an issue.
These things don’t go away easily and in South Africa, the genocide… 1948 is when both Israel and the Afrikaner apartheid governments took power and became… South Africa was already a state but they divided, they put native people on [inaudible] so that they became the majority population. They made them stateless and have to be careful, you know, about statehood. Palestinians have been very careful because they really studied the South African apartheid genocide and don’t want to be in that position of just having a little, you know, Bantustans, their own state. Whereas when people talk about the two state solution, well, here’s Palestine without an army, without even an armed resistance movement other than Hamas, which is a weak, although armed because it’s so fundamentalist Muslim, you know, and not Hamas government is… But it’s the only thing we have right now.
Scheer Let me push back a little bit. I’m here to try to understand settler colonialism. And I think the word genocide is not just the ethnic cleansing, another phrase that’s used where you, I shouldn’t say not just, I mean making people refugees and risking their lives and killing them by forced travel and exodus, if you want the biblical reference, is not child’s play. It leads to the destruction of a people, whether you call it reservations or you put them in the Sinai Desert. And that’s the goal, to drive to get Egypt to go along. And you suddenly have 2.3 million Palestinians living out the desert and eventually they will die from illness and so forth. But I will concede that what the Germans did under the Nazi leadership, the deliberate killing of vast numbers of the Other, the Jew. At this moment, I don’t want to explore genocide and I can understand why that word raises a red flag.
However, you could push back too, but in our limited time here, I actually want to get to this idea of settler colonialism, because I think the objection to settler colonialism is that it’s all too accurate. And therefore, the people who are presenting a propagandistic view of Israel’s needs and security and so forth, they don’t like that phrase because it so obviously fits. I want to bring it back to the experience of Native Americans, because we’re talking about a very common phenomena that involves the dehumanization of people, a denial of their culture, a denial of, in the case of Native Americans, that they had a complex culture that preserved the Earth, you’ve written books about this. You’re one of the leading authorities and I think that fit of settler colonialism is objected to so vociferously because it’s really difficult to deny its accuracy.
Dunbar-Ortiz Okay. Well, the thing is that settler colonialism is inherently genocidal, so you have to talk about the genocide convention.
Scheer Okay.
Dunbar-Ortiz When the genocide convention wasn’t drawn up and you can read over every part of it. It’s taking children from the group, they don’t have to kill, in fact, you don’t have to kill anyone to commit genocide under that convention. And that was very, very intentional because you had a history of pogroms against Jews from the Middle Ages. And so what Ralph Lenkin, who wrote the genocide convention, a Polish jurist, Jewish, who escaped the Holocaust by getting to Scandinavia.
Scheer Can you give us the name again?
Dunbar-Ortiz Ralph Lenkin. L e n k i n. He brought it up to the U.N. and he was the main person who wrote it. So taking children from the group, you know, like the Indian boarding schools, that’s an act of genocide. Forcibly taking them with the intent of not allowing them to go back. So boarding schools fit perfectly within that and Canada and the United States, also Australia and New Zealand, but also creating conditions that make it impossible for the group to remain an entity with its own organizational principles. So there are five acts of genocide, and none of them require death necessarily, although killing is one of five, that’s one aspect of genocide. So it’s very important that this genocide convention… The worst crime ever committed, which was the Holocaust, it is the worst crime ever committed in a space of time, in a limited space of time. You have a century it took, to create the genocide, you know, the long genocide of Native Americans. But the genocide convention covers that.
The only thing is the United States didn’t ratify it or Congress didn’t approve, the Senate didn’t approve it. Truman ratified it. Truman signed it. But Congress, in their discussions were afraid that slavery, you know, black people would charge genocide internationally or the Indians who were killed off. I have the the Senate records said that have these conversations and public information. So it was 1988, Reagan you would think that was strange but he was very good friends with Deukmejian who was the governor of California at the time and Deukmejian, because he was Armenian, the Armenian genocide, he convinced Reagan to push the Senate to sign it, to ratify it. But nothing before that that the United States is done is covered by the genocide convention. So they put it off enough, although I do think there are conditions now in the United States that can be, that could be just… the effects of the earlier genocide still live in current conditions, and native people have no permanent authority. They do not own the land. They’re on reservations, that much atrophied land that was finally granted to them. They don’t own it. It’s in trust. All it would take is Congress passing a bill saying it no longer exists. Native people are not native people anymore. They’re just U.S. citizens, which was what Reagan recommended to them. Why can’t they just join us?
Scheer I’m sorry, Reagan recommended?
Dunbar-Ortiz Well, when Reagan visited the Soviet Union and he went and spoke to one of the universities, a question came up. What does he think of the genocide against the Indians? And he said, well, we want them. We tell them, just come and join us. Just come and join us and be a part of us. Why do you… You’re Americans. They’re Americans. You know, So that’s a genocidal statement, actually. You know, you don’t exist, you don’t exist in your own right.
Scheer Yeah, but this is something you mentioned before, well back to the Palestinians, a one state solution, which some people favor, would very simply depend upon granting the Palestinians a vote over who governs them. This is something that seems to get lost all the time and that you could have a country in which you have a strong, maybe majority Jewish population, but you can’t guarantee it. And that doesn’t mean the Jewish population wouldn’t break into different groups and make alliances with Christian and Muslim people and so forth, which would you would expect. There is left and right among the Jewish population as well as among the Palestinian, Arab or Christian population.
But this idea of and it’s interesting, you put it in the context of genocide, an alternative to the killing of people and driving them into the desert or to concentration camps would be to at least guaranteed the basic human rights of individual power over your government through the vote. And very few people seem to discuss that now, because I have to say, when I went there at the time of the Six-Day War and wrote about it for Ramparts, at the time I thought there won’t be a viable Palestinian state really, and Israel will never accept what it said was this other boundary. What about one person, one vote? That gets lost all the time? Now, I don’t think that leads to the disappearance of people. But it might mean they don’t have a religious or ethnic basis to the power in their state. Are you suggesting that would be wrong?
Dunbar-Ortiz No, I think the thing is that we have a really heavy duty here in the United States because it would take United States backing the U.N. to observe, it would take what they finally did, you know, in South Africa would, if the U.N. was much stronger then, but they didn’t allow them to seat. You know, they kicked them out of the United Nations. And Israel is, only when there’s any kind of vote in the U.N. that is about human rights or anything, not just about Israel, there are two countries that oppose it in the General Assembly, Israel and the United States. So which of those are the strongest? It’s going to take us pushing our government. The Palestinians have limited power to do that. It’s get off their neck, United States, you know, stop sending arms. They give more aid to Israel per capita than any other country in the world. Sudan, where people are starving, they and Israel really can only have profits because, you know, there’s so much subsidizing of them so that, yes, one vote, absolutely. But that means for empowering the Palestinians and Israel to change fundamentally.
Scheer Right, but taking a back to the Native American experience. That was sort of the cop out. As opposed to describing Native Americans in the Declaration of Independence as savages.
Dunbar-Ortiz Merciless savages.
Scheer Merciless savages in our declaration. Norman Lear, the great man who changed television, had bought a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and he brought it to my class at USC. We actually had one of the originals, and he was showing around the country, his intentions were that there’s a lot of good stuff in there, as in our Constitution. And one of my students came up to me after and said, do you realize that Native Americans are described as savages and I said, you know what? Yeah. I went and looked at the actual, you know, one of the original copies and I said, My God, how come I didn’t know that? How come? And now, until this moment, I’d forgotten or didn’t pay attention that it said merciless. But the point is, at least in this country, once we ended segregation, racial segregation, officially, that at least you could be incorporated. What I want to be clear about here and that’s why I don’t like saying that the whole issue should be around the use of this word genocide.
And I think the settler colonial phenomena is really more illustrative of the problem, that Israel is not willing to risk a democratic society in the sense of each person having equal worth as far as the political process. That is really the issue. It’s the preservation of a Jewish majority, no matter its cost to the basic Democratic principle. And even the Palestinians in Israel, when I visited, did not have anything like full rights. They were legal in what was the original territory of Israel. But they you know, they gave their blood to the military. They were not allowed to be in the military; very, very severe limits on their powers. So that is an aspect of this that in an odd way, at least Native Americans in this country came to have the choice of assimilation. It’s not something Israel has offered to people that they’ve held in their power for, what, seven decades now?
Dunbar-Ortiz Well, you know, for Native Americans, there’s no such thing as a Native American or American Indian or an Indian. There are 500 different nations. There are nations. Many of them want to be nation states. They have not assimilated. They want their languages. They each have a different language, not a common language. They each have a different language. They each have different locations. And, you know, from east, west, north to south. They each have different practices, you know, so there is a you know, they have come together, let’s say, just because there’s a Council of Europe or economic gathering, those nations don’t lose their specific languages or, you know, even boundaries and so forth. So we have to understand that, about Native Americans, is they don’t want to assimilate.
That is what was proposed to them, was give up the reservations and assimilate and in the 1950s, ’54, they terminated native status. And this then actually caused an uprising of native people. It had been active, but they hadn’t really been able to organize themselves from the devastation and the genocide and the boarding schools were still going on and they were losing their languages and all. So they rose up and when this legislation was passed to terminate them and it took them from 1956 to 1975, including Wounded Knee and Alcatraz uprisings all over the country to get it reversed with the Indian Self-Determination Act. And this took enormous resistance; more than 300 Native people had felonies and misdemeanors after Wounded Knee. We had trials for several years. That’s how I got involved with the Indian movement as an expert witness. I got recruited as an expert witness in ’73, ’74, and that so we got through a self determination…
Scheer And still in prison, too. I mean, leaders of the…
Dunbar-Ortiz Oh, yeah. Leonard Peltier.
Scheer We should mention that. Why don’t you tell us about that?
Dunbar-Ortiz Leonard Peltier. With the American Indian Movement… The Pine Ridge government was a well the people say that there are these what in Latin America they call [inaudible]. And in Africa they called, I can’t remember the term they use, but these are native people who aligned themselves, in India tt was the Raj, that actually keep the people down. And that was an extreme situation at Wounded Knee where a dictator, literally a dictator who took away all rights and was, you know, supported by the Nixon administration. So they had the, you know, the Wounded Knee uprising to overthrow him. And it was successful, they were able to overthrow him even though 300 people had charges against them. The leaders, some of them had to serve a little time. But we actually got more than 350 of them freed, you know, through a through a process in federal court and I was involved in that.
Scheer Well the FBI was complicit.
Dunbar-Ortiz Oh, the FBI was central. That was the police force. That was the police force of Indians, is the FBI. Because it’s a federal colony, basically the federal colonies, they don’t have total self-determination. They have their local governments and they’ve gotten more and more power, like for women who are raped or killed on the reservation. It used to be the FBI did nothing to investigate it. So they really got through the Senate, that the law enforcement people in the reservation could actually prosecute because they’re not allowed to prosecute felonies. Indians aren’t allowed by the act in 1890 or 1880 or so that still exists, only misdemeanors. So they have a limited power even to control anyone who comes on to the reservation. It’s just a bright red light saying, come here, any rapist or pervert and do anything you want to the women on the reservation, they’re walking down a road and here comes someone you know who grabs them, put them in the car and takes them off the reservation. And either puts them into prostitution or just rapes them and leaves them or kills them. So this is a huge problem that has been taken up by Deb Haaland, who’s the secretary of interior now. She’s from [inaudible] pueblo in New Mexico. But we don’t know…
Scheer So tell us…
Dunbar-Ortiz We don’t get so much information of these things, you know?
Scheer Right. And, you know, I didn’t mean before to say that assimilation was a good thing. It’s better than being killed.
Dunbar-Ortiz But it is being killed.
Scheer Right.
Dunbar-Ortiz It’s your culture being killed.
Scheer Yeah. I’m endorsing your point, and I’m criticizing myself. But the illusion that somehow settler colonialism should be accepted because we have casinos or, you know, other manifestations of this thing is absurd. And I do want to connect it with the current, this is around Thanksgiving or whatever. I think, don’t we have the day after is now Native peoples day or…
Dunbar-Ortiz Well that’s Columbus Day it’s turned into Indigenous Peoples Day. On Thanksgiving, they’re up at Alcatraz. They’ll be at Alcatraz on on Thursday. There’s the gathering at Alcatraz that almost…
Scheer Indigenous Peoples Day, I think, no?
Dunbar-Ortiz No Indigenous Peoples Day is in October.
Scheer Oh, well something popped up on my calendar.
Dunbar-Ortiz Yeah, because it’s Columbus but Thanksgiving is on Thanksgiving, asking people to be…
Scheer I don’t mean to make light of this. The fact of the matter is, settler colonialism is, yes, it’s as vicious as you can be because it aims at the denigration and elimination of a people wherever you do it. And I want to return to the original point, because we’re going to run out of time. But I can’t understand for the life of me how the academic community, the mass media and so forth has allowed apologists for the Netanyahu government really for a fairly extreme version of Zionism, to say that the reference to settler colonialism, which has occurred, including in the United States, maybe most prominently at some point, that we can’t use this phrase. I mean, if you say it in a classroom somewhere or something, then you are open to even lose your tenure. And, you know, academic associations have had fights about this. In fact, the communications field even stops a Palestinian head of the organization from speaking out the other day. But the chilling… Makes McCarthyism sometimes seem mild. At least with I mean, you and I were both were well aware of what was going on in the McCarthyism, there was a strong civil liberties community in America that objected to McCarthyism. But now, no, you can make a non-person as somebody who… So I want to, as I said, interrogate this concept of settler colonialism. I don’t want to lose this because that’s the flashpoint right now.
Dunbar-Ortiz It is, yeah.
Scheer Yeah, go ahead.
Dunbar-Ortiz Well, you know, there’s a lot of a resonance, I think, in the US white population, especially descendants of old settlers, which most presidents are. That they feel a resonance with Israel. Because of settler colonialism, because it is the imprint, the geographical imprint on U.S. people that settler colonialism is a good thing. I have in my books, several times in different places, I’ve quoted Obama, our most liberal president.
Scheer Well, I just want to be clear about which book, because I brought it up before. You wrote a book at least was published in Canada, right? “On Settler Colonialism.”
Dunbar-Ortiz Yeah. Well, that’s a chapter from my “Indigenous People’s History of the United States” and also “Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants,’” which is about White supremacy and settler colonialism in the title.
Scheer I just want to be clear, people listening to this who want to have a further exposition of this. That’s where they should get it?
Dunbar-Ortiz Yes. “Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants,’” was published two years ago, and it’s a Beacon press and it can be ordered on Amazon or, you know, the local bookstore and it has that chapter in it but also much else you know about immigration. The difference between immigration and settlers because settlers come to already a populated… settlers come and want to take over the land, they want the land and no people. And immigrants come to an already existing polity and have to integrate themselves into it, assimilate into it to be a citizen. So settler colonialism is inherently anti-indigenous people whoever they are. And it’s a rare kind of colonialism in the old days of of a form of colonialism. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, they were all Anglo because they had already done settler colonialism in Northern Ireland and they had that, it was very beneficial to have their settlers controlling the land and people who might rise up or do rise up. And with Native Americans, this was turned into: just kill Indians, kill the Indians, kill them. They’re savages. They don’t, they’re not humans. It’s like killing an animal. Well, I’m an animal rights person, and I don’t think that’s a right thing to do either, but settler colonialism is inherently, I still say, genocidal, inherently wants to get rid of the people who are there, whereas colonialism wants to make workers out of them, you know, like the French in Southeast Asia and the…
Scheer But not the French in Algeria.
Dunbar-Ortiz No the French… that’s settler colonialism.
Scheer People should remember that because Algeria is very important to the whole thinking of people in that region. People in the United States don’t follow it as closely, I’ve been in Algeria, under different governments and I’ve studied it, thought about it. And you had a very large settler French, settler population of white people from France and basically Christian, moving into a muslim country. And it was one of the worst battles for people’s freedom. Costly in every which way and the French were absolutely savage. We can use that word, brutal. But something very simple, I mean, you know, there was an anti-colonial movement. The whole map of the Middle East was drawn by colonialists, colonizers. And, you know, the big thing that’s left out was the fight over the Suez Canal and the intent of the Egypt under Nasser to nationalize it and so forth resisted. And that’s where Israel, I think, made its critical decision. Which side are you on? Because this is what the Six-Day War had a lot to do with the people forgetting and maybe it’s beyond what we’re here to discuss.
But, you know, I was in Egypt at that time as well as in Israel, and the whole motivating thing was really not about freeing the Palestinians or ending Israel, it was the French and English with support from the United States at a critical time, and Israel, to prevent the government from Egypt from controlling its major asset, which was the canal. That was the issue. It hardly ever comes up in any discussion of what was this tension all about. And Israel, which had a strong left, particularly in the kibbutzim movement and people who were actually even officers, I think at one point, 70% of the Israeli officer corps had come from the kibbutz movement. And there was an idealism. People tell me I’m naive about this, but I interviewed a lot of these people high and low at that time who were committed, they said, not to be colonizers. They understood that this was the path to fascism, this was a common thing to observe.
You know, even a movie like The Gatekeepers, which I keep trying to get people to watch, where it’s all interviews with Shin Bet leaders, the people who administer the West Bank and Gaza, but generally came out of the Labor Party and they said this is the end of a notion of the democratic Israel, this kind of occupation. Well, at the time of the Six-Day War, that was… People understood when I ask questions about that, they lectured me about it, the danger. That’s all gone now. And that’s why I think the settler colonialism issue is decisive, because really, what kind of Israel are you talking about? Why? And I get back to that one person, one vote, what what are you really talking about? Anyway, we’re going to wrap this up, but every time I talk to you, I learn so much. About what I don’t know.
Dunbar-Ortiz Well, I learn from you.
Scheer No, but the idea that I didn’t know that word “merciless savages” in the Declaration of Independence. Really, I don’t know what it is. Why didn’t it stick? I must have looked at that sentence a thousand times. This nation was founded on… And then when you hear the language now about other people being less than human, yes, that’s an invitation to ethnic cleansing, to genocide. Yes. So I want to thank you. And now they’re going to read one book of yours, which I think everybody should read, it isn’t the Canadian version of settler colonialism that I was going to recommend. So tell us now, how does one get your work?
Dunbar-Ortiz “Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants: White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism and a History of [Erasure and Exclusion],’” Something, it’s a long subtitle. Okay. But “Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants.’”
Scheer Yeah. We’ve talked about it in the past. “Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants.’” And it’s the reality, again, connecting to Thanksgiving.
Dunbar-Ortiz Yeah, the whole book is really about settler colonialism and how it functions. And I bring up these analogies with Israel and Australia.
Scheer “Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants,’” is compulsory Thanksgiving weekend, or Indigenous Peoples weekend reading. “Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants,’” and the whole fantasy about immigrants. Just remind people who you know… I still can’t believe it, as a kid, I remembered my mother dragged me, my Jewish garment worker mother, dragged me to Washington to picket the White House with the slogan “Open the second front,” to get the United States to go get involved in the war and to stop the genocide and the experience of actually Jewish refugees turned away by our government and with a president that I, as a kid, certainly admired. There’s complex history, but when you’re bent on ethnic cleansing and when your government supports it we forget about complexity. It’s an inconvenience. All right. Thank you, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz this is another edition of Scheer Intelligence. I want to thank Laura Kondourajian and Christopher Ho, at KCRW, the lively public radio station in Santa Monica for hosting these shows. Joshua Scheer, our producer who insisted on doing this interview with you, I might add, and who has met you. Diego Ramos, who does the introduction and is ScheerPost managing editor. Max Jones, who does the video and the JKW Foundation in memory of Jean Stein, a terrific writer, very close to Edward Said, and one of the few people all through this history since the Six-Day War when I first met her, who actually said, “What about the Palestinians?” Jean Stein, this is a good time to remember her. Okay. Thank you. Take care.
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