Last night, I watched a fascinating PBS documentary, Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust. We all know, or think we know about Manzanar. It was the “flagship” incarceration camp for interned Japanese Americans during World War II (there were others in Arizona and Idaho). The World War II iInternment decreed by Pres. Rooselvelt, was the third worst human rights travesty in the history of the Republic (slavery and Native American genocide being the others). Manzanar was such a blight that it has become enshrined in our nation’s history as a supreme symbol of injustice.
This documentary expands our view of the camp and its place in a broader history of ethnic cleansing and genocide. While Japanese citizens were rounded up from their homes throughout California and forcibly removed to what were, in effect “benign” concentration camps, there was a much longer and equally troubling injustice surrounding Manzanar.
Namely, Native American Paiute and Shoshone tribes lived in the Owens Valley, and around its signature geographic feature, Owens Lake. The Lake was a huge saline sea, which captured all the water flowing down the eastern Sierras to the valley below. For 3,000 years, the tribes fished, hunted, and grew crops in the fertile soil and plentiful water resources available.
But in the 1860s conflict and trouble arose between the natives and white settlers:
[The] discovery of gold and silver in the Sierra Nevada and Inyo Mountains attracted a flood of prospectors. Ranchers and farmers followed, often utilizing Paiute irrigation systems and grasslands. A harsh winter and scarce food in 1861-1862 forced the Paiute and settlers into open conflict. The military intervened and, in 1863, forcibly removed 1,000 Paiute to Fort Tejon in the mountains south of Bakersfield.
The entire national history of relations between indigenous people and whites has entailed conflict over the land and its bounty. Whether the land had gold, silver, water, or other resources, once the white men came, they took it. If the native inhabitants resented or resisted, they were removed either by violence, trickery or outright theft. As but one example, nearly 1,000 tribal members met with US army officers and agreed to end hostilities in 1863. The army then forced them to march 200 miles south to Ft Tejon. Some died on the way and others escaped and returned to their ancestral home. Once they were dumped there they were provided little to sustain themselves. The food offered was little more than starvation rations.
In both the cases of the Paiute tribe and Japanese Americans, they were deemed a danger and menace to white people. In the case of the Paiute, the army response to raids by the Native Americans against settlers was either to kill or expel them. The Japanese Americans, on the other hand, put up no such resistance. Thus, they were treated somewhat better. Their internment lasted only three years. While the Paiute continue their battles with the government to this day.
Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink
In 1913, a new calamity befell the tribes. Los Angeles to the south, had become a burgeoning metropolis. With its mild climate and fertile agricultural lands, it became a beacon to Americans from the east and midwest. The population grew by leaps and bounds. The city fathers/power brokers determined that the one resource lacking for the growth they envisioned was water. There simply wasn’t enough.
For that, they looked north to the Owens Valley and its Lake, which encompassed over 100 square miles of pure mountain runoff. The water engineers in Los Angeles, led by the infamous, William Mulholland immortalized in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, coveted the resource and devised a method to divert it to Los Angeles, 200 miles south. The city water engineer led the effort to build the California aqueduct, which stole the water from the Valley and shipped it to the City of Angels.
Mulholland handled the engineering and left the issue of securing water rights to the city’s power brokers, land agents, and lawyers. By legal means, if possible and by subterfuge if necessary, they secretly bought up the water rights held by all the farmers in the Valley. Most of them left after they no longer had access to the water needed for their farming operations.
But the tribes posed a more difficult obstacle. As indigenous inhabitants, they not only lived in the Valley for thousands of years, they had a primary right to the water that had nourished them over that whole period. Eventually, some of the tribal members agreed to a population transfer, which offered them land to resettle within the Los Angeles city limits. In return for the land, the tribes gave up most of their water rights in the Valley. Thus, the infamous Department of Water and Power assumed control of the Owens Valley water, enabling the creation of the sprawling urban monster Los Angeles eventually became.
Intersectionality: Japanese internment and Native American expulsion
By linking the Japanese internment in Manzanar to the Native American displacement, the PBS documentary offered a completely new perspective on these phenomena. California and the US trampled the rights of both the internees and the indigenous peoples. For the former, the injustice lasted three years. For the latter, it stretched all the way back to the 1860s, when the Native Americans were first ethnically-cleansed from the Valley.
The two groups have united over the past decade, both to preserve the Manzanar national monument which the federal government dedicated; and to defend the rights of the remaining indigenous residents of the Valley. Together, they’ve lobbied the DWP to restore some of the diverted water back to the Lake, though the amounts are limited (the dry lakebed remains the greatest source of dust pollution in the country). It’s moving to see the 2019 Manzanar ceremony in which scores of survivors returned, joined by the Native Americans and even hijab-wearing Muslim Americans. It is a dramatic example of the power of intersectionality.
Slavery and ethnic cleansing–‘American as apple pie’
The state-sponsored crimes committed in the Owens Valley are not one-off events. One could even say, with H. Rap Brown, that ethnic cleansing is as American as apple pie. American plantation owners were instrumental in the African slave trade, in which victims were kidnapped from their homes and forcibly transported across the sea to work as slaves. Later, when the abolition movement began, many liberal white Americans believed the best way of dealing with the “race problem” was by shipping the freed slaves back to Africa, since they couldn’t possibly be integrated into civilized society. This would have entailed yet another displacement from America. Ironically, the main driver of this project was the American Colonization Society. By its very name, it declared that the freed slaves would themsevles be part of a new colonization effort to bring enlightenment and civiliazation to the African “natives” via this new state, Liberia.
Over the course of human history, tribes have slaughtered, expelled, or in less traumatic instances intermingled with rivals. There have been huge migrations of populations around the globe based on economic or climate-related dislocations. Many of these disruptions also resulted from invasions, conquest, and pillage. We are a (human) race prone to mass violence and genocide.
In the 19th century, Europeans excelled at such rape and pillage of the resources and human capital of their colonies. In the Congo alone, Belgium’s King Leopold was responsible for the death by disease and murder of 4-million indigenous inhabitants. In Latin America, Spain devastated the Natives with European diseases and worked the rest to death mining gold and silver, which was shipped back to the motherland.
European colonialism offered Zionists a model for ethnic cleansing
Which brings us to Israel-Palestine: Herzl and the early Zionists saw their enterprise very much in a similar light. They saw themselves as Europeans bringing the values of western civilization to the “natives,” the indigenous Arabs in Palestine. They adopted the colonial attitude of “uplift” which persuaded them of the righteousness of their cause. But when push came to shove, when the Arabs stood in the way of Progress, they would later be tossed aside in much the same way the California tribes were.
From 1937, if not earlier, Ben Gurion wrote in a letter to his son, that the Palestinians would be swept away by the Zionist enterprise. Yes, there were other passages in which he slightly softened his rhetoric. But the message remained clear: Zionism demanded a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. To obtain this there was a two-pronged strategy: bringing Jewish immigrants as pioneers to the Zionist state to populate it with Jews; and suppressing the Arab population.
In 1948, Ben Gurion took advantage of the War he provoked, to implement a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, the Nakba. As a result, nearly 1-million indigenous Arabs were forcibly expelled from their homeland. Only 250,000 remained after the 1948 War. Those who were expelled were prohibited from return, on pain of death. This was how he implemented his earlier vision of maintaining a Jewish majority. To this day, the Palestinian refugees and their descendants languish in camps spread throughout the Middle East. Nor have they assimilated into their host countries. They remain stateless after their homeland deprived them of their identity.
Like the Paiute in the 1880s, the Palestinians fled and resettled in many neighboring Arab states (primarily Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon). The camps are not unlike the reservations to which Native Americans were confined during westward expansion. and white settlement. But unlike the experience of indigenous American Natives, who enjoy special status, rights, and obligations from the federal government, Israel has adamantly refused any obligation to those it expelled. It refuses to even recognize that they are refugees. Nor has it attempted to normalize relations with the remaining Palestinians. Thus Nakba remains, like slavery for America, the Original Sin of the State of Israel. A blot and a stain on its nationhood. One which cannot be redeemed without Israeli recognition and repentance for the great affront it committed against the dignity of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of this land.
It’s also important to note that Israel’s siege on Gaza is a form of reverse ethnic cleansing. Instead of forcing a people to abandon their land in order to repopulate it with another people, the Gaza blockade punishes a people by imprisoning them in their own territory; smothering them and preventing them from free access to the outside world. This is a slightly subtler form of control than outright ethnic cleansing.
Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald commissioned journalist and politician Nicholas Flood Davin to study industrial schools for Indigenous children in the United States.
Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds | Ottawa – 14th March 1879 |
Report based on study President Ulysses S. Grant to assimilate Indian tribes through Peace Commission of 1869.
They saw themselves as Europeans bringing the values of western civilization to the “natives,” the indigenous Arabs in Palestine.
Rather then arguing whose agricultural methods were superior, lets just agree that the Ottoman’s neglected the region.
“Throughout these changes, [1876 Ottoman Land Laws] the situation of the peasantry grew progressively worse as the tax burden increased. Often the fellah was forced to borrow money to make ends meet and many ended up selling the titles to their land, which they continued to work on, but with reduced benefits. By the turn of the century, six families in Palestine (the effendi) owned 23% per cent of all cultivated land, while 16, 910 families owned only 6% (Awartani, 1993)”
file:///Users/www1/Downloads/Historia_agraria_palestine.pdf
But Zionists, and not Palestinians or the British, eradicated malaria, opening mosquito infested lands to cultivation (by Jew and Arab).
https://www.timesofisrael.com/remembering-the-man-who-battled-israels-most-formidable-enemy-the-mosquito/
And Zionists, not Palestinians and not the British, brought electricity to Palestine.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C743439-1%2C00.html
Richard wrote:
‘From 1937, if not earlier, Ben Gurion wrote in a letter to his son, that the Palestinians would be swept away by the Zionist enterprise’
Once again, a plain reading of Ben Gurion’s letter to his son, Amos, tells us that Ben Gurion was talking specifically, and only, about a single Beduin tribe in the Negev that was opposing a Zionist settlement there.
He was not talking about the Zionist enterprise sweeping away the Palestinians.
‘In 1948, Ben Gurion took advantage of the War he provoked.’
Well, if declaring Israeli independence pursuant to the approval of the United Nations, is provocative, than so be it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine
Richard wrote:
“Like the Paiute in the 1880s, the Palestinians fled and resettled in many neighboring Arab states (primarily Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon)”
Leaving aside whether these Native Americans were Paiute or Eastern Mono, please note that the Palestinians fought the Zionists tooth and nail until May 1948, when the combined weight of the armies of four Arab States intervened on the side of the Palestinians and invaded Palestine with the intention of driving the Zionists into the sea.
Intersectionality?
Mmm…I’m not quite sure.
@Judah:
Replacing one colonial master with another is not progress. Zionists stole land and oppressed Palestinians as much or worse than the Ottomans. As for the concentration of landholdings in the hands of rich landowners, its far worse today. Far, far worse. Capital is concentrated in the hands of 18 olgarch Jewish families. And Palestinians have almost no capital to speak of. Palestinians cannot get building permits, they must live in segregated communities and are not permitted in many Jewish-only communities. They generally face far worse living conditions than Israeli Jews. Not to mention higher crime levels because of lax enforcement by Israel police. Throwing Palestinians from the Ottoman frying pan into the Yishuv fire did them no favors.
Actually, the wetlands which the Yishuv eradicated were key features of the environment. Destroying them increased productivity at the price of destroying a balanced enrionment rich in the wildlife and other benefits brought by these wetlands. The old saw about eliminating malaria and mosquitos is just that, tired and out of date with modern understanding of environmental stewardship. It goes hand in hand with Israel’s miserable record on environmental issues. Progress and convenience at all costs, at the expense of wise steardship of the land.
Historians found that Ben Gurion knew his forces were united and stronger than the disparate Arab forces the Yishuv faced. He banked on beating them and expanding the limited territory offered under the partition plan. If he intended to adhere to the plan he would not have grabbed more territory than it called for. You can’t argue Ben Gurion acted according to the Partition Plan unless he respected all of its provisions, which he didn’t:
A British intelligence memorandum:
And further:
You have no idea of the relations between Native tribes. There was no clear distinction between many of them. They lived in close proximity and there was much intermingling. Not to mention that each tribe was equally damaged. IN the documentary, which you clearly didn’t bother watching, the various tribes of the region are always referred to together. They do not distinguish between tribles being treated differeent or having different outcomes. So don’t start claiming you know anything on the subject. You clearly have a smattering of knowledge. Just enough to wander off into the swamp and away from the real issues.
More ahistoric nonsense. “Palestinians” did not, by and large participate in the fighting. The primary military forces were Jordanian and from other frontline states. Very few Palestinians fought. Mostly they were expelled and occupied with saving their lives, rather than making war. Again, you would know this if you relied on sources other than the biased ones you either mention here, or don’t even bother to cite.
We can debate what the goal of the Arab forces were. There is no clear proof that they actually had an overall strategy other than fighting back against the Yishuv’s unilaterial defiance of the UN mandate. But the Yishuv was the one which threw the Arabs into the proverbial sea by stealing territory allocated to the Palestinians in the partition plan. So arguing that an intent that was never realized is worse than a strategy which actually did steal territory is an absolute red herring.
Electricity for whom? For Jewish communities. They did not bring electricity to Palestinian communities, which they let fend for themselves as best they could. Today, 120 years after the Yishuv began, Israeli citizens still do not have electricity and the Knesset can’t seem to offer Bedouin communities this benefit, because this community is considered too primitive to warrant it. Not to mention the State has invested almost nothing to improve their lives.
Do not advance the ridiculous argument that Ben Gurion was limiting his ethnic cleansing message to the Negev. As proof this is wrong, he expelled Palestinians from throughout Israel in ’48. He did not confine himself to the Negev.
Remember, this was your one comment in this thread.
“Capital is concentrated in the hands of 18 olgarch Jewish families.”
I’ve heard that among the Palestinian People there is also a “1%” that control most of the capital – Probably a small percentage control the Zionist lobby.
Please write about these few people, these “gods.”
Thank you.
“One which cannot be redeemed without Israeli recognition and repentance for the great affront it committed against the dignity of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants of this land.”
Some have persuasively argued that the Jews are the indigenous inhabitants of this land.
http://www.allenzhertz.com/2017/02/aboriginal-rights-of-jewish-people-2017.html
@ Braintree: There is no such valid argument. The true indigenous inhabitants of the Land are the humans who first settled it 50,000 years ago. To pick and choose which inhabitants you consider “indigenous” is ridiculous. Not to mention that none of the current Jewish inhabitants can trace their lineage in the land farther than a century or so (excpet for an exceedingly small number who lived in Palestine from centuries earlier). Direct Presence of the Palestinian clans and familes goes back much farther. You can’t transfer indigeneity to anyone who themselves weren’t indigenous to the land. I’m not indigenous. If I have ancestors millenia ago who were indigenous, my connection to them is non-existent. It doesn’t confer on me a benefit I don’t merit.
[comment deleted: I began to rebut the distortions and failures of your argument. But then realized it contained so much biased, false claims, that I didn’t have the time, patience or energy to rebut all of them. You clearly have read, if you’ve read anything at all, Zionist accounts of history. Which are not only biased and tell only one side of the story, but are simply not factually inaccurate.
The comment threads are not a place for propaganda or regurgitations of old, discredited accounts of history.]
This article with the footnotes should be mandatory study for anyone interested in history. Thank-you, Mr. Silverstein
Richard
I agree that Palestinians are treated by Israel in a manner similar to how the US treats it indigenous people.
With respect to the Japanese internees, you write ‘ For the former, the injustice lasted three years.‘ That is not quite true. Many internees lost their property either by theft or coerced sale at criminally low prices or other means, never to be reimbursed in any way. Also, there was considerable mental stress, what we might today call PTSD, and all the pain that caused. In other words, 3 years internment was the root cause of problems that lasted a lifetime.
On another issue, I typically equate Gaza with a Japanese internment camp, not a prison. People are put in prison as punishment for something they did. Gazans and Japanese were locked-up for who they are and not anything they did. Also, the social structure in Gaza is more like an internment camp than a prison. People live in family units. The people have a society with schools, jobs, stores, etc. unlike a prison.
best jeff
All points well taken. Thanks for expanding my perspective.
there’s something that has weight heavy on my head since august 2015
until that date john stewart had an extreme voice and that voice led a large group of people towards the dnc tent
zen at the zenith of that voice when he could have helped undoubtedly crush trump presidential run, mr stewart took a run at the exit and left that cowd his crowd rudderless and defenseless.
a huge group of blue votes saw a leader drop them and shakr his shoulder at them
i am positive had stewart stayed till after the elections we could have seen a different history unfold.he abandonned ship for wait for it………money
he literally crusshed the respect i had for his voice and i imagine am not alone.
yes i pin a huge blame for his legacy. sad
“Replacing one colonial master [Ottoman] with another [Zionist] is not progress”
You omit the intermediate, Mandate of Palestine, child of the League of Nations, which Mandate was discussed, debated and voted on by that assembly.
“Zionists stole land and oppressed Palestinians as much or worse than the Ottomans”
Not so.
The Ottomans neglected Palestine to the detriment of Jew and Arab alike and the genocidal Ottomans forcibly suppressed the nationalistic aspirations of both groups.
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/ottoman-empire/rise-of-arab-nationalism
Not stolen.
The British Mandatory Government saw to it that Zionists bought land from the Palestinians for ‘cash on the barrelhead’. Palestinians willingly sold their land to the Zionists right through the 1940’s in spite of British efforts to curtail land transfer to he Zionists.. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40105610
According to Richard’s link, “the leaders of the Arab states, who were meeting at that time in Damascus, had decided, with secret British support, to launch a lightning attack (blitzkrieg) and had devised a coordinated invasion plan.”
Which plan relied on a lack of heavy weapons and of Jewish air power.
“Tel Aviv will be attacked immediately from the air.”
What more could BG do than declare independence and defy the Arab States and ‘perfidious Albion’ (Britain).
It can be argued that the decision by Minhelet Ha’am was necessary, given the Arab leaders’ decision two days earlier to invade on May 15
Ben Gurion was not assured of victory.
Richard’s British intelligence source predicted a
“war of attrition” in which the Arabs would have the upper hand,
And British Intelligence produced “a May 7 memorandum sent to the Chiefs of Staff in London forecast accurately the stages of the War of Independence.They believed that the major goal – conquering Tel Aviv – could be accomplished by a combined attack of Egyptian forces from the south and the Arab Legion from the east.”
This is from your source, Richard.
Israel was forced to fight on several fronts simultaneously:
Richard said:
““Palestinians” did not, by and large participate in the fighting.”
The capture of the Etzion Bloc by Arab (Palestinian) irregulars, mostly from the surrounding villages, in cooperation with units of the Arab Legion, which concluded on the morning of May 13, persuaded even those Arab leaders who were still hesitant that their armies were capable of defeating the Jewish forces and of liberating Palestine.
Finally, Yigal Yadin, was the acting chief of staff, reported on the war situation. Yadin estimated that the Yishuv had an “even” chance to withstand the Arab offensive.
@braintree:
This is a misguided attempt to normalize yet another bit of colonial domination. I don’t care whether such colonialism was blessed by the Lord himself. It’s still unjust and offensive.
Read the sources you cite more carefully. Yours does not support your claims at all. It merely states that Arab nationalism arose within the Ottoman empire and that it sought help in its rebellion from the British. It does not, in fact, make any claim about Ottoman mistreatment of Jews or Arabs.
As for your claim that Zionist pioneers bought Arab land fair and square. the source you cite, once again, does not support your claim. In fact, the book review notes that the purchase of large tracts of lands was made from “large and often absentee landlords.” It also notes the “largely successful efforts of the Jewish AGency to get around (British) government regulations or, in a number of well-managed campaigns, to block…British policies which might have…inhibited its [land purchasing] schemes…A series of British reports…not only suggested Jewish land purchase was a major cause of Palestinian Arab resentment, but also led to efforts…which would restrict land transfers and protect the rights of existing (Palestinian) tenants.”
Your source also notes a failed government effort to “calculate the numbers of Arabs made landless by Jewish purchase.” It was defeated “as a result of Jewish pressure in London.”
So instead of cash on the barrel head, we have the Zionist powers conniving in every way possible, both legal and extra-legal to advance the dispossession of the Palestinian fedayeen.
This source describes in some detail the process of dispossession of the Arab peasants:
Not to mention that those fedayeen were uprooted from their land by a nefarious system which stole from them their livelihood. I consider that a form of theft by subterfuge.
As for your claims of a planned Arab attack against the Yishuv: this does not contradict the face that Ben Gurion started the war. Whether he believed the Arabs were planning their own attack is immaterial. It’s as if you murdered someone and afterward offered the defense: “Joe told me that Jimmy planned to kill me so I got him first.” First, we have no idea whether what Jimmy said was true and how he knew it. Second, even if it was true, you still murdered someone. And the victim isn’t around to tell us his side. You committed a crime and you should be punished for murder.
You of course neglect that this was based on French intelligence reports given to Ben Gurion. The French were vying with Britain for position in the lead-up to the end of the British Mandate. The entire pupose of intelligence is to make someone believe good of you and bad of your rival. Of course the French would whisper in BG’s ear that the British and their Arab allies wanted to launch a surprise attack. BG was smart enough to undersand that the French information might or might not be true. If he intended to start the war, it would be convenient to claim he did so because he believed the French report was reliable, whether it was or not.
Once again, Ben Gurion did not know what British intelligence predicted. He only knew about the allged plot to attack the Yishuv. And even if he did, he was far better informed about the Haganah/Palmach’s fighting capability than British intelligence. He did not bargain for a war of attrition. He bargained for a lightning attack which would carry the advantage to the Zionists. Exactly what happened. Again, he started the war. The Arabs didn’t. Someone who starts a war can always complain that he had to, that it was really an act of self-defense, etc. These are all ex post facto justification for a war of choice, not necessity.
First, Palestinian participation in the fighting was almost wholly restricted to defense of their native villages (as you yourself note). They were not involved in the much larger scale military operations of the Jordanian legion and other organized Arab armies. Those Palestinians who sought to form their own fighting forces, which only numbered in the thousands, were discouraged by the Arab states and their militas disbanded. These sources, as a I said confirm that even in defense of their own villages, the numbers of fighters was small. The Army of the Holy War had around 5,000 troops (which included both Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arab fighters) available to fight in the larger battles outside their villages.
Your claim that the fall of the Etzion bloc persuaded Arab leaders to join the war isn’t supported by a cite. So I have no idea what your source is or even if you have one. Nor does it offer any proof of the claim, even if it is sourced. The claim about Yadin is also not sourced. But even if it is, we’re talking about what BG believed and on what assumptions he decided to act. Yadin was one source on which he relied. But in the end the decision and his reasoning behind it was his alone.
You are using multiple IP addresses to post comments here. Do NOT do this. Use a single IP address. Using IP proxies is devious and opaque and raises suspicions that you are engaged in subterfuge or duplicitous behavior.
Do not comment again in this thread.