Indigenous Solidarity with Palestine

by Nick Estes

The genocidal assault on Palestinian life is also ideological, with firm roots in Turtle Island. The United States supplies more than bombs. It also supplies the media narrative justifying the slaughter of Palestinians and the colonization of their lands. The Atlantic Magazine has become the veritable mouthpiece for what can be called anti-anti-Zionism. This pro-genocide position, standard across corporate media outlets, has only hardened since the intensification of the Zionist-led genocide against Palestinians one year ago. 

Last December, I reluctantly took a phone interview from The Atlantic writer Michael Powell, who claimed, in an email, to be writing a “piece looking at the concept of Turtle Island within the context of struggles around native [sic] and Palestinian rights.” I made clear that his magazine was profoundly anti-Palestinian and, therefore, anti-Indigenous. The magazine’s longtime editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was a prison guard at the notorious Ketziot Prison during the First Intifada (1987-1993). Human rights organizations have called for the prison’s closing because of widespread human rights abuses against Palestinians. A colonial prison guard runs an outlet that prides itself on its abolitionist history.

Powell countered by citing his own expertise as an author of a book on young Diné basketball players (who he called “Navajo”). The interview was more of him debating the fact that the occupation of Palestine is a European settler colonial project in a similar vein as Canada and the United States. He said something that has haunted me since — claiming that in Gazan schools, Palestinian children were instructed in antisemitism. (I could only find sources for this assertion from the Israel lobby group, UN Watch.)

Israeli President Isaac Herzog appeared to back up this claim when he revealed during a BBC interview in November 2023 the occupation’s discovery of an Arabic translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a child’s room in Gaza. Spaces for children were now legitimate targets, and the Palestinian education system was a significant counterpoint to charges of genocide and colonialism. Today, there are no schools left in Gaza. The occupation has destroyed all of them, including universities, and killed thousands of children, students, and teachers. Gazan schoolchildren pose no threat when they are dead, have no schools, and are displaced.

Dehumanization is the first step in genocidal incitement. However, counter-annihilation is also a key feature of settler colonialism. It is the belief and practice that colonial society must annihilate Native people; otherwise, the colonizers, in turn, will be annihilated in a zero-sum calculus. It is a pre-emptive “self-defense” against any real or imagined anti-colonial attack. It makes invasion look like “self-defense.” It is why the chorus of Western media outlets repeat the mantra: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” But the colonized are never granted the authority of self-defense or the right not to be annihilated.

After one year of genocide, we have plenty of gruesome evidence of what settler “self-defense” looks like. Leaked video surveillance shows that occupation prisons are also sites of extreme sexual violence and rape. “Everything is legitimate,” responded the Zionist ruling party to condemnations of prison guards raping Palestinians. Such brutality is not solely a nineteenth-century phenomenon. This is modern, twenty-first-century settler colonialism.

Settler colonialism wages total war on Native societies by attempting to eliminate and destroy familial and kinship relations through a combination of physical destruction, incarceration, and family separation. Such violence is easily seen in the macabre spectacle of the military massacre of civilians, which has been live-streamed to billions of witnesses without serious challenge — and, in many cases, with explicit support — by the “democratic” West. The trauma of enduring and surviving such violence carries on for generations. The trauma inflicted upon Native peoples by the United States is a case in point. Only in the last several years has the United States acknowledged its centuries-long, genocidal war on Indigenous children. 

U.S. Colonel Henry Pratt was a notorious Indian killer who turned his pursuits from the battlefield to the targeting of Indigenous children and the destruction of Native families. His Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which pioneered removing Native children from their families by sending them to far-off schools, not only attempted to destroy kinship relations to weaken Indigenous resistance but also killed Native children and used them as hostages to force concessions from their parents, making them little more than “prisoners of war.” Luther Standing Bear estimated half the children of Carlisle’s first class died there.

While the off-reservation federal Indian boarding school system has formally ended its child removal policies, Native children today are still disproportionately removed from their families and placed into foster care. According to a 2019 report, Minnesota has the highest rates of Native child displacement in state foster care, with Native people making up 1.7 percent of the state’s population and 25.8 percent of children in foster care. The goal is to destroy the very social fabric of Native life — to take the land. Even after Native peoples pose no military threat to settler society, the war still wages against the young. The theft of the young is a theft of the future, and the theft of life is naturalized. (In my homelands, Native people have a median life expectancy of 58 years old.)

What Palestinians have taught us — and the people of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen who have joined them — is that things need not always be this way. A year ago, we watched the walls of the largest open-air prison camp come tumbling down. Gazans walked to the villages where they were from. They were surprised their prison guards were so easily overwhelmed. The retribution against their acts of liberation is exacting its toll. The settler “counter-annihilation” in “self-defense” doctrine has spread to Lebanon. The United States has clamped down on its own educational system, banning books teaching its true settler colonial history, while brutalizing college students and cracking down on educators opposing its genocide against Palestinians. And yet there is still hope for justice.

The Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta imagines what that future may look like. “In the future, when we have a museum for this genocide [in Gaza],” he recently told Al-Jazeera, “we will have a special place where we put the pictures of the journalists who allowed it to happen.”

Nick Estes is an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and the co-host of The Red Nation Podcast.