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The conflict in Israel isn't so different than the conflict at home – Daily Montanan [1]

['Russell Rowland', 'More From Author', '- October']

Date: 2023-10-20  

A good friend of mine who used to be the Tribal Chairman for the Northern Cheyenne tribe posted something on Facebook the other day, comparing what’s happening in Israel to the experience of his own people. I was glad he said something about this because it hadn’t occurred to me until then, and it got me thinking.

And of course this is dangerous territory, talking about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, especially for someone like me who knows very little about the area.

But, if anything positive has come out of this conflict, it might be that people are actually doing research to try and understand the complexity of the situation. I’ve watched more videos about this issue in the past week than I have for the previous 65 years. So, of course, I’m an expert now. I highly recommend the podcast “The Rest is Politics,” with Rory Stewart, who summarizes the previous 3,000 years in about 10 minutes, in a way that seems to be very objective toward both sides.

So here’s what I’ve concluded. As so many people have pointed out, both the Israelis and the Palestinians have a lot to be angry about. I didn’t know that the Israelis were forced out of that region 3,000 years ago by the Romans. So not only were they displaced, but they ended up in countries where they were subjected to horrific abuse.

In the early 20th Century, there was a Zionist movement to return to their original homeland. But during those intervening 2000 years, what we now know as Israel had become a region very much dominated by Muslim communities, with only about 3% of the population being Jewish. In fact, it had become known as Palestine. But at the end of World War I, when Europe was divided up amongst the allies, a secret treaty signed between France and Britain, called the Sykes-Picot agreement, gave Britain power over Palestine. Jews had slowly been buying land in the region, and the British supported turning it into a Jewish state, even though the population by that time was still 90% Arab. The British government issued a very controversial document called The Balfour Declaration, publicly stating Britain’s support of Palestine becoming a Jewish state, which naturally led to instant conflict between two groups of people who now saw this as their homeland.

This has been the basic underlying source of conflict ever since, and it’s not hard to imagine how each of these groups see themselves as the victims, or perhaps more importantly, as the rightful “owners” of this region. World War II brought this issue to a head when it became abundantly clear to the rest of the world that Jews needed a homeland. So a military assault took place in 1948, where the Israelites declared the region a Jewish state, and the United Nations agreed, as did several major countries. During the course of the next few years, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced.

Since World War II, there have been several military efforts to force Israel to negotiate some kind of agreement that gives the Palestinians their own homeland, including the The Six Day War in 1967, a revolt that was squashed by the Israeli army. This led Israel to retaliate by taking more territory, including Gaza and the West Bank, which were outside of the 1948 borders, and which is why these regions are now referred to as “the occupied territories.” There was another attempt made in 1973 called the Yom Kippur War, which the Israeli army squashed quickly, in less than three weeks.

Many experts are claiming that these new attacks are an effort by Palestine, once again, to force Israel to take notice of their need for their own country. Either way, the events have been horrific, especially the violence of the initial attack on a music festival, where Hamas showed a brutality that was unconscionable.

So how does this all relate to our own history? The obvious answer is the matter of the displaced population. My Northern Cheyenne friend talked about generational trauma, where the trauma his grandparents suffered at the hands of the U.S. government gets handed down from one generation to the next. The prevailing message our Native communities receive that they simply need to “move on” ignores the fact that there has never been any effort on the part of the U.S. government to issue a formal apology to these people for what they suffered. The chance of reparations is obviously not very realistic at this point, especially in today’s political climate, but ever since I moved back to Montana, where I was born and raised, I have puzzled over why there hasn’t been an effort to organize a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address the issue of accountability on both sides.

The underlying tension is such that I just don’t see how an organized conversation couldn’t at least break down some of the barriers in communication.

I have always found it kind of remarkable that the anger that exists in the Native community doesn’t manifest itself out into the rest of our region more. It seems the Native population tends to turn their anger more inward, toward themselves, as evidenced by the problems with addiction on our reservations.

In Israel, there have been several efforts through the decades to come to an agreement that is workable for both sides, but these have always been sabotaged, sometimes by the Palestinians, as Arafat did with the Oslo accords. Sometimes it was the Israelis, as with the London agreement in 1987, when Shimon Peres, who was the Israeli Foreign Minister at the time, secretly met with King Hussein over a period of months to hammer out an agreement. But the prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, apparently didn’t like the fact that Peres had negotiated this agreement behind his back, and he refused to sign the agreement.

In the end, as with the still unresolved situation with our Native Nations, it seems that pride and ego always seem to get in the way of the needs of the people. And it is the people who pay the ultimate price.

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