Feature: Why do Indigenous peoples feel so strongly about Palestine?
For many Native Americans, the issue of Palestine conjures memories of their own struggles against land theft, genocidal violence and displacement through European-American colonization
I.
Dressed in their traditional ceremonial regalia, Siihasin Hope was escorted away from the University of New Mexico student duck pond in handcuffs. A recent alum of UNM and activist engaged in organizing, Hope spent 24 days in April peacefully protesting the university’s investments in Israeli genocide against Palestinians—at the time, the confirmed death toll of Palestinians was estimated at over 34,000. As of Dec. 4, it’s over 45,000 confirmed deaths, yet the actual death toll could surpass 186,000, according to a Lancet study.
The University of New Mexico Palestine Solidarity Camp was formed at the university’s duck pond in the heart of campus in Albuquerque, NM. It gained support from a handful of groups, including UNM Students for Justice in Palestine and UNM Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine.
This arrest was not the first time Hope (Diné) had been targeted for Palestinian solidarity activism. While the police presence surrounding protestors and student arrests was intimidating and, critics argue, unconstitutional, Hope (who uses they/them pronouns) has witnessed and, sadly, experienced in 2019 a sliver of life under Israeli settler colonial forces that Palestinians experience every day.
“It was eye-opening for me when I returned from Palestine because I could understand settler colonialism and see it more clearly after that experience,” Hope told me over the phone. They are one of many Native peoples joining the pro-Palestinian frontlines, calling for university divestment of Israeli companies, an arms embargo, and a ceasefire to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Native American activists, artists, scholars, and communities have long forged alliances with Palestinians in the U.S. and beyond, beginning around the 1960s, surging in the 1990s, and has only increased in recent decades, especially in the months following Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestine after Oct 7. In Hope’s case, they took a class in the first year taught by a Palestinian professor called Children and Genocide, where Palestine was central. As they organized, traveled, and protested, Palestinians seemed to be in activist circles across the country, meeting several while resisting the Line 3 pipeline owned by multinational fossil fuel company Enbridge or working with migrants in the Southwest. “They draw connections with our struggle for life as well,” said Hope.
Indigenous peoples have long recognized the U.S.’s role in the ongoing atrocities against Palestinians, namely continuing to provide billions of dollars in aid several times a year, as well as weapons and intelligence support to prolong and expand Israel’s war. This Fall, on October 25, President Joe Biden issued a landmark formal apology at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona—a presidential election swing state where tribes have strong political sway—for the United States’ countrywide federal Indian Boarding School system that stole Native children from their families to assimilate them into white American citizens and culture. During his apology, which was widely hailed as historic yet overdue, he was interrupted by a young Akimel O’odham woman, who shouted, “What about the people of Gaza?” and “How can you apologize for a genocide while committing a genocide in Gaza?” Boos filled the crowd.
“Let her speak,” Biden said. The Secret Service pushed her out along with three other protestors belonging to O’odham Solidarity with Palestine, a Native activist group in Arizona. Their protest grew national attention and was featured on Democracy Now! These are the frontlines where Hope organizes.
“At this point, Native activists, writers, artists, and so forth have an extremely advanced understanding of Zionism and settler colonization in Palestine, and that understanding manifests itself throughout organizing and cultural spaces,” said Steven Salaita, Palestinian-American professor and American Indian Studies expert at the American University in Cairo.
II.
The moment Siihasin Hope and their colleagues stepped foot into Jerusalem, the omnipresent patrolling of Israel’s occupation force soldiers took notice and eyed them with hostility and suspicion. Hope recalls when passing through Israeli checkpoints during a trip in November 2019, “My passport protected me in a lot of ways, but we did get questioned a lot, like ‘Why are you here?’”
Hope was part of a group of Indigenous, Chicano, and Black activists sponsored by the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights in their second annual World Without Walls delegation. At the time, Hope was a principal organizer with The Red Nation Albuquerque Freedom Council and chair of Beyond Borders, a Native and migrant rights and activist group in New Mexico, organizing immigration justice actions against then-President Donald Trump’s border wall. The delegation was guided across Palestine to meet with Palestinian families and activists to learn and exchange experiences from their resistance to Israel’s racist apartheid policies, border wall, and colonial occupation. This cross-cultural journey led them through Jerusalem, Ramallah, Hebron, Nablus, Bedouin villages, and refugee camps.
The desert climate and terrain reminded them of their home in the Southwest, life among dunes and rolling hills of Black Mesa, close to the heart of the Navajo Nation reservation in northeastern Arizona.
As the sun was going down, while passing through an underground market on their way to a mosque in the Israeli occupied-West Bank city of Hebron, Hope observed a young boy, no older than seven, throwing rocks at Israel Defense Force (IDF) soldiers standing behind a fence outside the market. Hope watched the child, stunned at his bravery to stand up to occupying soldiers yet at the same time worried about his safety. Suddenly, a photographer in their group grabbed Hope and pulled them out of the street. While taking photos of the market, the photographer spotted a green laser, almost imperceptible, tracing along the ground in their path. An Israeli soldier had his rifle trained, a green laser sight sweeping up and down the block, searching for the child throwing rocks.
They would both survive. This is how Israel treats Palestinian children, thought Hope. Today, dozens of healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza hospitals say they treated children’s gunshot wounds to the head and neck nearly every day. They continued their journey.
Palestinian elders greeted the delegation with hospitality in their homes, offered food, and visited with the newcomers, sharing their life stories. It reminded Hope how her grandmother, who speaks Diné, meets and invites people over, especially other elders, visiting over tea or coffee and food, and connecting with medicine and knowledge keepers. Meeting with Palestinian families and elders was perhaps the most meaningful for Hope, as they could identify with their traditional way of life and connect to their cultural practices. Hope’s family is originally from Black Mesa, where, beginning in the 1970s, the U.S. government and utility and mining companies like Peabody Western Coal pressured and then forced Diné and Hopi families to relocate, including Hope’s to strip mine coal for decades. The Diné have a long history of displacement, or “relocation” as the U.S. calls it, too deep to justly sum up: fighting wars with cavalry, forced on a 400-mile death march called the “Long Walk” to a prison camp, then marched back to their homelands years later. Their family was and still is part of the resistance struggle to U.S. colonialism in Black Mesa. “So my family has been displaced and colonized,” they said.
While Hope recognizes the many parallels between Palestine’s colonization by Israel and Native peoples in the U.S., experiencing settler colonialism at its most degrading and dangerous phase was staggering. As a young Diné and Hopi activist, Hope reflects on having experienced U.S. settler colonialism centuries after initial European-American settler contact—well after hundreds of defensive wars and cavalry massacres and unfathomable land theft, after the country gained continental supremacy and instituted a vast government to administer to so-called Indian affairs. The American settler-imposed government and Western society are firm fixtures of everyday life for Native Americans and have been for generations. For Hope, witnessing a U.S.-backed settler state with supreme technological and military prowess reign over the Native Palestinians during their guided delegation in 2019 and now watching Israel absolutely level all of Gaza for over 14 months with 2000-pound bombs and unqualified impunity will bewilder Hope and other Indigenous people for years to come.
Since the 1960s, Indigenous peoples and Native activists, beginning with the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the U.S., have long shared an affinity and solidarity with the Palestinians living under colonial occupation and military blockade by Israel. When it comes to AIM, they had “actual contact with Palestinian radicals in Lebanon and to a lesser extent North America,” explained Steven Salaita, American Indian studies expert and Palestinian-American. “More recently, [Native peoples have] an identification of Zionism with U.S. settler colonization. Lots of Native communities have found in anti-Zionism a space to express displeasure with continued American and Canadian occupation.”
For Indigenous peoples, resistance to colonial occupation comes in many forms, many peaceful undertakings but also past armed struggles, perhaps the most difficult to talk about and sympathize with for outsiders. The decision to take up arms against an oppressor can appear beyond the average American’s reality. But Hope could grasp the similar reasons Indigenous peoples take up armed resistance to defend themselves and their land, especially in their peoples’ history. “They are just out there fighting for their lives, and I imagine that our relatives did the same, like in 1492 and specifically in 1680 and 1864, as these were times of rebellions and revolts,” said Hope, citing the year Christopher Columbus would embark Spain to the New World,’ the 1680 Pueblo Revolt that expelled Spain from Santa Fe, and the 1864 “Long Walk” after the Diné defended against a cavalry extermination campaign. “Like it was always due to the fact that our ancestors resisted and it was not peaceful, and the only reason that I’m here and my other Native people are here is because our ancestors fought for us to be here, and that was not done peacefully.”
Since their trip to Palestine, Hope has been involved in the Boycott, Divestment, and Solidarity (BDS) campaigns in Albuquerque. This Palestinian movement calls for boycotting Israeli products and divesting from Israeli companies until Israel stops its brutal occupation of Palestine. Yet many still aren’t familiar with the history of Palestine or Israel’s settler colonial founding, the wars of displacement that occurred over the past century. Aside from their activism, much of what Hope does is educating people. But then some deny or defend this history of settler colonialism and its continued impacts on Palestinians, namely Zionists in the U.S. and Israel.
Zionism emerged in the late nineteenth century as a colonial nationalist movement that sought to create a Jewish homeland by creating a Jewish-only state where, in the Torah and Bible, God established Israel. From 1917 on, Jews mainly from Europe began immigrating to Palestine, creating an eventual artificial Jewish majority in future Israel, who were culturally more European than the Indigenous Arab population. The early and influential Zionist leader Theodore Herzl wrote that Israel would “form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” Today, Zionists defend Israel as if settler colonialism is a mere detail of history unworthy of interrogation, reflection, or inclusion into their worldview.
III.
Just as there was no United States before 1776, there was no official state of Israel before 1948—only Turtle Island and Palestine of the Ottoman Empire belonging to Indigenous tribes and Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, and even Arab Jews, who made up three percent of Palestine. Western empires facilitated a seemingly unstoppable flow of European settler immigration, forcefully displacing and waging war against the Native populations. There are countless parallels between Native American tribes and Palestinians, partly because settler colonialism follows a consistent pattern of dehumanization, genocide, and displacement of Natives and replacement with settlers. When invading empires have a historical and current record of military domination and subjugation, it’s easy to see how anti-American or anti-Israel sentiment is created against an oppressor—wholly separate from antisemitism, which is a hatred of Jews.
“Settler colonialism needs to be broken down for people because we’re all impacted,” said Hope. “Settler colonialism, just in a sentence, is the domination of Indigenous people and the assimilation of those people into a foreign system, which is exactly what the United States is and exactly what so-called Israel is doing.” It’s a difficult conversation to have, Hope acknowledges, but it’s necessary. A former professor at Columbia University named Mohamed Abdou gave a public lecture entitled “1492 / Palestine,” arguing the two struggles of Indigenous North Americans and Native Palestinians are intertwined. He was secretly filmed by a far-right pro-Israel propaganda news aggregator account, Visegrad24, and painted as a terrorist and antisemite, calling for the death and destruction of the U.S. and Israel when he said nothing of the sort. Columbia did not renew his teaching contract. But that’s not all: the video unleashed a national smear campaign, accusations of antisemitism and terroristic support by congressional lawmakers, slandered by mainstream and far-right media, death threats, harassment by online hate mobs, and hunted by Proud Boys. He had to leave the country.
For some, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Would Stephens tell Jews to get over their historical grievances, like the Holocaust or other genocidal pogroms, or let Germany off the hook for carrying out their targeted demise?
Still, westerners often regard colonialism as a bygone era and disregard the detrimental impacts of genocide and displacement against Native tribes and communities are ongoing, especially by Israel, which is still a nascent settler colony founded in 1948 that is currently engaged in violent land grabs through its war in Gaza and West Bank.
Throughout Israel’s ongoing colonial wars and occupation, this Inter-Indigenous solidarity has befuddled Zionists and pro-Israel individuals alike, particularly Israel-biased outlets like The Atlantic and the New York Times. In a January 2024 essay, “The Curious Rise of Settler Colonialism and Turtle Island” (italics in headline), Atlantic staff writer and former Times reporter Michael Powell calls “settler colonialism,” particularly around Palestine and Native Americans, a “trendy academic theory.” The Atlantic magazine is known for its uncompromising pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian stance, which is perhaps not surprising given its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was a former IDF prison guard and has a record of denying war crimes committed by the IDF. Since Oct. 7, the magazine has published pieces titled “The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism” and “The Decolonization Narrative is Dangerous and False,” while the New York Times has published “Settler Colonialism: A Guide for the Sincere” by Bret Stephens, Times opinion columnist and former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post calls settler colonialism a “fatally flawed” academic theory. He also wrote a column headlined “We Should Want Israel to win.”
These influential Zionist writers at pro-Israel publications treat settler colonialism’s well-documented historical phenomenon of displacement and genocide as mere details worth forgetting as if those events are disconnected from the present. Rather than defending or even mentioning Israel’s historical record, they mock the decolonization movement as unfeasible in the face of powerful empires that would seemingly never bow to the demands of colonized peoples. “If you’re an American citizen of non-Native American descent, leave. Leave Hawaii. Leave California. Leave Massachusetts, too. Return to the lands of your ancestors — if they will have you. If not, that’s your problem,” Stephens writes. “If you are allowed to stay, do so under an entirely different form of government, one that isn’t based on the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Sign over the deed of your property to the descendants of those dispossessed by past generations of settler colonialists. Live under new rulers, not of your own choosing.”
Would Stephens tell Jews to get over their historical grievances, like the Holocaust or other genocidal pogroms, or let Germany off the hook for carrying out their targeted demise? Acknowledging monumental collective suffering appears to be reserved for Jews, particularly Israeli Jews, and not Arab Palestinians. “History is lived forward, not back, and the goal of politics and diplomacy is to make life as livable for as many people as possible, not to re-adjudicate ancient rights or wrongs,” he writes. “That should be a motto for Palestinians, too, in the hopes of a future state based on something better than current grievances or past glories.” The past is the past. Let it go.
The settler colonial states, these Zionists feel, are unfairly maligned for their origins, historical record, and ongoing colonial actions—unduly earning them an immoral image. “To talk of settler states and oppressed Indigenous people, and claim an umbilical connection between Palestinian struggles and those of Native Americans, is to construct a morality tale stripped of subtleties—a matter not of politics, but of sin,” wrote Powell after seeing pro-Palestine protestors in Brooklyn carrying signs stating “Land Back” and “Defund the Settler-Colonialist State.” Curiously, Powell wrote a book on a Diné high school basketball team called “Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation.” His dismissal and ignorance of settler colonialism’s ongoing impact on tribes like the Navajo Nation doesn’t inspire confidence in his analysis and insight into the lives of Native Americans, much less Palestinians. When confronted with such “academic jargon” (his words) encompassing settler colonialism’s historical realities, one’s natural inclination is to question the legitimacy of the settler’s claim to the land over the displaced Native people—or deny and downplay the inconvenient historical and ongoing realities.
“Israel is justified by being a sovereign state that commands the loyalty of its citizens, not by the precedents of antiquity,” concludes Stephens. “Ditto for the United States and every other state, whatever the nature of its origins.”
In October this year, during a presentation at the Premier Trauma Therapy Conference in California by Holocaust survivor, physician, addiction, and trauma expert Gabor Maté, a member of the audience asked him why someone should have compassion for the “animals” who perpetrated the Oct. 7 massacre of over 1,200 Israeli civilians. The question echoed Israel’s former defense minister Yoav Gallant when he announced a “complete siege” of Gaza by shutting off access to food, fuel, and electricity and unleashing a relentless bombing campaign after the Oct. 7 attack: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” History, he replied, didn’t start on Oct. 7. Maté, who lived in Vancouver, cited a survey that found nearly half of Canadians never learned about residential schools as students. Another survey found that 40% of Americans think Native Americans don’t exist. In the U.S., he said, “Most people will know nothing about what happened to the Indigenous people here. Nothing. The genocide. The torture. The rape. The starvation. They know nothing about it.”
First Nation Indigenous children were stolen from their families, forced into Western education at residential schools, forbidden from speaking their languages or practicing their culture, abused physically and sexually, and even killed—a 160-year history, with many survivors living today. The U.S. Indian boarding school history is tragically the same, rife with abuse and eliminating their culture, with over 417 Indian boarding schools where at least 973 Native children died. What does that say, Maté asked, if Americans or Canadians are unaware of their history, the Indigenous peoples’ existence, or even how the U.S. claimed the continent with people already inhabiting it? “Do you think the average Jew knows anything about the Indigenous people of Palestine?”
Yet Palestine is now an inescapable, blinding issue the West is struggling to grasp, to make sense of, to obliterate, or to resolve. “Palestine doesn’t fit especially well in the paradigm of the old area studies (Middle East Studies, East Asian Studies, Russian Studies, and so forth),” wrote Salaita over email. “Those area studies emerged out of State Department influence, and they haven’t been good at apprehending or even acknowledging homegrown movements for liberation.” Salaita’s book “Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine” explores the intersecting parallels between Native American tribes and Palestinians through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. He argues that American Indian and Indigenous Studies should become more central to scholarship and activism on Palestine, with its emphasis on the self-determination and cultural uniqueness of tribal nations as well as historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism, free of national mythology and white supremacy that has plagued western institutions. “Situating Palestine in these spaces isn’t just a matter of geography or culture, but of intellectual compatibility.”
For Siihasin Hope, liberation for Palestine unites with the struggles of their Native communities and all oppressed people. These cross-cultural Indigenous alliances, as Salaita observed, are undeniable and public, have been around for decades, and aren’t going away. “We’re not done,” Hope said. “Nobody is done until Palestine is free because our liberation is directly tied.”