The Sand Creek logic of the Gaza massacre

What is presently happening in Gaza will enter history as one of the worst atrocities committed by the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. It will rank alongside nightmares such as the massacres in Jenin and in Sabra and Shatila. The devastation has been unleashed with the full material and political support of the US government.

Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle, a survivor of the Sand Creek massacre

Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world. It receives more than $15 million every day from the United States. The F-16 fighter jets and apache helicopters that have rained down thousands of tons of bombs and missiles on Gaza are provided to the Israeli government by the Pentagon. It is inconceivable that the Israeli aggression in Gaza could have taken place without the explicit consent and military support of the U.S. government.

Using numbers alone, the offensive against Gaza is an abject massacre. At the time of this writing, 10 Israelis have died, including three civilians. The Palestinian numbers are constantly rising, but at this moment at least 660 Palestinians have been killed, hundreds of them civilians. Many thousands more have been seriously injured and Gaza is on the verge of a humanitarian crisis on a scale unfamiliar even to many Palestinians.

It is interesting to put Gaza in the context of an earlier atrocity.

In November 1864, the worst single massacre of American Indians in western settlement took place in the frozen plains of territorial Colorado southeast of Denver. A regiment of Colorado volunteer cavalry led by Colonel John Chivington attacked without warning a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, who were peacefully camped along the Sand Creek.

The Native American tribes were there both with government treaty and explicit territorial permission. They flew not only a white flag of surrender, but also an American flag over the village. In fact, most of the Native American men of fighting age were off hunting, because they rightly assumed their encampment was safe. Instead, Chivington and his men massacred the entire village.

They killed indiscriminately, butchering equally men, women and children. The soldiers raped several women and decapitated babies before their mothers. They also mutilated the bodies of the victims. Several men fashioned mutilated vaginas into necklaces they wore during their victory parade through the muddy streets of Denver.

Chivington has gone down in infamy. But one thing should be clear: He was doing exactly what the white settlers and their territorial government wanted him to do.

Colorado territory before statehood. The whole of the future state had been given by treaty to the Native American indigenous to the region: the Cheyenne and Arapaho in the East and the Utes in the West. The land was theirs, even by the white man’s law, plain and simple.

And then white surveyors identified things of value in Colorado. First and foremost, gold was discovered, triggering the initial burst of settlement. Failed miners often turned to agriculture on the fertile plains of Colorado. Later, other resources were discovered and coveted, especially coal.

So how do you take land that isn’t yours? You settle that land. You simply take the land you want. And then your army defends the settlers. Of course, that breeds anger and discontent from the population that lives there, with absolute right.

Chivington gives the following defense of butchering the village: First, the Indians were hostile to the settlers, especially in the preceding months. Second, among Indians, it is impossible to distinguish enemy from non-combatant, because the combatants hide among the non-combatants. Third, Indians had killed some white settlers and taken their property. Fourth, Indians didn’t respect the “chastity” of women.

Here’s how the Rocky Mountain News, the official paper of white settlement, justifies the massacre: “The confessed murderers of the Hungate family—a man and wife and their two little babes, whose scalped and mutilated remains were seen by all our citizens—were ‘friendly Indians,’ we suppose, in the eyes of these ‘high officials.’ They fell in the Sand Creek battle.”

The accusation—which, incidentally, was false—was that the Native Americans camped along Sand Creek had killed four settlers. And so Chivington and his men had permission to murder somewhere on the order of 200 Native Americans in retaliation. One settler’s life is worth 50 Indian lives, goes the racist logic.

Meanwhile, half a world away and in another century, the Israeli military employs far more sophisticated means as it rains horror upon the dense, squalid reservation known as Gaza.

Israel’s defense for all this? Rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel. Rocket fire, which, in the years prior to the bombing campaign and invasion, had killed exactly four settlers. Sound familiar?

Israel has undertaken a nearly incomprehensible atrocity against a people already living under inhuman conditions in alleged “self-defense.” Using U.S. weapons, Israel has now murdered at least 660 Palestinians. One Israeli life is now worth at least 165 Palestinian lives. How else but through the prism of naked racism can Israeli life be calculated to be hundreds of times more valuable than Palestinian life?

This is the Sand Creek logic of the Gaza Massacre. Except that the numbers have gotten even worse.

Chivington was removed from command, but never punished. This should come as no surprise. In fact, his best friend was the governor and he was doing precisely what the settlers wanted. He was terrorizing the indigenous population to make white settlement easier.

History has been a bit harsher to Chivington, who no longer has a single prominent defender. He is regarded as something between a fool and a monster. There is no longer a single monument in his name, save an abandoned town near the site of the massacre.

Meanwhile, the attack on Gaza has eclipsed even Sand Creek with the scope of its barbarity. On Jan. 6, word came that Israel had murdered dozens of Palestinians cowering in a school in a U.N. refugee camp. Think about that one more time: Israel is now openly bombing targets such as schools, ambulances and health workers, and claiming even that amounts to self-defense.

Palestinians have replaced Indians and the Israeli state has replaced white settlements, but the underlying principles remain the same. The perpetrators wish their violence to be horrific and public. They wish it to be terrifying. If we can’t subjugate you, we will simply exterminate you. And let this genocide be a warning to others.

What form of justice is adequate in the face of a crime such as this? What form of recompense for the attempted destruction of an entire people?

Like those who once defended Sand Creek, defenders of the Gaza massacre should be exposed to all for what they are: racist apologists of whole-scale barbarism, aiding and abetting an indefensible, criminal explosion of violence. These defenders include the entire political leadership of the U.S. government. History will not judge them merely as fools.

End the Gaza massacre! Long live Palestine!