The Indians Are the Bad Guys - Again

The lone cowboy or 7th Cavalry horseman shows up on a scene of utter devastation. The farmhouse is still burning. The scalped bodies of ma and pa lie inside. A baby is crying in the crib. Looking at the tracks on the ground our hero sees that the two older children have been kidnapped. The Indians did it again; they attacked defenseless, innocent settlers with whooping war cries and appear to feel absolutely joyous about it. Those animals.

That iconic image of the golden age of cowboy movies came back to me as I considered how some on the willfully blind side of the pro-Israel aisle look at the situation in Palestine. In the movie, we don't hear that the settlers were encouraged by local white rulers in violation of federal treaties. We don't hear about the massacres committed by whites previous to the beginning of the movie's story line. All the information we are familiar with that places the Indian massacres of settlers in context is absent; by showing only the savagery of a single attack, history is manipulated and falsified.

This is a classic method of distorting reality, and Israel by no means invented it. But the practice of this technique is stronger in the United States and Israel, because there are strong interests that still need it. Imagine if every report on a terror attack by Palestinians included a biography of the perpetrator, including which (now Israeli) town his or her family was expelled from in 1948. Or if a map showing the expansion of the settler population and Jewish only road network was part of any television report on the West Bank.

American young people often encounter 'real history' for the first time in late high school and college. There, they find out about slavery, the near genocide of Native Americans, the lies that helped American instigate wars all over the world, from Cuba and the Phillipinnes to Vietnam and Cambodia. These events are always neatly packed as part of 'the past.'

The dilemma for Israeli apologists is that in Palestine, all that dirty history - the expulsion of Palestinians, the massacres, the killing of POW's, the war crimes, the rejected peace offers, the torture, the use of banned weapons - all of these things are still with us. They never went away, hence the obsession with narrowing the frame so that they remain outside.

One side effect of this investment in denial is that the Israelis themselves are prevented from coming to terms with reality. The war against Palestinians leads to the war on truth and history. In Israel, the Indians are still the bad guys. This makes it impossible for the Israelis to get off the horse, which is really quite exhausting after so many years. If you support Israel - think about ways of letting Israel see that the cowboys were actually the criminal element in the Wild West. Then they can finally get of the horse and live in peace.