Palestinian Nakba vs. American Trail of Tears
I recently browsed some black and white photos of The
Nakba, the Palestinian term for the violent removal of some 800,000
Palestinians from their homes by Israeli militias in 1948.
The photos show long lines of refugees walking, sometimes
with a few donkey carts and usually with a woman or two carrying bundles on
their heads, men carrying trunks or suitcases. In one classic image a blown-out
old truck sits beside the dirt road, ignored by the homeless pilgrims with
blank looks on their faces.
The photos reminded me of paintings I had seen depicting
the notorious “Trail of Tears” – -the forced removal of several thousand
indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the American south to
reservations in Oklahoma in the 1830s.
It occurred to me
that I might get a better feel for the scale and degree of trauma of the Nakba
– and thus of the Israel/Palestine “conflict” today – by
comparing the Nakba to the better-known (in the U.S.) Trail of Tears event. The
results follow, but two specific details stand out:
Eight times more Palestinians were driven from their
homes in the Nakba than were Native Americans in the Trail of tears. And the
Palestinian removal occurred in one-tenth of the time.
Some Numbers
Table: 1948 Nakba vs,
1830s Trail of Tears
|
|
Trail of
Tears |
Nakba |
|
Date(s) |
1830-1840 |
1948 |
|
Land
Ceded |
39,000
Sq, Miles |
10,000
Sq. Miles (72% of Historic Palestine) |
|
Number
Removed from their Homes |
100,000 |
800,000 |
|
Number
Died |
15,000 |
15,000 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Deaths. A
very similar number of refugees died in the two events, roughly 15,000 in each case. The manners of death, however,
differed greatly. Most of the Palestinians who perished were killed by Israeli
militias, often in massacres that did not discriminate between combatants and
civilians, or between adults and children. In the case of the Trail of Tears,
nearly all the deaths were from various combinations of dehydration,
starvation, hypothermia, and infectious disease.
Number Removed from their Homes. The big difference between
the Nakba and the Trail of Tears is in the number of people removed from their
homes. As already noted, nearly eight times more Palestinians
were removed in the Nakba than were Native Americans in the Trail of Tears:
800,000 versus 100,000.
Moreover, the 800,000 Palestinians were all removed in
one year, as opposed to the 100,000 indigenous Americans being removed over a
ten-year period. And the Palestinians were removed from a much smaller and more
concentrated physical space than were the native Americans.
The point is not to declare one ethnic cleansing as worse
than another, Both are inexcusably cruel. The point is to gain a better
understanding of the more recent trauma in the Middle East by seeing it in
relation to one in our own country’s history. And what we see is an extremely
traumatic event that might help us better understand the Israeli/Palestinian
“conflict” today.
Implications
As shameful as the Trail of Tears incident was in U.S.
history, the Nakba was even worse.
Eight times more indigenous people were forced from their
homes in about one-tenth of the time.
Since 1948, Israel has continued to displace the people
who had been there for centuries, often using tactics that are illegal under
international law and should rightly be recognized as terrorism. Yet the word –
terrorist – is almost exclusively assigned to
Palestinians.
Sources
Trail of Tears | Facts,
Map, & Significance | Britannica
Frequently
Asked Questions - Trail Of Tears National Historic Trail (U.S.
National Park Service) (nps.gov)
Palestine
and Israel: Mapping an annexation | Infographic News | Al Jazeera
Nakba
Day: Palestinians aim to keep the history of al-Nakba alive | CNN
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