Archive for the ‘colonisation’ Category
Who are the Palestinians?
There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state?
Golda Meir, President of Israel, 1969
Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
Anne Frank, 1944
As I’ve pointed out a few times before on this blog, nations are a human invention, and quite a recent one. Here in Australia, we became a ‘state’ in 1901, when the British government decided they’d had enough of governing our land by proxy from the other side of the world. France and Germany’s borders were obviously still under question during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1, and Germany was two nations from 1949 to 1990. Italy became a nation-state in 1861, Switzerland in 1848, Austria in 1804 (as a central part of the Austrian Empire – it didn’t become a sovereign state in its current form until 1955). The borders of the Chinese and Russian ‘states’ have changed regularly over the centuries, more or less entirely due to warfare and pillage.
I should also point out that humans have been around for 300,000 years, and for some 99.9% of that time – or is it more? – have done quite well without the need for nations. And the land has existed for some 4 billion years, in different shapes and sizes, without being ‘owned’ by anything resembling a human.
The remarks by Golda Meir quoted above (and often repeated by her) were obviously made without a trace of irony, considering that there had never been an Israeli or Jewish state before it was imposed on the people of the region after massive dispossession and bloodshed in the late 19th and 20th centuries. In any case there is no doubt that Palestine is a place. As such, it is mentioned by Herodotus in his 5th century BCE histories. Before that, the region was called Philistia, the land of the Philistines, dating back another 7 centuries, and even before that, the land of Canaan. People lived there, as they did in Australia some 40 to 50 thousand years ago, and made it their own. Of course, they didn’t have a state. Such a concept didn’t exist before the modern era.
Years ago, I had a friend who wrote about and essentially complained about what he called ‘heavy culture’. I was inclined to agree, and that was some years before I joined a humanist organisation, as a kind of statement to myself that I considered common humanity to be more important, far more important, than nation or ethnicity.
Of course, that kind of thinking raises the question – what do we do with culture? What is culture, exactly? Think of unique cultural products, like kimonos or didgeridoos, which, over time, and sometimes grudgingly, get to be shared with cultural ‘outsiders’. And think of language, perhaps the most central cultural product. Nobody really knows how many there have been, but it’s in the tens of thousands, at least. Is it a tragedy that most of them are no longer spoken? Is it a tragedy that most of the gods we’ve invented are no longer worshipped? Is the movement away from religion, particularly in the WEIRD world, a form of evolution?
But I digress. The Palestinian people have suffered death, destruction and humiliation through the latest settler colonialist venture, just when we thought we were done with all that shite. And to be honest I’m not quite sure that when people talk of the state of Israel they’re not talking about the 51st state of the USA. That country has poured billions of dollars into Israel’s settler movement, especially its military, and has long been a profoundly biased negotiator in Palestinian-Israeli disputes.
Palestinians have had their villages erased, their leaders murdered – along with quite a few Israeli leaders, it must be said – and their lives continually threatened, for a long time now. They fight back against enormous odds, they reach out desperately for allies in the region, some have even become suicide bombers. Being mostly Moslem, like all their Arabic neighbours, they get little in the way of help, or even sympathy, from the WEIRD world. That world, where it exists in the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand, and some parts of Africa, had a more or less ‘successful’ settler-colonial history, which it now tries to come to terms with, more or less successfully. Of course we know that recent Jewish history has been traumatic to say the least. I’ve read books and watched TV programs on the Holocaust. The diary of Ann Frank was a set text at school when I was only twelve or thirteen, and I still get emotional just hearing her name. But there have been other examples of mass-murder, far less publicised, because those slaughtered belonged to cultures and ethnicities that have never gained prominence in the West. This is the case with the Palestinians, whose voices have gone largely unheard, first by the British, then by United Staters (I rather enjoy calling them that).
So, who are the Palestinians? They are the long-term residents of the region, who can trace their ancestry there for generations. They’re also people who have left the region for a better life or at least some kind of life after their homes have been destroyed, family members killed, their lives threatened and so forth. They’re a hurt and angry people, but many are stubborn and resolute about their homeland and their need to protect and preserve it. Of course many first people everywhere – here in Australia, in New Zealand, in all the Americas and much of Asia – have had what they thought were their lands taken away from them by more powerful new arrivals, but now we know – history tells us – that much of what those new arrivals did to the established populations was cruel and inhumane. The Palestinian people, like all those other first populations, deserve better.
References
Olfat Mahmoud, Tears for Tarshiha: A Palestinian refugee’s inspiring tale of her lifelong fight to return home, 2018
Ramzy Baroud, The Last Earth: A Palestinian story, 2018
Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and loathing in Greater Israel, 2014
Rashid Khalidi, The hundred years’ war on Palestine, a history of settler colonial conquest and resistance, 2024
Australia Day? Hmmm…
too black and white?
Canto: Okay, so today marks the day, 235 years ago, when British arrivals in what is now known as Sydney Harbour hoisted a British flag and declared that the land they were now standing on belonged to Britain. And this day has been commemorated ever since as Australia Day. These arrivals – a collection of convicted criminals, their minders and British government officials – had no idea of the extent of this ‘southern land’, the eastern coast of which had been mapped in around 1770 by Captain Cook, nor did it greatly concern them that the land was inhabited by other humans. The descendants of those earlier inhabitants are of course still with us, and many of them are still rather miffed about the events of that day, and its commemoration.
Jacinta: Interesting times for the Brits. Their colonies in North America had rebelled rather nastily. In fact, that’s why they were ‘down under’. They’d lost the American War of Independence a little over four years earlier, and the northern regions – Canada today – were too politically unstable for the British government to offload their felons. Having a whole new territory to call their own seemed an irresistible proposition. But I’m wondering – exactly how much did they know? You had Abel Tasman encountering what’s now Tasmania almost 150 years before, but managing to miss the mainland, and then there was Dampier…
Canto: Actually Tasman came up with one of the first names for the southern land – New Holland. He was Dutch of course. Or it might have been one of his compatriots – the Dutch were around the place in numbers at that time. Willem Janszoon was the first back in 1608, and then there was Torres, hence the Strait. But he was Spanish. On his second voyage, from Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, Tasman mapped much of Australia’s north and north-west coast. William Dampier used his maps in his own little trip to the west coast around 1699-1700, and himself charted the coast from Shark Bay to Broome, so, yes, the Brits did have a fair idea of the extent of this land. But getting back to Australia Day…
Jacinta: Well, yes, they must have had a fair idea of the enormity of their proposed acquisition, as well as the difficulty of maintaining such a claim to land so far from home.
Canto: And they didn’t even call it Australia at the time. It was generally known as New Holland still. So the Dutch must surely have been miffed as well.
Jacinta: Anyway there wasn’t much in the way of international law, or any sense of internationalism, in the eighteenth century, and it’s easy for us to be holier-than-thou when talking about the past. It’s another country, on dit.
Canto: Well even so, the day has earned an alternative moniker, Invasion Day. What thinks thou?
Jacinta: Well I thinks it’s complicated, as always. I do think we should change the date, but to call it an invasion is a bit harsh. What Putin has done in Ukraine, I’d call that an invasion. Also what the USA did in Iraq (with the help of Australian forces). I’d say that what the Brits did in 1788 and subsequent decades was colonisation. You might call it illegal colonisation, but of course there were no legal avenues.
Canto: Like what Britain did throughout the world in its Empire days.
Jacinta: And the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Italians, Belgians… And there have been attempts to make them pay for the damage done, but we can’t expect too much can we?
Canto: Others have suggested that we – I mean Europeans – brought civilisation to benighted peoples. Or, to be more even-handed, that they ultimately might have brought more good than harm.
Jacinta: Well, anyway, Aboriginal people have a good argument – a very good argument I’d say, for objecting to the celebration of Australia occurring on January 26, because the landing of the first fleet was a disaster for a culture that had established itself here, no doubt with great difficulty at first, over tens of thousands of years.
Canto: Yes it raises the question, what was this land like, in terms of climate and resources, 50,000 years ago? Probably a dumb question considering the enormity of the land-mass.
Jacinta: Yes and I’ve often wondered how long the first ‘Australians’ have been here, I’ve heard so many conflicting estimates, and also it’s sometimes hard to tabulate with the out-of Africa story for H sapiens.
Canto: You’re not kidding. Estimates of the Aboriginal presence here are all over the map. Australia’s National Museum, which is presumably reliable, says this:
Aboriginal people are known to have occupied mainland Australia for at least 65,000 years. It is widely accepted that this predates the modern human settlement of Europe and the Americas.
And I recall an Aboriginal elder (though he looked rather young) disputing the date with a sympathetic scientist, insisting that his people have been here since ‘the beginning of the world’. I’m not sure if he meant 4.6 billion or 13.8 billion years ago.
Jacinta: Another site, an indigenous one I think, claims their presence could date as far back as 120,000 years, but no evidence or dating techniques mentioned. As to the other question – when H sapiens first left Africa, here’s something from a National Geographic article:
Though it is unclear when some modern humans first left Africa, evidence shows that these modern humans did not leave Africa until between 60,000 and 90,000 years ago. Most likely, a change in climate helped to push them out.
So if these dates can be trusted – and I remain skeptical – the 65,000ya date for arriving in Australia is plausible.
Canto: So getting back to Australia/Invasion Day, what is to be done?
Jacinta: Well, to me, the screamingly obvious solution would be to celebrate the day when Australia ceased to be a colony and became an independent nation. That was 1901 I think…
Canto: Would this be acceptable to first Australians? They didn’t exactly have much in the way of rights in 1901.
Jacinta: Did anyone have rights before the 1948 Declaration? People are always screaming about rights these days, they don’t seem to realise how recent the concept is.
Canto: Hang on – Olympe de Gouges, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (September 1791)..
References
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/evidence-of-first-peoples
https://www.nla.gov.au/faq/who-was-the-first-european-to-land-on-australia
http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/History_2_60,000_years.html
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/their-footsteps-human-migration-out-africa