Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli air force bombed a refugee tent camp west of Rafah City around 8:45 pm local time on Sunday. The time is important, since +972 Mag reported that the Israeli total war on Gaza is being conducted by AI programs. One of them is called, sadistically, “Daddy’s Home.” The Israelis are tracking Hamas militants through the day but wait to strike at them when they come home at night, ensuring that their wives, children, relatives and friends are also killed. The AI program is set up to allow 15 to 20 noncombatant, civilian deaths for every member of the paramilitary Qassam Brigades killed in the attack. The eight missiles that struck the camp killed 2 Hamas operatives and left others 45 dead, mostly burned up in their flammable tents, the majority women and children.
That result is a little over the tolerance of the sadistic “Daddy’s Home” program, but it is ballpark. The individual whom the Israelis call Crime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to claim it was all a horrible accident, but it wasn’t. That is how Israel’s military operation is set up. Two Hamas operatives dead, about 40 civilians. Those are the Israeli rules of engagement. That ROE would get you court-martialed in the US military, and it is producing results that the International Court of Justice called plausibly genocidal. Based on these ROE, it may be that Netanyahu has killed 36,000 people to get at 2,400 fighters. Apparently thousands of previously unaffiliated young men have joined Hamas, horrified at Israel’s total war, so it is possible that the Israeli army has not reduced the number of fighters at all.
Burning the tents of the indigenous population has a long history in colonialism. When the Dutch ruled “New Amsterdam,” the capital of the New Netherlands, they brought in more and more settlers who were hungry for land and wanted to displace the Mohawks and Mohicans, who did not take kindly to being pushed around. The Dutch governor, Willem Krieft, became very nervous about the Native Americans, explains Walt Giersbach at Military History Online. At one point some 500 members of a small tribe, the Wappinger, moved to what is now Jersey City essentially to escape being taxed by the larger confederations. The paranoid Krieft took the movement of this small band as menacing and attacked them out of the blue in February 1643.
Historian Jon Romats Broadhead wrote of the “Pavonia Massacre,” “Warrior and squaw, sachem and child, mother and babe were alike massacred. Daybreak scarcely ended the furious slaughter. Mangled victims, seeking safety in the thickets, were driven into the river, and parents rushing to save their children, whom the soldiery had thrown into the stream, were driven back into the waters and drowned before the eyes of their unrelenting murderers.”
The snow turned red with blood and “the sky, it was reported, was lit with the fires from their tents.” The Dutch beheaded people and played kickball with the heads.
For the colonizers to burn the tents of the colonized is to declare them without domicile or connection to the land on which they were used to camping. It is to erase them from the earth.
Some 224 years later, two thousand miles to the west, the scene was repeated. The National Park Service explains that Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, a victor at Gettysburg, went out to Kansas in 1867, completely inexperienced in dealing with American Indians. He tried to bully the local Cheyenne, who grew afraid of him and abandoned one of their large and well-appointed villages. Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry couldn’t find the absconding locals.
Hancock had something wrong with him and took offense. He said, “I am satisfied that the Indian village was a nest of conspirators.” He, accompanied by Custer, ordered the village burned to the ground. If locals show signs of being unhappy to be colonized and of not being satisfied with their new lot, that is itself a reason to further oppress them.
Hancock started a summer of constant battles. The Federal government finally figured out what was going on and reassigned Hancock elsewhere. A new treaty was concluded in October of 1867, though the colonizer’s treaties are worth less than toilet paper. As for Custer, less than a decade later he would overreach in his notorious viciousness and meet his demise at the hands of his intended victims.
Here is an engraving of the destruction of the Cheyenne-Lakota village from Harper’s Weekly. You will notice that the tents are burning.
Burning tents has for centuries been a signal of aggressive colonization and of genocide.
© 2024 All Rights Reserved