When looking back, all we need do is say "Oops" and revisit the depictions of the wronged dead in the history books. Sort of like what John Paul II finally said about the Church's treatment of Galileo. It's easy to admire the dead; one can make easy peace with ghosts because they don't talk back.

I assure you, Justin, if you were to look at American history books' depiction of the Native tribes from the turn of the last century, you would find something close to what you said about the Palestinians here.

I will here excerpt from the only reference (vol. III., pp. 112-121, "The Seminole Wars") to the Indian Wars contained in a four-volume set called The Great Republic by the Master Historians. I own a complete set of the second edition, (c) 1901. The men who wrote the monographs were old enough to remember something of the Indian Wars, yet the only mention of the struggle with the Sioux is a lithograph depicting Custer in an heroic pose holding an American flag aloft in one hand and a pistol in the other. Amazing. This long and bloody war of conquest saw, starting in the late 1600s, a population that had lived on the land for thousands of years driven off by newcomers, refugees who said, initially, that God ("Providence" in Puritan-speak) gave them the land, and who used the indigenous groups' armed resistance as a further excuse to relocate, drive back, demonize, and kill them. Sound familiar?

During the early period of the nineteenth century few troubles with the Indians existed, except those that formed a portion of the war with Great Britain. . . . The country east of the Mississippi was now so thickly occupied by white settlers as to awe the savages, and the final conflicts in this region came from two thinly settled territories, -- Wisconsin, in the far northwest, and Florida, in the southeast. . . . As a result, most of the Indians were driven west of the Mississippi, and a treaty of peace was concluded, by which they ceded to the United States a large section of their territory.



The powerful tribal organizations of the Southern range of States, the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctoaws, were gradually induced to yield their lands and to accept new homes in the Indian Territory.

[This is known in the Cherokee histories as the infamous Trail of Tears. Induced, my fat Aunt Harriet! --MA] The Seminoles of Florida . . . resisted the efforts made to remove them, and started a war [italics mine] which proved to be the longest and most costly Indian war to which the United States had ever been subjected. Instead of being concluded in one or two severe campaigns, as in ordinary cases, it dragged its slow length along for seven years, until the government almost despaired of subduing its savage adversaries.

How dare they fight for their homes, those savages! They refused to be relocated, and were pursued into the choice real estate of the Everglades, which as we know was heavily settled. Not.

Why do we study history if we refuse to learn from it? The Palestinians are in the same position that the First Nations were in here. To advocate wiping out the former does no honor to the memory of our shameful treatment of the latter.

Regards--
Mary Anne