We Will Always Have Been Against This

When tourists look at our wall display at the Josephy Center that tells a very brief story of the walwa ma, or Joseph, Band of the Nez. Perce Indians, they often shake their heads and say something like “It’s terrible what we did to Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce.” Those who say this are mostly in their forties and older, and mostly white, and have read something of the Nez Perce War. Many go on to say that the boarding schools were terrible. Some continue, decrying the attitudes and actions of our government against Native Americans in detail. They’ve read about the killings of the Osage women, the stories of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Quanah Parker, Geronimo, and Captain Jack and the Modoc War. They know that Custer was not who he was portrayed as for many years by his wife and apologists for American expansionism, and that Indian women and children were killed by gatling guns at Wounded Knee. In recent years they’ve learned through Native fiction writers like Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie about lives on reservations in our own times. And if they read or listen to the news, they know that Indian women today are raped, killed, and disappeared more than other women, and that Indians suffer from alcoholism, diabetes, and poverty more than other Americans. We now know these things.

I was reminded of this reading Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Akkad was born in Egypt, raised in Qatar, and moved with his family to Canada when he was 16. He had a ten-year career as a reporter for the Toronto Star, including stints in Afghanistan and multiple visits to Guantanamo to report on a Canadian citizen held there. He wrote a novel—American War—which won him Canada’s most prestigious literary prize and $100,000. He now lives and writes in Oregon, where he has won Oregon Book Awards. The purpose of his new book, a kind of memoir and passionate plea described in the title, is to tell us that what is going on in Gaza is genocide, and that One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Known This. Like One Day—today—we know about the maltreatment—the injustices—visited on Native Americans over centuries.

El Akkad is especially irritated at American and other Western liberals, who have cozied to Netanyahu and the current Israeli government, and provided and continue to provide arms that are used to kill Palestinians, He does not say it, but what rattles in my brain is that our government—and especially its liberal politicians and thinkers over the last decades—is still welded to immediate post-World War II world attitudes towards Jews and Israel. We did not come to the aid of European Jews in the 1930s, when they were scrambling out of Germany, Russia, and East European countries. We did not really believe that genocide was happening until we liberated the death camps. At Buchenwald, Eisenhower famously told the troops that they now knew what they were fighting for. He ordered all American units in the area and not engaged in frontline battle to be sent to Ohrdruf—a subcamp of Buchenwald. He cabled General George C. Marshall, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C., requesting that members of Congress and journalists be sent to liberated camps to witness and document the horrific scenes US troops were uncovering. One Day had come; we could all now know these atrocities.

But we failed the Jews again after the War. We were moving on in our postwar world, helping Germany and Japan rebuild, educating and housing our veterans, building houses and highways. But we failed to accept refugees—read European Jews—in any numbers. Opinion polls of the day say that our people, our grandmothers and grandfathers, by huge margins, did not want them. Meanwhile, Zionism was creating a Jewish State in the Middle East in what had been a British Mandate following the first World War. President Truman quickly—11 minutes after it was declared—recognized the State of Israel. The first country to do so. Relief. And in 1958, we—my generation—read Leon Uris’s Exodus and applauded the Jews, the hardships they had overcome, and their new state. We absolved our guilt and celebrated Israel. About Israel, we were all in. About Nazi Germany and its extermination of the Jews, we had “Always Been Against This.”

One could go on, about always being against Slavery, Jim Crow, Japanese Internment camps, Indian language restrictions, etc.

Akkad wants us to be against the genocide that is happening in Gaza now. He documents America’s refusal to see the genocide, refusal to acknowledge charges put before the UN and other international bodies, and continues to send arms and money to Israel. An Israel that has destroyed the infrastructure and architecture of Gaza, that has and continues to chase its citizenry north and south as it chases Hamas leaders and units, that has destroyed hospitals and schools, refused aid shipments and foreign journalists into Gaza, and in essence now has annexed one-fifth of the territory. Meanwhile, settlers and the government officials continue the onslaught on the West Bank, and the Israeli military is bombing Lebanon and Syria.

We can be anti-Israeli without being antisemitic. We can acknowledge the horrors visited on Israeli citizens by Hamas while asking for fair treatment of the Moslems, Druze, and Christians—yes, there are many Arab Christians in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon. And we can agree with many world leaders and writers and reporters on the ground that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide. One Day can be now; we can know this. As much as we know about boarding schools and the unfair treatment of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce.

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Image of Eisenhower at Buchenwald, WW II Museum