The stock market is setting records at every mention of a cease fire in Gaza, Iran, or Lebanon, and as each ship crosses Hormuz. Sometimes there is disappointment, and the market briefly plunges, but it is ready to leap back at the next bit of good news.

And the people in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon? They of course rejoice at a lessening of violence, at the good news of a cease fire deal, no matter how temporary it may be.

I’ve been reading American Indian history fairly seriously for the past dozen years, and have gained friendships with Native people, mostly Nez Perce, over some forty years. And it occurs to me that what our president and Israel’s Netanyahu are practicing now is much the same as what the American government has practiced over the course of history, but especially in the pivotal 1800s, the time of treaties, wars, and reservations.

What we—the United States—did then set the pattern that our president and Bibi are pursuing now: hit them hard, kill some if you have to, then back off and tell them how magnanimous you are, how you have stopped the settlers, the war, the miners—the bombings, missiles, and drones, the attacks on water and power and roads.

Take the Nez Perce story. After conflicts with settlers and missionaries, make a treaty and tell them they now have land that is theirs forever. When gold is discovered, tell them that their forever land must be reduced by 90 percent, but it will be theirs forever, and they can go on living their lives as they have always done, But then tell them that they have to give up their children to boarding schools, give up their language, dances, and drums, and squeeze themselves onto individual plots of land in what is called the “allotment” process. Don’t mention that lands not allotted to Indians will be declared “surplus” and sold to settlers. (And don’t do the math for the Nez Perce and other tribes that would tell them that 90 million acres would be stolen from tribes during this allotment process.)

In Gaza the Israelis struck back after a horrendous attack by the militant Palestinian Hamas on their civilians. In four years of scouring and torching Gazan neighborhoods, turning homes, schools, and hospitals to rubble, Netanyahu still finds holdouts among the devastated civilians and breaks a cease fire to hit them. Tens of thousands of Palestinians are dead, that many or more wounded, and millions displaced. They bask now in a precarious cease fire. The American president takes credit for being a peace maker. The stock market rises.

In the West Bank, Israeli settlers continue to displace Palestinians, following the pattern set by their Zionist ancestors, some of whom had looked to and announced the following of the American treatment of our Native populations as a blueprint for the eventual takeover of the Holy Land by immigrant Jews. The Immigrants came mostly from an antisemitic Russia and eastern European countries, and then as survivors of the Holocaust and WW II.

In Lebanon, Israel has wrapped up an enormous attack on the Hezbollah, a Shia group funded by Iran following a previous Israel-Lebanon war.  Hezbollah, in sympathy with Iran after American and Israeli strikes on that country, sent missiles and drones into Israel. Israel used a sledge hammer to counter their attacks, forcibly removed tens of thousands from Southern Lebanon, and turned Southern towns and parts of Beirut into rubble—it looks like Gaza all over again. Millions have been displaced, and refugees put up tents on Beirut’s streets as they do in Gaza and increasingly, in Iran! Our president brokers a peace between Israel and Lebanon—strong-arming Netanyahu—in the interest of maintaining the cease fire in Iran. And the stock market sets new records!

In the end, we might be looking at new “reservations” across the Middle East: In Lebanon, three or four reservations, for the Christians, the Shia Moslems, the Sunni Moslems, and the Druze. Beirut will once again be the Paris of the Middle East, with Parisians and Americans funding and visiting.

In Gaza, the T-development team will build a new landscape of upscale housing and resorts, The Gazans for the most part will labor in the service industry. Maybe they will have their own “reserve” to go home to.

And in the Gulf States and Iran itself? There is plenty of oil and money floating in the region, and the moneyed will end up in control. Maybe Iran will have to be divided into reservations for the religious, the secular, and the followers of the old Shah who are waiting for the chance to return,

And the stock market will climb until someone punches a hole in it, at which point the moneyed will have already found safe retreats, and those scraping along with their IRAs toward retirement will go back to work.

# # #