CPTnet
16 December 2005
AT-TUWANI REFLECTION: Are there settlers in America?
by Rich Meyer
Diane and I were out by Sarura watching three farmers from At-Tuwani plow
their little valley fields with one-mule plows. We heard the settlers
singing in the trees on our way out, so we were watching in case they tried
to chase the Palestinian farmers from their fields. When Kristin and Jenny
came, I caught a ride back to At-Tuwani on a tractor. Yelling over the
sound of a Ford diesel, the driver asked me how I liked this area, I said I
liked it a lot, except for the problems with the settlers, then he asked me,
"Are there settlers in America?"
Well, this was the day after Thanksgiving, the day Americans celebrate the
start of the genocide of the Native people. On the team here, we had had a
couple conversations about the call for a national day of mourning in place
of Thanksgiving and about the irony that we, settlers in North America, are
standing with the indigenous people here, opposing settler violence and
settlement expansion.
I didn't answer, deciding to hide below the tractor roar.
At noon, I had a chance to ask a well-educated Palestinian, the accountant
for a large marble-cutting firm. He knows the story of European conquest
of the Americas. I told him of the conversation on the tractor, and asked
what I should have said. "You have to say, 'No.' In terms of what he means
about the life in America, the answer is 'No.' He's thinking of the
settlement of Kiryat Arba. For what he imagines, you would be giving him
the wrong idea if you said, 'Yes.'"
I wasn't satisfied. I think if I were looking from Pine Ridge Reservation,
I'd see a whole lot of settlers very much like those of Kiryat Arba or
Ma'on. Many settlers here see themselves as pioneers and cowboys on the
frontier.
In the evening I was talking with Gershom Gorenberg, whose new book on the
first ten years of the occupation will be out in March. At the end of the
evening I told him the story of my morning conversation on the tractor, and
asked him, "How do you think I should answer that question?" Gershom's
immediate answer was, "You have to say 'No.' The two cases are too
dissimilar." He explained differences based on questions of how much the
occupied are seen or see themselves as a nation, and some other differences
in historical-political context that made more sense to me. Then he said,
"And then there's the reason your Palestinian friend at lunch needs you to
answer, 'No.' That is because if you say 'Yes,' then the rest of the answer
is, 'and settlers win.' He needs to have hope, and making his situation
parallel to North America will tell him that he's lost."
Yes, we have settlers in America. I'm one of them. Have we won?
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