An out-of-the-box proposal for boxed in negotiations.
"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting different results." -- Albert Einstein
Two decades after their leaders signed the Oslo Peace Accords
in Washington, new polls show that barely one-third of Palestinians and
Israelis now see a badly-needed “two-state” solution as feasible. The seemingly
intractable difficulties in coming up with a sustainable framework agreement
means that key issues of land, faith, recognition and rights need to be
reexamined. A paradigm shift towards a cogent analysis of issues of national
identity, self-determination and nationalism is urgently required, accompanied
by another, similarly imperative, fundamental change
in approach and underlying assumptions in public opinion, the latter also required for the making
of lasting peace. To date, a backbench yet debilitating use of the indigenous
perspective by both sides in the Palestinian-Israeli debate appears meant to
incite anger, rather than to understand the opposing sides’ common concerns,
those that could ultimately bring the warring nationalities together. By turning
the current acrimonious debate on its head using reality-based indigenous
approaches, the prospect of badly needed and currently scarce
confidence-building measures— on core issues such as borders,
Jerusalem, security and refugees— unfolding in a timely fashion would be greatly advanced.
If presented as part of a more hopeful framework, the
indigenous perspective offers a unique examination of concepts such as the
“right of return” and the right to live on ancestral lands. It carries with it
demands for honest recognition of how, as Brookings scholar Khaled Elgindy has
correctly noted,[1] a
current lingering reliance on “constructive ambiguity,” has “prolonged—and
ultimately doomed—the Oslo process for more than twenty years… producing
confusion and eroding trust between the parties.” The common indigenous language necessary to
jump-start post-Oslo negotiation is based on ancient perspectives and modern
understandings. While seemingly still outside the toolkits of the Washington
establishment, it could provide Secretary of State John F. Kerry with what he
needs to turn the tide as the April deadline for a peace agreement approaches,
eviscerating the feeling that both Israelis and Palestinians now share, that:
“Americans could have done more.”[2]
Resuscitating a two-state
option now on life support
In short, what is lacking up to now in the discussions and
debates is a clear understanding of the modern rights and needs of indigenous
peoples, and how that knowledge can go a long way in eliminating what critics
rightly deem the “vacuousness” of discussions about the two-state solution. To
date, both Israeli and Palestinian publics have been left without real,
practical building blocks leading to a shared understanding what the
“near-universally recognized need for a two-state solution”[3]
can offer. Yet done correctly, an indigenous orientation could allow for the
escape—over time—of the potential for a two-state solution from the pessimistic
and Churchillian-sounding portrayal of being “not the best option,” but rather
the “least worst option.”[4]
Key points: ·
The
Jewish and democratic state of Israel is also one of the world’s first modern
indigenous states; Palestinian demands center on their own tribal
indigeneity. Both require a set of specific rights based on their historical
ties to a specific territory, and that their cultural/historical
distinctiveness from other populations, including the politically dominant, is recognized. ·
While
questions of indigeneity are increasingly used as weapons by both Israeli and
Palestinian antagonists, the important potential contribution of a real
debate on both indigenous peoples in effectively re-activating the stalled
two-state option in the Holy Land is little understood and less appreciated. ·
Thorny
issues involving peoples’ right of return to traditional lands and the right
to live in indigenous nation states can be better appreciated in the context
of current and historical examples of other tribe-based identities and their
struggles around the world. ·
Palestinian
distrust of Western “betrayal” does not extend to Native peoples of U.S.,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Chile, whose own lessons learned and
expertise can be extraordinarily useful in resuscitating the two-state
debate. ·
The
potential mediating role of tribal experts from the world’s oldest democracy
offers myriad “lessons learned.” For example, Israeli needs for maintaining a
“Jewish state—and Palestinian worries about what that means for them—can be
better understood by recognizing the exercise of rights by non-native and
other tribe residents of American Indian reservations. |
Israel as a modern
indigenous state; Palestinian dreams of one of their own
It is important to remember that the Jewish state of Israel
is arguably the world’s first modern indigenous state (although academicians
and statesmen in countries in Central and Eastern Europe might reasonably make
a similar claim based on their own ethnonationalist experience). As a result, not only can the history of Israel’s
own emergence help shape and inform the fight of other peoples around the world
for their own recognition and rights.[5]
More to the point in relation to Israel’s ultimate survival as a people is the
fact that little of the indigenous argument has been consciously and
conspicuously incorporated in a way as to make the two-state solution not only
plausible, but also workable.
The facts on the ground clearly delineate Israel’s relationship vis-a-vis
tribal peoples elsewhere today. As I noted in my book Peoples of the Earth; Ethnonationalism, Democracy and the Indigenous
Challenge in ‘Latin’ America, “The protection of ancestral lands, dimly
understood if at all by modern urban dwellers in the global North, is
nonetheless a powerful and ecumenical symbol for indigenous and traditional
peoples around the world.” As the British historian Hugh Seton-Watson pointed
out: “Theodor Herzl and other Zionist leaders came to clearly understand that a
nation could not be created from language and religion alone; a state could
only emerge when there was an unshakeable bond with a specific territory from
which it could be created. … [6]
Another example of this search for
self identity—whose uniqueness helps ratify de Vos’s dictum that what is
believed, not what objectively was, becomes the operative principle in the
reconstruction of identity—is the case of the 700 Indians from Peru and
Brazil. The group’s ancestors included a handful of Moroccan Jewish tradesman
imported more than a century and a half ago to work in the Amazon rubber
industry.
The Jewish merchants had no wives,
and ended up marrying local Indian women. In 2005, hundreds of these Indian
descendants immigrated to Israel after reconnecting with Judaism and their
Jewish heritage, which “up until twenty years ago … was nothing more than a
distant memory … living through a handful of religious customs practiced by a
few of the families living in the Amazon.” As one author noted, the Jewish
immigrants of Indian descent “prove nothing trumps the need to connect with
one’s heritage.” The Indians who identified themselves as Jewish qualified
to emigrate to Israel under the state’s Law of Return [5710-1950], which gives
Jews, those of Jewish ancestry, and their spouses the right to migrate to and
settle in Israel and to gain citizenship. (Italics added)[7]
As far as the Palestinian experience goes, Thomas L.
Friedman, in his From Beirut to
Jerusalem, Revised Edition, provided the perhaps the best synopsis of the
tribal imperative for the still-stateless people when he wrote of the
continuing legacy of Yasser Arafat:
Long before Arafat came on the scene,
there was a clearly defined Palestinian nation, but it was a nation to whom
history had said no. … As Arafat himself liked to say, the Palestinians were
being treated like “the American Red Indians,” confined on their reservations—shafted
by the Arabs, defeated by the Jews and forgotten by the world. Arafat brought this people back from the dead
… and transformed them in the eyes of the world from refugees in need of tents
to a nation in need of sovereignty. (Italics added)
Far from dividing Palestinians and Israelis, addressing their
common concerns as indigenous peoples provides one of the few bridges to
greater mutual understanding and eventual reconciliation. Clearly both Israelis
and Palestinians share a history in which both are victims and both have held
fast for a less dangerous place in the world for their people. This common
perspective is based on an emerging experiential alphabet shared by U.S.
Indians and other native peoples, full-bore attention to which could help break
the enduring post-Oslo logjam by providing key topics for confidence building:
Dispossession, colonization, tribal identity, land
and belonging, return of an irrecoverable past, collective trauma, passion for land, ethnonationalism, displacement and exile, diaspora, the relationship between self-conceptualization and
community, reclamation of spiritual
wholeness, national identity, spiritual co-existence
The indigenous perspective can foster, unite and sanctify the
dispirited apostles for peace in both Israel and in Palestine, including those
of respective diasporas clamoring for understanding and participation. It
offers the possibility of shedding the mistaken idea that only vague and
purposely politicized concepts—the contemporary version of the Kissingerian
“constructive ambiguity”—can keep both sides from seeking to grab the other’s
throat. It puts on the table essential issues of land, faith and languages and
what these mean in practice on the ground, in order to nuture policy trees with
real olive branches.
Common lands, common
ground
The paucity of other approaches that are offered for
consideration by American and other foreign policy mavens reflects either
entrenched interests or a misrepresentation of the history of “The Other” in
the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. An
example of this is the call by some for the creation of a “truth and
reconciliation commission” as a way of promoting essential confidence building
among the necessary constituencies of a two-state solution—an idea recently
floated by a panelist at an otherwise enlightening New
America Foundation event in Washington, D.C.: “Peace for Israel and Palestine?”[8]
In fact, setting up such a commission would in the
foreseeable future most likely seriously backfire—adding damaging heat to a
crucially necessary dialogue that polling by Zogby Research Services shows both
Israeli and Palestinian publics believe offers few signs of light on the
horizon. Continued advocacy in some corners in Washington of “constructive ambiguity”
in the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue underscores the yawning pitfalls in the
“truth commission” argument. Add to
that the fact that neither side has suffered a knock-out military and/or public
relations defeat and that outside constituencies, including in the diaspora but
also beyond, still hold a lock on what can under present circumstances actually
be addressed.[9]
In contrast, the use of the indigenous perspective as a way
of moving forward offers a venue of common understanding for opposing sides
that share—albeit from antagonistic perspectives—legitimate claims to the
earth, and who are flanked by belligerent and aggressive comrades willing to go
to the mat to prevail. A contemporary understanding of the century-old Wilsonian perspective regarding ethnonationalism is
essential to beat back claims of ethnic superiority and its evil
twin—fanaticism—by offering real and protected inclusion into the family of
nations, one tribe at a time.
Critical
support for the Kerry Initiative
To be victorious in the Middle Eastern
arena, the Kerry State Department needs to promote a far better understanding
about the rights of, and the fight for, indigenous peoples around the world and
the protection of their land and resources.
In this regard, “The Other” narratives emanating from the lessons
learned of U.S. Indians and many non-North American indigenous peoples can help
fashion a functional roadmap leading to the two-state solution being viewed
again as not only desirable, but also feasible. The lack of US leadership in
this regard has left a noxious vacuum shared by those whose views can only
imperil the peace processes—and global security.
Despite his undeniable though controversial
role in that process, it is clear that Arafat’s wholly negative and often cited
comparison of the Palestinians with “the American Red Indians” was based on an out-dated
understanding arrived at before a still much-overlooked fact (including in the
United States): That it was disgraced President Richard M. Nixon who actually
served as “the modern day ‘Abraham Lincoln’ of Indian people,”[10]
inaugurating an enlightened self-determination policy for Native American
tribes. (“From the time of their first contact with European settlers,
the American Indians have been oppressed and brutalized, deprived of their
ancestral lands and denied the opportunity to control their own destiny,”
President Nixon wrote to Congress on July 8, 1970. “Even the Federal programs
which are intended to meet their needs have proven to be ineffective and
demeaning”—a charge echoed by Palestinians against Israel today.)
An indigenous promise
Since that time, the experience of U.S. Indian
tribes—recognized as “domestic dependent nations” since the country’s
beginning—offers dynamic examples of how American Indians—with centuries of
differences, customs and language to overcome—are more united and successful
than any time after the brutal Conquest. Thus, U.S. tribes are
themselves a wellspring of knowledge ranging from democracy and security
issues, to environmental protection, the protection of cultural patrimony, and
the extension of free-market ideas within the context of collective land
ownership.
Specifically, the American Indian experience offers critical
examples of how resilient Native peoples:
Returned
as full citizens from a time of near ethnic genocide
Successfully
demanded recognition of long-standing treaty rights both nationally and
internationally
Pressed
for the repatriation of cultural artifacts and sacred land return as a way of
fighting against their own spiritual exile that resulted from a profound
disconnection with their peoples’ past
Ultimately
used the tools meant to repress them by a victorious non-indigenous military
for their own benefit
Employ
free-market capitalism and education on their own terms, retaining their
respect for the land and traditional life
Offer
stunning successful examples of the importance of traditional venues in the
framework of the rule of law
Labored
with U.S. Nobel peace prize winner and President Jimmy Carter to ensure passage
of the Indian Religious Freedom Act
Worked to reconcile long-standing
land disputes existing between tribes themselves[11]
The possibility that experiences and
lessons learned such as these are likely to have special value for efforts to
re-start the two-state negotiations through confidence building is
self-evident. By reaching out to key
non-ideological and fair-minded academics and practitioners in Indian Country,
and finding their peers in other nations, the Kerry State Department could put
what André Malraux called “a
scar on the map,” as Israelis and Palestinians alike desperately seek ways to
breathe life into the post-Oslo process. It could also begin to refocus public
discussion to what those contending peoples share, the necessary antidote to a
tattered “constructive
ambiguity” that leads to nowhere.
In societies where justice through
public institutions is denied, groups seeking resolution of their grievances
are more likely to resort to violence.In an
age when policymakers claimed to be focused on the need to drain “swamps” of
neglect and despair around the globe considered potential breeding grounds for
terrorists, that disaffection and radicalization can be contained, at least in
part, in the words of an Indian rights lawyer “by offering the poorest and most
neglected people access to legal systems that recognize their human rights
under the rule of law.” For
that reason, contributions by tribal leaders such as Raymond D. Austin are
essential. Austin served for 16 years as
a justice on the Navajo Nation Supreme Court, the world’s largest tribal
justice system. In his 2009 book, Navajo
Courts and Navajo Common Law, A Tradition of Tribal Self-Governance, Austin
noted the leading role played by his tribe in a global legal revolution in favor
of indigenous peoples. The Navajo are in thus in a unique position to help the
indigenous peoples of the Jewish state of Israel and in Palestine as they seek
to protect their access to land, cultures and spiritual traditions.[12]
Part of the process of potentially harvesting the fruits of effective
sovereignty for Israelis and Palestinians is a greater understanding of the
role played by the U.S. Department of Defense in the protection of cultural
properties both at home and abroad (the latter in cooperation with the State
Department). For more than a decade, proactive cultural resource stewardship
has been an increasing part of the mission of U.S. armed forces. This “period
of openness and consultation”—lessons learned—with American Indians, Native Alaskans
and Native Hawaiians is the result of many years of being engaged in talks over
the identification and protection of those places where native peoples have
lived currently held by the armed forces.
DoD’s own potential contributions in
resuscitating the Oslo Accords can be seen in the work of the late Native
American author Vine Deloria, Jr., and anthropologist Richard Stoffle. They
noted: “Native Americans, both as citizens and members of dependent nations
within the United States and as original occupants of lands that are currently
held by the DoD, have a special cultural relationship with these military
lands. Traditional, aboriginal, and historical cultural ties to places,
objects, and activities are the foundation of this special relationship.” In an
explanation of the views of U.S. tribes that is also of significance for
indigenous peoples in other areas of the world, Deloria and Stoffle added:
Native Americans are attached to the land in
some ways that others can easily understand, but also in other ways that are
almost impossible to explain. The Christian-Islamic-Hebrew concept called holy
land perhaps best describes where the Indian people perceive they were created.
Here in their holy lands are origin mountains where the supernatural created them
and gave them responsibilities for using and protecting the land. Here also are
places of great religious significance to all Native ethnic group members;
places best described by the Christian-Islamic-Hebrew term sacred site. [13]
The problem of getting the some of the right people in
place to take part in a meaningful post-Oslo dialogue is already in part taken
care of, as the U.S. Central Command (already in the lead among American
military theater commands) has given special responsibility to its Historical/Cultural
Advisory Group for devising actions to mitigate cultural property damage,
including archaeological and cultural resource mapping. In 2009, the U.S.
ratified the 55-year-old Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural
Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. The Army Field Manual on Stability
Operations includes among “essential stability tasks” the requirement to
“protect and secure places of religious worship and cultural sites,” and to
“protect and secure strategically important institutions (such as government
buildings; medical and public health infrastructure; … museums; and religious
sites.)” Section 402 of the National Historic Preservation Act indicates that
the United States is responsible for cultural resources stewardship, by government
representatives as well as contractors, everywhere the U.S. is in a position of
command responsibility. Furthermore, US-trained foreign students from countries
facing contentious issues of indigenous rights are using concepts learned from
laws such as the U.S. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
(NAGPRA) to confront situations of potential conflict at home. [14]
Unhealthy
politicization of a common indigenous agenda: A 2-way dead end
Increasingly,
the still-yawning international vacuum on the rights of indigenous peoples has
redounded negatively on Middle East development and security policies, with the
fight between Israelis and Palestinians quickly growing into a verbal trench
warfare reminiscent in style to the tragedy of World War I. Following the
American Studies Association’s decision last year to boycott Israeli
universities in protest against what one supporter called “Israel’s
regime of occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid against the
Palestinian people,” the U.S. Native American and Indigenous Studies
Association (NAISA) unanimously declared its own one-sided support: “We strongly
protest the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and the legal structures of
the Israeli state that systematically discriminate against Palestinians and
other Indigenous peoples.”
There was no mention of Israel as being itself a modern indigenous
state, or the rights of its people (whose tribal and religious identification
is essential to its being) to retain ancestral lands and protect its own nation
state.[15] As Jonathan S. Tobin correctly noted in Commentary Magazine:
Jews are not foreigners in Israel as Europeans
were in Africa. They happen to be the indigenous people of their ancient
homeland and efforts to deny this isn’t scholarship. Zionism is the national
liberation movement of the Jewish people and those who would deny them the same
rights accorded other peoples are practicing bias, not scholarship.[16]
And on the pro-Israel side, the indigenous peoples’ question and the
rights of Palestinians are similarly largely used as public
relations/propaganda tools, rather than a beckoning to common ground. For example, last year The Jewish Press ran a
blog story, “Debunking the ‘Palestinians as Native Americans’ Myth—In one
anti-Israel protest outside of Nablus, Palestinians even dressed up like Native
Americans in order to make a political point.” While the story correctly
concluded that “Muslims were never the sole inhabitants of the
land like the Native Americans were in the United States,” it also charged that “the
truth of the matter is that the Jewish people are the closest thing to an
indigenous people within the Holy Land, while the Palestinian Arabs’ ancestors
sprung out from centers of empire.”[17] A promising article in Israel National News, that began with the headline, “Israel: The
World’s First Modern Indigenous State,” was written by Ryan Bellerose, a Métis from the Paddle Prairie Metis
settlement in Northern Alberta, Canada, and a declared Zionist.
Unfortunately, Bellerose, too, willingly waded into the swamp of anti-two state
rhetoric, declaring, “Those who are arguing for Palestinian ‘indigenous
rights’ are usually those who have little grasp of the history, and no
understanding of the truth behind indigenous rights.”[18]
A comprehensive and realistic alternative to continuing an ever-more
dangerous militaristic solution is needed. The Israeli bottom line is the
protection of its homeland; that of the Palestinians, the right to a nation
state that provides for freedom and justice on ancestral soil. In order for
both to feel that a two-state solution is feasible each side needs to encounter
a common platform of thought and belief that replaces “constructive ambiguity”
and accusatory political flatulence. That program is one in which narratives of
“The Other” are understood for what they are, and how they are essential to any
possible civilized solution.
Due to the need for a common language that does not deny the narrative
of “The Other”—and the fact that too many political and religious leaders from
both sides engage in radical rhetorical posturing that makes that discourse
unlikely if left to themselves—a bottom-up grassroots strategy for both peoples
is needed to better, and more realistically, define their goals and aspirations,
and as such bring into the mix well-organized
social, economic and legal pressure.
The United States and other democracies must help, with the support of
indigenous peoples from around the world, to facilitate an organization
established at the same time to work with “constituencies of the willing” to
sustain strategies leading to those desired effects. In particular, the
experiences of indigenous peoples in the United States, Canada, Australia,
Chile and New Zealand, could be particularly useful.
Although the start-up cost in terms of necessary commitments to truth,
and time and some resources for such an approach may seem challenging, the cost
of the present boxed-in alternative goes far beyond what any people can pay for
forever. Open to debate in determining a winning two-state formula should be
what short-term goals will lead to a common ground of enfranchising and
protecting two native peoples—Jewish and Palestinian—currently at risk of
engaging in another fratricidal war.
Martin Edwin Andersen, a former assistant professor of
national security at the National Defense University, is also the staff author
of the Cranston Amendment, which since 1993 has required the U.S. State
Department’s annual human rights country reports to include sections on
indigenous peoples.
______________________________
This article is dedicated to
the memory of Dr. Robert A. Pastor,
a prophetic teacher and
brave defender of democracy and
the human rights of peoples
around the world.
© Martin Edwin Andersen, 2014. All rights reserved.
[1] Elgindy, “When Ambiguity is Destructive,” The Cairo Review of Global
Affairs, January
22, 2014 @
http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/01/22-when-ambiguity-is-destructive
[2] James Zogby, “20 Years After Oslo,” Zogby
Research Services, llc, January 2014.
[4] British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is
remembered, among other things, for his dictum that “Democracy is the worst
form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from
time to time” (from a House of Commons speech on November 11, 1947).
[5] Unfortunately, although one of the justly
hailed intellectual capitals around the globe, Israel has for some time failed
to maintain the kind of prominence and recognition in the developing world it
enjoyed three or four decades ago. That said, a closer examination of the work of diaspora Jews in the civil right
movement in the United States,
in leadership roles against Argentina’s infamous “dirty war,” and with Nelson
Mandela in South Africa, for example, can help create a more just environment
for engagement.
[6] Page 82; Peoples
of the Earth continued: “Perhaps out of similar
reasoning, a woman who was a member of the Winnebago tribe took part in the
1969 takeover of Alcatraz Island by U.S. Indians and their sympathizers that
symbolically claimed the island for indigenous peoples. There she told a
journalist that she had unsuccessfully volunteered to fight for the Israelis
during the 1967 Six-Day War, pointedly declaring: ‘I care about Zionism,
because those people want a homeland, too.’”
[8] The event was held January 31, 2014 in
Washington, D.C.
[9] The Zogby report was offered at the New
America Foundation event. The mother of all truth and reconciliation efforts
was the Argentine “National Commission on Disappeared Persons” (CONADEP). Also
known as the Sabato Commission in honor of its chairman, the leading Latin
American novelist Ernesto Sabato, it emerged under radically different
conditions than those shared by Israelis and Palestinians, and whose many
benefits at that time are therefore unlikely to be reproduced in the Middle
East of today. CONADEP would only come after the shameful military defeat (in
the Falkland/Malvinas war) of the ousted armed forces dictatorship whose members
it was investigating. CONADEP therefore enjoyed broad majority backing of the
type hard to discern in current polling of Israeli and Palestinian attitudes
toward the peace process. CONADEP’s chief ally was an Argentine human rights
movement of great international and national prestige and credibility for its
brave history of peacefully combatting that dictatorship—responsible for the
disappearance, torture and clandestine death of at least 20,000 people. Despite
the fact CONADEP supporters were the clear victors against a military defeated
on a real battlefield against a foreign foe, as well as in the court of public
opinion, it lacked subpoena powers and the ability to compel testimony. Any and all evidence of unlawful behavior it
discovered could only be provided to relevant civilian courts (to be sure
itself revolutionary in the Latin American context), as it had no prosecutorial
powers either. See, for example, Fabian Bosoer and Federico Finchelstein,
“Argentina’s truth commission at 30,” Aljazeera
America, January 19, 2014, and Chapter 1, “The Sad Privilege of being
Argentine,” in Dossier Secreto:
Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War” @ http://goo.gl/4jmFBj
[11] See, for example, Donald Fixico, Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous
Nations in the Modern American West, University of Arizona Press, 2013;
Martin Edwin Andersen, "Native American Policing: The Experience of U.S.
Tribes" A report prepared for the International Criminal Investigative
Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) of the U.S. Department of Justice, March
7, 1995 @ http://goo.gl/mBwccM
[12] Austin, Navajo
Courts and Navajo Common Law, A Tradition of Tribal Self-Governance,
University of Minnesota, 2009; Martin Edwin Andersen, “Thankful for renewed
rights; Native Nicaraguans needed protection,” The Washington Times,
November 22, 2001.
[13] Deloria and Stoffle, “Native American Sacred
Sites and the Department of Defense,” A Report Sponsored by the Legacy Resource
Management Program, United States National Park Service and submitted to the
U.S. Department of Defense, June 1998, Chapter One: “Introduction.”
[14]Interview with Col. Michael F. Welch, USAF,
Vice Director, Sub-secretariat for Administration and Conference
Support/Military and Defense Advisor, Inter-American Defense Board, Organization
of American States.
[15] Matthew Kalman, “Palestinians Divided Over
Boycott of Israeli Universities,” The New
York Times, January 19, 2014; “Native American Studies Group Joins Israel
Boycott,” Inside Higher Ed, December
18, 2013; Declaration of Support for the Boycott of Israeli Academic
Institutions, Decenber 15, 2013, @ http://naisa.org/node/719
[16] Tobin, “Indigenous? Native American Studies
and Big Lies About Israel,” Commentary
Magazine, December 18, 2013.
[17] Rachel Avraham, The Jewish Press, April 29, 2013. Perhaps more damaging to its own
credibility, The Jewish Press story when on to uncritically quote alleged Native
American scholar Ward Churchill, who the Investigative Committee of the
Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado
concluded committed multiple counts of academic misconduct—plagiarism,
fabrication and falsification. (In a September 2001 essay entitled “On the
Justice of Roosting Chickens,” Churchill argued that the September 11 attacks
were caused by U.S. foreign policy, comparing World Trade Center financial
employees involved in “ongoing genocidal American imperialism” to the role
played by Adolf Eichmann in the Holocaust.)
[18] Bellerose, “Op-Ed: Israel: The World’s First
Modern Indigenous State,” Israel National
News, January 14, 2014.