Jeff Sparrow || In a recent article for Prospect Magazine, the Israeli-American historian of genocide Omer Bartov wondered at what he called
the extraordinary ability of so many Israelis to simultaneously justify, deny, ignore or deliberately avoid speaking and thinking about the ongoing systematic obliteration of the Gaza Strip and the Palestinians who live there.
Australians should be less surprised at the social and psychological mechanisms that enabled the Gaza genocide, since similar techniques facilitated the violent dispossession of Indigenous people in this country.
Historical analogies require, of course, considerable care.
The Zionist colonisation of Palestine differed from the British colonisation of Australia in many ways, not least because of periodisation. Israel’s foundation in 1948 came in an era marked elsewhere by systematic de-colonisation. Israeli apartheid distinguishes itself by, we might say, its belatedness, embracing in the twenty-first century an ethno-nationalism once common among European nations but now widely discredited (albeit only after, as Tony Judt notes, prolonged mass expulsions and ethnic cleansing in the wake of the Second World War).
In Australia, settlement began with convict transportation in 1788. The resulting Indigenous dispossession facilitated the eventual development of a more conventional capitalist state, which then cultivated what the anthropologist WEH Stanner called “The Great Australian Silence” about the violence of its foundation. In the second half of the twentieth century, hard-fought social struggles forced the abandonment of the ethno-nationalist White Australia policy and at least some public acknowledgement of the suffering associated with settler colonialism.
Nevertheless, the parallels between two histories remain important.
On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice issued a provisional measures order in relation to the genocide case brought by South Africa, demanding that Israel take immediate steps to prevent the crime in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately rejected the ruling:
Like every country, Israel has an inherent right to defend itself. … Israel will continue to defend itself against Hamas, a genocidal terror organization. On October 7th, Hamas perpetrated the most horrific atrocities against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and it vows to repeat these atrocities again and again and again.… We will continue to do what is necessary to defend our country and defend our people.
Settler colonists in Australia described themselves in much the same way. In their letters, articles and diaries, they portrayed themselves as victims, inexplicably under attack by Indigenous people and forced to fight back in self-defence.
In 1816, for instance, Lachlan Macquarie wrote of deploying the military against Indigenous people in NSW. He explained that he did so because:
the ABORIGINES, or Black NATIVES of this Colony, have for the last three Years manifested a strong and sanguinary Spirit of ANIMOSITY and HOSTILITY towards the BRITISH INHABITANTS residing in the Interior and remote Parts of the Territory, and been recently guilty of most atrocious and wanton Barbarities, in indiscriminately murdering Men, Women, and Children, from whom they had received no Offence or Provocation; and also in killing the Cattle, and plundering and destroying the Grain and Property of every Description … to the great Terror, Loss, and Distress of the suffering inhabitants.
“[T]hey suddenly appear”, complained Governor Arthur in 1829, “commit some act of outrage and then as suddenly vanish”. In 1837, the Sydney Herald fulminated against tribes who were “murdering the shepherds and stockmen with impunity”. Somewhat later, Major Mitchell wrote of the people near Bogan’s Creek in precisely the same terms:
[T]he more we endeavoured to supply their real wants and show good will towards them, the more they seemed to covet what was utterly useless to them and the more they plotted our destruction.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, white Australia sought to forget the extent of frontier violence. A map produced by the University of Wollongong documents the mass killings associated with white settlement. Like the cartography associated with the Gaza genocide, it shows death inflicted almost everywhere. Yet, notoriously, the Australian War Memorial still contains no permanent acknowledgment of the tens of thousands of people killed during the long struggle between settlers and Indigenous fighters, even though the government allocated at least $700 million and possibly as much as $1.1 billion, (depending on how you do the maths) to celebrate the centenary of the First World War. As David Marr says,
There are memorials to the sniffer dogs of the First World War … and we haven’t yet found the space in [the AWM] to commemorate the war that is the basis of our country’s existence.
That erasure was, however, a project of a later period. During settlement, the colonists did not seek to forget the violence. On the contrary, they often memorialised it. Bronwyn Carlson and Terri Farrelly note that all through the country, one can find commemorations of casualties from the wars of dispossession. They write that
these commemorations typically consist of graves, memorial moments and even place names, and they are dedicated to white settlers who were “killed by Natives”. These commemorations serve to uphold the pioneer legend that honours the brave settler and the characteristic representation of the “Natives” as being savage and vengeful, and their attacks unmotivated and unpredictable.
Again, the monuments position the settlers as, first and foremost, innocent victims.
Lorenzo Veracini explains how the structure of settler colonialism fosters such sentiments. “Despite the inherent character of an original founding violence”, he says,
one should also emphasise that settler collectives are also escaping from violence: where a “secure future in a new land” is recurrently and dialectically opposed to an uncertain prospect in an old one.
In rejecting the UN’s ruling, Netanyahu evoked the memory of the Hitlerite death camps. “On the eve of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day”, he said, “I again pledge as Prime Minister of Israel — Never Again”. His cynical deployment of the “Never Again” slogan to facilitate rather than prevent a genocide draws on an understanding of Israel in terms of the history of the settlers, rather than the colonised. In a similar fashion, the centrality of convict transportation to the early colony shaped the perception of European victimhood, since many of those first in conflict with Indigenous people saw the land not as somewhere occupied by others but purely as a place to which Englishmen had been sent against their will.
In both cases, the nature of settlement made conflict inevitable, as even the activities of “peaceful” colonisation disrupted the lives of the pre-existing population. In Israel, Zionists spoke of “a land without people for a people without land”. In colonial Australia, legal theorists developed the doctrine of “terra nullius” (or “empty land”). In both cases, the supposed emptiness was understood by all as a fiction, made possible by ideas about the innate inferiority of those being displaced: in Netanyahu’s presentation of the Gaza genocide as “a clash between barbarism and civilisation”, we hear echoes of Britain’s nineteenth century colonial racism.
The parallels extend from colonisation to resistance. Consider the recent study by Stephen Gapps, an exhaustive account of the war between settlers and Indigenous people in NSW between 1838 and 1844. Gapps’ book is entitled Uprising. In Arabic, that translates as intifada.
The comparison becomes more compelling the closer you look. In his book How they fought, Ray Kerkhove shows that Indigenous people adopted a variety of strategies. They negotiated, they petitioned, they compromised — and then they waged an armed struggle. Their resistance sometimes entailed pitched battles, fought at the level of the company or sometimes even the battalion level and employing both traditional weapons and, at times, European firearms and horses.
More often, Kerkhove says, “Australian [Indigenous] resistance shared the tactics of guerrilla warfare around the globe: accumulative impact”. That is, they employed a variety of different measures to harass and wear down the settlers: hit-and-run raids, economic sabotage, disruption of communications, targeted assassinations and other forms of terrorism. Crucially, Kerkhove argues that Indigenous resistance was remarkably effective, with settler losses in parts of Australia twice or three times the rate of losses experienced by Germany and Russia during the Second World War.
The colonists responded by inflicting deliberately disproportionate collective reprisals. Lyndall Ryan notes that most frontier massacres were
carefully planned operations […often in] response to a particular act of perceived aggression, such as the alleged killing of a settler or stockkeeper by Aboriginal people, even though the original aggression may have been by settlers themselves. To this end, a frontier massacre was intended either to intimidate the Aboriginal owners of the land into subjection or to eliminate them entirely. The act was usually carried out by settlers who lived in fear of the alleged aggressors and believed that by engaging in massacre, they would regain the upper hand. The act of massacre was thus usually an expression of weakness.
In their discussion of settler monuments, Carlson and Farrelly describe the commemoration of what became known as the Hornet Bank Massacre in Taroom, Queensland. It is worth discussing in detail, as an illustration of Ryan’s point.
In a recent study of Hornet Bank, Zoe Smith describes how:
in the early hours of 27 October 1857, approximately fifteen Indigenous men of the Yiman nation attacked Hornet Bank station on the upper banks of the Dawson River near Taroom in central Queensland. … The Yiman men raped Martha, aged 43, mother of the Fraser family who resided there, as well as her two eldest daughters, Elizabeth, aged 19, and Mary, aged 11, before murdering them. Three of Martha’s five sons, John, aged 23, David, aged 16, and James, aged 6, and her two youngest daughters, Jane, aged 9, and Charlotte, aged 3, alongside the family tutor and two station-hands, were also murdered that morning, but left unviolated. The murder of these eleven settlers, known as the Hornet Bank massacre, was the largest massacre of white settlers by Indigenous peoples in Australian history to that date, and was distinguished by its sexual violence.
For Netanyahu and his supporters, the killing of Israelis by Hamas fighters on 7 October erased everything that came earlier and justified all that followed, with the IDF operations in Gaza thus an appropriate response to an unprovoked atrocity. Most Western coverage of the genocide accepted a framing in which, as Omer Bartov says:
the violence [of the Hamas attack] was immediately perceived as an inexplicable, surprise event that could not have been foreseen. The only plausible root was the irrational, innate hatred of Jews by Palestinians. Everything that had gone before was denied, knowingly or not. The clock was set to zero at 6:30am on 7th October when the attack began: everything changed and history had to be rewritten.
The settlers thought of Hornet Bank and similar incidents in precisely the same way. That was the point of their commemorations, presentations in which, as Carlson and Farrelly explain:
the events are decontextualised; there is no account of what led up to an incident, what actions by the settlers prompted the attacks made by Aboriginal peoples on them. There is also usually no account of the retaliatory attacks that followed, where settlers sought retribution through the indiscriminate brutal massacre of Aboriginal peoples that went unpunished and largely undocumented.
The attack on the Fraser family came, according to Smith,
after the repeated rape of Yiman women and girls at the hands of the older Fraser sons, members of the local Native Police, and other settlers. Records show that Martha Fraser was aware of her sons’ atrocities, that she explicitly demanded that they cease these acts, and then asked members of the Native Police to intervene as she ‘expected harm would come’ of their repeated acts of ‘forcibly taking the young maidens’. Her pleas were unsuccessful.
Yet that context made no difference to the response. Smith describes how:
white male settlers deployed the event, particularly the rape of Martha, Elizabeth, and Mary, as justification for further punitive violence–both physical and sexual–on a horrific scale. These settlers, led by the two surviving Fraser sons William and Sylvester, massacred between three hundred and five hundred Indigenous men, women and children over this eighteen-month period, nearly eliminating the Yiman nation.
The parallels between Israeli and Australian violence are useful because the concept of settler colonialism encourages us to think about structure rather than events. Perpetrators might see themselves as responding to previous acts of violence inflicted upon them. Yet, ultimately, conflict unfolds because of the structural incompatibility of settlement with the way of life it displaces. That’s why, as Patrick Wolfe says, “elimination is an organising principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence”.
In Australia, Indigenous people mounted an armed struggle against their dispossession — a struggle that sometimes resulted in atrocities. But no-one suggests that discussion of the colonial period should begin with denunciations of that struggle. Almost everyone now accepts the obvious point that European settlement made violence inevitable. Indeed, we almost say that the acceptance obscures its significance, at least among white liberals. The replacement of White Australia ethnonationalism with multiculturalism as the mode of nationalism best suited to a modern globalised economy allows the frontier wars to be understood as a purely historical phenomenon: regrettable, perhaps even necessitating some recompense, but with no direct political significance today.
The journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad entitled his memoir about watching the Gaza genocide from the US One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. For many mainstream liberals, a condemnation of Australian colonialism isn’t merely safe — it also facilitates attacks on contemporary activism in the form of what I’ve elsewhere described as “smug politics”: a denunciation of racism that identifies bigotry with ordinary people (rather than institutions, structures or the political class) and thus provides a pretext for greater managerial control.
Higher education provides the quintessential illustration. The peak body Universities Australia publicises an “Indigenous Strategy” that, among other points, urges staff and students to “understand the ongoing impact of colonialism and the dominant culture on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.” Yet, almost without exception, Australian universities not only failed to condemn the genocide in Gaza but devoted their considerable resources to undermining, attacking and disrupting Palestine solidarity.
The University of Melbourne, for instance, maintains a page titled “conflict in the Middle East and activism on campus,’ which explains how it “deplores and actively stands against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as outlined in our Anti-racism commitment”. Yet this supposed activity against racism does not extend to condemnation of a genocide conducted by an apartheid state. Rather than opposing the ongoing criminality in Gaza , the page functions primarily as a clearing house for official statements directed against anti-genocide activists.
By contrast, a recognition of the parallels between two forms of settler colonialism, has led to an outpouring of solidarity from Indigenous people. “Black Palestinian solidarity,’ explains Amy Mcquire, “is … grounded in the understanding that settler colonialism, colonialism and imperialism is intertwined, and so our resistances to this violence is also intertwined in each other”.
The historian and activist Gary Foley makes the same point. “All Aboriginal people in Australia, like all Palestinian people, are impacted by the ongoing occupation of our homelands”, he says.
The ongoing attempts to assimilate us, the ongoing and never-ending implications of settler colonialism that are not diminishing but getting stronger, impacts all people. When I see what is going on in occupied Palestine, it hurts me.
Omer Bartov concludes his account of Israeli denialism by appealing to other nations: all the signatories of the UN Genocide Convention who have done nothing to protect Gaza. “As long as they do not act”, he says, “they will have been complicit in this horror, as in its denial”. That applies even more so to a white Australia.
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