On December 23, 2016, the 15-member United Nations Security Council took a highly controversial step by voting 14-0 to condemn Israel’s construction of so-called “settlements” on the occupied West Bank, which was seized after the 1967 War with its Arab neighbors.
Though the United States chose to abstain, Barack Obama vocalized longstanding official policy throughout his presidency that designated Israeli settlements as a major impediment in any hoped-for two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Related
Donald Trump’s inaugural address was an ode to white Christian patriarchy
Where do I even begin?
In February 2024, President Joe Biden reiterated U.S. policy that dates back almost 50 years, which posits that so-called Israeli “settlements” in the occupied Palestinian territories are “illegitimate” under established international law.
Dive deeper every day
Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues
Subscribe to our Newsletter today
But in 2016, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-President-elect Donald Trump blasted the United Nations vote. Trump’s proposed U.S. ambassador to Israel during his first term in office, David Friedman, a right-wing lawyer, did not support a “two-state solution” but did support a Jerusalem capital, the “settlement” program, and Israel’s annexation of the occupied West Bank.
Trump’s pick to serve as the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel in his second administration is former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee, who has never supported a two-state solution.
“I feel that we have a responsibility to respect that this is land that has historically belonged to the Jews,” Huckabee told the AP in 2015.
Trump’s close ties with Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right Israeli Parliament spurred the far-right minister of finance to suggest the country will look to annex the occupied West Bank in 2025.
Though declared illegal under international law, approximately 517,000 Israelis live in the more than 130 so-called “settlements” Israel seized in the 1967 War. If the Trump/Netanyahu plans are enacted, they will have hammered the final nail into the coffin of Palestinian/Israeli peace.
Many see Israel’s “settlement” policy on the occupied West Bank in the same light as Russia’s illegal incursion into Eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea and its continuing war to subsume the entire nation under Russian domination, which likewise threatens political and military stability in the area and further endangers world peace.
Historian Joel Spring refers to this “cultural genocide” as “the attempt to destroy other cultures” through forced acquiescence and assimilation to majority rule and standards. This takes place through the process of “deculturalization,” which Spring describes as “the educational process of destroying a people’s culture and replacing it with a new culture.”
“Cultural genocide” and “deculturalization” are evident in the case of Christian European American domination over Native American Indians, whom European American colonizers viewed as “uncivilized,” “godless heathens,” “barbarians,” and “devil worshipers.”
White Christian European Americans deculturalized Indigenous peoples through many means: confiscation of land, forced relocation, forced conversion to Christianity, the establishment of Christian day schools and off-reservation boarding schools far away from their people, and the undermining of their languages, cultures, and identities.
The expansion of the republic and movement west was, in part, justified by overriding philosophical underpinnings present since the American Revolution. “Manifest Destiny” was based on the belief that God intended the United States to extend its holdings and its power across the wide continent of North America over indigenous peoples from the East Coast to the West. The doctrine embraced a belief in American Anglo-Saxon superiority.
“This continent,” one congressman declared in 1844, “was intended by Providence as a vast theatre on which to work out the grand experiment of Republican government, under the auspices of the Anglo-Saxon race.”
Throughout the Alaska territory, Christian missionaries, including Presbyterians, Catholics, and Moravians, vied to win converts. Simultaneously, the United States government issued laws barring Alaskan Indian ceremonies it regarded as “pagan” and contrary to the spread of Christianity.
During the early years of the new republic, with its increasing population and desire for land, political leaders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson advocated that Indian lands be obtained through treaties and purchases.
In 1803, President Jefferson wrote a letter to then-Tennessee political leader Andrew Jackson, advising him to convince Indians to sell their “useless” forests to the U.S. government and become farmers. Jefferson and other government leaders overlooked the fact that this style of individualized farming was contrary to Indian communitarian spiritual and cultural traditions.
Later, however, when he inhabited the White House, Jackson argued that white settlers (a pleasant term for “land thieves”) had a “right” to confiscate Indian land. Though he proposed a combination of treaties and an exchange or trade of land, he maintained that white Christian people had a right to claim any Indian lands that were not under cultivation. Jackson recognized as the only legitimate claims for Indian lands those on which they grew crops or made other “improvements.”
The Indian Removal Act of May 28, 1830, authorized President Jackson to confiscate Indian land east of the Mississippi River, “relocate” its former inhabitants, and exchange their former land with territory west of the river. The infamous “Trail of Tears” during Jackson’s presidency attests to the forced evacuation and redeployment of entire Indian nations during which many died of cholera, exposure to the elements, contaminated food, and other environmental hazards.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 excluded Native American Indians from citizenship, considering them, paradoxically, as “domestic foreigners.” They were not accorded rights of citizenship until 1924, when Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act. Asians at the time continued to be denied naturalized citizenship status.
In addition, though Jackson founded the Democratic Party and brought greater popular control to the government, his wealth as a farmer increased enormously through his enslavement of Africans, and he gave the lash to any who attempted escape.
The United States purchased 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River from France in 1803 for $15 million. This “Louisiana Purchase” doubled the size of the United States.
The United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1819 through the Adams-Onís Treaty, also known as the Transcontinental Treaty, and the U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million.
The Mexican government outlawed slavery in 1830 and prohibited further immigration from the United States into Texas, then a part of Mexico. U.S. residents of Texas rose up against the Mexican government in 1836 and claimed independence under the name “Lone Star State.”
The United States annexed Texas in 1845. In 1848, under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico relinquished California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, and Utah to the United States.
The U.S. declared war on Spain in 1898. It took Cuba and Puerto Rico, annexed Hawai’i, occupied Wake Island and Guam, and claimed the Philippines.
The newest manifestation of Manifest Destiny I will refer to as “MAGAfest Destiny”: that which is designated not by some unknown or unproved god, but, rather, the musings of the would-be king and current cult leader, Donald Trump. During his transition to overtaking the White House for a second time, he announced that he intended to purchase Greenland from Denmark for “national security reasons.” He did not rule out taking the enormous island by force if he could not purchase it.
On more than one occasion, he referred to Canada as becoming America’s “51st state” by annexing the large territory for economic and strategic military security. In addition, he has threatened to retake the Panama Canal, again for economic and military reasons.
Trump seems to have positioned himself as both an “isolationist” with his “America First” policies and also a would-be imperialist with his threats to invade other nations, all of whom are current U.S. allies and some of whom are NATO members. The irony is that according to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, if any member is attacked, other member nations have to come to their aid.
The only occasion on which Article 5 was activated followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States when our NATO allies, including Denmark, came to our defense. Now, if the United States attacks Denmark in its attempts to take Greenland, the United States would also be obliged to come to the defense of Denmark according to the provisions of the NATO treaty.
I have seen “settler” defined as “a person who settles in an area, typically one with no or few previous inhabitants.” I would add an essential condition that for this person to settle, the area must not have a prior claim by others who call it their home.
How could Columbus have discovered what would later be called “the Americas” when people lived on this land for an estimated 12,000 years after coming over the Bering Isthmus during a glacial age when sea levels dropped? How can one “discover” people who have been here so long? Actually, First Nation people discovered Columbus on their land.
We must interrogate the concepts of “settler,” of “discovery,” of “the New World” as distinguished from “the Old World.”
Say, for example, I own a house and someone knocks on the door, walks in, pushes me outside, and claims: “I like your house, and I am now settling here. You be on your way. Goodbye!”
“Manifest Destiny,” “annexation,” and “settlements” are different terms with similar meanings: unethical and immoral muggings and robberies of other people’s land. Do not be fooled by the terminology: it is imperialism.
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.