In fact, if you study the history of that period you will see accounts of Native Americans forced onto reservations, and then having needed resources put out of their reach, shippings of food and aid owed them by treaty prevented from reaching them, etc. And then when the people on the reservation would lash out in some in response to their intolerable situation, they would be deemed "savages" and an incredibly harsh response would be meeted out (what we might call a non-proportional response).

Why the same blindness, over and over. A Chinese professor once told me (regarding my Free Tibet acivism): we are simply doing to them what you did to your indigenous peoples. And I replied to him: Yes, but 100 years later intelligent people look back and are bitterly, bitterly ashamed (and even then, some few spoke out). And how does the fact that my country committed an injustice, which I admit and hate and deplore, have to do with someone somewhere else committing one? To reply to my charge that you are acting unjustly with the reply that some people in my country did the same kind of thing (and is now doing some similar things in Irag)is clearly irrelevant.

Jeez, even I understood what my Mom meant when I was a kid and was caught breaking a rule and said, well, Tommy did it too! Two wrongs don't make a right, she would say. Those trite sayings are so embarrasingly true.

The treatment of the Palestinians and the attitudes exhibited towards them are eerily reminiscent of u. s. treatment of Native Americans, particularly in the treatment of the native California tribes in the late 1800’s and early 20th century. Consider this passage from the account at http://www.cabrillo.edu/~crsmith/anth6_americanperiod.html

There were a few people who spoke out, who reacted against the savagery of the anglo-Americans in California. Unfortunately, such voices were"crying in the wilderness." They were pushed aside, their humanity negated by a system that promulgated the shibboleths of inevitable conflict, the greatest good for the greatest number, and the most important one, the destiny of the white man.

As I note below, the anglo-Americans believed they were the chosen civilizers of the earth. And contrary to popular myth, the men who ruthlessly destroyed the Native Californians were not the outcasts of society, the footloose riffraff of the United States. In fact, many of the whites often became California's leading citizens. For example, in northwestern California William Carson has been credited with creating hundreds of jobs on the Pacific Coast. Yet, this man participated in the Hayfork Massacre of 1852 where 152 Native Californians were slaughtered. John Carr, in his book Pioneer Days, describes the Massacre and states in the introduction: " It may help ... to rescue and preserve some of the doings of the common people that founded and built up this great State of California" [emphasis added]. With the exception of Isaac Cox, author of the Annals of Trinity County, most white historians who discuss the Hayfork Massacre and the events leading up to it [the killing of the white John Anderson and the stealing of his cattle by the Indians], place the BLAME for the Massacre on the Indians, not on the whites. Even Cox, who states the Indians were justified in having a grudge against Anderson, justifies the massacre: "Be this true or not, the rascals had committed a glaring infraction into the peace and security of the county and to chastise them was proper and laudable."

The same sad damn story, with the same kind of sad damn justifications and blindness.

I've read through in a long time.

Thanks for continuing to highlight this issue, Glenn, which I take to be humanitarian one, and having nothing to do with religions or ethnicity one either side. Damn those who shoot unguided missles into civilian areas, and damn those who respond with bombing runs into civilian areas as well.

And I suppose I am still allowed to comment, since I did serve in the military :)

and I value that. Think about this: What tribe do I identify with? The tribe of those devoted to rationality in the richer sense of the word, which includes the ancient notion of elements of noetic rationality that includes yet expands the boundaries of discursive reasoning, with a default to simple deductive logic and scientific evidence when things get unclear; those who see the interconnectedness of all life (including the ecosystems necessary for it); those who only harm others as a last resort to prevent further harm (harm defined as a decrease in the operational excellence of any life in question): as said in the Tao Te Ching, fine weapons are ill omened tools, uses them only with regret, etc.: “a great military victory is like a funeral ceremony.”; those who know they don’t know many things, and so who go cautiously, slowly, in dealing with matters that impact on the lives of others (having in mind Socrates’ words to his jurors when on trial for his life (paraphrased from the greek): I have only a human kind of wisdom (anthropine sophia), not like yours, which must be like a gods, since you are so sure when someone must live or not). The tribe of those who rejoice in life and beauty, and who would rather die than betray their sense of humanity and what Camus called the lucid love of fidelity to its limits, awareness of its tragic greateness, the refual to compromise one’s humanity no matter what the provocation. Better to suffer evil than commit it, as Socrates said.