Evidently, Gaza, and by extension Palestine, means different things to different people; yet since October 7, American politicians and Israeli lawmakers—including Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Kallner, and Avi Dichter—have all voiced calls for genocide and ethnic cleansing to restore Israeli deterrence and to effectively maintain colonial control over Gaza, or what many call Israel’s right to defend itself. But this desire to annihilate Gaza transcends the Zionist project and predates October 7, the 1948 Nakba, or even the Holocaust. In fact, a long Euro-American tradition of genocide and ethnic cleansing, both secular and religious, imagined freeing a barren Palestine from Palestinian barbarity and heathenism.
In secular American travel writing, for instance, Ottoman Palestine was either underdeveloped or empty. Palestinians, portrayed either as silent heathens or indigenous savages who hinder progress, had to go. Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869) portrayed Palestine as a land infested with marauding Bedouins, overtaken by disease, superstition, and poverty. Palestinians were an unsophisticated, “thankless and impassive race.” Twain imagined that Palestinians with shaven heads were “careful to leave a lock of hair for the Prophet to take hold of” because “a good Mohammedan would consider himself doomed to stay with the damned forever if he were to [die without it].”
Like Native Americans in dime novels, Twain’s cartoonish Palestinians were “Digger Indians” who acted “like a pack of hopeless lunatics,” or irredeemable savages “with very long spears in their hands, cavorting around on old crowbait horses, and spearing imaginary enemies; whooping, and fluttering their rags in the wind.” One man in his group, Twain reported, “was going to scalp such Bedouins as fell to his share, and take his bold-headed sons of the desert home with him alive for trophies.”
In portraying Palestinians as stereotyped Indians, scalping and whooping on horseback, Twain was equating indigenous people in Palestine and the Americas. The colonial solution to both was implied. In the absence of effective stewardship, colonial logic dictated that only Euro-American settlers could transform this unsettled land into a paradise. Indigenous Palestinians were unworthy of it and should be eliminated or displaced, just like the Native Americans to which this discourse compared them.
Though espousing a secular worldview, Twain paradoxically presented Palestinians as morally and spiritually corrupt, and therefore dispensable. The holy city of Jerusalem—symptomatic of the rest of multifaith Palestine—he imagined as “mournful, and dreary, and lifeless.” While partly directed at the American Protestant pilgrims in his company, his irreverent satire mainly targeted Catholic and Muslim Palestinians.