For reasons that are personal, not journalistic, I have just spent about two weeks on the lush, volcanic Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa. I thought it might prove a pleasant remove from the nightmare news about Gaza and other atrocities.
Instead, I quickly realized — a bit like graphic novelist Art Spiegelman’s father in «Maus,» when he arrives, after passing through indescribable horrors, at the gates of Auschwitz — And here our troubles began! .
How so? Gaza is one culmination of the last five centuries of Western global conquest and rule. But where did it all start? The Canaries! As Randy Newman sings, in «The Great Nations of Europe»: “They’d conquered what was behind them/ And now they wanted more/ So they looked to the mighty ocean/ And took to the western sea.”
The first place they landed was those islands, en route to the Americas or Asia. They wiped out Indigenous populations like the Guanches (“Guanches by the score/ Bullets, disease, the Portuguese, they weren’t there anymore.”) An early genocide, and since then, a part of Spain.
Columbus stopped in the Canaries on his three voyages. There’d always been empires but they tended (Rome, China) to be land-based and assimilative, like Moghul consolidation in India or the roughly 800 years of Muslim-Christian-Jewish coexistence in medieval Spain.
Newman’s «Great Nations of Europe,» starting in the 1500s, leaned instead toward extermination and colonization, or what’s now called settler-colonialism, as in South Africa and Israel-Palestine.
Along with that came justifications that empires often resort to for plunder and pillage, like spreading «civilization» to the savages, or religious salvation. But the Great Nations of Europe (eventually including the U.S.) may’ve hit grotty new lows. As Newman sang (and still does): “Hide your wives and daughters/ Hide your groceries too/ Great nations of Europe coming through.”
Their empire-building was always tawdry. They’d mostly been countries on the outer edges of Europe, widely looked down on, but well-situated in the 1500s when seafaring tech took off and well-endowed, previously uncharted lands beckoned.
They had firearms and transmissible diseases on their side and were animated by early buccaneering capitalism. They showed no great genius, they were just in the right place at the right time. It’s true they got places and holidays named after them but at bottom they were a gang of murderous louts.
If that sounds extreme, I agree some qualification is in order. I dislike, for instance, applying settler-colonialism to Israel. That fits better in South Africa, to Dutch Afrikaners. It’s true Zionists frequently allied with colonial powers like Britain from the start. But other early Zionists showed greater sensitivity to the people already there.
It’s also true that Palestine’s permanent Jewish population had been small; still, Jerusalem played a role in the minds and daily prayers of Jews everywhere during 2,000 years of exile. They simply didn’t feel like outsiders when they “returned,” nor did I in the year I lived there.
That may sound psychotic and delusional but so does much of being human. Their sense of attachment will need to be taken into account if there’s ever to be a lasting peace in the region.
What links Israel’s war on Gaza to Newman’s song is its role as a colonizer — albeit with a sense of roots — and subcontractor to the Great Nations of Europe in the Mideast. That’s what global protesters mainly reference, not antisemitic tropes, which they’re accused of, even if some antisemites do hang around the protests, to exploit them.
It’s a basic bad fit. Many protesters are actually Jews. They look around and say, «What, us? No way» — and carry right on protesting.
Gaza does feel like a last act — one of many — in that 500-year Western project of theft and domination. I grant that, too, may be delusional. It’s easier to end a song than an era. But the world’s peoples do seem, at a minimum, less inclined to accept what the Great Nations of Europe decree, than they once did.
