( Tomdispatch.com ) – Leon Golub once related a story to a mutual friend. A Chicago artist famous for large canvases depicting crimson torture rooms in Central America, Golub had been asked what it meant to him to be a “Jewish political artist.” The painter’s quick reply was that he wasn’t a “Jewish political artist,” he was just a “political artist.” In the end, though, Golub came to believe that he had let himself off too easily, that his answer was too pat. Yes, he was a political artist. His paintings had focused not just on Latin America but on war-torn Vietnam and racism in the United States and South Africa. But he had consciously avoided Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Golub admitted that what it meant for him to be a successful artist was never to take the “horrors inflicted on Palestinians” as his subject matter. Only then would he be left free to paint his political opinions on anything else.
Over the last year and a half, I’ve thought of Leon Golub, who died in 2004, many times as the escalation of Israel’s assault on Gaza and settler violence on the West Bank paralleled my own rush to finish a book (just published as America, América: A New History of the New World). Among other things, it traces Latin America’s largely unrecognized role in the abolition of the doctrine of conquest and the creation, after World War II, of the liberal international order, including the founding of the International Court of Justice (today considering South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza).
I’ve been writing critically on how the U.S. acted in Latin America for more than three decades. Unlike many scholars and students of the Middle East, I was able to do so and not be punished because, like Golub, I mostly focused on the “horrors inflicted” on people other than Palestinians. As President Richard Nixon put it all too accurately in 1971, nobody of import in the United States gives “one damn about Latin America.”
A general indifference to the region, as well as the fact that even the most diehard defenders of U.S. global power have been willing to concede that this country often acted in unhelpful ways in its own hemisphere (where Washington undertook at least 41 regime changes between 1898 and 1994!), have made it remarkably safe to speak out about Latin America. Yet, in 2025, the “horrors inflicted” are everywhere and it’s no longer possible to silo one’s sympathies.
Conquest, Then and Now
Consider the Spanish conquest of the Americas alongside Israel’s assault on Gaza. In many ways, the two events, separated by half a millennium, are incomparable. The first was continental in scale, a fight for a New World that was then home to, by some estimates, 100,000,000 people. The second unfolds on a patch of land the size of Las Vegas with a population of just over two million. The conquest would claim tens of millions of lives, while so far, Israel is estimated to have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and injured tens of thousands more.
Yet there are uncanny parallels between the two conflicts, including the fact that each began in the wake of a communications revolution: the printing press then, social media now.
Spain was the first empire in modern history to actively publicize its colonial atrocities, as printers in Madrid, Seville, and other cities stamped out sheet after sheet of conquest gore: accounts of mass hangings, of babies drowned or roasted over fire pits to be fed to dogs, and of torched towns. One Spanish governor described a postapocalyptic landscape filled with the walking near-dead, victims of mutilations meted out to Native Americans, this way: a “multitude of lame and maimed Indians, without hands, or with only one hand, blind, their noses cut off, earless.” Today, the internet circulates countless photographs and videos with no less horrific images of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers on Palestinians, of armless boys and “decomposing babies.” Some photographs of children starved by the IDF, according to a New York Times editor, were simply too “graphic” to publish.
In sixteenth-century Spain, common soldiers wrote, or paid others to write, their stories of mayhem, hoping to make a heroic name for themselves. Today, we see updated digital versions of a similar kind of conquering pride, as members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), on platforms like TikTok, upload videos of Gazans “stripped, bound, and blindfolded” and others showing bulldozers and tanks razing homes. Soldiers mock the destruction of schools and hospitals or, as they rummage through abandoned homes, are seen playing with or wearing the bras and underwear of their former residents.
Both Spanish officials then and Israeli spokesmen now have openly declared their intention to “conquer” their enemies by forcing their removal from their homes and concentrating them in more controllable areas. Not all Spanish, like not all Israelis, believed their enemies to be subhuman. But some did and do. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda thought Native Americans were “brute animals,” as “monkeys are to men.” Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls Palestinians “human animals.” Many Spanish priests and royal officials admitted that Native Americans were human, but considered them child-like innocents who had to be violently severed from their pagan priests — just as Israel believes Palestinians have to be violently severed from Hamas. “We are separating Hamas from the population, cleansing the strip,” said Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the IDF’s extreme tactics.
Hernán Cortés had his men level Aztec temples, which he called mosques. Those temples served as healing places, and their destruction parallels the ruin visited on Gaza’s hospitals and other centers of refuge. Not even the dead were safe — neither in the Americas, nor today in Gaza. As did the conquistadores, the IDF has desecrated several burial grounds.
Spanish violence in the Americas provoked a powerful ethical backlash. The Dominican jurist Francisco Vitoria, for instance, questioned the legality of the Conquest, while Father Bartolomé de las Casas insisted on the absolute equality of all human beings, and other theologians of the time condemned the many varieties of enslavement imposed on Native Americans. Such declarations and condemnations were consequential in the long run. Yet they did little to stop the suffering. Arguments over the legality of the Conquest went on for decades, just as arguments over the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands have.
“The Conquest,” as a singular uppercase event, might have been challenged, but all the individual battles that made up the Conquest, the morning massacres and midnight raids on indigenous villages, simply went on. Spanish settlers took it for granted that, no matter what priests said from pulpits or jurists argued in seminar rooms, they had a right to “defend” themselves: that, were Indians to attack them, they could retaliate.
Here’s just one of many examples: in July 1503, Spanish settlers slaughtered over 700 residents in the village of Xaragua on Hispaniola (the island that today comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic), killings that Spain’s Queen Isabella deemed “just” because some members of the village had started to violently resist Spanish rule. Israel uses the same kind of legalisms to insist that its war on Hamas is indeed similarly just, since Hamas started it. Just as the conflict on Hispaniola is sequestered from the larger context of the Conquest, the conflict that started on October 7, 2023, is isolated from the larger context of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
From Cortés to Hitler
The doctrine or “right” of conquest goes back to Roman times and, apart from the criticism aimed at Spain in the 1500s, remained mostly uncontested until the late eighteenth century, when — with the breaking free of the Americas from Europe — the doctrine found new champions and new critics.
The leaders of the new United States reinforced the doctrine, invoking the right of conquest to justify their drive westward toward the Pacific Ocean and their taking of Native American and Mexican lands.
Generations of law professors in the U.S. taught their students that the doctrine was legitimate. “The title of European nations, and which passed to the United States, to this vast territorial empire, was founded on discovery and conquest,” as James Kent put it at Columbia Law School in the 1790s. The Supreme Court, too, said that the United States was founded on conquest, and that its doctrine remained applicable. As late as 1928, a widely-assigned English-language law book insisted that, “as long as a Law of Nations has been in existence, the States, as well as the vast majority of writers, have recognized subjugation as a mode of acquiring territory,” deeming it legal for “the victor to annex the conquered enemy territory.”
In contrast, Spanish America’s independence leaders fiercely repudiated the principle of conquest. They had to, since they had to learn to live with each other, for they presided over seven new Spanish-American republics on a crowded continent. If they had adhered to a U.S. version of international law, what would have stopped Argentina from conquering Chile the way the United States conquered the Creeks and the Mexicans? Or Chile from marching on Argentina to gain access to the Atlantic? The result would have been endless war. And so, the region’s jurists and other intellectuals (drawing from earlier Catholic criticisms of Spain’s subjugation of the New World) disavowed conquest. In its place, they cobbled together a new framework of international relations that outlawed aggressive war and recognized the absolute sovereignty of all nations, regardless of their size.
For decades, Latin American diplomats tried to force Washington to accept such a vision of cooperative international law — and for decades Washington refused, not wanting to be a Gulliver tied down by a gaggle of Latin Lilliputians. Over time, however, U.S. statesmen began to grudgingly accept Latin America’s legal interpretations, with the far-sighted among them realizing that a reformed system of international law would allow for a more effective projection of Washington’s power. In 1890, at the first Pan-American Conference, the United States signed a provisional treaty abrogating the doctrine of conquest. In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to give up the right to intervene in Latin American affairs and to recognize the absolute sovereignty of all nations.
At the end of WWII, with Adolf Hitler dead and fascism defeated, Latin America’s nations gladly joined in the creation of a postwar “rules-based” liberal order, the founding principles of which they had all already adopted, especially the rejection of the doctrine of conquest.
Cortés to Hitler, the age of conquest, it seemed, was finally over.
The End of the End of the Age of Conquest
Not really, of course. Cold warriors found many ways to circumvent the “rules,” and didn’t need to cite Roman law doctrine to justify atrocities in Vietnam, Guatemala, or Indonesia, among other places. Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, war began spreading again like wildfire in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, including the U.S.-led first and second Gulf Wars.
Still, the liberal order globally held on to the idea that the world should be organized around cooperation, not competition, that nations had more interests in common than in contention.
Now, though, that idea seems to have been tossed aside and, in its place, comes a new vision of conquest. We see its burlesque version in the boastful pronouncements of Donald Trump, who has casually claimed the right to use coercion to take the island of Greenland, annex Canada as “the 51st state,” grab the Panama Canal, and clear out Gaza, supposedly turning the strip into a Riviera-like resort. Far more ferocious expressions of that vision of conquest are seen in both Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s in Gaza.
Of those two wars of conquest, the second touches a deep nerve, in part because Israel’s existence is so tightly bound up with the fortunes of the liberal international order. The United Nations in 1949 conjured Israel (legally at least) into existence. Latin American nations at the time voted unanimously to recognize Israel’s nationhood, with Guatemala serving as Washington’s whip, ensuring that the region would act as a bloc. And the Holocaust has served as the West’s moral reference point, a nightmarish reminder of what awaits a world that forsakes liberal tolerance or doesn’t abide by liberal rules. At the same time, especially after the Six-Day War in 1967, the United Nations has also become the most persistent critic of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel ignores U.N. criticism while invoking the U.N. charter’s article 51, which grants nations the right to self-defense, to justify its assault on Gazans.
As we enter what may be the final phase of the Gazan genocide, that long entwinement between a rules-based order and Israel has become a kind of death dance. Many turn away, unable to bear the news. Others can’t turn away, horrified that those in power in this country offer nothing other than more weapons to Israel, which continues to kill indiscriminately, while withholding all food and medicines from those trapped in Gaza. As of April, about two million Palestinians had no secure source of food at all. Babies continue to decompose. “When children die of starvation, they don’t even cry. Their little hearts just slow down until they stop,” said Colorado pediatrician Mohamed Kuziez, who works with Doctors Against Genocide.
In early May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet unanimously approved a plan dubbed Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which, if enacted, would drive all Gazans into a small containment zone in the southern part of that strip, with Israel controlling all food and medical aid to them. The IDF would then, as one official described the plan, complete “the conquest of the Gaza Strip.” Gaza, said Finance Minister Smotrich, will then be “completely destroyed.” He added grimly, “We conquer and stay.”
Back in the 1500s, the revulsion felt by some theologians and philosophers at the extreme brutality of the Spanish conquest began the “slow creation of humanity” — the fragile idea, nurtured over the centuries and always imperfectly applied, that all humans are indeed equal and form a single community beyond tribalism and nationalism. Today, a similar brutality is undoing that work. Humanity appears to be dissolving at an ever-quickening pace.
From Cortés to Netanyahu, Putin, and Trump, the end of the end of conquest begins.
Copyright 2025 Greg Grandin
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