In this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient, we continue our conversation about forced famine and its use as a powerful tool to control people, land and resources. Starvation has, for centuries, been a part of the colonizer’s “playbook.”

We speak with two scholars to explore two historic examples: the decimation of Indigenous populations in the Plains, North America, which historian David Stannard has called the American Holocaust and in India, the 1943 famine in Bengal. According to a recent BBC story, the Bengal famine of 1943 killed more than three million people. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in the Second World War. (The United Kingdom lost 450,000 lives during that same war.) [SEE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT BELOW.]

Although disease, environmental disasters and famine were features of life before colonialism, decades of research has shown how these occurrences were manipulated by colonial powers to prolong starvation and trigger chronic famine. In other words, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, acquire land and the wealth that comes with that. This colonization was accompanied by an “entitlement approach” and the belief that Indigenous populations are inferior to the lives of the colonizer.

According to scholars, prior to the arrival of colonialists, both populations at the heart of today’s episode were thriving with healthy and wealthy communities. And although disease and famine existed before the arrival of Europeans, it cannot be denied colonial powers accelerated and even capitalized on chronic famine and the loss of life due to disease and malnutrition.

As the famous economist Amartya Sen has said, famine is a function of repression. It springs from the politics of food distribution rather than a lack of food. Imperial policies such as the Boat Denial Policy and Rice Denial Policy meant that, as curator Natasha Ginwala wrote: “freshly harvested grain was set on fire, or even dumped into the river.”

Joining on this episode were two experts on the North American and Bengal famines.

James Daschuk is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina. He is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life.

We also spoke with Janam Mukherjee, an Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire. Mukherjee was recently a primary historical advisor on the BBC Radio 4 series “Three Million,” a five-part documentary on the Bengal famine of 1943.

Listen and follow

You can listen to or follow Don’t Call Me Resilient on Apple Podcasts (transcripts available), Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts.

You can read the transcript of this episode here:

THIS IS AN UNEDITED, UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

INTRO

Vinita Srivastava: For centuries, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, to acquire land, and the wealth that comes with that.

This colonization was accompanied by an entitlement approach, the belief that the indigenous populations are inferior to the lives of the colonizer. So today we’re looking at two historic examples, the decimation of indigenous populations in North America, what has been referred to as a cultural genocide, or the American Holocaust, and the famine in Bengal, India, in 1943 under British rule.

According to a recent BBC story, the Bengal famine killed more than three million people. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side during the Second World War. Of course, these are two vastly different populations that were decimated by a complex set of factors. But both populations had a few things in common.

They were thriving with healthy and wealthy communities. And although disease and famine existed before the arrival of Europeans, it cannot be denied that they accelerated and even capitalized on chronic famine and the loss of life due to disease and malnutrition. In other words, as the famous economist Amartya Sen has said, chronic famine springs from the politics of food distribution rather than a lack of food.

With us today are two experts on the famines I just mentioned. James Daschuk is an associate professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina. He is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. And Janam Mukherjee is an associate professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, and the End of Empire.

Thank you so much both for being here.

INTERVIEW

Janam Mukherjee: Thank you, Vinita.

James Daschuk: Thank you.

Vinita Srivastava: So, today’s conversation is a bit of an experiment, and something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. And that is, can we talk about the tools of colonialism as a playbook across different regions? So, let’s give it a try, and let’s jump into this conversation.

James, in your book, you mention a scholar who describes what happened in North America as an American Holocaust. This is a very complicated history with many different factors impacting things. But can you describe generally what this means?

James Daschuk: I think standards approach to American holocaust talk about the apocalyptic events that happened after the arrival of Europeans.

So not only was, They’re the displacement of indigenous people, but the diseases that came with them, unbeknownst even to the Europeans themselves, it was before the days of germ theory or anything like that. So I think the arrival of Europeans and, and all the baggage, the biological baggage they brought with them brought such monumental events that’s standard to use that term, like you said, an American Holocaust.

Vinita Srivastava: I remember reading in the very beginning of your book that stayed with me is that The indigenous population declined by almost 90 percent and that they were basically destroyed, as you’re saying. I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit about what contributed to that decline of population.

James Daschuk: It’s more than biology, for sure, but I think one of the things to think about is, Indigenous people in North America and other places around the world that didn’t have a long tradition of, for example, uh, domestication of animals.

We know now in the 21st century that animals are the reservoir of diseases. So because indigenous people in America didn’t domesticate animals, they hadn’t had the, the biological experience of passing germs or viruses between animals and humans. Europeans arrived with endemic smallpox, the people who they encountered had no biological resistance.

There’s a new interpretation that it’s more than just that. It was, it was the violence enacted by the Europeans, by the new arrivals. But I think those two things combined to create standards, Holocaust like situation.

Vinita Srivastava: One of the things I really liked about reading your book, James, is that every single thing is, is really sourced. You provide all of this information. It’s like thousands of years, like 2000 years, and you take us through this history. And one of the most famous lines that’s quoted from your book is this line that the first prime minister of Canada said, which is that we’re doing all we can basically to refuse food to Indians who are on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense. So first of all, hearing that quote, it might explain why we had this problem with statues of John A. Macdonald in Canada, why they were being asked to be taken down, why some of them were taken down. But can you explain a little bit more in the context of that very famous quote? Now, what was happening at that time?

James Daschuk: For sure. This wasn’t me being a conspiracy theorist. This was me cutting and pasting from Hansard, the official record of the house of commons. One thing we don’t tend to think about is that really provocative statement by Prime Minister Macdonald about keeping people on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense.

He was being criticized by the Liberal Party for spending too much money on food. So, there didn’t seem to be too many sympathetic actors in 19th century Canadian Parliament with regard to the well being of Indigenous people. I think he was bragging that he was controlling the population, weaponizing food, and he wasn’t embarrassed about it.

He was actually quite proud that he was able to control 20, 000 Indigenous people as cheaply as possible. He wasn’t wasting the taxpayers money, which is a very cynical thing to say. What that did was, that food as a, as a means to control the population, ensured the, the quick construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which is the backbone of the nation, especially here in Western Canada.

Vinita Srivastava: So he sacrificed Indigenous populations to build a train across Canada and to help settlers come into this nation, into this land.

James Daschuk: Yeah. And once you had an industrial means of bringing settlers in, they were coming in potentially by the hundreds every week. So the population here in Saskatchewan. Rose like a rocket over the decades after that, First Nations people were barred from leaving their reserves with a pass system. They were excluded from the commercial economy with a permit system that lasted until the 1960s. So that hunger, the initial hunger was institutionalized for decades.

And the abduction of children into the residential schools program, which we all know about. The hunger was institutionalized to such an extent that tuberculosis broke out almost universally in those kids. And Ian Mosby from Toronto Metropolitan has, has written that things were so institutionalized in the mid 20th century that there were nutritional experiments undertaken on residential school children by Canadian government physicians and scientists.

Vinita Srivastava: I saw that instead of feeding the children, they, or instead of feeding indigenous populations, they decided to study the impact of hunger and starvation. Janam, moving forward into a different time period, but also a different continent, You’ve researched and published a book about the 1943 Bengal famine in India.

Even though there’s now books published on the famine, it’s still a relatively unknown history that in the 1940s that more than 3 million people died in eastern India. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in the Second World War. I know it is complicated, but I’m wondering if you could help unpack what happened in that era.

Janam Mukherjee: I think the prevailing condition of India at the inception of World War I is colonialism. Colonialism is the most dominant force politically, societally, geopolitically, etc. So we have to see colonialism itself as a sort of authoritarian regime with resort to famine throughout the colonial period.

Famine is used throughout the colonial period as a way to subjugate the colonized population. And then in particular, the other main vector creating famine in Bengal in the 1940s is war itself. So the pressures of war, particularly on Bengal in Eastern India, once Japan takes Burma and India becomes the front of the war against the Axis powers, tremendous pressure to produce for the war effort is made in Bengal.

So there’s a huge extraction of goods, uh, commodities, resources, as well as people, that puts tremendous economic pressure. And then the colonial system overlaying it. So in the name of war, they’re also claiming certain emergency powers that amount to a totalitarian state. They’re also facing armed rebellion and active rebellion from the Bengali population in particular.

So famine is a very. Useful tool in a sort of collective punishment of Bengal and India at large. So if we see these two factors of colonialism and then empire at war as being the kind of concrete context of famine, we can expand that and look at famine around the world and see the relationship between authoritarianism, war and famine quite broadly.

And I think explains a lot of modern famines.

Vinita Srivastava: Many of us are a victim of a lot of brainwashing. You know, we’ve been taught certain things in school. We’re talking about John A. Macdonald in the case of Canada, similar to what John A. Macdonald said. There’s a famous quote by Winston Churchill, who lays the responsibility of the famine on the too high population of Bengal.

That’s been a standard trope in the West that people in the Global South starve because they’re just simply too many people. And what you’re saying, I think is something very, very different that famine across the board, almost you can point to certain factors. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, like responsibility behind the famine, who was responsible for it.

Janam Mukherjee: I think famine is, is most commonly seen as a kind of by product of various systems, whether that’s economic systems or environmental systems or political systems. When you have empire at war, the kind of will towards power becomes totalitarianism, as Winston Churchill famously called the war effort, a total war.

During total war, extreme measures are taken, and those extreme measures are also categorical. I believe that famine defines a certain category of people who are beyond the pale of our humanity, who are outlined and then marked as outside of human life itself. Authoritarian regimes often resort to famine and torture.

These are the most direct, biopolitical, Aspects of a structural violence on population. And I think famine has to be seen not as a consequence of certain orders of power, but it’s really necessary of certain power structures to delimit a population that is beyond human concern or compassion or life itself, because to starve a population is a collective act, whereas torture, for instance, is an act upon individual parties.

Famine is a collectivization of a kind of torture of populations. So you starve an entire population, which is a collective punishment, whereas torture is an individualized punishment.

Vinita Srivastava: In your book, you said, the mute complicities of an increasingly callous society at large grew more indifferent month after month and year after year.

Janam Mukherjee: So, because famine, as I say, delimits a population that is understood through public discourse to be outside of human concern. I think this is why famine is allowed to occur in the world in places like Yemen today, which has been suffering a famine situation for many years. And the concern of the world is not there.

And in kind of solidarity with the people of Yemen or the people of Sudan or the people of Afghanistan, for that matter, as well as Gaza, starvation in being seen as a consequence of certain orders of power and of war is seen as an incidental. I think it needs to be seen rather as a part and parcel of certain orders of power and authority and in relation to conflict occupation and territorial expansion, as in the case in North America.

Vinita Srivastava: James, I see you nodding your head. I wonder if you want to jump in.

James Daschuk: I think here in the Canadian West, it was, it was more of a slow burn, but I’m thinking of the idea of settler colonialism. It’s not an event. It’s a structure. And here in Western Canada, our founding mythology of the Canadian society is that we’re the breadbasket of the world and we’re a haven for dispossessed European peoples and people came here to have a good life and that may all well be true, but that society is founded on the institutionalized structural In position of, if not outright starvation, of generational food insecurity that continues into the present.

We’ve got hungry kids going to bed without supper here in Saskatchewan every single night.

Vinita Srivastava: Last week on this podcast, Hilal Elver, who is the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, talks about the famine in Gaza. And then she talks about the lingering intergenerational impacts of starvation.

Not only are people living through it in the present day, but she talks about the impact on future generations. She talks about especially the impact on children. How three months or longer of malnutrition can impact so much in one’s little body. James, you write extensively about this, the lingering effects from the North American famine. That’s one of the reasons you wrote your book. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of those lingering effects?

James Daschuk: Yeah, for sure. Well, I teach in the Faculty of Health Studies. We use as an interpretive model the social determinants of health. One thing to think about, across Canada, a former federal government cabinet minister, Jane Philpott, in 2018, said there was a 15 year life expectancy between Indigenous people and the rest of the population in Canada.

So what that means is, if you’re Indigenous, you can expect to lead a shorter, sicker, hungrier life. And it’s really based on poverty. There’s no biological difference. What it is, is it’s the social forces, the structures that have kept people poor, that have created that intergenerational trauma. Think about a hundred years of a family having their children taken away from them, abducted by the authorities, sent to a place where they’re institutionally malnourished, potentially abused.

They have their language taken away from them, generation upon generation. And actually, there’s a class action lawsuit. That, that’s being organized for the survivors of intergenerational trauma. So not only are the, the survivors of schools going through that, the legal system, now the children of, of, of those people are, are starting the process of restitution.

You can physically see the impacts of two generations, three generations later. And I want to turn to Janam to talk a little bit about it because you, you talk about in your book, how directly tied you are personally to the Bengal famine. It’s part of the reason you started your research there. Your dad lived through it. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal journey?

Janam Mukherjee: My interest in the, in the spirit of time in India, in Bengal, the 1940s is the period of my father’s childhood. He was born in 1932. I was born in the U. S. in my own childhood. I heard these stories that were very disconnected from my own reality about the things that my father had seen when he was a child, and that was aerial bombardment by the Japanese on Calcutta.

His house was very close to the docks that were bombed, and he remembered the foundation cracking, The sound of the bombs, the famine, and then the civil war between Hindus and Muslims in India at the end of colonial rule. So that’s essentially what I knew of India, but famine itself in particular, I found when much later in life, I began researching it and traveling to Calcutta to do that research.

Had written a deep script in Bengali population at large. The 1943 famine was told about by parents and then grandparents and now great grandparents. It had influenced the culture of Bengal in deep ways and abiding ways in terms of aesthetics, art, food, culture, et cetera. So famine is very much with Bengali people.

I think it will remain as such in many ways. It’s also a collective experience, often of populations. You see that in Ireland. You see that in Ukraine with the Holodomor famine, where, you know, it is also a cultural foundation or, or starting point and often a nationalist, uh, starting point, it triggers off resistance and collective understanding of a collective plight, uh, so famine has that boomerang effect.

Vinita Srivastava: You said it. Resistance. I have to say that since I’ve been thinking about this, I just keep writing down in a piece of paper resistance and putting a big square around it. How do we start to talk about resistance?

In your book, Janam, there’s a scholar that talks about How people in Bengal, quote, died without a murmur. James, in your book, you talk about the collective punishment that would happen if there was resistance, that food would be withheld for a whole week. The ration of food would be withheld on that reserve. So I do want to ask you both about if you can think about instances of resistance that you can draw from in your work and in your research about these famines. Janam I can start with you and then go to James.

Janam Mukherjee: What I really aim to detail is that the Bengal famine was resisted at every stage. You can’t expect people in the last throes of starvation who are walking skeletons, who are ridden often with madness because of the condition, their physiological condition is such.

that you can’t really expect resistance from already starving masses. What you see is resistance to the policies that lead to starvation. Often those policies, particularly in the context of the Bengal famine, were related to war. So the wartime efforts to appropriate rice were resisted. The efforts to collectively punish various parts of the population were resisted in the form of armed resistance often.

So these all have to be seen as part and parcel of resistance to the power structure that is exacting famine. So resistance, I think has to be seen more broadly, but it often does delineate the power structure itself. It sheds light on the power structure. It, in a sense, exposes its weakness. Because famine is often the result of a dying power structure, of a power structure in a desperate attempt to maintain its order of power.

It’s often a last ditch of empire in particular. So we see famines at the end of many of the colonial states as empire is coming apart and colonialism is being ejected from the colonized world.

Vinita Srivastava: James, what do you think?

James Daschuk: I think the resistance was at a different level here in Canada. With the Indian Act, during the patriarchal system, adult male First Nations people were made wards of the state.

So they had the legal sanctions of children. So instead of having an organized campaign, as Janam just mentioned, I think the, the resistance was more at the community level, at the family level. One of the things that comes to mind is a film that a friend of mine, Floyd Favel just produced. Ashes and embers.

And in 1948, the residential school children made a plan and burned the school down. They warned all the other kids when it was time to make a break for it, and they burned the school down. And there are plenty of instances of that without the structure actually changing. And I think at the end of the Second World War, there was an inordinate amount of First Nations men that volunteered for service, probably to get out of reserve conditions, whatever it might be.

Also to, to get back to traditional warrior societies, that kind of thing. But when they came back, they were fighting in the same trenches as non Indigenous people. And they organized politically and worked very hard and ultimately successfully to gain recognition. You know, that recognition is still coming, but you know, these things take time.

I think it’s important to talk about resistance and all, even if it’s like, as you say, kind of an everyday in community resistance, it’s, it’s it’s very challenging to talk about what we’re talking about. You guys have both written books, but these are very challenging things to engage with. I’m wondering, how do you both see these two very different chapters of history intersecting?

Janam Mukherjee: You know, I think the way you began, the question of territorial expansion, the question of control of populations, the role that food distribution and starvation play into those orders of colonial power. are certainly in conversation with each other and are related. I always see famine as delineating the other, the colonized other, more clearly than any other act of state.

It is to make of the colonized people, the wretched masses that the colonizer wants to understand them as. It’s actually to make them physically that. And the intergenerational connection then of devitalization, of impoverishment, of the long trajectory of slow famine, that also has close similarities in the North American as well as in the Asian context.

Vinita Srivastava: James, what do you think learning about the history of this famine, starving, clearing the plains you talk about, what do you think it can teach us?

James Daschuk: Well, the stories we’ve heard about Canada being, you know, one of the kindest nations in the world probably isn’t so true. But one thing, and this is in conversation with Janam and, and, and other scholars, is the British empire, when we were kids, when I was at the French school back in my hometown, we had that, to that map with all of the pink countries, that sort of, the sun never set.

Different manifestations of colonialism, different uses of food as a weapon, uh, it wasn’t just them. You know, all different strategies. And I guess we’re coming together to deconstruct that myth of the British empire, the benevolence of the British empire. We have a long way to go down that trail, but there are actually scholars now trying to defend the British empire and receiving a backlash.

I’m thinking of Nigel Biggar, a retired professor from Oxford, who’s written a book called the Colonialism, A Moral Reckoning in an attempt basically to explain the mixed legacy of colonialism. So in one sense, the anti anti colonialists getting organized is a sign that, uh, that we’re doing our job.

Janam Mukherjee: Good point.

Vinita Srivastava: I want to turn to the current situation in Gaza and I’m wondering if you think that there’s anything to learn from these chapters of history and can we apply it to the current situation in Gaza where experts are saying famine is imminent?

James Daschuk: I’m just a simple Canadianist. But on the radio, Antonio Guterres was speaking about there are truck convoys full of food, there’s a fence, and there are people who are in imminent danger of starving to death.

That’s not an absence of food. That is the organizing principle I’ve been looking at, that Janam been looking at, and that other scholars have been looking at.

Vinita Srivastava: That there is no lack of food, basically, that famine is a structure.

James Daschuk: Absolutely. And no matter what the geopolitical implications are, children should not be starved.

Janam Mukherjee: As is also well outlined in international law. I think all famines are very specific and as a historian, I always argue for the historical specificity and not to make too gross generalizations, but we can learn from previous famines about orders of authority, occupation, and war in particular. I would suggest that famine is not a consequence of war.

It’s incidental to war. Famine is the handmaiden of war. It has been for centuries. It is part and parcel of war, no matter what legislation is made to outlaw the directed use of starvation as a weapon of war. It seems that those international laws have not worked. And famine remains part and parcel of how war is fought.

Practiced on the face of the earth. So the question of the orders of authority that war allows and the decisions made in terms of sacrificing large populations of people and subjecting them to hunger remains with us. And I think there’s a lot to learn from history in that regard. And there’s unfortunately a lot to be seen in the present in that regard as well.

Not just in Gaza, but also in Yemen and also in Sudan and in other parts of the earth as well. So you still have one out of two people living in India under the nutritional kind of global standards or one half of this hungry people on earth live in India. So these orders of power still exist.

Vinita Srivastava: I think they exist right in Saskatchewan, as James was saying, too, where he says children are going hungry and this just seems to be unacceptable that if it’s about control, then it’s unacceptable.

Janam Mukherjee: And it’s about war and it’s about winning. The ideology of war is in the modern age, regardless of all kind of Codes of conduct otherwise, it’s still what it’s always been. It’s a brutal attack on whole populations that does not discriminate well or often between enemies and civilians. And we see that collapsing in all the wars around us. Those questions of who is the enemy and the civilian population most often becomes the enemy in relation to the opposing sides in conflict.

James Daschuk: It’s really interesting to have both of us, Vinita, because in Janam’s case, it’s a conflict. In my case, it’s the establishment of what is thought of as a peaceful society and it can structures continue.

I don’t know if they diverged food insecurity, famine, that whole continuum. In the case of my research is the structure of our province and potentially Canada.

Vinita Srivastava: I thank you both very much for taking the time to have this conversation. I appreciate your time today.

Janam Mukherjee: Thank you, Vinita, and nice to meet you, James.

James Daschuk: Thanks, Vinita.

OUTRO

Vinita Srivastava: That’s it for this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient. You heard me say at the beginning that this was a bit of an experiment from us, and I would love to know what you thought. You can reach the team at dcmr@theconversation.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram. @dontcallmeresilientpodcast.

Don’t Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation. This series is produced and hosted by me, Vinita Srivastava. Our associate producer is Ateqah Khaki. Our student journalist is Husein Haveliwala. Krish Dineshkumar does our sound design and mixing, and our consulting producer is Jennifer Moroz. Lisa Varano is the managing editor of The Conversation Canada, and Scott White is the CEO. Zaki Ibrahim wrote and performed the music we use on the podcast. The track is called Something in the Water.

We’d love to hear from you, including any ideas for future episodes.

Join the Conversation on Instagram, X, LinkedIn and use #DontCallMeResilient.

Resources

“When Canada used hunger to clear the West” (by James Daschuk, July 19, 2013)

Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Indigenous Life (by James Daschuk, 2013)

“Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952” (in Social History by Ian Mosby, 2013)

“Proposed class action seeks damages for intergenerational trauma from residential schools” (CBC News)

Ashes and Embers: Stories of the Delmas Indian Residential School (by Floyd Favel)

Churchill’s Secret War (by Madhusree Mukerjee, 2010)

Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (by Janam Mukherjee, 2015)

“Three Million” (The documentary podcast by the BBC)

“Witnessing famine: the testimonial work of famine photographs and anti-colonial spectatorship” (Journal of Visual Culture by Tanushree Ghosh, 2019)

“We are about to witness in Gaza the most intense famine since the second world war” (The Guardian, March 21, 2024, by Alex de Waal)

Ateqah Khaki, Associate Producer, Don’t Call Me Resilient, The Conversation and Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer, Don’t Call Me Resilient, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In recognition of Arab American Heritage Month and in light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, UM-Flint, in partnership with the Arab American Heritage Council, invited historians Juan Cole, University of Michigan Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History, and Melanie Tanielian, U-M associate professor of history, and Muna Tareh, a UM-Flint alum and political scientist, to provide context for understanding the region.

University of Michigan-Flint Video: “Palestinian History: Understanding the Past, Engaging with the Present” | April 15, 2024

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The figure of Mohammad Mosaddeq, Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, is an uncomfortable one for both sides of the US-Iran rivalry. For the US, Mosaddeq is a constant reminder that the dictatorial reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after 1953 came into being with a US intervention to overthrow the constitutionally elected Mosaddeq. The US would provide strong support for the Shah in the coming decades. Mosaddeq is someone who challenged Western powers to defend Iranian national interests. This alone should, a priori, afford him a place of honor in the Islamic Republic established by Ruhollah Khomeini after his return from exile in 1979. However, Mosaddeq’s nationalism was grounded on democratic secularist convictions that are at odds with the ideology of the Islamic Republic, which in recent years has shut down its already limited avenues of democratic participation within the system.

In their book “The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954”, David S. Painter and Gregory Brew revisit Mosaddeq’s nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, the ensuing tensions with the US and the UK, and the Western powers’ final decision to remove Mosaddeq. As the title of the book already suggests, the oil dispute was the obvious point of contention but the early 1950s events in Iran would not have unfolded as they did absent the weight of much larger conflicts.

Among them was the desire of many Third World nations to manage their natural resources. In the age of decolonization, newly independent countries found themselves in a paradoxical situation. For the first time, they enjoyed political sovereignty but were tied to their former metropoles by long-term contracts to exploit their natural resources. Iran was never formally colonized. Still, the original oil concession Britain obtained in 1901, with very disadvantageous terms for the Persian state, had much to do with Persia’s internal weakness at the time. This fragility had been exacerbated by imperial competition between Russia and Britain for influence over Persia.

The oil dispute in Iran in the early 1950s took place against the background of an increasingly intense Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. In a time of strong ideological polarization, there was little place for a leader such as Mohammad Mosaddeq, who followed a policy he called “negative equilibrium” as he did not want to align Iran with either of the two blocs.

Mosaddeq became prime minister in 1951 after the Majles (the Iranian parliament) decided not to ratify the so-called Supplemental Agreement negotiated by the Iranian government and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The British company, founded in 1909, had been exploiting Iran’s oil for four decades. The Supplemental Agreement fell short of what most Iranians demanded. The Majles appointed Mosaddeq as prime minister after his proposal to nationalize the Iranian oil industry was unanimously approved by the parliament.

When nationalization was implemented, British leaders became convinced that Mosaddeq would have to go for the oil dispute to be settled in terms favorable to London. In October 1951, after Iranian troops took over the Abadan oil refinery in southern Iran, the last AIOC personnel departed the country. Mossadegh had Iran’s oil infrastructure in his hands but faced the major challenge of keeping the oil industry running without foreign technicians. Finding export markets for the oil products was even more complicated as Britain imposed an oil boycott and sanctions on Iran.

Diverging from the British position at this point, Washington “sought a solution that would restart the oil industry and preserve Iran from communist control while not endangering U.S. interests in the region”, write Painter and Brew.[1] At the same time, the Shah did not dare make a move against Mosaddeq since both his political figure and the cause of nationalization were widely popular in Iran. US officials acted as mediators between Mosaddeq on the one hand, and the AIOC and Britain on the other. There was no common ground to be found, however. Mosaddeq argued that Iranian oil belonged to the country after nationalization. Consequently, he wanted international companies to buy Iranian oil at a price higher than that offered to other developing countries where Western companies controlled the oil industry.

David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954. Click here to buy.

Mosaddeq was open to international companies returning to Iran to help operate the oil infrastructure as long as it was under Iranian control. British diplomats in Tehran sought to destabilize the Mosaddeq government and have it replaced with a new one that would be more amenable to British interests. The crisis escalated in October 1952, when Mosaddeq ordered the British embassy to close and its citizens to leave the country.

By the end of 1952, the US presented to Mosaddeq the so-called ‘package proposal’, which would have recognized Iran’s ownership of the oil industry but still envisaged Iran selling most of its oil to a consortium of international oil companies. The thorniest issue was compensation payments to the AIOC for Iran’s oil nationalization. As the authors note, the US and the UK insisted that “payment could not be limited to physical assets but also had to cover lost future profits.”[2] Mosaddeq rejected the ‘package proposal’. The reason was not that the Iranian prime minister failed to understand the specifics of the oil trade, as it has often been suggested. Rather, Painter and Brew argue, Mosaddeq understood very well the risks of being trapped in continuous compensation payments to AIOC if it agreed to the terms of the deal. Iran would have been in nominal control of its oil industry but, in truth, once again dependent on the British company’s compensation wishes.

Painter and Brew situate the US decision to consider the forceful removal of Mosaddeq around April 1953. With the British forced out of the country, the US operatives in Iran stepped in to mobilize the Iranian clerical and political groups that opposed Mosaddeq as well as the military. Bribes were a common means to achieve the desired result. Although there was no love lost between the Shah and Mosaddeq, the monarch had to be talked into the coup by his Western backers as he feared a failed move against Mosaddeq could backfire. The Shah finally signed two firmans (royal decrees): one dismissing Mosaddeq and the other one appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as the new prime minister. While street mobilizations headed by bribed local gang leaders took place in Tehran, significant sectors of the army carried out an operation against Mosaddeq on August 16, 1953.

The prime minister had been alerted of the impending coup and loyalist troops defended his residence and the army headquarters. After the failed coup attempt and the Shah’s departure from Iran, the Tudeh Party took to the streets and used the opportunity to call for a republic. The US ambassador to Iran convinced Mosaddeq to order the police and the army to repress the Tudeh protests. As Painter and Brew remark, “ironically, Mosaddeq’s decision to crack down on the Tudeh, which illustrated his anti-communism and his desire for U.S. support, helped seal his fate.”[3] On August 19, 1953, with the streets empty of Tudeh demonstrators, the army moved once again to overthrow Mosaddeq, who was not prepared for a second coup attempt. Soldiers took the ministerial offices and Radio Tehran, while Mosaddeq was finally captured. The former prime minister was later sentenced to three years of prison and would die under house arrest in 1967.

Although the Shah returned from his short exile and General Zahedi was installed as prime minister, the removal of Mosaddeq did not immediately solve the oil dispute. Nationalization was a popular cause in Iran, and Mosaddeq’s forced departure from the scene did not change this. Negotiations dragged on until late 1954 when the Iranian government agreed to pay limited compensations and retain a largely symbolic control of its oil industry. The US sweetened the deal with a military and economic aid package of $120 million.

“The Struggle for Iran” partly draws on documents about the US role in the coup first released in 2017 and is particularly strong in covering the economic dimension of the conflict. Painter and Brew’s work helps debunk some of the most common myths about the coup. Although anti-communism and opposition to nationalization were strongly connected, the authors explain Washington viewed nationalization as the biggest threat. Successful nationalization in Iran could have resulted in other Third World nations following the same path.

Painter and Brew also note that it is unfair to portray Mosaddeq as an irrational and stubborn leader who was unwilling to compromise. Orientalist tropes were rife in contemporary assessments of Mosaddeq by British and American leaders. Mosaddeq was described as “incapable of rational thought”, “dominated by emotions and prejudices,” or a “reckless fanatic”, among many other condescending and offensive remarks.

Painter and Brew argue that the British were never interested in finding a negotiated solution to the conflict and “used talks as a stalling tactic to buy time”[4] for Iran to experience the negative economic impact of Britain’s oil boycott and allow covert actions against Mosaddeq to run their course. In “The Struggle for Iran”, Painter and Brew importantly reflect how the tragedy of the coup was not only that the US and Britain removed a constitutional leader in a foreign country, but also that the intervention “halted the progress Iran had been making toward representative government. Autocracy was the outcome.”[5]

[1] David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, “The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951–1954,” (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023), p. 64.

[2] Ibid., p. 129.

[3] Ibid., p. 170.

[4] Ibid., p. 208.

[5] Ibid, p. 212.

Juan Cole, “As Palestinians continue to die, the history of their betrayal by the ‘Free World’ tells us why” at Scheerpost

“You have this exchange of populations, this ethnic cleansing: Jews sent to Israel and Palestinian sent out of Israel. But the Palestinians that were sent out of Israel didn’t have a stable framework for their lives, they became stateless people, for a while,” Cole said.

In terms of the Palestinians as victims of colonialism, Cole said, “The Palestinians are among the great unresolved problems created by the modern era of this industrial ethnic nationalism and settler colonialism that came together in Palestine in this very unfortunate way.”

Featured Image: Digital, Dream/ Dreamland 3.0.

The siege was enforced by armies and navies which had come from Germany, Finland, Italy, Spain, and Norway. It was part of a war started by a coalition of forces from around Europe led by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941.

The goal of the war against the Soviet Union was different from the war Germany had waged in Western Europe. On the day of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler declared that “the empire in the east is ripe for dismemberment”. Germany sought new living space (Lebensraum) but did not need the people who lived on it. Most of them were despised as subhuman (Untermenschen) and destined to be killed, starved or enslaved. Their land was to be given to “Aryan” settlers. To make his point in racial terms familiar to the Europeans, Hitler referred to the Soviet population as “Asians”.

Indeed, the war against the Soviet Union had aspects of a colonial war: millions of Soviet civilians – Slavs, Jews, Gypsies (Roma) and others – were systematically put to death. This surpassed Germany’s genocide in Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia) in 1904-1908 when it just as systematically massacred the local tribes of Herero and Namas. True, Germany was not exceptional: this was common practice among European colonial powers. 

The intentions of the Nazi invaders were summarized succinctly:

After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban center. […] Following the city’s encirclement, requests for surrender negotiations shall be denied, since the problem of relocating and feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for our very existence, we can have no interest in maintaining even a part of this very large urban population.

As one of the Nazi commanders enforcing the siege put it, “we shall put the Bolsheviks on a strict diet”.

British Movietone Video: “Siege of Leningrad – 1944 | Movietone Moment |

The last rail line linking the city with the rest of the Soviet Union was severed on August 30, 1941, a week later the last road was occupied by the invaders. The city was completely encircled, supplies of food and fuel dried up, and a severe winter set in. The little that the Soviet government succeeded in delivering to Leningrad was rationed. At one time, the daily ration was reduced to 125 grams of bread made as much of sawdust as of flour. Many did not get even that, and people were forced to eat cats, dogs, wallpaper glue, and there were a few cases of cannibalism. Dead bodies littered the streets as people were dying of hunger, disease, cold and bombardment.

Leningrad, a city of 3.4 million people, lost over one third of its population. This was the largest loss of life in a modern city. The former imperial capital famous for its magnificent palaces, elegant gardens and breathtaking vistas was methodically bombed and shelled. Over 10 000 buildings were either destroyed or damaged. This was part of the invaders’ drive to demodernize the Soviet Union, to throw it back in time. Leningrad had to be wiped out precisely because it was a major centre of science and engineering, home to writers and ballet dancers, the see of famous universities and art museums. None was to survive in the Nazi plans.

Sadly, neither sieges, nor colonial wars ended in 1945. Britain, France and the Netherlands waged brutal wars of “pacification” in their colonies long after Nazism was defeated. Racism was still official in the United States, another ally in the fight against Nazism. Twelve years after the war, it took the 101^st Airborne Division to enable nine black students to attend a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Today’s Western values of tolerance are recent and fragile. Overt racism is no longer acceptable, but its impact is still with us.

Human lives do not have the same value either in our media, or in our foreign policies. The death of an Israeli attracts more media attention that that of a Palestinian. Severe sanctions are imposed on Iran for its civilian nuclear enrichment program while none are imposed on Israel for its military nuclear arsenal. And, of course, Western powers continue to provide arms and political support for the siege of Gaza, where civilian population is not only bombed and shelled, but deliberately starved and let die of disease. The International Court of Justice confirmed “plausible genocide”, even though it failed to stop Israel.   

Commemoration of the siege of Leningrad should prompt us to put an end to all racism, to stop the siege of Gaza and to prevent such atrocities in the future. Otherwise, the accusation thrown in the face of the European citizen by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in 1955 would remain still valid:

.. what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

The Omari Mosque in Gaza was largely destroyed by Israeli bombardment on Dec. 8, 2023. It was one of the most ancient mosques in the region and a beloved Gazan landmark.

The mosque was first built in the early seventh century and named after Islam’s second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, a successor to the Prophet Muhammad and leader of the early Islamic community. It was a graceful white stone structure, with repeating vistas of pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled by a carved wooden balcony and crowned with a crescent.

The lower half of the minaret and a few exterior walls are reported to be the only parts of the mosque still standing.

Gaza is rich in cultural treasures, with some 325 formally registered heritage sites within just 141 square miles, including three designated for UNESCO’s World Heritage tentative list. The Omari Mosque is one of over 200 ancient sites damaged or destroyed in Israeli raids since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

As a scholar of Islamic architecture and archaeology, I know the Omari Mosque as a building that embodies the history of Gaza itself – as a site of frequent destruction, but also of resilience and renewal. While narratives about Gaza often center on war and conflict, Gaza’s rich history and pluralistic identity as expressed through its cultural heritage equally deserve to be known.

Layered histories

The sun-soaked coastal enclave of Gaza, with the tidy stone buildings of its old city and its verdant olive and orange groves, has been a trade hub that connected the Mediterranean with Africa, Asia and Europe for millennia. It was famed in particular as a transit point for incense, one of the ancient world’s most precious commodities. Given its abundant agricultural and maritime riches, Gaza has known conquest by nearly every powerful empire, including the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the early Islamic caliphs, the Crusaders and the Mongols.

Gaza’s history of repeated conquest meant that buildings were often destroyed, reimagined and rededicated to accommodate changing political and religious practices. New sacred structures were continually built over old ones, and they frequently incorporated “spolia,” or stones reused from prior buildings. The Omari Mosque, too, was such an architectural palimpsest: a building embodying the layered, living material history of the city.

In the second millennium B.C., the site of the mosque is believed to have been a temple for Dagon, the Philistine god of the land and good fortune. The temple is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as the one whose walls were felled by the warrior Samson, who is locally believed to be buried in its foundations.

In 323 B.C., Gaza fiercely resisted the conquest of Alexander the Great, and the city endured devastating destruction when it was finally subdued. Yet after Gaza was conquered by the Romans in 50 B.C. it entered a period of renewed wealth and prosperity. A concentric domed temple was built for Marnas, a god of storms and the protector of the city, on the site of the future mosque. He was venerated there until just before 400 A.D., when the Byzantine Empress Eudoxia imposed the new faith of Christianity and ordered the destruction of the temple.

The priests of the temple barricaded themselves inside and hid the statues and ritual objects in an underground room. But the temple was destroyed and a Greek Orthodox church rose in its place. The stones, however, preserved the tale: in 1879 a monumental, 10-foot-high statue of Marnas, portrayed in the guise of Zeus, was excavated and its discovery made international media headlines. The statue is now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums.

The Byzantine church, too, was destined to be transformed. In the early seventh century, the Muslim general Amr ibn al-As conquered Gaza, and the church was converted into the Omari Mosque. Yet the continued presence of Gazan churches and synagogues attested to pluralistic norms that characterized the region under various Islamic dynasties until the modern era.

Gaza under Islamic rule

Gaza thrived under Islamic rule: Medieval travelers described it as a remarkably fertile, creative and beautiful city, with prominent Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities. It was still a flourishing urban center when the European Crusaders arrived. When the city fell to the Crusader King of Jerusalem, Baldwin III, in 1100, the Omari Mosque was converted once again – this time into a Catholic cathedral dedicated to St. John the Baptist.

The Muslim general Saladin defeated the Crusaders in 1187, and Gaza returned to Islamic rule. The church was transformed back into a mosque, and in the 13th century its elegant octagonal minaret was raised. Yet the reconversion into a mosque preserved much of the Crusader church, and the majority of the nave and the western portal were still visible in modern times.

It was in this period that the mosque became famed for its extraordinary library containing thousands of books, the earliest dating to the 13th century. After the library of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the Omari Mosque’s collection was one of the richest in Palestine.

In the 13th century, the mosque endured destruction by the Mongols as well as major earthquakes that would repeatedly topple the minaret. Its rebuilding after each of these disasters speaks to the ongoing centrality of the mosque in the communal life of the people of Gaza.

The stones tell the tale

Later, Gaza continued to flourish as a coastal port city, where Muslims, Christians, Jews and others lived in the vast, cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire.

In the late 19th century, as scholars explored Gaza’s heritage, an eloquent reminder of the building’s layered history emerged: a relief on a mosque pillar depicting a seven-branched menorah and Jewish ritual objects, including a shofar, or horn, surrounded by a wreath. The name Hanania, son of Jacob, was engraved in Hebrew and Greek.

Its date is uncertain, but it seems likely to have been a column from a synagogue reused during the building of the Byzantine church, which was used again in the building of the mosque: yet another layer in the architectural palimpsest that was the Omari Mosque.

A few decades later, during World War I, the mosque was severely damaged when a nearby Ottoman arms depot was targeted by British artillery fire. In the 1920s, the stones were once again gathered and the mosque was rebuilt.

After the 1948 creation of the state of Israel, Gaza became the sanctuary of tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The area was primarily administered by Egypt until it was captured by Israel in 1967.

It was at some point after the 1967 war, when Jewish symbols had come to be associated with the state of Israel and its occupation of Gaza, that the menorah relief was effaced from the column in the mosque.

A future for the Omari Mosque

On Dec. 8, 2023, Israel became the most recent military force to target the mosque. The library, too, may have been ruined, a treasure house of knowledge that will not so easily be rebuilt. A digitization project completed in 2022 preserves an imprint of the library’s riches. Still, digital files can’t replace the material significance of the original manuscripts.

The hundreds of other heritage sites damaged or destroyed include Gaza’s ancient harbor and the fifth century Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, one of the oldest churches in the world.

From today’s vantage point, it seems extraordinary that the menorah relief had endured for over 1,000 years: a Jewish symbol unremarkably cohabiting inside a Muslim prayer hall. In truth, both the relief and its removal embody the story of Gaza itself, a fitting reminder of the many centuries of destruction, coexistence and resilience embodied in the mosque’s very stones.

And if the Omari Mosque’s richly layered history is any indication, the people of Gaza will raise those stones again.

Stephennie Mulder, Associate Professor of Art History, The University of Texas at Austin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Verses 19:17-35:

And once remote from them, she hid behind a screen. Then we sent to her our spirit, who took the shape of a well-formed man.
She said, “I take refuge in the All-Merciful from you, if you are pious.”
He said, “I am but an angel of your lord, come to bestow on you a son without blemish.”
She said, “Will I have a son, when no mortal has touched me, and I was not rebellious?”
He said, “So it is.” He said, “Your Lord says, it is easy for me. We will make him a sign for the people and a mercy from us. The matter has already been decreed.”
So she bore him, and withdrew with him to a remote place.
And the pangs of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree. She said, “I wish I had died before now, and had been forgotten in oblivion.”
But he called to her from beneath her, saying, “Do not be sad. For your Lord has made a stream run beneath you.”
So shake the trunk of the palm tree toward you, and ripe, fresh dates will fall to you. So eat and drink and be comforted. If you see any human being, say, “I have taken a vow to the All-Merciful to fast, and will speak to no one today.”

Many of these details are from material circulating in the late antique Christian community that also reached the Prophet Muhammad. In the Qur’an Jesus is depicted as in a line of God’s prophets, including Moses, Solomon, David, and others, a line that went on to include the Prophet Muhammad as of the early 600s CE.

The tradition of Persian and Mughal miniature painting — of painting leaves intended to go into manuscript books for the libraries of kings or very wealthy notables — flowered in the 1200s and after, in Iran, Central Asia, India and what is now Turkey. It was influenced by Chinese techniques that came in through the Mongol conquests and the Silk Road and sometimes the people depicted look a little Chinese.

In 1519-1687, the Qutb-Shahi dynasty ruled the Kingdom of Golconda, named after their initial capital, a city near Hyderabad in South India. From 1591 Hyderabad itself became the capital. That city today is the capital of Telengana State and is the fourth-most-populous city in the Indian Republic. The dynasty was founded by an adventurer from Hamadan in Iran, who was a Shiite, and so the kingdom had Shiism for its state religion, even though most of its subjects were Hindus and most of its Muslim subjects were Sunnis. In its later decades it became a vassal of the Mughals based up north, and ultimately was absorbed into the Mughal Empire.

During the 1600s in particular there was a lot of contact with European maritime empires and merchants, who brought books and paintings from Europe, and so the Renaissance tradition of depicting the Nativity had an impact on court artists. But these paintings were commissioned by Muslim rulers for Muslim court purposes, as their own celebration of Jesus, whom they considered, as did all Muslims, one of their prophets.

The National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian has a spectacular miniature painting from Golconda, dated to about 1630, of the adoration of the baby Jesus.



Jesus and Mary are both shown with golden halos. Joseph is also there but without a halo.

One of the adorers is, (extremely) anachronistically, a 17th-century European merchant in boots, almost certainly Dutch. He also seems to have brought gold vessels, and he has in his hand what looks to me like fine cloth, dyed purple. Indigo dye was one of India’s trading major commodities. More on all that later.

There are three winged angels, two hovering above and one on the ground in front of the manger. One of the angels above is holding what looks to me like a crown. Since the Muslim tradition doesn’t know about the Gospel language regarding the messiah being the king of the Jews, my guess is that this motif was borrowed from a European artist. Also, gold was one of the gifts traditionally thought by Christians to be brought to the Christ child by one of the 3 magi.

The other angel has a bow. In South India, the crown and the bow were royal symbols. So I think the angels are depicted as exalting Jesus in the way royalty was exalted. These symbols raise the possibility that the royal treatment given here to baby Jesus is not Christian in origin but Hindu Indian. After all, the beloved god Ram was a king. For these Indian artists, who did not know the Bible, the symbols may not be an assertion that he was royalty, only that he deserved the sort of glorification that kings received.

Although in the West of the Muslim world Arab artists were reluctant to depict holy figures, this Indian artist has no problem with it. Most did not, and they painted Muhammad, as well. Mary is shown wearing hijab but with her face visible, and Joseph and Jesus also have their faces depicted.

Shiite Islam puts special emphasis on piety centering on the family of the Prophet, including Muhammad’s son-in-law and first cousin, Ali, Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah, and the two sons of Ali and Fatimah, Hasan and Husayn. Although Sunni courts also produced nativity paintings, it could be that this form of Christian piety especially appealed to the Shiite rulers of Golconda.



As for the Dutch merchant or factor, Sanu Kainikara explains,

“In 1627, the Dutch had a disagreement with the Governor of Golconda, under whose jurisdiction the region fell, regarding the grant of a ‘farming’ permit for Masulipatam (Macchilipatanam). They withdrew to Pulicat and blockaded Masulipatam from the sea. The Qutb Shah dismissed his governor and invited the Dutch to return to Masulipatam. The reason for the Qutb Shahi sultan’s action was that the Dutch possessed a preponderance of naval strength that was able to threaten an adversary from the sea without exposing themselves to any significant danger—a capability that no other European power in India could lay claim to at that time.”

“The Dutch trade from Masulipatam amounted to Rupees 600,000 per year throughout most of the 17th century. In 1660, the Dutch opened a factory in Golconda, whose chief merchant also doubled as the ambassador to the Qutb Shahi king.”

One of the key commodities traded from Golconda to the Netherlands and later to Britain was diamonds.


Map of Hyderabad state, c. 1730, H/t Wikipedia, UM Clement Library .

So that Dutch merchant was almost certainly in Hyderabad seeking diamonds. But maybe also indigo dye and textiles, which he is shown in turn offering to baby Jesus.

And the court painter, having been commissioned by the king to do a nativity scene, obligingly incorporated the trader into the painting, a common practice. It is unlikely that the painting was commissioned by the foreigner– it stayed in India until a British officer purchased it. It just shows that the Prophet Jesus (`Isa in Arabic) had acquired another connotation in the Renaissance period, being associated with the expanding maritime trade empires of the Christian Europeans. The Dutch had just displaced the Portuguese, who can be seen in earlier miniatures.

The painting is a reminder that Christmas is not parochial — not northern European, as it is often conceived in the US, but a global commemoration of a global event. Not only do Muslims celebrate Jesus as a holy figure, but many Hindus also respect him (and more used to before the rise of Hindutva, Hindu nationalism). And Jews who live alongside Christians often have Christmas trees, even if they can’t go along with Christian beliefs about Jesus, who after all was born and bred a Jew. Christmas should be for celebrating rebirth and renewal and hope, in a world that desperately needs all three, for Christians and for everyone.

And they can hardly be blamed. On 3 November, the UN Development Programme and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) announced that 45 per cent of Gaza’s housing units have been destroyed or damaged since the beginning of the latest Israeli aggression on Gaza.

But the history of Gaza is also a history of great civilisations, as well as a history of revival, rebirth.

Shortly before the war, specifically 23 September, archaeologists in Gaza announced that four Roman-era tombs had been unearthed in Gaza City. They include “two lead coffins, one delicately carved with harvest motifs and the other with dolphins gliding through water,” ARTNews reported.

According to Palestinian and French archaeologists, these are Roman-era tombs dating back 2,000 years.

The finding was preceded, two months earlier, in July, by something even more astonishing: a major archaeological discovery, of at least 125 tombs, most with skeletons still largely intact, along with two extremely rare lead sarcophaguses.

In case you assume that the great archaeological finds were isolated events, think again.

“Byzantine-era mosaic discovered by farmer on Gaza Strip | USA TODAY”

Indeed, Gaza has existed not only hundreds of years, but even thousands of years before the destruction of the modern Palestinian homeland during the Nakba, the subsequent wars and all the headline news that associate Gaza with nothing but violence.

I grew up in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp located in central Gaza. As a child, I knew that something great had taken place in Nuseirat without fully appreciating its grandeur and deep historical roots.

For years, I climbed the Tell el-Ajjul – The Calves Hill – located to the north-east of Nuseirat, tucked between the beach and the Gaza Valley – to look for Sahatit, a term we used in reference to any ancient currency.

We would collect the rusty and often scratched pieces of metal and take them home, knowing little about the value of these peculiar finds. I always gifted my treasures to my Mom, who kept them in a small wooden drawer built within her Singer sewing machine.

I still think about that treasure that must have been tossed away following my mother’s untimely death. Only now do I realise that they were Hyksos, Roman and Byzantine currencies.

Once Mom would diligently scrub the Sahatit with lemon juice and vinegar, the mysterious Latin and other writings and symbols would appear, along with the crowned heads of the great kings of the past. I knew that these old pieces were used by our people who dwelled upon this land since time immemorial.

The region upon which Nuseirat was built was inhabited by ancient Canaanites, whose presence can be felt through the numerous archaeological discoveries throughout historic Palestine.

What made Nuseirat particularly unique was its geographical centrality in the Gaza region, its strategic position by the Gaza coast, and its unique topography. The relatively hilly areas west of Nuseirat and the fact that it encompasses the Gaza Valley have made Nuseirat inhabitable since ancient times to the present.

Evidence of Hyksos, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and other civilisations which dwelled in that region for thousands of years is a testimony to the historical significance of the area.

When the Hyksos ruled over Palestine during the Middle Bronze Age II period (ca. 2000-1500 BC), they built a great civilisation, which extended from Egypt to Syria.

So powerful was the Hyksos Dynasty that they extended their jurisdiction into Ancient Egypt, remaining there until they were driven out by the Sea Peoples. Though the Hyksos were eventually defeated, they left behind palaces, temples, defence trenches and various monuments, the largest of which can be found in the central Gaza region, specifically at the starting point of the Gaza Valley.

Like the Calves Hill, Tell Umm el-’Amr – or Umm el-’Amr’s Hill – was the location of an ancient Christian town, with a large monastery complex, containing five churches, homes, baths, geometric mosaics, a large crypt and more.

The discoveries of Tell Umm el-’Amr were recent. According to the World’s Monuments Fund (WMF), this Christian town was abandoned after a major earthquake struck the region sometime in the seventh century. The excavation process began in 1999, and a more serious preservation campaign began in earnest in 2010.

In 2018, the restoration of the monastery itself started. The discovery of the St. Hilarion Monastery is one of the most precious archaeological finds, not only in Gaza’s southern coastal region, but in the entire Middle East in recent years.

There is also the Shobani Graveyard, tucked by the sea and located near the western entrance of Nuseirat, the Tell Abu-Hussein in the north-west part of the Camp, also close to the sea, along with other sites, which are of great significance to Nuseirat’s past.

A Gaza historian told me that it is almost certain that Tell Abu Hussein was of some connection to Sultan Salah Ad-Din Al-Ayyubi’s military campaign in Palestine, which ultimately defeated and expelled the Crusaders from the region in 1187.

The history of my old Refugee Camp is essentially the history of all of Gaza, a place that played a significant role in shaping ancient and modern history, its geopolitics as well as its tragic and triumphant moments.

What is taking place in Gaza now is but an episode, a traumatic and a defining one, but nonetheless, a mere chapter in the history of a people who proved to be as durable and resilient as history itself.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Middle East Monitor

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Documents released by the Bill Clinton administration showed that in the first half of 1973, Kissinger and Nixon had more bomb tonnage dropped on Cambodia than was dropped by the Allies during all of World War II.

The US war on the Viet Cong led Washington to attempt to cut off their supply lines, which zigged and zagged over the borders colonial powers had drawn on Southeast Asia, in and out of Cambodia. In a fruitless bid to cut off those supplies, the US began bombing Cambodia in the 1960s, but the intensity of this bombardment increased over time.

The renewed 1969-1973 bombing campaign was Kissinger’s idea, “Operation Breakfast.” Sophal Ear writes, “The diary entry of Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, reads [on March 17, 1969]: ‘ … Historic day. K[issinger]‘s “Operation Breakfast” finally came off at 2:00 pm our time. K really excited, as is P[resident].” The following day, Haldeman wrote: ‘K’s “Operation Breakfast” a great success. He came beaming in with the report, very productive.'”

What kind of genocidal psychopath “beams” at beginning the illegal bombing of a country with which the US was not even at war?

By early 1973 Kissinger’s bright idea had already so disrupted Cambodian lives that disgruntled peasants there turned to the Communists, the Khmer Rouge. Kissinger and Nixon ordered even more bombing as the Communists approached the capital, Phnom Penh.

Embed from Getty Images
Victim of U.S. Bombing Error. Phnom Penh: Wearing head bandage, this young Cambodian youngster is one of some 300 casualties of bombing error on Neak Luong by U.S. warplanes August 6. He and other victims are awaiting transportation to hospital after having been brought here by Navy boats August 7.Getty Images/ Bettman

So Washington upped the ante. Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan reported that in February through August of 1973, “2,756,941 tons’ worth [of bombs were] dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all.” To repeat, in all of World War II the Allies dropped 2,000,000 tons of bombs, including the nuclear warheads at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The authors conclude that Cambodia may have been the most bombed country in world history.

Owen and Kiernan imply that hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died in this carpet bombing. Cambodia only had a population of 6.7 million then, so half a million dead, which is a plausible estimate, would be over 7% of the entire population. That would be like killing 16 million Americans.

While they say that 10% of the targeted sites were indiscriminate, the fact is that bombing populous villages from 30,000 feet is always indiscriminate. Most of the hundreds of thousands dead were certainly innocent noncombatants, a concept Kissinger never understood; or in a darker reading perhaps he understood it and had contempt for it. Responding to the repeated nuking of islands in Micronesia in above ground tests, Kissinger said, “There are only 90,000 of them out there. Who gives a damn?”

Anthony Bourdain, the great traveler and food enthusiast, wrote in his 2001 memoir, “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia — the fruits of his genius for statesmanship — and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.”

The Netanyahu government’s carpet-bombing of Gaza is a direct descendant of Kissinger’s Operation Breakfast.

“Gaza Guernica 1.1,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/IbisPaint, 2023.

Yuval Abraham of +972 Mag writes, “The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip.”

It is estimated that the Israeli Air Force massacred 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza from the air, very few of them combatants.

Abraham underlines, “the army significantly expand[ed] its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (‘matarot otzem’).”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s mealy-mouthed assertion that Israeli “precision munitions” can kill Hamas without killing large numbers of innocent civilians is mere Israeli propaganda. The precision munitions were set to kill large numbers of noncombatants in a total war of the Kissingerian sort. As Israeli targeting of the Palestinians (it is not a war, since the latter have no heavy weapons or air force) resumes, so will the high body counts, assuming the Netanyahu government permits enough societal organization to survive to permit the counting.

Reuters: “LIVE: View over Israel-Gaza border”

Kissinger’s butchering of villagers from the air threw Cambodia into such volatile political turbulence that a genocide resulted in which 20% of the population was killed, littering the country with sun-drenched white skeletons.

The Communists defeated him in Vietnam, where they still rule as preparations are made for Kissinger’s burial. The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party rules Laos. The Cambodian People’s Party, with roots in Communism, rules Cambodia, though it has turned to supporting a mixed economy model.

I don’t predict any sort of victory or longevity for Hamas itself, but it is clear from this history that you can’t use air power to destroy radical movements with genuine grassroots. Palestinians if anything will come out of the carpet-bombing (and the even more deadly denial of potable water and sufficient food) more radicalized than ever. They will still be on Israel’s doorstep even if they can be crowded into south Gaza as the maniacal Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant diabolically plans.

Kissinger rose to positions of power where he could overrule what he thought of as the soft and namby-pamby laws of war enacted in 1945 and after. Despite being a refugee from the Holocaust, he never escaped his formation in a Central European tradition of elite and profoundly amoral statecraft in the service of an unbridled nationalism and for the purposes of the super-rich in their white tuxedos.