Fifteen years after the 1607 founding of the New World’s first permanent British settlement at Jamestown, a group of Powhatan warriors attacked white settlers, killing almost 350. The brutality of the attack stunned settlers, and inspired the decimation of the Powhatan nation.

Historian Betty Wood writes that “as far as the survivors of the Massacre of 1622 were concerned, by virtue of launching this unprovoked assault native Americans had forfeited any legal and moral rights they might previously have claimed to the ownership of the lands they occupied.”

In the following three centuries, scores of what settlers saw as brutal Native attacks were used to justify further expansion. This was hardly because white attacks on Natives were somehow less brutal. Over and over again, Native nations were promised homelands farther west, but in the end there was no two-state or many-state solution.

Settlers pointed to the vicious tenor of Native attacks to conclude they were facing subhuman “savages.” Were Native attacks brutal? Yes. Were non-combatants killed and captured? Yes. But how can we stop there? Natives were losing their homelands “from sea to shining sea.”

Americans have often glorified Native dispossession as either a courageous response to “savagery” or as a divinely sanctioned destiny: “God shed His light” on America. Looking back, are we Americans proud of this? If we had it to do over, knowing what we know now, would we do it again just like before? Would we justify it the same way? Would we support an ally who was doing a similar thing now?

All historical analogies are fraught, but blanket descriptions of Natives as “savages” and Palestinians as “terrorists” divert us all from grasping the larger reality of violent dispossession. Like the Jamestown “massacre,” the Oct. 7 Hamas attack was vicious and unjustifiable. But the response of the U.S.-allied Israeli government follows the pattern of Native dispossession in the U.S.

Most of the Palestinian population has been driven to refugee camps in surrounding countries. The asymmetrical violence they have absorbed is unlikely to make them accept Israeli dominance. Perhaps Israel’s long-term survival depends less on overwhelming military power and more on the pursuit of justice.

For more than 1,000 years, European Christians confined and intermittently brutalized their Jewish neighbors — always with the justification that Jews were inherently depraved and dangerous to Christians. This made it easier for Nazis to accuse Jews of threatening Germans through an international communist conspiracy and to name Jews, leftists, Roma, Slavs, homosexuals, even the handicapped, as untermenchen — those whose lives can be snuffed out without concern.

Did this make Germans feel powerful and superior, or was it evidence of a basic insecurity, of knowing how they would react if others treated them as they treated others? Trauma does not simply evaporate. It seethes within the hearts of victims and remains to haunt the perpetrators forever. Shockingly, every American must now ask themselves, which side would the U.S. support if World War II were happening today? Would we be as divided about that as we are about immigration?

President Joe Biden, like every U.S. leader before him, provides an endless flow of sophisticated high-powered weapons to help Israel perpetrate what is, in many ways, comparable to the Native dispossession in North America. Around the world, many refuse to sit by and watch this horror without speaking out.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right supporters betray the Jewish ideal that even the powerless deserve justice. Those of us concerned about the rise of vicious antisemitism today must realize that desperate Palestinians are not the real threat but rather metastasizing fascist nationalism, especially in the U.S. itself.

Those who support the Israeli war effort point not to the number of victims — after all, Israel has killed 20 Palestinians for every citizen they lost — but rather to the particular cruelty of the attack, exactly the justification used to dispossess Natives here. The Jewish people know what it is like to be labeled subhuman and expendable.

The current conflict is absurdly asymmetrical. How can we leave it at “both sides are brutal” when one side is driving the other from their homeland? Do Palestinian lives count at all or have they become, in the eyes of some who support the Israeli war effort, as expendable as those the Nazi regime feared?

Perhaps it is time for all to step back from the temptation toward revenge and consider the only path that can lead to lasting peace: justice for all.

Patrick McGreevy lives in Greenfield and welcomes comments at pmcgreevy64@gmail.com.