If you think the madness unfolding in Gaza is new, you haven’t been paying attention. What we’re witnessing today is not a tragic slip-up, a one-time “security crisis,” or a “complicated conflict” (the favorite term of every spineless diplomat). It’s a rinse-and-repeat formula that’s been perfected over centuries — a toxic mix of racist ideology, land theft, and bureaucratic cruelty served up with a side of media gaslighting.
Let’s rewind to 1830. The United States passed the Indian Removal Act — a shiny piece of legislation that made it legal (and patriotic!) to force Indigenous peoples off their land, walk them thousands of miles, and let thousands die along the way. The Trail of Tears, they called it. Very poetic. Almost sounds like a wellness retreat — until you realize it was a death march where children collapsed, elders starved, and entire cultures were uprooted like weeds.
And here’s the kicker: America didn’t even blink.
Expulsion Is a Habit, Not an Exception
What happened to the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and other tribes wasn’t some isolated horror cooked up by a few bad apples. It was a national project. The government passed laws. The military enforced them. And settlers moved in like it was a land lottery.
Now, take that same script and apply it globally. The French in Algeria weren’t exactly handing out welcome baskets. Their “civilising mission” looked a lot like stealing land, torching villages, and pretending that the locals were lucky to have their culture steamrolled. The Portuguese? Same thing in Angola and Mozambique. Europe, the so-called heart of “Enlightenment,” has been obsessed with uprooting people who don’t look like them, worship like them, or own property like them.
From Manifest Destiny to Ethnic Cleansing — Just With Better PR
Fast-forward to today. Israel — backed by a cheerleading squad in Washington — is now pitching the idea of “voluntary transfer” for Palestinians. And no, that’s not satire. That’s the language used by former President Donald Trump and his ilk. “Voluntary transfer.” Like it’s a holiday package to the Sinai.
Let’s be clear. There is nothing “voluntary” about fleeing your bombed-out neighborhood under threat of starvation and shelling. Just like there was nothing voluntary about Native Americans walking hundreds of miles with U.S. soldiers breathing down their necks.
This is not a policy discussion. It’s not a peace plan. It’s ethnic cleansing with a PR manager.
The Madagascar Plan: Europe’s Forgotten Blueprint for Genocide
Before the Nazis decided to build death camps, they had another idea: ship all the Jews to Madagascar. They even called it a “solution.” Sound familiar?
Turns out, powerful countries love this idea of dumping entire populations somewhere “empty.” It’s the colonial fantasy — that somewhere out there, a stretch of land is just waiting for your political inconvenience to be planted on it. Rwanda, Chad, Somalia — all whispered as potential “destinations” for expelled Palestinians, as if these countries are just waiting for more chaos.
Let’s be honest. When the West talks about “vacant” land, they really mean land where the people don’t matter.
The Myth of the Enlightened West
We’ve been fed this narrative that Europe and its settler-colony offspring — the U.S., Canada, Australia — have learned from the past. “Never again,” they said after the Holocaust. “Human rights for all,” they said at the UN.
But tell that to the people in Gaza. Or to the Rohingya. Or the Congolese. Or the Yemenis.
What we’re actually seeing is that Western powers didn’t “evolve” — they just got slicker at hiding their crimes. They swapped muskets for drones, slave ships for detention centers, and direct rule for puppet regimes. But the soul of the system? That stayed the same.
Why Israel and the U.S. Still Get Away With It
If any other country bombed refugee camps, hospitals, and schools with the frequency and glee that Israel does, they’d be sanctioned into oblivion. But Israel? They get more weapons. More aid. More diplomatic cover.
Because they’re not breaking the rules. They’re playing by the West’s old rulebook.
From the Indian Removal Act to the forced relocations in Africa and Asia, from the Madagascar Plan to the Gaza “transfer” proposal — it’s all the same game. Only the players change. The goal remains: Remove the “problem” people, take their land, and write a press release blaming them for their own misery.
And Let’s Not Forget the Resistance
Here’s what they never want to admit — the people they’re trying to erase don’t go quietly.
Indigenous tribes fought back. Algerians didn’t roll over. The Vietnamese sent the French and Americans packing. Palestinians? They’re still standing, even as the world shrugs and hashtags its way through another massacre.
That resistance — that refusal to disappear — is what terrifies empires. Because once people stop accepting their assigned fate, the whole colonial project starts to crack.
Final Thoughts
It’s fashionable in some circles to “both-sides” every situation. But if you’ve made it this far, you already know that’s coward talk.
What’s happening in Gaza — and what happened in America, Algeria, Angola, and everywhere colonizers laid their greedy little hands — is not a misunderstanding. It’s not complicated. It’s theft, plain and simple. Theft of land, of history, of dignity. Wrapped in legal language and dropped from fighter jets.
The oppressed aren’t confused. They’ve seen this movie before. And sadly, they know how it ends — unless the rest of us stop pretending the script is new.