In America, a lot of the discord on the Israel-Hamas War and the complex and frustrating history of Palestinian statehood stems from the need for a villain.

It’s hard to get moral ambiguity on a piece of cardboard from Staples. Instead, you define your villain and make every attribute from the dropdown (colonialism, imperialism, apartheid) stick. With the widespread protests following the murder of George Floyd, the villain began, understandably, as the police. In the aftermath of the major demonstrations, however, it evolved into anyone who was not a self-avowed anti-racist.

After the October 7 Hamas attacks, American progressives who may not have previously embraced the Palestinian cause found in Israelis a villain as clearcut as the one from June 2020. They held up signs with many variations on the word “solution.” All that tedious history of wars and failed negotiations could be rolled up in “colonialism” and other crimes against humanity attributed to the villain.

The new fear of the larger left is that the villain designated by the pro-Palestinian left will follow the Defund the Police route to become not just Israelis but anyone who does not place 100% blame on Israelis. In other words, you will be called out for what you fail to affirm. Which will only inflame American supporters of Israel to follow the same ugly playbook of calling out those who fail to affirm support for Israel.

The level of anger and bellicosity on college campuses was initially perplexing. These are spaces where, historically, complexities and challenges above the paygrade of most civilians are avidly discussed and analyzed. Prejudice against Jews and Muslims is global and ancient, but when you make the issue about white skin versus Black, you can reduce one of the most difficult land disputes in a century to villain and victim.

I recently thought a lot about a villain/victim subject with which pro-Palestinian protesters are likely familiar: the United States’ actions against the continent’s indigenous peoples. The Ken Burns documentary on the American buffalo is a devastating reminder that the slaughter of more than 30 million of these animals was a way of exterminating the less populous indigenous tribes. Americans—both the federal government and the free agents doing the shooting—managed to achieve three things simultaneously with their barbaric killing in the 1870s: get rich off the animal hides and later the pillaged bones, clear the buffalo out of the way of the railroads and homesteaders, and starve the Indians by removing their source of food.

When you contemplate the removal of millions of large animals that once covered the continent as far east as Virginia—herds whose seeming infinity left the explorer Merriwether Lewis without words—you understand America’s early and enthusiastic commitment to the use of violent force at any scale. Buffalos are the largest animals in North America, beating out any Fat Bear Week contestant, and their ruthless destruction grimly followed on the first extractions of oil that would kick off a century-long and counting desecration of the ozone.

America’s reckoning with slavery and racism against Black people has been front and center in the lives of most Americans for the past several years, and it is understood among the left that white people collectively bear the blame of this injustice.

But the history of America’s claim to existence is murky. Do white Americans bear 100% of the blame for what the country took from indigenous tribes given that Americans of color own and prosper from this stolen land? Do white Americans bear 100% of the blame for what the country has taken from Earth’s inhabitants through the continued burning of fossil fuels even though fossil fuels have created jobs for generations of people of every color? And if some white people are not at fault for these actions by settlers and Big Oil, who decides which ones?

Everybody back east wanted a buffalo blanket, just like the ladies, both white and Black, wanted hats made from the feathers of birds hunted to near-extinction. There is a direct line in modern life from buffalo blankets to the iPhone 15, and yet I know that many people brandishing shiny new Apples at protests consider themselves victims of America’s historical villainy and therefore not hypocrites for living on land taken from indigenous peoples while making proclamations about whose indigenous rights matter more on the other side of the globe.

As an American, I accept my share of the collective blame for all the injustices of our distant history, because that history created the rich country I was born into. The fact that I was born into a poor family in a rich country doesn’t change anything. The fact that America is a villain to many other countries doesn’t change the banal reality that the opportunities up for grabs here are a lot better than many places and not as good as others.

Americans’ self-professed identities do not place them morally above the intentions and failures of everyone that came before. Speculators didn’t seek to take the lands on which indigenous tribes hunted buffalo because they had a backlog of settlers waiting to occupy those lands. They sought to take those lands simply because they could. And once that land was taken, people of every ethnicity and color flooded in to create towns and cities and states. However unassailable Americans believe their virtue to be, there is a long trail of blood and tears that never disappears. §