Joe Biden gave a speech in October, in which he issued an historic apology to Native Americans for past injustices. Meanwhile, his administration continues to arm and fund the genocide of the century, which has massacred well over 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone, a number which is still rising. During the event, a woman in the crowd asked Biden: “How can you apologise for a genocide while committing a genocide in Gaza?”
The underlying logic behind this brutal irony is that Palestinians, if history is any guide, must wait a century or two before the ‘civilised world’ reckons with their destruction. It took 75 years for the UN to recognise the Nakba, and then only under pressure from the Global South.1 Major Western powers have yet to acknowledge the Palestinian tragedy. Last year, after a fierce ‘Israeli’ campaign, the US, along with Britain and Germany, boycotted the historic first UN event commemorating the Nakba. This is a grave omission, a deliberate erasure of a people’s memory on the part of Western democracies — especially since the Nakba remains an ongoing event.
In recent years, historical apology has become a battleground for intense political activism and lobbying, where various political groups are vying over contending interpretations of history and historical reckoning, and where only the powerful and influential seem to prevail. For example, Britain has consistently refused to apologise for the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised to support the founding of a Jewish homeland in Arab Palestine. (This has not prevented ‘Israeli’ leaders from admonishing Britain for not handing over the whole of Palestine!) And on the rare occasion that Britain does apologise for one of its colonial crimes—such as David Cameron’s hollow apology for Bloody Sunday—it works quickly, as the so-called ‘Legacy Act’ shows, to close down the possibility of any semblance of justice for the victims of other, similar crimes.
Historical apologies, then, are often selective, and rarely sincere. And, in the liberal West they are often marred with hypocrisy. In 2022, Germany marked 70 years of compensating Holocaust survivors, in ‘Israel’ and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Germany has a dark record of banning Nakba commemorations at home, according to Human Rights Watch. ‘Israel’ itself has, of course, never apologised for the Nakba, which brought about the dispossession of nearly one million Palestinians and the destruction of over 500 Palestinian towns and villages. Instead, it has enacted a ‘Nakba Law’ in Gaza, with the support of Germany, Britain, and, of course, the US.
Western nations are not fond of apologising for war crimes committed or abetted by their governments overseas, because such apology would imply an admission of guilt. According to Jonathan Neale, author of The People’s History of The Vietnam War,2 one reason the US never apologised for using Agent Orange in Vietnam was because “to do so would be to admit what had been done in the war,” and to admit liability would, in turn, entail compensation for the victims.
Even at home, the United States has yet to offer a sincere apology for its genocidal atrocities. In 2009, a Congressional apology to Indigenous peoples was stealthily tucked away on page 45 of an unrelated spending bill), on page 45! Likewise, Biden’s apology to Native Americans for the residential school system felt more like a cynical election ploy rather than a sincere gesture; an attempt to exploit Native trauma for political gains. (Needless to say, this pathetic manoeuvre failed to achieve its aims.) And, while the US did, in 1988, offer $20,000 in compensation to the Japanese-American victims of internment during World War II, it took until 2008 for it to even apologise for 246 years of institutionalised slavery and Jim Crow laws.3 Again, this apology was mainly symbolic, and offered no restitutions or reparations to the millions of Black Americans whose ancestors were forcibly brought to the country.
At its core, the notion of historical justice is a Western invention designed to alleviate liberal guilt over its violent legacy of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. Even supposing these apologies were sincere, they would still mean little to the victims. That’s because the oppressed find little solace in the prospect of historical justice—the notion that future historians or leaders will perhaps look more kindly on their plight, or recognise them as having been deeply wronged. Palestinians, like all oppressed peoples, want justice now, on this earth, in their lifetime, while they are still alive and have the power to witness it and benefit from it.
Historical justice is like posthumous fame––it demands the death of the victims. But unlike posthumous fame, which is largely an artistic matter, historical justice is highly hypocritical: it demands considerable temporal and emotional distance from the event, to minimise inconvenience to the perpetrators; and it’s often dispensed when there is no real political cost incurred, or moral courage required, in doing so. Because the victims must necessarily cease to exist in order to be recognised as victims, historical apologies are often too little, too late. Biden’s election-timed apology to Native Americans was too little, too late, just like his recent discovery of Rashid’s Khalidi The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, was, in the author’s own words, “4 years too late.” And belated justice is no justice at all, for justice delayed is justice denied, and that rings true for individuals and collectives alike.
Today historical justice has become a sort of liberal religion, offering future redemption or afterlife salvation to the oppressed. But brave and morally solid citizens act now, without the need to wait for historical justice or historic apologies to remind them of what’s right. Being on “the right side of history” means nothing if it is an excuse for inaction. That’s precisely what Aaron Bushnell meant by his last words, which he wrote shortly before he burned himself alive over US complicity in the Gaza genocide:
Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.
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The draft resolution was put forward to the General Assembly by Egypt, Jordan, Senegal, Tunisia, Yemen, and the State of Palestine, and attracted numerous co-sponsors, all of which were Global South states. The breakdown of votes leading to the resolution’s adoption also reflects this. ↩
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Jonathan Neale. 2004. A People’s History of the Vietnam War. New York: The New Press. ↩
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In Britain, Tony Blair finally apologised for the slave trade in 2007. This followed criticism of a 2006 statement of his “deep sorrow” that stopped short of a full apology. ↩