[This is the transcript for Alex Sheremet’s video essay, “Before Palestine, There Was Liberia”.]
The Parrot spoke: “When my tail began to grow, he and his people took my feathers and made headdresses. They sold them for expensive goods, with which they bought wives. Their wives bore daughters who, for much money, were sold into marriage, and their children bore more children. So it is I that caused them these women and was the foundation of their wealth.”
– “Right of Inheritance”, a West African folktale
The forced expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their land has many parallels in history. Native Americans greeted, then fought, then terrorized European colonists when their own ethnic cleansing had begun. The Neo-Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel, annexed its territory, and deported its Jews—[actions which would repeat with the Romans, Babylonians, and others.] In 1995, the Srebrenica massacre was one of the final acts of a long military campaign to remove non-Serbs from Bosnia and Herzegovina. But while these examples are useful for understanding the Israel-Palestine conflict, it is modern-day Liberia which offers some overlooked lessons and universals. Just as Israel was founded on the memory of the Holocaust, Liberia was settled by free American blacks—many with roots in slavery. Both claimed, in official pronouncements, an ancestral connection to the land they now wished to ‘civilize’. Both were victims, at some point, of serious crimes, which came to define much of their art, culture, and worship. Both couched the foundation of their state in the language of international law, as well as biblical justice. Their self-definition was righteousness and the wisdom one accumulates with a long period of exile. It was as if the Israelis and Americos had absorbed history—and were now happy to repeat it. Before Palestine, there was Liberia, and before Liberia, there was a forgotten curse: No people shall learn from their forefathers, as each generation must watch through ignorant eyes.
In 1820, ‘the Mayflower of Liberia’, then known as the Elizabeth, set sail for Freetown, Sierra Leone. The trip was organized by the American Colonization Society and President James Monroe, thus tying the fate of West Africa to American politics. Most of the ship’s emigrants were manual laborers, including carpenters and farmers, and a good portion was illiterate. Its leadership was divided between a few white abolitionists and free(d) blacks, some of whom would relocate to Liberia after encountering difficulties in Freetown. Many emigrants died or left early, as both colonies had a high fatality rate—partly due to bad preparation by the settlers, and partly due to how exotic Africa was to native-born Americans, of any color. In fact, most blacks had no interest in Liberia at all, arguing that it was America’s way of side-stepping the race problem it itself created. Yet as more ships arrived, something unspoken was now being noticed. The faces of Liberia’s founding fathers were rather pale, especially by the standards of its native population. Daniel Coker, who also helped settle Sierra Leone, was a Baltimore preacher of mixed race, and the patriarch of Nigeria’s elite. Lott Carey and Peyton Skipwith were sometimes described as light-skinned, while the circumstances of their enslavement were relatively lucky, as they were educated by ‘liberal’ masters. The first president of Liberia, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, was only 1/8th black—and a lifelong freeman, to boot. Even the natives called these black Americans “kwi”—or white men, in the Kru dialect, because in color and privilege, there was little distinction between them and the Europeans now carving up Africa. As in the United States, a mixed-race aristocracy had emerged, with fair-skinned blacks at the top, native-born Africans at the bottom, and a middle space reserved for dark-skinned Americans originating from the most brutal forms of slavery. Americo-Liberians thus recreated the customs and mores of Southern gentility, wherein color married into color and the names of their white masters still garnered respect. This would prove fatal to Liberian unity, but for now, hierarchy was so natural, so easy, that it imparted something of America’s permanence—a model the settlers wished to replicate, thinking that the abolition of slavery would justify their more destructive pursuits.
The founding of Israel is likewise contradictory, as it was once again foreigners—this time, Europeans—who imposed their vision on the Middle East. Although a few thousand Ottoman Jews lived in Palestine for decades, Eastern European migration soon multiplied their numbers. Over the next half-century, hundreds of thousands of settlers would arrive, mostly from Poland, Germany, and what became the Soviet Union. It was only after the establishment of Israel in 1948 that Jews from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia began to dominate immigration, yet the hierarchy had already been established. Theodor Herzl, the first political Zionist, was an Austro-Hungarian who helped arrange Jewish migration into Palestine. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, was a Pole who married a Russian in New York. The first president was Ukrainian, as were the second and third Prime Ministers, and Golda Meir twenty years later. Benjamin Netanyahu’s father was Polish, while Netanyahu himself spent his formative years in a Philadelphia suburb. Like the Americo-Liberians before them, many of Israel’s leaders came from relative privilege, with Ben-Gurion claiming he had never personally experienced anti-Semitism in Europe. Indeed, despite Israel’s diversity of color, and the importance of Mizrahi Jews to its exploding population, almost none of its 30+ leaders has been anything but white.* Perhaps the most well-known Mizrahi in Israel’s government is the convicted criminal Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is widely hated, as if playing the role of designated scapegoat for Israel’s own foundational ideology. Even more disturbing is the plight of Holocaust survivors themselves. Though welcomed into Israel after the Second World War, they are the poorest Jews in both Israel and America, leading to survivor-led protests, allegations of underpayment, as well as outright bigotry and discrimination. The image of ‘weak’ Holocaust victims was at odds with militant Zionism, creating ambivalence in the wider Jewish public tasked with integrating malnourished, psychologically broken refugees. Most telling of all is the fact that no Holocaust survivor has ever reached the highest levels of Israeli power, as they are an out-group within Israel for similar reasons that the dark-skinned ex-slaves of Liberia once were. The moral resonance of both slavery and the Holocaust were critical for establishing state power, yet served only a hypothetical purpose beyond this. As David Ben-Gurion infamously said:
…if I knew it was possible to save all children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish people.
As American blacks arrived in Liberia, they faced the classic problem of an inhabited land. Edward Blyden, a dark-skinned politician and writer, bitterly reflected on the impressive quality of native African culture, and how deeply the American settlers had internalized anti-African racism. He gained newfound respect for local tribes after waging war against them, remarking that they were:
…more independent than our independent republic…Interior people have [an] advantage…in never having been under foreign masters, in never having imbibed a sense of inferiority or a feeling of self-depreciation. They never had to look up to white men for anything…They are entirely free from the mental and moral trammels which the touch of the Caucasian has imposed upon us.
As with Palestinian Arabs in Israel, Africans were at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, and would likewise be forced to give up land in a series of wars. Liberian tribes included the Vai people—Muslims who developed a written language without the use of European or Arabic models, and inventors of unique musical instruments. The Kru were considered expert traders and oarsmen, thus keeping them safe from European slavery, which they themselves refused to practice. They continued to rebel against Liberia well into the 1900s, culminating in the genocidal Kru War of 1915, waged with direct American help. The Kpelle people are farmers and cotton-spinners from the Tunjur and Funj kingdoms of Sudan, now making up 20% of Liberia’s population. Yet it was the Dey who effectively introduced Liberia to American settlers through Zolu Duma, known as King Peter in the West. The American naval officer Robert Stockton met King Peter to ‘purchase’ land at gunpoint, replicating the dynamic between white colonists and American Indians back home. As with the United Nations 1947 Partition Plan for Palestine, King Peter’s land-sale was rejected by the locals as unjust, and the King taken prisoner. Back then, Liberia was little more than the port city of Monrovia, as it would take a while for its borders to expand. Yet one would not assume such ambitiousness if taking Liberia’s Declaration of Independence at face value. Ratified in 1847, the signatories argued that they were given few benefits and protections in America, and so had to forge a new life:
Strangers from all lands of a colour different from ours were preferred before us…[But now] our number has been increased by migration from America, and by accessions from native tribes; and from time to time, as circumstances required it, we have extended our borders by acquisition of land by honourable purchase from the natives…[Yet] no desire for territorial aggrandizement brought us to these shores…The native African, bowing down with us before the altar of the Living God, declares that from us…the light of Christianity has gone forth; while the slave trade [recedes] as far as our influence extends.
One century later, the borders of Liberia had increased a hundredfold. Tens of thousands of natives would be killed, with not one African elected President as the racial hierarchy stiffened. As with the Israel-Palestine Oslo Accords in the 1990s, a great and melodramatic banquet was organized in 1904 with promises to the natives, only for these commitments to be ignored. By 1927, a scandal broke out when President Charles D.B. King stole the election, then faced accusations of kidnapping native-born Africans as slave labor for government projects. It would take a civil war for the indigenous tribes to finally seize power, and at that point, the dream of pan-African unity gave way to the embers of white—and black—colonialism.
Although the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is often presented as a ‘necessary’ byproduct of war (thus echoing Liberia’s own statements a century prior), evictions and massacres began months before the half-hearted entry of the Arab Liberation Army. Time and again, the Hebrew words tihur, biur, and nikkuy appear in official military directives—all variations of “cleansing”, “cleaning”, and “purification”, in reference to populated villages and towns. Rather than stumbling into mass expulsion, David Ben-Gurion had long coveted a Greater Israel: the idea that any internationally-proposed borders were a mere starting point for Israel’s wider ambitions. A decade before Israel’s military campaign, the Avnir Plan mapped out the conquest of Palestine in its entirety. This was superseded by the first outlines of the Dalet Plan in 1944—several years before ‘official’ start of hostilities. As in Liberia, the settlers were heavily outnumbered, legally owning less than 10% of the land. Yet despite being only one-third of the population, the UN allocated 56% of Palestine to the recent migrants, with predictable results. One of several Jewish terrorist groups, the Haganah, would eventually become the Israeli Defense Forces, but in 1947, they limited themselves to smaller operations. In August of that year, the Haganah ignited the Palestinian Civil War by dynamiting a Palestinian home, killing a mother and six children—soon a routine tactic. The Battle of Haifa (“Passover Cleansing” in Hebrew) saw 15,000 Arabs expelled in two days, with a total of 60,000 over months. To the extent that an ‘orderly’ transfer was possible, the UN was required to oversee it, yet refused. This directly led to the events described by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe:
The Jewish campaign of terrorization, begun in December, included heavy shelling, sniper fire, rivers of ignited oil and fuel sent down the mountain-side…[By April, the operation officer] orchestrated [a] cleansing campaign, and the orders he issued to his troops were plain and simple: ‘Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.’ As soon as [the Palestinians] fled, Jewish troops looted their houses. When [Zionist leader] Golda Meir visited Haifa a few days later, she found it hard to suppress her horror as she entered homes where cooked food still stood on the tables, children had left toys and books on the floor, and life appeared to have frozen. Meir’s family…had fled pogroms in Russia, and the sight she witnessed that day reminded her of [family stories] about Russian brutality against Jews.
And yet, the atrocities continued. After Haifa’s refugees fled to Acre and Baysan, the Red Cross reported that Jewish terrorists injected typhoid germs into the water supply in the middle of its siege. Other refugees were hunted down by paramilitaries and their homes looted. In several villages adjacent to Haifa, “males between the age of ten and fifty” were summarily executed to precipitate flight. Former Haganah operative Hans Lebrecht recalled the Ayn al-Zaytun massacre, in which the tied-up bodies of women, children, and infants were burned behind a mosque to avoid British inquest. Men were stripped of their valuables and dumped into mass graves, with dozens of teenagers picked at random for death. Rape was common, sometimes as a spectacle in front of villagers, as established by Israeli officials, UN investigators, soldier testimony, and eyewitness accounts throughout Palestine. Every few days, David Ben-Gurion made fresh entries into his diary under the heading “Rape Cases”. Israeli officers complained of widespread theft and a culture of insubordination. A military directive forced 17-year-old Jewish boys to sign up as martyrs, ensuring that their formative years were spent engaged in war crimes. Fearing death, both Jewish and Palestinian civilians fled their homes, yet only Jews were permitted to return. When Israel’s Supreme Court demanded the repatriation of Palestinian Christians to the village of Kefr Berem, the IDF refused to comply, destroying every structure and confiscating land. Much of this had already transpired when David Ben-Gurion delivered the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948:
Exiled from Palestine, the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion…They reclaimed a wilderness…They sought peace, yet were prepared to defend themselves. They brought blessings of progress to all inhabitants of the country…The Nazi holocaust which engulfed millions of Jews in Europe proved the urgency of the re-establishment of the Jewish state, which…will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all…[It] will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
By the end of the war, Israel would control not 56%, but 77% of Palestine, with 750,000 Palestinians forcibly expelled. In further violations of the Charter of the UN, Israel would go on to occupy the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and has recently taken over additional parts of Syria. In Liberia, endogamous marriage prevented the intermixing of settlers and natives, while intermarriage between Israelis and occupied persons is effectively banned. Nearly a century of human rights reports unanimously conclude that Palestinians are second-class citizens, and that occupied Arabs have no rights at all. In 2024, a state-led investigation into the IDF gangrape of a Palestinian hostage was met with rioting, as Israelis were permitted to attack soldiers, destroy property, and interfere with official business in ways that Palestinians cannot. One stated justification for the Gaza genocide is “Never Forget”, yet Holocaust survivors still pluck food out of trash-heaps as the state awaits their liquidation. It now threatens to annex more territory, bribe or blackmail its critics, and destroy nations—all nations, if it must. In brief, Israel extracted all that it could from international law in order to establish itself, then shut the door behind it on its way to lawlessness.
In 1980, Liberia was a troubled country which had failed to resolve its deepest contradictions. As a result, Samuel Doe, an illiterate army officer from the Krahn ethnicity, led a coup against the final Americo ruler of Liberia, William Tolbert, who was killed and dumped in a mass grave. Despite Doe’s brutality and a rigged election, he was openly supported by the United States as a Cold War strongman, thus eroding any remnants of the country’s liberalism. As his utility waned, the CIA is thought to have groomed Samuel Doe’s adversary, Charles Taylor, possibly helping him break free of an American prison as he awaited extradition to Liberia. Upon his return, he realized that Prince Johnson, once Taylor’s ally, had already formed a new rebel faction, took Monrovia, then tortured and executed Doe while broadcasting it on television. Johnson would later justify his actions by referencing the Monrovia Church Massacre, where Doe’s soldiers killed around 600 civilians belonging to competing tribes. If this seems complicated, keep in mind that Liberia is known for secrecy and paranoia, as we don’t even have good numbers (much less extended accounts) for its century-and-a-half of ethnic cleansing. It was long recognized that Liberia’s political questions were decided in Masonic lodges, since membership was required for key government officials and private elites. The capital’s Grand Masonic Temple still has its massive, ten-foot eye staring down at the inhabitants, who once claimed it was a site of “kwi witchcraft” imported from America. Yet it wasn’t just natives who were an out-group from the Liberian perspective, but the world at large. According to Liberia’s former Secretary of State Edwin Barclay:
It is not always advisable nor politic to openly expose our secret intentions…our secret thoughts. That is the way we do…or rather don’t do [things]…in Liberia. We don’t tell [white nations] what we think; we only tell them what we like them to hear…what, in fact, they like to hear.
Israel-watchers are no doubt familiar with this sentiment, down to the choreographed nature of Western demands, Israel’s choreographed promises of change, and then the next violation—the next massacre. Yet whether it is in the form of Masonic lodges, or the perceived need of former slaves for African territory, or the ‘logic’ of European repatriation, these are but layers of abstraction meant to paper over human universals. To wit: no people has ever taken another’s land without blood. The blood is mostly that of the dispossessed, but sometimes, elites change places. It took 133 years for Liberia to plunge into civil war. Israel is only about half as old, yet history moves as fast—or as slowly—as the number of eyes upon it. There will come a time when no one is left in the Promised Land, but until then, the mountains will see and the grasses will register every image that the human eye refuses.
[*Due to Israel’s line of succession, Dalia Itzik was the acting President of Israel for two weeks in 2007, making her the second of two Mizrahi Jews to reach Israel’s highest ceremonial office. The first was convicted rapist Moshe Katsav, 2000 – 2007. Yitzhak Navon, President between 1978 and 1983, was of Sephardic origin.]
Bibliography
J.K. Jackson, West African Folktales
James Ciment, Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It
Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering
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