Gaza War Portends Return Of Dark History Of Forced Migration In United States
As of Jan. 9, Israel has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, one out of every 100 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, including more than 9,000 children, 6,200 women and 61 journalists, while thousands more may be dead and buried under the rubble.
Ultra-nationalists in the Israeli government have used the cynical euphemism “voluntary migration” to describe what amounts to plans for ethnic cleansing by moving Palestinians out of Gaza, possibly to the Republic of Congo or to Egypt. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has advocated “voluntary migration” although the United Nations prohibits such forced population transfers.
Two of Israel’s most outspoken hawks are National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
“What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration,” Smotrich said. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different.”
Smotrich said the elimination of most of Gaza’s population would permit Israelis to regenerate the land.
“Most of Israeli society will say, ‘Why not, it’s a nice place, let’s make the desert bloom, it doesn’t come at anyone’s expense,’” said Smotrich.
Ben-Gvir called the war an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza” and a pretext for annexing territory. Israel has reportedly reached out to officials in the Republic of the Congo and to Egypt.
Danny Danon, a member of the Israeli Knesset, said “the world is already discussing the possibilities of voluntary immigration.” Gila Gamliel, the intelligence minister, said “voluntary migration is the best and most realistic programme for the day after the fighting ends”.
The policy of forced displacement goes back thousands of years. In recent times, in 1937, the Nazi government created the Madagascar Plan to forcibly relocate the Jewish population of Europe to the island of Madagascar. The proposal called for handing over control of Madagascar, then a French colony, to Germany as part of the eventual peace terms. The plan was cancelled after the Nazis lost the Battle of Britain in September 1940. Forced displacement was replaced with the Final Solution.
Involuntary relocation was employed in the U.S. as part of the Indian Removal Act of 1839 when around 60,000 native Americans were forced to leave their homelands in the southeast U.S. and resettle in newly designated Indian territory west of the Mississippi River. The migration and ethnic cleansing was known as the “Trail of Tears” in which the relocated people suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation and thousands perished from disease before reaching their forced destinations.
The earliest consideration for relocating enslaved Americans was proposed in 1816 by the American Colonization Society. The society included white men from the north and south, including slave owners who felt that free Black people undermined the institution of slavery and should be sent away. Others in the society felt that slavery should be gradually dismantled, but that Black people could never live freely with white people.
The society bought a strip of land 36 miles long and three miles wide along the west African coast. Over the next 40 years, more than 12,000 freeborn and formerly enslaved African Americans were sent to the land, which became the nation of Liberia. Many died from tropical diseases in their new land; of the 4,571 emigrants who arrived in Liberia between 1820 and 1843, only 1,819 survived.
Members of the society included future presidents James Monroe and Andrew Jackson, who later created the act that precipitated the Trail of Tears. Most African American leaders in the U.S. opposed the colonization plans, calling it forced relocation of people who were born in the U.S. and had built lives in the U.S.
“Shame upon the guilty wretches that dare propose, and all that countenance such a proposition,” Frederick Douglass wrote in his newspaper “The North Star” in 1849. “We live here — have lived here — have a right to live here and mean to live here.”
American plans at involuntary relocation were supported by none other than America’s great emancipator, President Abraham Lincoln. The historic leader wanted to end slavery in the U.S. but he didn’t believe that African Americans should or could be integrated into U.S. society.
“If as the friends of colonization hope…[we] succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery; and, at the same time, in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land,” Lincoln said during a eulogy for statesman Henry Clay in 1852, “it will indeed be a glorious consummation.”
In 1861, Lincoln asked Congress to approve a plan to relocate and colonization all Black Americans in a warm climate or tropical location like Texas, Florida, Mexico, Haiti, Liberia, or the coal fields in New Granada. Shipping magnate Ambrose Thompson had proposed transporting liberated blacks to New Granada, where he allegedly owned several hundred thousand acres of land in the Chiriqui region. New Granada is in present day countries within Central and South America.
In preparation for the emigration, slaves were to be gradually emancipated, beginning with the border states, including Kentucky. The plan for resettlement in New Granada fell apart because of numerous reasons, including opposition by members of Congress from the border states and from abolitionists.
New Granada was soon replaced by Haiti as a potential destination for Black Americans. A day before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves, Lincoln signed a contract to relocate 5,000 free African Americans to an island off the coast of Haiti. The experiment at forced migration was a fatal catastrophe for all involved.
On Jan. 1,1862, Lincoln signed a contract with Bernard Kock, an entrepreneur and Florida cotton planter. The contract authorized $600,000 in federal funds to relocate 5,000 formerly enslaved people from the United States to Île à Vache (“Cow Island”), a 20-square-mile island off the southwestern coast of Haiti.
Kock’s eyes were opened when he visited the 1862 World Fair in London and was impressed by the quality of cotton on display. He came up with his plan to grow cotton on the fertile land of Île à Vache. The island includes high rolling hills, swamps and a lagoon with one of the largest mangrove forests in Haiti. The island is surrounded by dangerous shoals, reefs, and rocks that have been the cause of many shipwrecks throughout history.
Finding workers was difficult so Kock proposed using newly emancipated Black Americans as labor. In return for their labor, under Kock’s brainchild, each African American family would receive homes, access to hospitals and schools, and be given 16 acres of land and their wages after the completion of four-year work contracts. Colonization would be voluntary but it was strongly encouraged by Lincoln, Kock, and others.
Under a negotiated agreement, the newly-formed Haitian government would allow Kock to use 10 percent white overseers while farm workers would be only of African or Indian descent. The newly arrived colonists would be naturalized as Haitian citizens upon arrival and when the lease expired, they would be given preference to become farmers or landholders
Kock expected to make a fortune selling cotton at war-time prices. To convince Lincoln of his utopian plan, Kock promised that each family would be given a furnished home and garden. A church, hospital and school with a minister and teachers also would be provided. Kock pledged to sign a four-year contract with each family and pay higher wages than those prevailing in the West Indies. The cotton workers would toil only 10 hours a day, six days a week, with Sundays for worship, and profit-sharing for workers. Kock’s goal was to hire up to 5,000 workers.
At the expiration of their term of work, the Haitian government would give each family 16 acres of good land, and to each single man eight acres.
“The intelligent negro may enter upon a life of freedom and independence, conscious that he has earned the means of livelihood,” Kock wrote in his proposal, “and at the same time disciplined himself to the duties, the pleasures and wants of free labor.”
On April 14, 1862, more than 450 Black settlers boarded a ship to Île à Vache, leaving behind their lives in former Confederate territory for what they had been told would be a better life. It was not to be.
A bout of smallpox killed at least 25 settlers at sea. When they arrived on the island, they found no good shelter and had to build crude huts. Kock, the overseer of the island, instituted a strict “no work, no rations” policy and disease and starvation quickly followed.
The settlers mutinied three months later, and Kock fled the island while the Haitian government dispatched military to maintain order. Finally on Feb. 1, 1864, Lincoln ordered a naval vessel to rescue the settlers and a month later, a ship carried the 350 surviving emigrants back to America.
The plan fell apart for many reasons, from U.S. government reluctance to rumors of malfeasance. One of the last straws came when an armed rebellion occurred on the island after Kock’s investors failed to provide lumber to build homes for the emigrants.
The experiment at colonization had a bright side; after it failed, Lincoln gave up the idea and embraced policies of Black inclusion and assimilation.
In 2013, the Haitian government began work to create an international touristic destination project on the Cow Island. Plans include 1,000 luxury hotel rooms, an archaeology museum, nightclubs, art galleries and craft boutiques. Development began in 2013 and was initially projected to be complete in 2015, making Île-à-Vache among the largest ongoing tourism projects in the Caribbean. As of August 2022, the master development contract for the island is held by WatersMark, an U.S.-based firm.
“This paradisiacal sanctum will become to mainland Haïti what Disney World is to Orlando, Florida,” notes the WatersMark website.
It is a far cry from Kock’s dream of providing a place where former slaves could work and prosper.