Human rights advocates on Monday stressed the links between Native American and Palestinian struggles for decolonization — and the hypocrisy of celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day (which fell on Monday, October 14, 2024) while the United States provides massive military aid and diplomatic support to Israel in its war on Gaza, for which it is being tried for genocide at the International Court of Justice.

“A few years ago, Native activists successfully rallied their city councils to replace Columbus Day, the day honoring the Italian explorer who was a destroyer of Native worlds, with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a holiday celebrating Native people who have resisted colonial oppression for more than 500 years, since the arrival of Christopher Columbus,” said American Jewish scholar Benay Blind in a statement. “It’s also a good opportunity to highlight Native solidarity among Americans as well as with other Native peoples, including Palestinians.”

“In fact, both peoples (Indians and Palestinians) share a similar story of resistance to colonialism, while the settler colonialists — the United States and Israel — share similar origin stories and tactics used to separate Indigenous people from their land,” Blind said.

Blind cited Stephen Salaita—a Palestinian-American professor of American Indian studies who was offered a tenure-track position at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in 2014 because of his criticism of the Israeli bombing of Gaza in July 2014—and noted that “Israel and North America share a similar narrative that justifies their origins.”

“Settlers in both countries, inspired by biblical references to ‘salvation, redemption and destiny,’ believed they had reached the Promised Land, where God had commanded them to eliminate the indigenous population to make way for more fertile land that had previously been ‘untapped and unappreciated by the indigenous people,’” she added.

In a social media post that included video footage of Israel’s Monday bombing of a camp for displaced people on the grounds of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, Ohikia Mile — a Native Hawaiian professor of race, diaspora, and ethnicity at the University of Chicago — said on social media that “Indigenous Peoples’ Day is about commemorating our survival and endurance despite settler colonialism — and resisting genocide as a distinct people.”

“If your celebration does not condemn Israel’s wanton destruction of Palestinian lives, it only reinforces its relentless settler colonialism,” she added.

Samoan poet and educator Teresa Siagatono (Samoa Island) stressed that “Palestinians are an indigenous people” and “Free Palestine is an indigenous struggle.”

"I say this over and over again very clearly because I don't think people are fighting for this enough, and you need to," she added.

“The cynical celebration of Indigenous Peoples Day by a settler state that supports the genocide of another settler state against Palestinians and Lebanese shows us nothing is sacred, not even our survival, until we bury colonialism once and for all,” said Nick Estes, a Lakota community organizer and historian at the University of Minnesota.

In response to US President Joe Biden’s declaration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day “in honor of tribal sovereignty and self-determination,” labor historian, author, and Empire State University professor Jeff Shurkey criticized those “who celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day while simultaneously facilitating the real-time colonial genocide of the indigenous people of Palestine.”

The American direct action group Jewish Voice for Peace chose Indigenous Peoples’ Day to hold a protest in which more than 200 activists were arrested while calling for an end to US military aid to Israel. “The fact that the US claims to stand with and honor indigenous peoples… while funding and financially supporting the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples in Palestine contradicts their statements,” said Sumaya Awad, the Palestinian American spokesperson for the event and a member of the Adalah Justice Project.

“I find it ironic that settlers would claim that Native peoples of North America are not doing enough to fight settler colonialism,” Rick Tabinonaka, a member of the Comanche Nation and left-wing organizer who hosts the podcast “Decolonized Buffalo,” said on social media.

"Yet these same settlers spent a whole year watching their colonial government support genocide in Palestine and did nothing," he added.