Massacre or collateral damage?

The short game and the long one

In August 1813 a band of Creek Indians attacked Fort Mims, a settlement in Mississippi Territory in what would become the state of Alabama. The attack caught the soldiers at the fort by surprise. The fort was there for a reason; the white settlers had tangled with Indians in the area in times past. But peace had lately prevailed, and security at the fort was casual. The main gate was open, and soldiers and settlers wandered in and out.

The attackers, a faction of the Creeks called Red Sticks, fell upon the fort suddenly and without warning. Hundreds of warriors poured through the gate and killed scores of soldiers and what civilians they could lay hands on. The soldiers fell back to an inner structure within the fort; the Indians set this on fire. By the time the fighting ended and the flames died down, nearly all the soldiers and many settlers had been killed, to a total of perhaps five hundred. Others, including women and children, had been captured and carried away. Also stolen were some hundred black slaves.

When news of the massacre reached the rest of Mississippi Territory and the state of Tennessee, to the north, the whites there were outraged. They demanded reprisal, both to avenge the settlers killed and to keep other Indians from thinking attacks on settlers would go unpunished. Militiamen—parttime soldiers—were called from their farms and shops and mustered into service. Commanding them was Andrew Jackson, who had moved from North Carolina to Tennessee when the latter was the western half of the former and had grown up with the new state to become commanding general of the Tennessee militia.

Jackson’s force, which eventually included U.S. Army regulars and members of the Creek and Cherokee tribes, pursued the Red Sticks and pinned them at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River. In a battle so bloody it turned the river red, the Red Sticks were crushed. With their defeat ended the last serious resistance to white settlement in that part of the old Southwest. During the next two decades the region’s settler population exploded, enabling the creation of the states of Mississippi and Alabama.

I first studied the Fort Mims massacre and its aftermath about twenty years ago, when I was writing a biography of Jackson. I was trying to imagine how it felt to be a settler on the frontier, and how it felt to be a Creek or Cherokee encountering the settlers. At the time the best modern analogy I could come up with was the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians over the lands in dispute between them. The Palestinians perceived the Israelis as intruders who had managed to establish a foothold and then to expand that foothold at Palestinian expense. The Israelis were determined to hold the land, some of them motivated by religious belief, others by the perceived necessity of defending Jews in the wake of the Holocaust.

Both sides believed they had a claim to the land, but after a few rounds of fighting, in which Palestinians killed Israelis and Israelis killed Palestinians, sometimes under brutal circumstances, the claims often mattered less than the anger at the loss of loved ones. Whoever had been attacked most recently felt most righteous in striking back—just as Jackson and the settlers felt righteous in punishing the Red Sticks and taking more of their land.

The recent violence in Israel and Gaza reminded me of the analogy I had drawn. Israelis are as outraged at the Hamas murders of Israeli civilians as Jackson and the settlers had been at the murders at Fort Mims. The Israelis feel as justified in their reprisals as Jackson and the settlers did. At the same time, the perpetrators of the massacres placed their actions in the longer context of a war they were losing. The Red Sticks denied the right of the white settlements to exist; their goal was to drive the whites out of Indian territory, by murder and terror since nothing else had worked. The ideology and actions of Hamas toward the Israelis are quite similar.

The responses of outsiders to the killings and reprisals are also similar in the two cases. The United States stands firmly with Israel, emphasizing Israel’s most recent injury at the hands of Palestinians. Many other countries are more sympathetic to the Palestinians, noting their decades of dispossession by the Israelis. In the wake of the Fort Mims attack, whites near the frontier were united in their demands for reprisal. Farther east, and especially in Europe, people who learned of the killings were likelier to account them an understandable response to a history of oppression. Over time, the sympathetic view has taken still firmer hold. Today there are many who refuse to call the Fort Mims killings a massacre. People who choose to live in a war zone, they say, risk becoming collateral damage. Hamas says the same thing about Israelis.

Parallels can be found in the politics of the resistance movements as well. The Red Sticks were the hardliners among the Creeks. Others in the tribe had concluded that resistance to the whites was useless; the war for Indian territory had already been lost. The attack on Fort Mims would demonstrate to waverers that the Red Sticks would defend Creek interests even if the accommodationists would not. Hamas has long been in a contest with Fatah, the more moderate faction of Palestinians which, through the Palestinian Authority, governs the West Bank. Hamas boasts of having liberated the Gaza Strip from Israeli occupation, which ended in 2005, while the Palestinian Authority continues to lose ground to new Israeli settlements in the still-occupied West Bank. The recent Hamas attack will show young Palestinians that Hamas is the hope of their people, Hamas and its supporters say.

History would seem to suggest that Hamas is as doomed as the Red Sticks were. Indian resistance in America ended in the late nineteenth century, and it shows no signs of reviving. But the Middle East is an old region by the standards of human history. For two centuries—the twelfth and thirteenth—regimes established in the vicinity of Jerusalem by Christian crusaders from Europe dominated the Arab and Muslim peoples there. But local resistance, combined with outside aid, eventually sent the Christians packing. That chapter of history gives Hamas reason to keep fighting—even as it gives the Israelis cause to dig in deeper.