Vanishing Peoples: What Native America’s Erasure Teaches Us About Gaza Today

History does not repeat, but it rhymes with brutal consistency. What happened to Native American nations across four centuries of dispossession is now being cited by legal scholars, UN investigators, and genocide researchers as a reference point for understanding what is unfolding in Gaza. The comparison is not a slogan. It is being made inside courtrooms.

In 1492, an estimated 10 million or more Indigenous people lived in North America. By 1930, only a few hundred thousand remained. The mechanism was never a single event. It was a sustained combination of war, forced removal, engineered famine, disease, and policies designed to break a people’s connection to land and self-governance, from the Trail of Tears to the reservation system.

The defining feature was not any one massacre. It was the machinery: displacement dressed up as policy, land seizure justified as security, and a civic silence that let it continue for generations because the people it happened to had no vote, no press, and no seat at the table.

That same question, whether a people is being systematically erased under the cover of war, is now before the International Court of Justice. South Africa’s case against Israel, filed in December 2023, alleges violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention arising from Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The court’s first provisional measures order in January 2024 found it plausible that Israel’s conduct could violate the rights of Palestinians under the Genocide Convention, and a follow-up order in March 2024 required Israel to ensure basic food supplies without delay as famine conditions took hold.

The case is far from resolved. Israel filed its counter-memorial in March 2026 after multiple deadline extensions, and legal experts do not expect a final merits ruling from the ICJ until 2027 or 2028, with the court’s provisional orders stopping short of mandating a ceasefire. A UN Commission of Inquiry concluded last September that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, a finding its authors say used a methodology similar to what the ICJ itself will apply. The International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution in September 2025 declaring that war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide have occurred in Gaza.

Israel rejects this characterization entirely, calling South Africa’s case baseless and describing its military campaign as self-defense under international law following the October 7, 2023 attack. Germany initially opposed the case and argued the war should be understood as self-defense rather than genocide, though Germany withdrew its intervention in March 2026, citing preparations for its own separate ICJ matter. That underlying dispute, self-defense against a terrorist organization versus a campaign of destruction against a civilian population, is exactly what the court has been asked to settle, and it has not yet done so.

Whatever the ICJ ultimately rules, the pattern connecting these two histories is a structural one: decisions about a people’s survival made while that people had little or no meaningful voice in the process, and accountability, when it arrives at all, arriving only after the harm is largely irreversible.

Native American nations had no forum capable of forcing transparency on the government dispossessing them; recognition of what happened came generations later, through historians and courts, long after the demographic damage was done. Palestinians in Gaza are living through a version of that same asymmetry in real time, with the difference that today’s version is being documented, litigated, and disputed as it happens rather than reconstructed decades afterward. Whether that faster scrutiny changes the outcome is the open question the ICJ, and history, will eventually answer.