Opinion: Indians and Palestinians forced onto reservations

At the time, it seemed peculiar to me. It was the late 1970s. My visitor was a Palestinian Arab, a pharmacist who owned a business near Nazareth, in an area of Palestine that had become part of Israel in 1948. He was exploring the possibility of immigrating to the United States. Though he had citizenship in Israel, he did not believe he had equality, and he did not believe his children had a future there. I expected that he would want to know about U.S. pharmacies. Instead, he wanted to know about Indians. “Where are the reservations?” he asked me several times.

Not knowing any Indians and never having seen a reservation, I was of no help to him. It would be years before I would understand where he was coming from, psychologically as well as geographically. This man had seen himself and his people as the modern-day equivalent of Native Americans. The Palestinians were being pushed off their lands by settlers, many of them new immigrants from Europe, just as the natives of the Americas had been. He had seen a future of Palestinians being confined to increasingly smaller areas while foreign newcomers claimed control of the most productive land and water resources.