BY ED FELIEN
The Trail of Tears was the forced displacement of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations between 1830 and 1850. 60,000 people were forced to leave their ancestral homes. Many thousands died on the trail that led from Georgia and South Carolina more than 800 miles to Oklahoma.
The Cherokee were the first in Georgia to cultivate peaches. But their trees 
were too bountiful. Their fruit too tempting. Frustrated miners, whose dreams of wild fortunes did not pan out in the Georgia Gold Rush of 1828, looked on the trees with envy and coveted their neighbor’s fruit and simpler life. They came up with a plan to steal those lands.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson. He said: “It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will 
retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.”
In 1922 the League of Nations granted the British a Mandate to rule Palestine as a safe homeland for Jews. Between 1922 and 1926, 75,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine.
But the British grew weary of the burden of trying to maintain peace between Jews and Arabs. The Irgun and Stern Gang were harassing and murdering Arabs and agitating for independence from Britain. The bombing of the British administrative headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 by the Stern Gang was the last straw. They said they would abandon the Mandate on May 14, 1948.
On that day, Israel declared its statehood and was immediately invaded by Arab forces from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Israel successfully defended the territory ceded to it by the United Nations and gained even more. More than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes. Palestinians call this the Nakba, the catastrophe. They were driven into Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza.
The village of Huj, where Palestinians had once sheltered and protected Zionist militants from the British in 1946, was violently depopulated, looted and destroyed by Israelis two weeks after May 14. Sderot was built in its place.
The Palestinians were driven into Gaza, but, unlike the 800 mile exodus of the 
Cherokee, Gaza was only about half a mile from their homes, their citrus groves and their banana trees. Between 2001 and 2008, rocket attacks from Gaza killed 13 people in Sderot, wounded many more and caused millions of dollars in damages.
On October 7, Hamas military units attacked and occupied the police station in Sderot. The next day IDF troops counter-attacked, killed the insurgents and demolished the building. There were 50 Israeli civilian casualties, 20 Israeli police and military casualties, and 20 Hamas military casualties.
There will only be peace in Israel and Palestine when the Israeli settlers in Sderot 
welcome back their Semitic brothers and sisters, the Palestinians, who were there before them.
