Whose Genocide?

In my historical novel Though An Army Come Against Us I repeatedly describe a pattern by white Americans of projecting their own racist violence onto the Native, Black, and Mexican people they murdered. For example when Ezekiel Payne prepares to leave a burning Black Tulsa, he reflects on a life time of observing white racist violence:

The lynchings were always followed by panicked reports in the white press of armed Black men on the way to exact vengeance. Back in ’07 the whites of Henryetta had nearly fled the town because they feared that the 1300 rounds of ammunition they had stockpiled would not be enough to stop the 35 armed Black men they heard were coming for them: more than seven 5-round magazines for each imaginary invader! In the case of Okemah, they said it was the entire town of Boley, ten miles away, that was supposedly coming to kill the white people, and – Ezekiel supposed – outrage their women. Sheriff Dunnegan armed every white man in Okemah, prepared for an attack that – like the one expected in Henryetta – never came. From that day on, Okemah was a sundown town.

It was the consistency of this pattern, from town to town, from state to state, that made Ezekiel think that all these white folks were actually reading from the same secret script. But sometimes he had an even darker thought. Sometimes he imagined that white guilt and white fears were so strong – and so uniform – that it resulted in these common patterns of violence and blame. What if white folks were so filled with guilt and shame for their own crimes that they imagined an army of Black people retaliating against them because it would have to be so in any just universe? What if white folks had to bar Negroes from their towns because they couldn’t look them in the eye after the atrocities they had committed against them? What if white folks imagined that colored folks were impervious to bullets because they knew their own actions were demonic and thought God himself was sending avenging Black angels to destroy them? And – finally – what if those loathsome postcards of their victims that they all kept as souvenirs were meant to reassure them that these Black angels were, in fact, mortal?

We still see this today when the press fearfully speculates after a police murder about protests “turning violent,” as if they have already forgotten the violence that people are protesting!

And now I see the US Congress and various universities worrying about calls for genocide against my Jewish people? In the last two months alone the Israeli military has killed roughly 20,000 Gazans and Israeli civilians have murdered over 250 West Bank Palestinians. More than half the homes in Gaza are gone, along with universities, churches, and mosques. Israel has control over food, water, electricity, and communications. It has advanced weapons: warplanes, warships, missiles, nuclear warheads. It is systematically pushing Gazans from more portions of what is, after all, a 25-mile by 8-mile strip, leaving them nowhere to go.

This is the genocide. Worrying about a genocide of Jewish people is either a guilty projection or a conscious misdirection.

I will always be proud of my heritage and religion. But I am increasingly ashamed of the atrocities committed by some who claim to share them. I am increasingly ashamed of the willful blindness of others who deny that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians and - instead - insist that we are the ones who live in fear.

Jewish values demand an end to the genocide.

Israel goes full Schutzstaffel in Gaza

 Okay, sure, complicated. 

The Israeli prime minister is on trial for bribery and fraud. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis had been protesting in the streets for months against his move to undermine the country’s court system. 

The Minister of Justice (and Deputy PM) opposes Palestinian residence anywhere in Israel or the territories it has illegally occupied for the last 56 years, despite signing treaties to protect and safeguard a Palestinian state. He drafted the law undermining the courts. He hobnobs with organized crime figures.

The Minister of National Security has repeatedly pulled his gun on unarmed Arabs and then told arrived police officers to shoot them. He leads hate marches through Arab neighborhoods. His personal hero is Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli American terrorist who shot 154 Ramadan worshippers in a Hebron mosque, killing 29 of them. His slogan is, “We are the landlords,” apparently meaning that he is allowed to do anything to Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories.

Even before October 7, extrajudicial violence by Israelis against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank had accelerated under this new government. This included shootings and beatings; burning of homes and olive groves; and vandalism and destruction of infrastructure, especially water lines and cisterns. 

This prime minister and his government absolutely ignored the intelligence reports that Hamas was preparing a major attack on Israel. It told the Border Patrol to shut up about what they were seeing and just do what they were told. Incompetence? Stupidity? Underestimating the sheer scale of the attack Hamas was planning? Actually hoping for the attack so they could use it to halt the demonstrations and launch a genocidal attack on both Hamas-controlled Gaza and the West Bank? I’ll bet on all of the above.

Now Israel’s paid apologists are feeding the infosphere with endless reminders of the sheer horror of the Hamas raid - 1200 massacred, over 200 taken hostage - as if that justifies their own massacre of 15,000 Gazan civilians (as of yesterday) and another 250 Palestinians in the West Bank. As if that justifies the absolute destruction of churches, mosques, medical centers, office buildings, and apartment houses by advanced munitions. As if that justifies the forced relocation of Gazans to the southern portion of the 25-mile long coastal strip, and - now - the orders to evacuate the south!

But Israeli propagandists don’t only rely on the truth of the Hamas massacre. During the pause in their military operations for prisoner exchange they insisted on differentiating the hostages held by Hamas from the prisoners held by Israel, arguing that the latter were all convicted murderers. That is an easily disproven lie because most of the people released by Israel were administrative detainees, people who had never been charged with any crime at all, and certainly never tried in any court. 

Among the best known is Ahed Tamimi. She first gained international notice in 2012 when she was 11 for trying to stop an Israeli policeman from arresting her mom during a peaceful march against the occupation in their village. The story of that village and the Tamimi family can be found in The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine by American freelance journalist Ben Ehrenreich.  Last year she published her own memoir, They Called Me a Lioness.

When Ahed was 16-years old she was caught on video slapping an Israeli soldier. That soldier had just shot her younger cousin with a rubber bullet from close range, putting him in a coma. She served eight months in Israeli prison, during which she was able to complete high school and earn her diploma. The Israeli poet Yehonatan Geffen wrote of her in 2018:

,את, אהד תמימי
,אדומת השיער
,כמו דוד שסטר לגולית
תהיי באותה שורה עם
.ז'אן דארק, חנה סנש ואנה פרנק

An English translation reads:

You, Ahed Tamimi,
The red-haired,
Like David who slapped Goliath,
Will be counted among the likes of
Joan of Arc, Hannah Senesh and Anne Frank.

In November Ahed was arrested again when her Insta was hacked and somebody put up a hateful post against all Jewish people. Characterizing her as a convicted murderer of Jews is more than a stretch. 

The Israeli military is pursuing a calculated policy of emptying Gaza of Palestinians: by mass murder, by threats of mass murder, and by evacuation orders followed by mass murder. This is genocide. It is genocide regardless of what you say about the Hamas attack that preceded it. It is genocide regardless of whether you believe the Israeli government invited that attack on purpose or through arrogance and stupidity. If you believe that Israel has some special historic right to commit genocide, then you have learned nothing of Jewish law, religion, ethics, or history.

This week the US Army overturned the convictions of 110 soldiers of the Black 24th Infantry for a “riot” in Houston in 1917. The new judgement came 106 years late for the 19 men who were hung. It came late for those who were imprisoned, too.

The full story doesn’t fit in a Facebook post. It includes Houston Police invading a

Black woman’s house and dragging her out half dressed because they lost track of an unrelated man in a foot chase. It includes a Black soldier arrested and beaten for asking those officers to allow her to put on some clothes. It includes Black Military Policemen who were ordered to patrol unarmed because white Texans were offended even by the sight of Black men in uniform, not to mention carrying their weapons. It includes a Black MP beaten and shot for asking white police the whereabouts of that arrested soldier.

This story is not a major plot point in my historical novel Though An Army Come Against Us. It is more of a looming and ongoing presence in the lives of my characters: a concern that everybody has on their minds.

Lt. Flipper c. 1877

H.O. Flipper, who by that point (as in real life) was working as an engineering consultant and confidential informant for Senator Albert Fall, reported to him (in my novel) about the reasons for what he described as the “mutiny”:

“First, is the abusive behavior toward them of white Houston, and especially the Houston Police Department. In my presence a white police officer bragged that in Texas the fine for killing a vulture is $25 but killing a n----- only costs $5. The mutiny itself began when two white police officers pistol-whipped and shot a colored military policeman for asking where they were holding a soldier they had arrested.”

Flipper in 1923

His second reason is the incompetence and racism of the men’s own (white) officers. And Flipper suggests that if he (a West Point graduate) were reinstated in the Army, he could immediately make the 24th a better unit.

My character Major Walter Loving was - like the real Walter Loving - a Black military band leader who is recruited at the outset of the First World War by Military Intelligence to report on the readiness of the Black regiments. In the novel he visits Camp Des Moines, where African American non-commissioned regulars and college graduates who volunteered were trained as officers. In the novel he writes to headquarters:

Walter Loving, c. 1890

“You asked in your letter of 16th last how the candidates are responding to the mutiny by some members of the 24th Infantry in Houston. A few dozen members of the class here are detached from the 24th for this training and everybody else relies heavily on them for both facts and opinion. The most important source of both appears to be a young Regular Army sergeant named Osceola McKaine. He corresponds both with members of his own battalion, who remained in Columbus, New Mexico throughout, and with some in the Third Battalion, including Corporal Charles Baltimore of I Company, the Military Policeman whose beating and arrest by Houston police precipitated the affair.  Sgt. McKaine’s version is that Cpl. Baltimore’s arrest was an example of race prejudice by local law enforcement, but that marching into town to free him was both a gross dereliction of duty and bad for the Negro race. He has urged all his questioners to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States by excelling as officers and thereby to make a case for just treatment.”

Osceola McKaine was a real-life person. It is my fictional McKaine who addresses
a contentious gathering in Charleston, South Carolina on this subject, saying:

Osceola McKaine, by Orlando Rouandl

“The 24th Regiment in Houston is not an abstraction or a debater’s point to me. That was my unit. I served alongside those men. They are my comrades and my friends and if they are executed, then I will mourn them personally and by name."

Near the end of the novel my character Joey Quintana, a union organizer, is imprisoned at Leavenworth for opposing the war. He had previously been deported from Bisbee, Arizona along with about 2,000 striking copper miners and held in an Army camp guarded by… the 24th Infantry. And who does he re-encounter?

“He worked, as usual, with his cellmate, Gabriel
Joyner, #12252. The other prisoners were always surprised to learn that Joey and Gabriel knew one another prior to their incarceration. They asked where a Negro soldier crossed paths with a Mexican-American union organizer. Neither ever elaborated. Joey would sometimes say they met over a card game, but nothing more. Both Gabriel and Joey found it too painful to think about the fate of the other players who had been at that table.”

#12275 Jessie Sullivan

And a couple of pages later we find the inmates singing to make the work go by more easily:

"When Ralph’s song was done, Jessie Sullivan picked up the lead. Sullivan had been a career soldier, a corporal in the 24th Infantry with Joey’s cellmate, Gabriel. Nineteen of their barracks mates were executed in secret for the so-called 'mutiny' in Houston against racist police violence. Jessie, like Gabriel, was spared that. Now he was inmate #12275, sentenced to life in prison.  He led them in the army song, 'Mama, Mama Can’t You See?' The prisoners liked the soldier songs: they were new every day, with lyrics that made them laugh about where they were and what they were doing."

I wrote Though An Army because I believe we cannot understand our present without knowing our past. We are in a moment where white supremacists and monopoly capitalists alike are actually passing laws against the teaching of history. But history like the Houston, Texas affair of 1917 with the 24th Infantry and the Brownsville, Texas affair of 1906 with the 25th Infantry were really never taught. The mass court martial in the one case and the mass discharge without trial in the other, like the mass sedition trials of IWWs, were never really taught.

I published Though An Army in the fall of 2019. I am still hoping to find my readers.

• Chanting “Stop the Steal!” while working for months around the clock to steal a Presidential election.
• Harping endlessly on Hillary Clinton’s communication of State Department business on a private email server while stealing secure documents and storing them in a hotel.
• Accusing the grieving parents of murdered schoolchildren of being “crisis actors” while hiring actors to be on camera cheering at one’s events.
• Tirelessly insisting on the guilt of Hunter Biden and the complicity of his father while Jared Kushner’s new equity firm gets a $2 billion infusion of cash from the Saudi crown prince, a transfer that the prince’s financial people advised him was unjustiable as an investment.
• Denouncing “cancel culture” while banning books from libraries and entire subjects from school curricula.
• Using an expanded definition of religious freedom to take away the rights of women and gay people.

Is there a pattern in this?

When Capitalists Whine about Class Warfare

 Forty-two years ago, August 5, 1981, Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers who were striking for a pay increase, a reduced work week, and improved retirement benefits. They had endorsed Reagan’s 1980 election campaign because he promised to support them, but instead he fired them all. The entire union membership lost their jobs; EVERYONE was replaced. Firing strikers instead of negotiating with them encouraged large private employers to do the same: at Phelps Dodge in 1983, at Hormel in 1985, at International Paper in 1987. 

Twenty percent of salary and wage workers were represented by unions in 1983; today that proportion is ten percent. Forty years of attacks on workers haven’t been confined to union members. Real wages are down. Benefits have vanished. Even social security is under attack. This represents forty years of ONE-SIDED CLASS WARFARE… attacks by the capitalist class on all of us. 

Now, when people speak up about the massive robbery that “tax reform” has accomplished by freeing the wealthiest of paying any taxes at all, the rich cry, “Class warfare!”

When people ask that the federal government enforce existing safety regulations that would reduce the number of train derailments, chemical spills, and fatalities to rail workers and civilians, the freight companies cry, “Class warfare!”

When workers vote to bargain collectively, employers cut their wages and cry, “Class warfare!”

The next time you hear some politician complaining that a call for justice is “class warfare,” remember that they always endorse class warfare when it is waged by the wealthy against everyone else.

The Likud Coalition's Attack on the Israeli High Court is an Assault on Palestinians

 The open fascists of Israel’s governing coalition like to pretend that their attacks on the High Court are actually in support democracy of democracy. They ask why unelected judges should be allowed to overturn the will of the people (by which they mean, of course, those who are allowed to vote) as expressed by the Knesset the people  [sic] elected. They are especially exercised by the standard of reasonableness, which - until this week - allowed the Court to block government decisions that the judges deemed unreasonable. But Justice Minister Yariv Levin gave away the game in a speech to the Knesset. Instead of providing examples of times when the Court blocked the people’s will, he offered these five examples that he felt demonstrated how the failure of the reasonableness standard:

• In 2018, bereaved Israeli families from Parents Circle – Families Forum and Combatants for Peace Tel Aviv invited bereaved Palestinian families to join them in observing Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day) at a ceremony in Tel Aviv Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman barred those Palestinian mourners from entering Israel on the grounds that a joint ceremony was a “display of bad taste.” He characterized it as equating the murdered with the murderers. The Supreme Court overruled him and allowed the joint remembrance to take place.
• That same year Lara Alqasem, a 22-year old student at the University of Florida with Palestinian grandparents, arrived in Israel to continue her studies at the Hebrew University. She was refused entry, her student visa was canceled, and she was interned for two weeks on the grounds that she had previously been in an organization that supported boycotting Israel. The Court agreed with Hebrew University and with hundreds of Israeli and US professors that she should be permitted entry and they overruled the Interior Ministry.
• In 2002, three Palestinians - Kipah Mahmad Ahmed Ajuri, Abed Alnasser Mustafa Ahmed Asida, and Amtassar Muhammed Ahmed Ajuri - were accused of complicity in bombing attacks in Israel. The military commander of the West Bank ordered them relocated to Gaza and all three sued. The Court had no problem admitting conclusions of guilt that could not be supported by evidence because the source of that evidence was declared secret. The Court had no problem with the forced relocations of two of the three. But it overturned the third deportation (Abed) on the grounds that he was guilty only of being the brother of a bomber who had refused to loan him his car and gave him a ride instead.
• In 2021 Computer Science Professor Oded Goldreich of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot was selected for the Israel Prize in Mathematics for his work in computational complexity. Minister of Education Yifat Shasha-Biton refused to give him the prize on the grounds that he signed a letter to the German Parliament saying either - depending on whose story you accept - that support for boycotting Israel is not, by itself, antisemitism; or that they shouldn’t provide financial support for the settler college, Ariel University. The Court ordered Shasha-Biton to give him his prize, saying it is meant to be a reward for excellence in scholarship, not loyalty to the government.
• In 2018, Professor Yael Amitai, a neurobiologist at Ben Gurion University, was named to the board of the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development, which is a fund for distributing research grants. Minister Ofir Akunis blocked that appointment on the grounds that Dr. Amitai signed a petition in 2005 supporting Israeli soldiers’ right to refuse to serve in the occupied territories. The Court asked Minister Akunis to reconsider.

On their face, these decisions affect both Israelis and Palestinians. It is definitely worth noting, though, that their weight and consequences differ. On behalf of Israelis, the Court intervened in cases where they were being denied academic honors, or the right to invite guests to a celebration. On behalf of Palestinians (or Americans of Palestinian descent) the Court intervened in their forced relocation and in the refusal to admit them into the country. As important, even the cases involving Israelis concerned Palestinian rights: including them in a joint bereavement ceremony, acknowledging that opposing an illegal occupation is not a crime, acknowledging that opposing that illegal occupation is not antisemitism. It should be clear from this that, at least for now, the motivation for the attacks on the Court is to give the government impunity in attacking Palestinians.

Israelis are not wrong in protesting a partisan parliamentary attack on the independent judiciary. It would be good if they recognized that behind this attack on their individual rights is an assault on the entire Palestinian people.

STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

 The intense interest in the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday about so-called affirmative action absolutely begs the question: “Why do high school seniors and their parents compete so intensely over admission to certain schools? Is it really because they offer a vastly superior education? Or is it because they represent pathways to other kinds of success?

It isn’t even ironic that the backgrounds of the nine current Justices themselves offer a strong hint to the answer. Seven of them attended Ivy League undergraduate colleges. Eight of them attended either Harvard or Yale Law schools. There is no statistical universe in which roughly four thousand other undergraduate colleges are underrepresented to that extent. There is no statistical universe in which 198 other law schools are underrepresented to that extent. And this is not new, though it may be truer now than ever. Of 116 people who have served on the Court, 22 were Harvard alumni and 11 were Yale alumni.

No, this is a relational universe, not a statistical universe. It is not about the best or the brightest or even the most prepared. It used to be called an old boys’ network. It meant that people’s paths in life were prepared for them. It meant that - for example - people hiring new law school grads for prestigious and highly-compensated firms were more likely to choose alums from their own alma mater. It still means that admissions officers at elite colleges are more likely to admit the children of alums and faculty, what they call “legacies”.

High school seniors want to attend elite colleges because the name of that college attaches to them and enhances their chances of success later on. College seniors want to attend elite law schools for the same reason. And law students with certain ambitions compete for clerkships with judges because it brings them closer to becoming judges themselves. Again, let us return to the current nine Justices: Chief Justice John Roberts clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist; Justice Elena Sagan clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall; Justice Amy Coney Barrett clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia; Justice Brett Kavanaugh clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy; Justice Neil Gorsuch clerked for both Justices Anthony Kennedy and Byron White. Students at Yale Law have long known that cultivating close personal relationships with Professor Amy Chua (Harvard College, Harvard Law) and her husband Professor Joel Rubenfeld (Princeton College, Harvard Law) was a pathway to a Supreme Court clerkship. The Yale Daily News reported that those students were afraid to speak out against either of them on allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate relations because of those coveted clerkships and the danger of retaliation.

Let’s look for a second at Justice Thomas, who felt the need to add a 57-page concurring decision to Chief Justice Roberts’s decision on the affirmative action case. And let’s look at President George HW Bush who nominated Thomas to the Court way back in 1991.

Clarence Thomas graduated Yale Law in 1974. He has complained repeatedly over the last fifty years that he was subsequently overlooked by the prestigious firms to whom he applied because they assumed he got his degree because of affirmative action. He says it “robbed my achievement of its true value,” and that interviewers "asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated”. The possibility that those interviewers were simply racist seems to have eluded him completely. He has been on the Supreme Court now for almost 32 years, by far longer than any of his colleagues and has avidly sought opportunities to declare what he calls “racial preferences” unconstitutional throughout that time. In his concurring decision yesterday he referred repeatedly (and triumphantly!) to a dissent he wrote twenty years ago as proof that he has been right all along. 

How, then, did he get to the Court? Thomas found a patron in Missouri Attorney General John Danforth, a fellow Yale alumnus. He served Danforth as assistant attorney general. When Danforth was elected to the US Senate, Thomas followed him to Washington as a legislative aide. Danforth championed him to positions in the US Department of Education, the EEOC, the Court of Appeals and finally the US Supreme Court. His long tenure on the Court is, in part, due to the fact that he is among the youngest Justices ever appointed, certainly the youngest in the last 150 years. When we look back earlier, to younger appointees, we find more about legacy. Bushrod Washington became a Justice in 1798 at the age of 36. Yes, he was the nephew and closest blood relation of George Washington. Even younger was Joseph Story who was 32 when he joined the Court in 1812. He actually taught law school while concurrently serving as a Justice. Where? You guessed it already: Harvard.

If we turn to President George H.W. Bush we find a legacy at Yale. He graduated in 1948, after serving in World War 2. His son, President George W. Bush graduated Yale in 1968. His granddaughter, Barbara, graduated Yale in 2004. I will have more to say about how they all “earned” this in a moment. First, though, let’s go in the other direction. George H.W. Bush’s dad, Prescott Bush graduated Yale in 1917. He was one of the the thieves who stole Geronimo’s skull from Fort Sill for a secret society at the college named Skull and Bones. Prescott Bush's grandfather, Reverend James Smith Bush, was also a Yale graduate, class of 1844. 

It isn’t necessary to look at the high school records of all these Bushes to determine whether this was a meritocracy. It isn’t necessary to look at the statistical likelihood that this was anything other than preference for the children of alums. Yale Professor Gaddis Smith, who worked on a history of the college wrote that James Rowland Angell, who was president of Yale from 1921 until 1937, “would say, very explicitly, that we must preserve Yale for the ‘old stock.’” Smith clarified this, writing, “The slogan of the first major fund-raising campaign for Yale, in 1926, was ‘Keep Yale Yale.’ The alumni knew exactly what it meant.” And this is hardly unique to Yale. Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell (1909-1933) insisted on excluding Jews from Harvard in order to maintain admissions opportunities for Gentiles and perpetuate the “purity of the Brahmin race”, which is what they called New England’s white, Protestant upper class in those days.

I mean, we use the word “legacy” freely to describe a college applicant who is accepted because his family attended. But what does that word actually mean. The definition is simply money or property that is handed down by an ancestor. And what should be clear by now is that these are, indeed, legacies. Does Bushrod Washington get on the Supreme Court if his uncle is not George. Does George W. Bush become President if his dad is not George H.W.? Does he become Governor of Texas? Does he even get admitted at Yale?

In his concurring decision yesterday, Justice Thomas dismissed the idea that a racially diverse student body yields any educational benefit. He goes still further, claiming that Black students do better at HBCU’s. He claims that attendance at elite white schools stamps them “with a badge of inferiority. He cites data showing that HBCU’s do better at promoting Black scientists, physicians, and engineers. He fails to consider the possibility that racist white professors in those fields actively discourage their Black students. But he also fails to note that elite colleges still represent a pathway to elite positions in society, positions like chairs on the bench of the US Supreme Court.

Military Necessity

 Harris Neck, Georgia

Harris Neck is a unit in the National Wildlife Refuge system, a four square mile tract about thirty miles south of Savannah, Georgia. Until Emancipation it was a forced-labor camp where Black people were enslaved. In 1865 the title-holder deeded the entire tract to one of those formerly-enslaved people Robert Delegall. For the next seventy-seven years, he, his family, his neighbors, and their descendants lived there. They farmed and fished and they built operated processing plants for oysters and crabs. After the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the US Army Air Corps was looking in the area to build an air strip and air gunnery range. The local white political establishment pointed them in the direction of Harris Neck. Seventy-five Black families were given eviction notices. Those Black landowners who received any compensation at all got 40% less than white owners, despite the fact that there were homes, barns, and other improvements on the Black-owned land and that there were none on white-owned land, with the exception of one white woman. The families were given two weeks to vacate and then their homes were bulldozed and burned (with the exception of that white woman's home.) The families were promised that they could return when the war ended.

World War 2 ended in 1945. In 1948 the military (now the US Air Force) turned the property over to the county, not to the owners, to operate as a civilian airport. That was never done, so the Federal Aviation Authority took ownership. In 1962 the FAA transferred the property to the US Fish and Wildlife Service to be operated as a refuge.

In the 1980's and again in the 2010's the landowners and their heirs launched campaigns to regain their ownership of the land. Their struggle continues and they are organized as the Harris Neck Land Trust.

Vieques

Vieques is a 90 square mile island about 8 miles east of the main island of Puerto Rico. After the US colonized Puerto Rico in 1898 it was primarily used for sugar plantations owned by outsiders. After the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the US Navy was looking to establish a bombing range to practice aerial and marine bombardment. Since most of the inhabitants were not landowners they were not compensated for being evicted from their homes.  For over sixty years - long after the end of World War 2 - it served as a gunnery range, with bombardment taking place roughly 180 days a year.

In the 1970's protesters began demanding that the Navy cease the peacetime warfare against the island and leave. They picked up in intensity in the 2000's. The Navy finally left in 2003 and the damaged and poisoned lands were turned over to the US Fish and Wildlife Service as the Vieques National Wildlife Refuge.

Kaho'olawe

Kaho'olawe is a 45 square mile island in the Hawaiian archipelago, located about 7 miles southwest of Maui. When the US annexed Hawaii in 1898 the island was sparsely populated, in part because it doesn't get much rain. Over the next forty years the environment was further degraded by intense livestock grazing. After the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the US Navy took the island to practice naval bombardment, aerial bombing. and beach landings. The damage was intense, but not all these bombs went off, and by 1948 Kaho'olawe was also covered with undetonated explosives. The island was subjected to similar assault for military training during the US wars in Korea and Vietnam. In the 1970's a Protect Kaho'olawe 'Ohana formed to sue the military to cease the peacetime warfare against the island and conduct environmental and cultural assessments. In 1976 protesters launched boats to land on Kaho'olawe, but they were turned back. Live fire finally ended in 1990 and ownership of the island was turned over to the state. Environmental restoration efforts continue, but they are difficult.

Military Necessity?

I will stop here to belabor a few points that may have appeared to you already.

1. The militarization of the United States that began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor lasted long after World War 2. That was reflected in the insistence on keeping bombing ranges going as much as it was by the fact that the "defense" industry never returned to a peacetime status.
2. The government is certainly reluctant to cede land once it takes it. National Wildlife Refuges are a lot easier to establish on land that is already federal even though it may seem counterintuitive that bombing ranges are ecologically important.
3. It is a lot easier to take land from Black people, Puerto Ricans, and Hawaiians than it is from white people. In the case of Harris Neck all the evidence suggests that officials specifically pointed the Army to this Black-owned enclave in the Black-majority, but white-controlled, county.

Masafer Yatta

And then there is Israel. And then there is the Occupied West Bank, especially "Area C" which remains under the direct control of the Israeli military, not the Palestinian Authority. Masafer Yatta is an 11 square mile cluster of Palestinian and Bedouin villages about 12 miles south of Hebron. In 1981 then-Minister of Agriculture Ariel Sharon offered the tract to the military as Firing Zone 981. If an area is designated as a firing zone - similar to the gunnery zones, and aerial bombardment zones discussed above - elementary concern for public safety demands that it be evacuated. 

The people of Masafer Yatta have sued to prevent their eviction. But the Israeli courts have upheld it. They have also repeatedly allowed the demolition of structures built without permits, despite the evident fact that the Occupation authorities will not issue permits to Arabs. It is worth noting that, far from also clearing Israeli settlers from this region, their numbers are increasing. It is worth noting that those settlers, who pretend to be religious Jews, have repeatedly destroyed Palestinian olive groves. (The Torah explicitly forbids this, even against an enemy: 

When in your war against a city you have to besiege it a long time in order to capture it, you must not destroy its trees, wielding the ax against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Are trees of the field human to withdraw before you into the besieged city? Deuteronomy 20:19) Two days ago, settlers who were protected by the army brought their sheep to graze on Palestinian crops in the "FiringZone."

But it is especially worth noting that here we have an actual reversal of cause and effect regarding " military necessity". It is not simply easier to seize the land of a subjected group than the land of a dominant group as in the US cases described above. It is not simply more likely that the army will protect Jews over Arabs in the heat of a conflict started by violent, extremist settlers. In the minutes of that 1981 meeting, Minister Sharon clearly states that his motive is not to create a training area, but rather to clear the area of Arabs. I should also mention that an astonishing 18% of the Occupied Territories have been designated as "firing zones." So for the government of Israel the category of "military necessity" is actually a barely-believable cover for ethnic cleansing.