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Sacrificing Indigenous interests: solving the ‘native question’ in Australia and Palestine on the eve of the Second World WarAlison HollandReceived 19 Jun 2024, Accepted 19 Nov 2025, Published online: 05 Dec 2025Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2025.2594550ABSTRACTIn 1937 administrators in Australia pronounced the fate of Aboriginal Australians as their eventual elimination, either through biological absorption or natural death. Historians have discussed this moment primarily through the prism of genocide. In this article I widen the interpretive lens to compare it to the contemporaneous resolution to eliminate Indigenous peoples from Palestine by British administrators. I show how the 1937 Aboriginal welfare conference and the 1937 Peel Commission on Palestine were symptomatic of an imperial humanitarian turn when the ‘native question’ was raised as an international concern for the first time. Widely understood to have been a failure, this humanitarian moment simultaneously recognised ‘native’ interests and retreated from (sacrificed) them. The outcomes for Indigenous people in Australia and Palestine bear this out and demonstrate how solutions about racialized ‘others’ that were playing out across Europe were refracted in policies targeting Indigenous peoples around the colonial periphery. The comparative frame places Australian developments in global context and draws out the settler colonial imperatives at work. Despite their differences the comparison highlights the salience of the structural effects of settler colonialism. It suggests that this moment was foundational, when the twentieth century settler colonial logic of elimination was set in train in both sites.
The Australian 1937 Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities recommended - and implemented - a policy of removing light-skinned indigenous children from their families to be raised in white orphanages or by white families to eventually eliminate all aboriginal peoples from Australia.
Was the Peel Commission of 1937 "eliminationist"? No, it recommended voluntary transfer of Arabs from the tiny area of the proposed Jewish state.
The comparison is obscene. But if you accept the logic of forcing everything into a settler-colonialist frame, then what is genocidal in one must be genocidal in the other. If Patrick Wolfe declares that settler colonialism is a process meant to eliminate the native, then you cannot argue that any policy that is not eliminationist is not eliminationist.
This is dogma, not scholarship.
But as is often the case, there is context that is utterly missing from Ms. Holland's zeal to place her own twisted morals front and center.
The Peel Commission explicitly noted the 'pressure of Jewish immigration from Europe' due to persecution. Alison Holland mentions Europe exactly once - in a footnote about racial policies - and never once says the word 'Jew' in the context of refugees fleeing murder.
This was 1937. The Jews of Europe were already aware of the looming danger to them. Many desperately wanted to save their lives by fleeing to their historic, ancestral homeland. And to "scholars" like Alison Holland, saving the lives of millions of Jews doesn't enter into her already twisted moral equation where the false concept of settler colonialism is considered worse than industrialized murder.
She is so anxious to equate an actual impulse to genocide in Australia with Palestine because in today's twisted culture, Palestine has replaced Nazi Germany as the paradigm of evil. The idea that she is tacitly supporting Hitler's goals of wiping out Jews from Europe doesn't even enter her woke mind.
To be blunt - how can anyone discuss British policy in Palestine in 1937 without mentioning that this policy doomed hundreds of thousands of people?
If you consider Zionism to be unparalleled evil, then the death of millions of Jews pales in comparison with a voluntary transfer plan of Arabs.
The idea of "settler colonialism" has gone beyond scholarship into cult status, with its own foundational scriptures that cannot be questioned, and mere facts or human lives no longer matter.
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