Sacrificing Indigenous interests: solving the 'native question' in Australia and Palestine on the eve of the Second World War

In 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.