The Violence of the Oppressed

"Do you condemn Hamas violence?" Another oft-repeated cue, a question routinely put to Palestinian leaders (non-Hamas) interviewed in the mainstream media.

Martin Luther King had a good response here - as a leader in the civil rights movement in the 1960s who preached non-violent resistance, similar questions would be put to him by establishment figures and the media, and he faced a similar dilemma when it came to black youth who sometimes resorted to violent means in struggling against the brutality they faced, particularly in the American South. At the same time, the Vietnam war was raging, and many fellow civil rights leaders urged him not to speak out on the issue (as they wanted the US Government on their side in enacting reforms to bring about racial equality and desegregation). This is what he said, in a key speech entitled 'Beyond Vietnam':

"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."



Likewise, I cannot bring myself to denounce the violence of Palestinians in their struggle, until I see world leaders denounce the illegal occupation of Palestinian land by Israel and the blockade of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and Israel's deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians including children over the past 70 years, resulting in thousands of deaths, cheered on (literally) by Israeli civilians. Until that happens, and until world leaders put serious pressure on Israel to end the blockade of Gaza which has gone on for over a decade, and agree a workable two state solution that gives the Palestinians full self-determination, until then I do not think it appropriate to expect any Palestinian to "condemn" Hamas violence. First things first. We cannot conflate the violence of the oppressed with that of the oppressor.

To boot, Israel helped create Hamas (literally), in order to undermine the moderate Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in their efforts to pursue recognition and pressure Israel through international institutions. Israeli politicians have for that reason explicitly referred to Hamas as an "asset" - amongst other things, it has given Israeli officials a pretext to treat Palestinian civilians in Gaza as a legitimate target, and they have made statements to that effect, including in public comments and leaked diplomatic cables.

In other words, just as they conflate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, as if they are one and the same, they conflate the Palestinians (including civilians) with Hamas, making them in turn legitimate targets. These are two sides of the same deranged coin.

And yet, former commander of US forces in Iraq, David Petraus, speaking on Radio 4's Today Programme the other today tells us that Israel "fully understands" the complexity of fighting in a densely-populated urban environment against an enemy who "doesn't have the regard for civilians that we do."

What a bunch of hypocrite bollocks. This coming from the US establishment, which has, since WWII, caused more bloodshed and civilian deaths than virtually anyone else, including by funding and supporting the violent overthrow of democratically-elected governments worldwide, directly training and financing death squads and torturers across Latin America, not to mention the illegal coup of the Palestinian Authority in 2006-07, or for that matter Iraq.

At the moment, most of what I hear from the top leadership in the US and here in the UK and other European countries is sickening. The US is preparing to deploy 2,000 troops to support Israel. Seeing things like this, I can imagine how something like the Holocaust or any other genocide could have happened, as the world stood by - back then, the tabloid press wrote about and demonised Jewish refugees from Germany in the same way they demonise refugees from the middle east these days. Their pain - the pain the Palestinians suffer and have suffered under a brutal occupation, and a decade-long blockade of Gaza, as their civilians and leaders are systematically killed, abducted, and so forth - their pain simply doesn't matter to our leaders the same way that Israeli pain does. Their pain has been legalised.

I would also add, for all the talk of beheadings of babies by Hamas (for which the IDF now admits they have no evidence, despite President Biden claiming he had seen it), it is worth remembering one of the worst crimes in history, certainly the worst in the past century or so, perpetrated by Nazis against the Jewish people, the Holocaust - the real horror of it was not this type of spectacular violence, but precisely what is termed 'administrative massacre'. Annihilating Palestinians by way of 'collateral damage' in the way Israel has been doing for decades through indiscriminate bombing (with deliberate disregard for any distinction between civilians and combatants, as per the comments referenced above), levelling entire apartment blocks and neighbourhoods, fits into the same general category. They kill a lot more Palestinians than Hamas could Israelis, don’t they?

I can also imagine here how world wars start, as Iran and the US have both now conditionally pledged their involvement - wars have started over less. World War I was famously triggered by the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand in my hometown, Sarajevo, by a young Bosnian anarchist rebel.

Keir Starmer was on Radio 4 too, shortly after Petraus, and his lack of any moral or ethical backbone is equally sickening. How far the Labour Party has fallen. I would liken this to a situation where, say, the Ukrainians, in resisting Russian occupation (and in retaliation for years of Russian atrocities), have crossed into Russia and committed atrocities, and killed civilians - and suddenly now we all "stand with Russia", instead of the occupied and oppressed Ukrainians.

Except that this would never happen in regards to Russians and Ukrainians, because the Ukrainians are 'White' - when it’s White against White, it’s ok to side with the obvious underdog, the victims in the fight. We will even give them weapons. But in the Middle East, our leaders urge everyone that we must "stand with Israel", because Israel is more 'White' than Palestinians, and our leaders are a bunch of morally bankrupt racists and Islamophobes. The war in Gaza is part of a modern Judeo-Christian continuation of the Crusades, aimed at purging the Brown Arab heathen from the Holy Land. We really haven't advanced much since the Middle Ages, here in Europe.

"Israel has a right to defend itself"

“Israel has a right to defend itself” - I hear this phrase unthinkingly parroted so often, but it seems almost nobody expressing or questioning this sentiment gives much thought to what it means, to the difference between a war of defence and a war of aggression or occupation, or to the fact that notwithstanding this currently pending invasion of Gaza, the Palestinians have been living under a brutal Israeli apartheid occupation for decades. I've written a lot about it in a previous post here.

Is the forced expulsion of 1.1 million residents in a humanitarian disaster zone under siege - virtually the entirety of Gaza city - and a full scale invasion that is likely to flatten their homes and leave many of those who survive nothing to return to, in the world’s largest open-air prison - a war of defence? Imagine that Iraqis or Vietnamese or Chileans or Iranians or any other country that has suffered unchecked aggression or terrorism by British or American forces (or by US-funded militias or terrorists) had the resources to “defend” themselves in this way, and did the same - imagine that they amassed troops on the border and ordered the expulsion of the entire population of New York or Washington or London from their homes in advance of a full scale military invasion - because they, too, have a right to defend themselves. If that is how we define "defence", where does it stop? The war in Iraq itself - which we now all know was justified by a hoax orchestrated by top-level leadership in the US and Britain - was pitched to the British and American public as a pre-emptive war of “defence”.

There is a racist, imperial logic underpinning all this - when Palestinians kill Israeli soldiers and civilians as an act of resistance to occupation, they are "terrorists". Yet British or American or Israeli troops, no matter what they do, even when they invade other countries illegaly and with impunity, murder civilians and commit war crimes, torture, rape women and children, are always fighting a war of "defence". Once they have defined their objective as 'defence' and ensured the effective dissemination of that message via an entire array of military-industrial media networks, there is no limit to what they can do.

Anyone who doesn't get the point, I have no words for you. Trigger warning - I've survived two years under siege by Serbs in Sarajevo, all the while they were proclaiming in the media that the Bosnians / Muslims were "bombing themselves" and using civilians as "human shields" - as if it's even possible to fight a war under siege in a densely-populated urban area, to resist occupation, without defending fighters at some point being in close proximity to civilians, at least from the viewpoint of long-range artillery. The Nazis themselves perfected this kind of logic, referring to the partisans as 'terrorists'. And the Serbs too saw themselves as "defending" Europe from Muslim hordes, in the process committing genocide.

But "Hamas denies Israel's right to exist, it's in their charter." Oh yes, and Israel likewise, quite clearly denies the Palestinian state the right to exist, and has been much more successful at it than Hamas, given that the Palestinians don’t have a state - Israel has denied them that since long before Hamas existed, from the creation of Israel and the Nakba in 1948. When they tried legitimate means, through free and fair elections in 2005, Israel reacted by arresting Palestinian legislators, jailing hundreds of them indefinitely without trial - for the crime of election campaigning. Not exactly the way to encourage a peaceful solution and dialogue.

On the whole, it is not really in the Palestinians' interest to disrupt the peace process - it has largely been successive Israeli governments that have repeatedly disrupted the peace process, because they cannot possibly ever agree either a one state or two state solution, for as long as Palestinians outnumber Israelis, and for as long as a number of Palestinians or their descendants may seek to exercise a 'right of return' to the homes they were expelled from in what is now Israel. Even the creation of Hamas as a formidable force is the Israeli government and IDF's doing - because they needed to undermine the legitimacy of the moderate and secular PLO led by Yasser Arafat, and demonise the Palestinians. You can read all about it here.

And, I have to add, putting my lawyer hat on - technically, any Palestinian questioning Israel's right to exist does have an arguable case here. The population of Mandatory Palestine under British rule in the 1920s was around 80% Arab - if a democratic state had been created, it should have been majority Arab; which is why the creation of a Jewish state necessitated the forced expulsion of a significant portion of the Arab population from what is today Israel, which resulted in the 'Nakba' - in other words, ethnic cleansing, which is not only unethical but illegal under international law. Any fair-minded person, equipped with the facts and knowledge of the history of the region, should be able to appreciate that you don't have to be a bloodthirsty religious fanatic to legitimately think that Israel should not exist. It's not very different from Native Americans feeling that the United States should not exist, however impractical the sentiment may be as the foundation for a political platform.

And make no mistake - the historical expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land over the millennia was not the Palestinians' or Arabs' doing - oh no, for most of history, until the early 20th century, and until the British colonial administration massively fucked things up with their 'divide and conquer' style of governance, the Arabs were among the few allies Jews have had had in the region. The exile and persecution of Jews in the Holy Land has been largely at the hands of Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and later Christian Crusaders in the Middle Ages. Ironically, it was the Persians (ancestors of modern Iranians) and later the Arabs and Ottomans who brought the Jews back to the Holy Land. The Ottoman empire was a refuge for Jews exiled from Europe during the Spanish Inquisition and various other pogroms. And in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule for four whole centuries (until 1917), it was common practice for Muslims and Jews and Christians to all pray together at the site of the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount - one of the holiest sites in Islam, and for Jews as well, being the location of the former Jewish Temple (first destroyed by Babylonians, later the Romans). That this would be unthinkable today, is a measure of how bad things have got, and how fast.

Understandably, the Zionist cause got a boost after the Holocaust. The Jews needed a state of their own. But why did the Palestinians have to pay the price for it? Why wasn't it somehow pinned to those responsible for the historical wrongs done to Jews, from the Roman Empire and Christian Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust - the Germans, Italians, Spanish? They should have been made to pay. You think Hamas are extremists for taking extreme measures to resist occupation? Think of the Nazis, the Fascists, the Inquisitors and Conquistadores - nobody did anything to them to make them genocidal psychopaths. They were not oppressed or living under siege. Let's also not forget previous incursions into Gaza, or the Lebanon war of 2006, in which Israel launched a full scale invasion of southern Lebanon, displacing around 1 million people and killing over a thousand, and causing extensive damage to civilian infrastructure. Why? Because Hezbollah attacked an Israeli military transport patrolling the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, demanding the release of prisoners held by Israel.

But I digress. What I want to say is, this pending invasion of Gaza is not about 'defence'. The Israeli leadership are seizing on an opportunity to kill more Palestinians, flatten more Palestinian homes (something they have been doing for decades, not just with artillery but even plain old bulldozers), and in the long term seize more land, once it’s become uninhabitable for Palestinians. Hamas is useful to them. They started the occupation, they created Hamas (literally), and they ultimately provoked this. There is no fair solution, fair to all - two state or one state - that the Israeli leadership would accept. They are outnumbered, and they know that. You think Hamas are extremists? Look at the Israeli politicians. Ayelet Shaked, one of the most influential Israeli lawmakers, formerly Minister of Justice and Minister of the Interior, has in the past posted statements on Facebook referring to Palestinian children as "little snakes", and condoning the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians, suggesting they should all be treated as "enemy combatants", not just those doing the actual fighting. I fear that many Israelis themselves have, in their historical memory of exile, internalised the European racism that was once turned against Jews and Arabs alike (rooted in the Crusades and Inquisition), just as many Arabs have internalised the anti-semitism that led to the Holocaust (also a European creation). Yet they remain brethren - the Jews claiming descent from Isaac, the Palestinians from Ishmael, both sons of Abraham.