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.