Sunday 20 May 2018

The Right To Violence


Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people oppressing them.

                - Assata Shakur



How many people were killed in Gaza over the past few weeks, I don’t know. The estimates of the dead vary wildly, and the number of people injured by Israeli soldiers is in the thousands. I’m not here to try to count the bodies, or name the dead. They’re dead, killed by worthless cowards every one of whom is lower than a tapeworm, and nothing I say or do can make any difference to them. What I can do, though, is point out the hypocrisy of the liberal response to the slaughter, and maybe change a few people’s minds.

                I’ll be addressing a very specific reaction to the events in Gaza, namely the endless debate over whether or not the march for return could be described as a peaceful protest. So if you’re one of those people who don’t care about that, who make excuses for anything Israel does regardless of how obviously evil it is, this post isn’t directed at you. You’re a supporter or apartheid, an apologist for genocide, and you should be ashamed of yourself, but I’ll get to you another time. I’m talking about the more reasonable, non-bloodthirsty liberals that I see on my Facebook newsfeed. The ones who might actually be receptive to a well-thought-out argument.

                The question on a lot of people’s lips seems to be: were these peaceful protests? The answer is: it doesn’t matter. This is a conflict between two groups of people. One has been forced out of their homeland, packed into an overcrowded ghetto where the electricity is turned off for twenty hours a day, where ninety-seven per cent of drinking water is contaminated by sewage, where settlers are still encroaching ever further into their land, stealing their homes, uprooting their olive trees, spraying their houses with raw sewage. They have been subject to systematic violence and oppression for seventy years.

                The other group have built and maintained a colonial ethnostate, backed by the most formidable military on the planet and given billions of dollars per year by the world’s richest government. They drop white phosphorous on civilian areas, torture children, and lock people up for years without trial. They are invaders and the children of invaders, carrying on the legacy of colonialism and oppression bequeathed them by their parents. In every encounter with the indigenous inhabitants of the land they stole, they are the aggressor.

                To talk of Israel’s “right to self defence” is nonsensical. If I break into your house, I have no right to defend myself against you. In that situation, I am the aggressor, and any violence I enact towards you is an extension of that aggression. You might just as well talk of the right of a slave owner to “defend himself” against a slave uprising.

                Likewise, all this insistence on “peaceful protest” denies Palestinians the most important right of all: the right to self-defence. This liberal discomfort with self-defence is something I see a lot – whether it’s an individual fighting off a burglar, or an oppressed population fighting back against those who victimize them, liberals don’t like any action that complicates the victimhood dynamic. What I mean by that is that there’s a tendency among liberals to want every victim to be passive, peaceful, and pure in their suffering; the Harriet Tubmans and Leila Khaleds of this world complicate that. They make it hard to maintain a kneejerk opposition to any and all violence. They challenge the intellectually catabolic pacifism that far too many people seem to uphold.

                To demand peace from Palestinians is monstrous, especially when in the same breath these people will talk of Israel’s “right to defend itself”. Do the victims of a decades-long campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing not have a right to defend themselves against the perpetrators of this violence? Do they not have a right to throw stones at the people who have killed their loved ones? Of course they do. Even if, as zionists are claiming, the Palestinian demonstrators used Molotovs and stones to fight back against Israeli troops, they were still in the right. They were defending themselves against an occupying army, while attempting to cross a border imposed on them by said occupier.