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.