Popular
Resistance.org – 06/12/2023
Above photo: Still from
The Battle of Algiers, 1965. British Film Institute/Rialto Pictures.
Choosing To Focus On
Denouncing Palestinian Violence Is Akin To Asking Them To Passively
Accept Their Fate.
To die quietly and not
resist.
"By what standard of
morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be
considered the same as the violence of a slave master?" – Walter
Rodney
Following Hamas’s
October 7 attacks on Israel that caused more than 1,200 fatalities,
there was a barrage of injunctions from Western mainstream media,
politicians, and pundits insisting that anybody wishing to express an
opinion on the events and the ensuing Israeli war crimes and genocide
in Gaza, first denounce Hamas before expressing any other view. The
failure to explicitly do so or any attempt to put events in their
historical context or emphasize the root causes of the conflict were
interpreted as condoning Hamas’s actions (that the speaker was a
Hamas sympathizer) and conflated with antisemitism.
It was as if the history
of what is called the Palestinian-Israeli conflict started on October
7 and not with the 1917 Balfour Declaration that saw the colonial
British government announce its support for the establishment of a
“national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. That
announcement culminated in what Palestinians and Arabs call the Nakba
(the Catastrophe) in 1948, concomitant with the founding of the state
of Israel through the widespread ethnic cleansing, massacres, and the
displacements of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. More wars
followed, more violence, more killings, and more occupation of new
territories. This led to still more displacements, more illegal
settlements, and more bombings, which cost the lives of hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians and forced millions more to live as
refugees. I will not dwell on this history as numerous wonderful
resources have done so brilliantly. Rather, my purpose here is to
draw some parallels from the history of the Algerian anticolonial
struggle to show the vacuity, shortsightedness, and injustice of
denouncing the violence of the oppressed/colonized and
oppressor/colonizer in equal terms. The moral dilemmas, debates on
violence, and disagreements around how oppressed or colonized people
should resist, and what they may or may not do, are not new.
When I think about
Palestine, I cannot help but draw parallels with the case of my home
country Algeria during the colonial era (1830-1962). It is no
coincidence that the Algerian popular and working classes strongly
support the Palestinian cause as both countries
experienced/experience violent, racist settler-colonialism. To
understand why, it is worth visiting Frantz Fanon’s writings and
analyses about what he called "revolutionary violence" in his
masterpiece The Wretched of the Earth, which he wrote based on his
experiences in Algeria and West Africa in the 1950s and early 1960s.
The Wretched of the Earth is a canonical text about the anticolonial
struggle and served as a kind of bible for liberation struggles from
Algeria to Guinea-Bissau, South Africa, Palestine, and the Black
liberation movement in the US.
Fanon thoroughly
described the mechanisms of violence put in place by colonialism to
subjugate oppressed people. "Colonialism is not a thinking machine,
nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its
natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater
violence," he wrote. According to Fanon, the colonial world is a
Manichean world, which, taken to its logical conclusion, "dehumanizes
the native, or to speak plainly it turns him into an animal." For
him, "National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of
nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings
used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a
violent phenomenon."
The Algerian independence
struggle against the French colonialists was among the most inspiring
anti-imperialist revolutions in the 20th century. Part of the
decolonization wave that began after World War II (in India, China,
Cuba, Vietnam, and many African countries), the Bandung Conference
declared these movements to be part of the "awakening of the
South"— a South that has been subjected for decades (in some cases
more than a century) to imperialist domination.
Following the November 1,
1954 declaration of war in Algeria, merciless atrocities were
committed by both sides (1.5 million deaths with millions more
displaced on the Algerian side, and tens of thousands dead on the
French side). The National Liberation Front (FLN) leadership had a
realistic appraisal of the military balance of power, which tilted
heavily in favor of France, which then had the fourth-largest army in
the world. The FLN strategy was inspired by the Vietnamese
nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh’s dictum "For every nine of us
killed we will kill one—in the end you will leave." The FLN
wanted to create a climate of violence and insecurity that would
ultimately prove intolerable for the French, internationalize the
conflict, and bring Algeria’s struggle to the attention of the
world.
Following this logic,
Abane Ramdane and Larbi Ben M’hidi decided to take the guerilla
warfare to urban areas and launch the Battle of Algiers in September
1956. There is perhaps no better way to appreciate this key and
dramatic moment of sacrifice than the classic 1966 realist film of
Gillo Pontecorvo: The Battle of Algiers. In the film, there is a
dramatic moment when Colonel Mathieu, a thin disguise for the
real-life General Massu, leads the captured FLN leader Larbi Ben
M’Hidi into a press conference at which a journalist questions the
morality of hiding bombs in women’s shopping baskets. "Don’t
you think it is a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags
to carry explosive devices that kill so many people?" The reporter
asks. Ben M’hidi replies: "And doesn’t it seem to you even more
cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there
are a thousand times more innocent victims? Give us your bombers, and
you can have our baskets."
Through widespread
favorable coverage of the Algerian revolution in the African-American
press, many local screenings of The Battle of Algiers, as well as
Fanon’s writings, Algeria came to hold a seminal place in the
iconography, rhetoric, and ideology of key branches of the
African-American civil rights movement, which came to see its
struggle as connected to the struggles of African nations for
independence.
After visiting Algeria in
1964 and the Casbah, the site of the Battle of Algiers against the
French in 1956-1957, Malcom X declared:
"The same conditions
that prevailed in Algeria that forced the people, the noble people of
Algeria, to resort eventually to the terrorist-type tactics that were
necessary to get the monkey off their backs, those same conditions
prevail today in America in every Negro community."
A few months later, in
1965, he went on to say:
"I don’t favor
violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our
people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to
reach his objectives peacefully. But I’m also a realist. The only
people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black
people."
And upon hearing of the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, the Black Panther
Party leader Eldridge Cleaver proclaimed:
"The war has begun. The
violent phase of the black liberation struggle is here, and it will
spread. From that shot, from that blood. America will be painted red.
Dead bodies will litter the streets and the scenes will be
reminiscent of the disgusting, terrifying, and nightmarish news
reports coming out of Algeria during the height of the general
violence right before the final breakdown of the French colonial
regime."
We too must challenge the
victim-blaming narrative that fixates on Palestinians as imperfect
victims, which in
the words of the American-Palestinian scholar Noura Erakat,
amounts to an "absolution of, and complicity with, Israel’s
colonial domination." In choosing to highlight Palestinian
violence, our message to them "is not that they must resist more
peacefully but that they cannot resist Israeli occupation and
aggression at all."
Denouncing and singling
out the violence of the oppressed and colonized is not just immoral,
but racist. Colonized people have the right to resist with any means
necessary, especially when all political and peaceful avenues have
been stymied or obstructed. Over the past 75 years, every Palestinian
attempt to negotiate a peace deal has been rebuffed and undermined.
Every non-violent means has been blocked, including the "March of
Return" endorsed by Hamas in 2018 (savagely repressed, with more
than 200 people killed and tens of thousands wounded and maimed) as
well as the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
campaign, which has been made illegal in several Western countries
under pressure from the Zionist lobby.
Amid a barbaric, colonial
occupation, and Apartheid conditions, it would be fitting for any
talk about justice and accountability for violence against civilians
to start with the oppressor. As Fanon’s rationality of revolt and
rebellion puts it, the oppressed revolt because they simply can’t
breathe.
Choosing to focus on
denouncing Palestinian violence is akin to asking them to passively
accept their fate—to die quietly and not resist. Instead, let us
focus on an immediate ceasefire, halting the unfolding second Nakba,
and ending the siege and the Occupation, while showing our solidarity
with Palestinians in their struggle for freedom, justice, and
self-determination.
Palestinian lives matter!
Originally published in
Africa
is A Country.
★
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