On Violence and Freedom

Reader Q&A: Part III

Buckle up friends, it’s time to talk about the question of violence in the context of Gaza and Palestinian liberation more broadly.

Joey asks:

The path of violence has been tried many times by/on behalf of Hamas and it always fails. Who was so stupid to think that a greater amount of more savage violence would not elicit a massive Israeli response and result in anything other than tremendous destruction and suffering? Those people deliberately still chose violence over peace. That choice was made long ago as the operational and tactical way to achieve their strategic goals. A massive amount of resources and energy were focused on this attack for some considerable time. How much did Hamas/others on behalf of Hamas spend on this attack? Everything from rockets to tunnels to smuggling rockets into Gaza - how many millions of dollars were spent? It had to be a tremendous amount and we'll probably never know and that's not my real question. My question is: What if and why weren't all of those resources devoted to building an army of lawyers, historians, lobbyists, journalists, film makers, etc. to tell the Palestinian story world-wide and argue their case in all the courts and via other peaceful methods?

There are several different facets to this question, and I’ll try to speak to all of them in reverse order of complexity.

The last bit is actually the easiest to answer: Palestinians have devoted enormous diplomatic, legal, and creative energy toward telling their story and trying to exert pressure on Israel through international courts and other bodies. Decades of diplomacy and negotiations failed to result in a Palestinian state, but did enable Israel to entrench its West Bank settlement infrastructure and partially outsource its policing job to the Palestinian Authority — discontent with which propelled Hamas’s rise in popularity. Even before the International Court of Justice case, Palestinians have filed petitions and complaints with the International Criminal Court and enjoyed the overwhelming support of the UN General Assembly with no fewer than 800 resolutions over the years that affirm their right to self-determination. Literally hundreds of human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Save the Children have for years issued report after report on the illegality of Israeli actions in the East Jerusalem and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. All of this sanction hasn’t made one ounce of a difference. Why is that the case?

The primary reason is that Israel exists in an artificial bubble, insulated by diplomatic support and a steady flow of arms from the United States. But the “special relationship” is an increasingly uncomfortable one for both parties. Israel chafes at its imperial patron’s attempts to restrain its barbaric assault on Gaza and has even canceled an upcoming visit to Washington after the US abstained from vetoing a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution (the US has also tried to claim, incredulously, that the resolution is non-binding and does not affect the continued supply of arms by a Security Council member to a belligerent). If Israel finds its subordinate position unbearable—and let’s be clear that it’s not optimal for a sovereign state—it should aggressively pursue the pathway to normalization with its neighbors that has been before it for over twenty years now in the form of the Arab Peace Initiative.¹ But US patronage empowers the most extreme elements within Israel to reject pragmatic compromises that make long-term strategic sense.

In my view, Hamas is a symptom of the failure to achieve Palestinian liberation through diplomatic, legal, or economic means (I would recommend Josh Leifer’s excellent piece if you want a general run-down of this history over the past thirty years). The product of dashed hopes and desperation, Hamas has fed like a cancer on the sense that Palestinians have nothing left to lose (or live for). It’s either slow death via subjugation or quick death via resistance, and the latter offers at least a chance to inflict harm on the enemy - and to pierce the psychological bubble that has convinced Israelis that the status quo is tenable. But do Palestinians have the right to resort to violence to contest their situation? Yes and no.

Copy of the signature and seals page of the original Geneva Convention, 1864

Per the Fourth Geneva Convention under Protocol I (1977), the right to use violence extends to “armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist régimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.” The only way around this provision is to claim, as Israel has repeatedly done, that the occupation is not really an occupation and therefore the Geneva Conventions don’t apply. But this is silly and few outside the Israeli right and their legal gymnasts take this argument seriously. So too, prior to Oct. 7, Gaza was still considered legally occupied by most international governing bodies even though Israel withdrew settlers and soldiers in 2005 on account of the the blockade that controls the flow of food, water, electricity, and nearly all other goods and people in and out of the strip.

But colonized peoples who resist occupation via armed struggle must still abide by international laws of belligerency, which notably forbid the targeting of civilians and other non-combatants — a provision which Hamas has repeatedly flouted. And here is where everything gets complicated, not just ethically but strategically as well. It’s not just that I think targeting civilians is categorically wrong no matter who is doing it, but that this strategy has been an unmitigated disaster for Hamas and by extension the Palestinian cause.

Hamas first embraced the tactic of suicide attacks against civilian targets inside Israel in 1994 after Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshippers in a mosque in Hebron. The attacks in the 1990s were explicitly aimed at spoiling the Oslo process and upholding the banner of resistance in contrast to PLO capitulation to a mini-state within 1967 borders (the whole question of whether the Oslo process was ever designed to lead to a Palestinian state is a whole other post). But this justification for violence is somewhat at odds with that which has been used since the Second Intifada, namely that attacks against civilians will compel Israelis to shift their government’s policy and withdraw from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Which is it? The destruction of Israel or the end of the occupation to clear the way for a two-state solution? The reality is there is no singular Hamas, but different factions which have at various times toggled between these eliminationist and pragmatic poles. But in my opinion both justifications for targeting civilians deserve censure — again not merely on moral but strategic grounds.

Hamas founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was a refugee from Magdal/Ashkelon

First, on the destruction of Israel track: There are two plausible versions of this vision, only one of which is ethically acceptable and neither of which are realistic for the foreseeable future. Option #1: a triumphant Palestinian army overruns Israel and turns the clock back to 1948. Edward Said already rejected this goal in 1979:

The conservative version of the Palestinian quest is both historically and morally intolerable: the idea that we can all go back to 1948, to our property, to an Arab country, presumably ruled by traditional Arab despots. Such a quest flies in the face of the Palestinian vision as it has attracted so many victims of injustice everywhere (The Question of Palestine, 167).

What happens to Israeli Jews in such an fantasy is questionable, ranging from living in a state of unequal subjugation (what I call the role reversal option) to expulsion or genocide. I do not share the (racist) Zionist view that living with Arabs necessarily means death to the Jews, but I can also see why a people who lived through a genocide last century might be on edge about calls for their elimination.

Next, there’s a version of this goal, #2, which entails not the “destruction of Israel” but its transformation into a singular, democratic state with equal rights for all (which many Zionists will tell you is a distinction without difference). This is the goal that many academics and leftists, present company included, have supported, and that is repeatedly dismissed as utopian (most recently by Charles Schumer, who trots out the “Jews and Arabs can’t live together” narrative:

I can understand the idealism that inspires so many young people in particular to support a one-state solution. Why can’t we all live side-by-side and house-by-house in peace?

I count at least two reasons why this wouldn’t work, and why it is unacceptable to most Jewish people. 

First, this combined state could take an extreme turn politically, putting Jewish Israelis in peril. This state would be a majority-Palestinian, and in the past, some Palestinians have voted to empower groups like Hamas, which seeks to eradicate the Jewish people.

It is longstanding American policy to support democracy overseas, but in this hypothetical single state, democracy could cost Israeli Jews their safety if extremists were to take control of this new state of affairs to ultimately achieve their true aim: the violent expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land.

Leaving aside for now the question of whether either of these tracks are practical, how does Hamas’s violence fit in the strategic picture of achieving them? Hopes of achieving Option #1 are delusional at present, and will remain so as long as Israel is a nuclear power. It may become a global pariah but it will not be eliminated by a militant group assembling homemade rockets in tunnels. What about Option #2, the transformation into a single democratic state? Presumably this option would require the assent of a sizable chunk of the Israeli population, which after the attacks of October 7 is more resolved than ever that peace with the Palestinians is an impossible dream (if you support a democratic one-state solution AND doesn’t give a shit about what Israelis think or feel, then I don’t think you have a credible pathway to achieving this goal).

What about using violence to compel Israeli to withdraw from the Occupied Palestinian Territories? This tactic grows out of the history of anti-colonial struggle, particularly in Algeria, and reasons from this false analogy in ways that I find wholly unproductive (I’ve written about this elsewhere if you want to read more). Here it’s useful to look at the more localized historical record, and particularly to compare and contrast the responses to the First and Second Intifadas. The First was largely non-violent or involved minor violence like rock-throwing against Israeli soldiers. It drove home the lesson that a low-cost occupation was impossible and paved the way for a historic pivot: the PLO recognition of Israel and direct negotiations in Madrid, Washington, and eventually Oslo (where Arafat’s team undid the promise present in the earlier rounds, but that too is another story).

By contrast, Hamas played a starring role in the very bloody Second Intifada, was disastrous for the Palestinian cause - particularly in a post 9-11 War on Terror international context. Widespread suicide campaigns against Israeli civilians only discredited left/liberal forces and strengthened the hand of the Israeli right. And here it was not just Hamas, but the PA and Fatah that embraced such tactics. Here’s historian Rashid Khalidi:

Whatever the case, there was at the very least a lack of clarity in the Fateh/PLO/PA camp about the limits of violence, and in consequence a strategic incoherence in the Palestinian position: if the Palestinians wanted to make peace with Israel within its 1967 frontiers, why were militant Palestinian groups killing Israeli civilians within these borders? If the problem was the occupation (and not the existence ofIsrael itself) why was the occupation itself not the sole target of Palestinian attacks? One did not have to be aiming at discrediting the Palestinians to ask such questions, and indeed they were increasingly asked by Palestinians as the intifada wore on and produced significantly more devastating results for Palestinian society than for Israel (The Iron Cage, 179-180).

This description underscores that the oscillation between the two poles of violence—what I have called the eliminationist and the pragmatic—has been part of Palestinian politics for decades. But why, given the response to the Second Intifada, did Hamas not change tactics in the interim?

Two things: First, I mentioned that the Israeli right emerged victorious from the Second Intifada, but Hamas arguably did as well. This might seem impossible given that they are ostensibly opposed to one another, but I think it’s more productive to view them as mirroring one another—and feeding off one another—in mutually destructive ways. Israel pulled out of Gaza to pursue an annexationist strategy in the far more important West Bank; misreading the situation (or purposefully obscuring it), Hamas claimed victory and entrenched itself at the helm of Palestinian politics. Hamas was also been inspired by Hizbollah’s campaign against Israel, which compelled the latter to withdraw finally from its northern neighbor in 2000. Again, I would suggest this analogy does not hold because Israel has no territorial claim on Lebanon and no settlers in situ there, nor is it geographically part of Israel/Palestine. But despite these obvious differences, the idea has circulated based on this example that armed resistance could compel Israel to give up territory.

So finally, we circle back to Oct. 7. In the immediate aftermath, I could not stop asking myself, “What were they thinking?” — and I still believe it’s plausible that Hamas was surprised at the scope of carnage it was able to inflict because of the relative ease of breaching the border fence and limited Israeli troop presence. I remember being absolutely floored by celebratory social media posts by young Palestinians and allied activists during those first days: did they really not know what was coming? In contrast, I was filled with a sense of dread. I told my husband on Oct. 9 that Israel was going to kill 100,000 people in Gaza before they were done, and I struggled to understand how anyone could express surprise at the brutality of the Israeli response given everything that we know about the ruling coalition. So, Hamas’s attacks invited immense suffering for the people of Gaza who had no hand in this strategy, even as its leaders camp out in foreign hotels and its fighters hide out in tunnels. There seems to have been no serious effort to stockpile food and no plan to mitigate against Israel’s starvation campaign (Let me be clear: Israel is still responsible for ensuring the free passage of food and aid regardless of what Hamas did first). So again, what were they thinking?

The answer that circulates in policy circles is that the attack was designed to spoil Saudi-Israeli normalization plans, underscoring that ‘peace’ in the Middle East cannot arrive by shunting the Palestinians aside. I think this is basically true, but also that there is another layer we must account for. I read Hamas’s violence as an attempt on behalf of a subjugated and humiliated people to exert agency. What’s most chilling is that—and here the Islamist movement is hardly alone—the violence has become an end in itself. For those of you who think Hamas is ‘winning’ by getting Israel to commit genocide in Gaza, I think we have a different sense of what victory looks like. Israel is certainly losing the war—that’s been the case for months—but that doesn’t mean anyone is winning. The far more depressing reality, I think, is that tens of thousands of people have died in vain because the underlying political reality—the need to accommodate two people in a narrow strip of land—has not materially changed. That’s why I have insisted on using the language not of “sacrifice” but of waste: there is nothing redeeming waiting for us on the other side.

In The Question of Palestine, Edward Said noted that Palestinian politics toggled between the old and new - dreams of restoration vs. visions of a future not yet realized:

The idea of resistance gets content and muscle from Palestine; more usefully, resistance gets detail and a positively new approach to the microphysics of oppression from Palestine. If we think of Palestine as having the function of both a place to be returned to and of an entirely new place, a vision partially of a restored past and of a novel future, perhaps even a historical disaster transformed into a hope for a different future, we will understand the word's meaning better.

What Said picks up on repeatedly in this text is that—as Frantz Fanon insisted before him—a true anti-colonial politics cannot just be a backward-looking project built around dreams of restoration. Rather, he insisted on novelty as a necessary ingredient in the struggle: neither a return to earlier ways of life nor the mere reversal of power relations, but the articulation of a radically different set of political values and forms. We have perhaps never been further from realizing this vision, and I for one am convinced that Hamas will never lead the way to such a destination.

p.s. I’ve left aside the question of how Palestinian violence compares to the manifestly greater violence of the Israeli state not because it isn’t true or doesn’t matter, but because it’s frankly a different post. Don’t @ me with your whatabouts.

1. There’s another aspect of Israel’s rejection of international law that is interesting to me, namely that in order to affirm the legitimacy of the occupation, the Jewish state has effectively turned its back on the liberal institutions that emerged from the Second World War: the Geneva Conventions, the UN, the ICC and IJC — these are all just antisemitic clowns bent on denying Israel’s national sovereignty. The undermining of these institutions has chilling implications far beyond Israel, including for Jews in the diaspora, and again, were I in charge, I would caution that choosing maximalist, messianic nationalism over liberal democracy is Not Good For The Jews.