Decolonization is not a Metaphor: Stop Seeing Things in a Vacuum. Free Palestine.
Let’s cut to the chase: Hamas didn’t wake up one day and randomly decide to fire huge barricades of rockets into southern Israel. The attacks do not exist in a vacuum; historical evaluation is important for contextualizing present happenings. Israeli apartheid has oppressed, massacred, and colonized Palestinian lives for over 75 years without anyone batting an eye, and now that Palestinians have retaliated at a much smaller scale, everyone says its terrorism and suddenly thinks this is a violation of human rights. It reeks of hypocrisy. And guess what? This hypocrisy is anything but unprecedented. It is in fact very on-brand, and has sustained the Israeli propaganda machine for decades.
Ilan Pappé defines the Israeli policy towards Gaza strip as an “incremental genocide,” and says that Israel “attempts again and again to narrate its policies as out of context and turns the pretext it found for every previous wave of destruction into the main justification for another spree of indiscriminate slaughter in the killing fields of Palestine.” He explains that the Zionist strategy of branding its policies as a response to Palestinian action is as old as the Zionist presence in Palestine itself. And while Hamas’s retaliation is condemned by the international community as barbarous, it’s important to remind you here that all of Israel’s war crimes are licensed, approved, and funded by the United States, the EU, and all of Israel’s other buddies.
Israel subjecting Palestine to repression and violence has indeed become the standard, which is why the disregard for Palestinian life has become institutionalized and any form of resistance deemed arbitrary. As Noam Chomsky (bless his soul) puts it, “the norm is that Israel continues its illegal construction of settlements and infrastructure so that it can integrate into Israel whatever might be of value, meanwhile consigning Palestinians to unviable cantons and subjecting them to repression and violence. For Gaza, the norm is a miserable existence under a cruel and destructive siege that Israel administers to permit bare survival but nothing more.” The norm is that Israel proceeds with its incremental genocide “that elicited little attention, which is understandable, since it is routine,” but when Palestinians defend themselves and exercise their right to self-determination, it’s terrorism.
Such is mainstream media’s narrative – the same platforms that justify the crimes, deliver carefully curated and biased coverage, and dub any pro-Palestinian sentiment as anti-semitism. Israel benefits from weaponizing the word “anti-seminitsm” left and right – which I would argue is bad for Palestinians and Jews altogether. This, once again, falls into the hegemonic discourse that maintains Israel’s position of power, and weakens any hope for Palestinian solidarity.
Aside from gory imagery and biases perpetuated by mainstream media, there is an inherent imbalance of power between Israel and Palestine on a military, economic, and political level. The Israeli Occupation Forces hone over 300,000 active military personnel, and rank 15th in terms of military expenditure globally, and have an effective Iron Dome air defense system. Meanwhile Palestinians neither have real state, nor an army, and Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas have much less manpower and military capabilities. So, even if a fully-fledged war were to erupt, it would be a deeply unfair one.
You see, this is exactly why I grew sick of Academia – I wanted to shift from analysis to action. I am tired of the world condemning Palestinian resistance when it is entirely justified at all times. The silence of the international community and neighboring countries is deafening, and the shameless accusations of terrorism are getting real old. History does not exist in a vacuum. And surely enough, this is what oppressed fighting the oppressor looks like – and no one else gets to dictate how the fight for liberation is executed.
*If you’re wondering what you can do to help, never underestimate the power of spreading awareness and speaking up. If you are in no position to partake in protests, check the news, stay informed, and challenge any misconceptions (albeit historical, linguistic, or ideological). Any action is better than no action. More on that in future blogs.