The following OP addresses the fact that the apparent, surface-level logic according to which Israel has functioned throughout the Gaza war—that dangerous ideological actors need to be eradicated at almost any cost if it means ensuring safety and societal stability for one’s own people—is rarely flipped. When it is flipped, it bends heavily toward favoring Palestinian resistance groups, but because of a bigoted double standard those groups’ resistance is delegitimized, and a destructive cycle is enabled. If we want to undercut this double standard and prevent the annihilation of the Palestinians, we must affirm their right to armed resistance.
There seems to be a bifurcation describing the dangerousness of one’s ideology when taken to extremes and its level of responsibility for any given action one might take. I don’t see anything fundamentally different between Israel’s worst actors and Hamas’ worst actors with regards to either of the prongs of that fork as they have functioned in the conflict since and including October 7th. For example, both have employed terrorist tactics or committed terrorist acts, which are clearly intentional and destructive. Does that mean that Israel should be put under siege and its population starved and bombed at will? No, that would be evil and fruitless. But, with almost complete control over the other’s population, which side has committed so many war crimes that many people have stopped paying attention? We know, without a doubt, that Israel is committed to following through on its declared intentions. The Palestinians, although they seem to largely believe that armed resistance is justified, probably mostly want the suffering to end. However, if picking up rifles brings them closer to self-determination, which is, admittedly, a somewhat dubious assumption, then who are we to condemn them for doing so?
While many may believe that there is limited moral complexity to what is happening in Gaza, the multitude of factors that caused, and the events leading up to, October 7th are indisputably part of a complex history. Furthermore, many of the actions the Palestinians or Israel could have taken leading up to October 7th could have been justified depending upon when one starts the clock. Thus, it seems to me that it can be said that the attack on October 7th, if designated as our locus, was not wrong because it was an act of violence—it was wrong because it was an act in which civilians were targeted. Not every act of resistance is justified, but the Palestinians had a right to do something in light of the occupation; and if Israel has a right to defend itself with overwhelming violence after October 7th, the Palestinians had a right to abandon peaceful protest when it was met with sniper fire. The same standard applies even more strongly when faced with genocide, a juncture at which armed resistance becomes unequivocally justified.
To explicitly state the core inversion that supports Palestinian resistance: even if one denies the genocide, if one remains committed to the validity of Israel’s foundational logic—that dangerous ideological actors need to be eradicated at almost any cost if it means ensuring safety and societal stability for one’s own people—one is also arguably committed to accepting the position that the Palestinians have an overriding right to engage in violence. This is because that same logic can be invoked in support of the position that the Palestinians can retaliate against threats associated with the continuing occupation and concomitant war crimes at any juncture and with almost any degree of violence given the right people are being targeted; furthermore, it follows that Israel’s logic fails to justify excessively violent responses on Israel’s part to most of the actions Hamas fighters and Palestinian resistance groups might take because of the fact that Israel’s people are not continually or directly threatened with any significant challenge to the stability of their society or anything even approaching it by those groups at this point. Hamas’ military wing simply cannot launch more October 7th’s if their capabilities and leadership are significantly degraded by the war and there are sizeable “buffer zones”. Thus, if one continues to assert the validity of Israel’s purported guiding logic, one is committed to acknowledging that the Palestinians currently have an unchallenged, asymmetrical right to armed resistance.
If you would object to an end to the genocide (or general mass murder) of the Palestinians or would’ve since it became clear a genocide was occurring, because some Palestinian men are, and have been, willing to engage in armed resistance, then consider the reasons behind that objection. The Palestinians themselves exist alongside an actor—a rogue state—that has made it clear that it will not live peaceably alongside them. Indeed, Israel has done everything it can to avoid an end to hostilities, which makes sense when considering the plan to consolidate Greater Israel. So then why is armed resistance wrong when the Palestinians do it? Is it their ideology? Is it their skin color? Regardless of the potentially dangerous beliefs of Hamas fighters, they pursue a goal largely grounded in concern for their own people, even if terrorist attacks like October 7th cannot be justified. Furthermore, if there is any doubt that racism could map onto the conflict in a meaningful way, there appears to be a devastating cycle enabled by bigotry: Israel shuts down every attempt at lasting peace while maintaining the hellish conditions that cause Palestinian men to turn to arming themselves and then certain actors including Israel use this continuing resistance to justify policies and actions that are destroying the Palestinians (that is, if any sort of justification is given at all). Given the men doing the resisting have brown skin and/or are Muslim, the resistance appears to be unjustified in the minds of many—otherwise the cycle would not find traction. And while it has limited explanatory power with regards to Israel’s motives and strategy, the general disregard it requires for the humanity of Palestinians is boundless. If we want to end this depraved cycle, we ought to support the Palestinians’ right to armed resistance. Affirming their humanity when the opportunity arises is also good.
My own impotence in the face of the atrocities being committed in Gaza has made me ask: what sense is there in having developed moral faculties if we do not have the wherewithal to act on our convictions? Is human nature made of elements so disparate and contradictory that this conflict between what we know should be and what we actually decide to try to bring about, is necessary? Are these even coherent questions? Israel appears to entertain no such philosophical quandaries. We know what Netanyahu and his cronies would decisively bring about given the opportunity to follow their policies to their ultimate conclusion: a crystal-clear example of ethnic cleansing (i.e. a step towards the establishment of Greater Israel). Perhaps unsurprisingly, an impossible, and in some ways arguably undesirable, peace plan has been implemented that puts the conflict into stasis until the destruction can be resumed at the previous scale at a later date. The West Bank will likely share a fate similar to that of Gaza. Few of us want this. Why don’t our leaders fight it harder? Why are they so spineless?
Once again, Israel’s maximalist logic, when inverted, should favor the Palestinians when considering the occupation and genocide (or systematic slaughter)—but few take up this reasoning likely because Hamas’ and Palestinian resistance groups’ resistance is delegitimized according to a racist double standard. That this obvious double standard is never broached by our politicians, or really much of anybody mainstream, indicates that even among those who are purportedly well-informed, there is little understanding of the depth of the moral sickness afflicting Israel and its policies. The cycle of resistance to destruction I wrote about earlier is just one way in which racism manifests and might function in the real world, but it also seems to have not-so-covertly saturated a large portion of the discussion itself. Given the way some people talk about Muslims, it is a relatively uncontroversial inference from something like “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas” to “Muslims that choose to believe in bad ideas are themselves bad for choosing to believe in those things and acting on them” so long as one entertains even a barebones idea of agency. Clearly this reasoning does not excuse what is being done to the Palestinians, although it is sometimes, absurdly, provided as proof of such. I don’t see many ways of explaining that other than racism. And while I don’t think all of our politicians are racist, I do think that if we were to put forth and defend a more principled view of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians—which includes unequivocally supporting the Palestinians’ right to armed resistance—we could better motivate them to represent their constituencies instead of foreign governments.
