Part terrorism, part resistance: Palestinian freedom struggle at crossroads

As Israel continues to pound the Gaza Strip and terrorise some 2.3 million besieged Palestinian people since Saturday in response to what it calls a terror attack by Hamas resistance fighters, what comes to mind is a quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind”. The great non-violence advocate believed that revenge and retaliation could lead to a never-ending cycle of violence and destruction.

After the Hamas attack on Israeli civilian and military targets last Saturday, countries in the West and even in the non-aligned bloc -- including Narendra Modi’s pro-Israeli India -- have expressed their support for Israel’s retaliatory action even though Israel deliberately targets civilians.

Anyone who rushes to criticise Palestinians and back Israel’s right to self-defence either has no knowledge of the Palestinian quest for liberation or deliberately refuses to look at the current crisis through the lens of justice.
The violence perpetrated by Hamas against civilians is reprehensible and should be unreservedly denounced, but such denunciation should equally be applied to Israel’s slayings of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and the support Israel receives from its powerful allies.

It is unfortunate that nations that consider themselves civilised refuse to take stock of the Palestinian suffering throughout the century-old crisis when they, in solidarity with Israel, endorse the Zionist state’s crimes and asymmetrical retaliation which amounts to imposing collective punishment on millions of Palestinians living in squalid conditions in the Gaza Strip, a 365 sq. km area equivalent to half the size of the Colombo District. The territory is densely populated and regarded as an open-air prison, where the conditions are multiple times worse than the Jewish captivity in Babylon circa 6th century BC. Gaza is like a concentration camp where lives are sniffed out at the whims and fancy of Israeli leaders.

The support the West extends has encouraged Israel to undertake a scorched earth policy of decimating the Palestinian people. In the United States, the chief sponsor of Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinian people, politicians, from the President downwards, scrambled to show their loyalty to Israel. Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations and a potential Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election, tweeted on X, “Finish them.” Hail Haley! Her words are equivalent to desiring a genocide of the Palestinian people or even a Holocaust.

In China, visiting US Congress delegation chief Chuck Schumer had the temerity to give lessons in diplomacy to the Chinese Foreign Ministry on how Beijing should conduct its foreign relations vis-à-vis Israel and Palestinians. It came after Beijing issued a statement calling for the de-escalation of the tension without condemning the Hamas attack. 
What is more shocking is the stance of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. In several of his statements since Saturday, he has desisted from issuing an unambiguous call for an immediate ceasefire. Such a subtle endorsement of Israel’s scorched-earth policy, which is, according to international prosecutors, a violation of international law, is inhumane, to say the least.

I agree that Hamas fighters attacking civilians at a musical festival is a horrific act of terrorism. It falls within all the definitions of terrorism, notwithstanding the dispute over claims that one’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. But the Hamas fighters also attacked Israeli military targets. This is legitimate resistance. So Hamas’ action was partly terrorism and partly resistance. But neither terrorism nor resistance operate in a vacuum. They come to the open when avenues of justice are denied. Both terrorism and resistance are contextual. While terrorism should be condemned, resistance should be supported.

The context for Hamas’s attack, whether it is called terrorism or resistance, is found in the century-old injustice imposed on the Palestinian people since the 1917 Balfour declaration by imperial Britain. Palestine was an Ottoman territory where Muslim and Christian Arabs lived in harmony with the territory’s Jewish minority. Throughout history, the territory has been multi-ethnic, but due to oft-quoted biblical narrations, a wrong perception is created that the territory is exclusively Jewish. Historians contest this claim and point out that Palestinian tribes had been living in harmony with the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, and the Edomites in the territory long before the Jews settled there after their exodus from Egypt in the 13th century BC. And even after that.

It is interesting to note a less-celebrated incident in Islamic history. When Caliph Umar visited Jerusalem after the city fell into Muslim hands in the 7th century CE, he asked the city’s Christian leaders where all the Jews had gone. Upon being told they had left the city due to the Byzantine persecution, Caliph Omar instructed the city officials to bring 70 Jewish families and resettle them in the city, which is holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. This event demonstrates Caliph Umar’s commitment to religious tolerance and coexistence between different religious communities.

But such favours are hardly returned. When Jews were exterminated by Adolf Hitler in Europe, they were protected and treated like brothers in the Muslim Middle East. After all, the Jews and the Muslims were united in monotheism. Jewish food is kosher for Muslims and there are no religious barriers for Muslims to marry Jewish women.
Coming back to the context, the Hamas attack was the outcome of 17 years of blockade of the Gaza Strip and more than 70 years of humiliation of Palestinians living under occupation in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. 

The crisis is aggravated by never-ending illegal Jewish settlement-building activities that shrink the Palestinian land (see map), violence by armed Israeli settlers, denial of access for the Palestinians to the Al-Aqsa mosque, desecration of Christian holy places, killings of Palestinian people including children (on average 30 Palestinian deaths a month are recorded this year before the latest flare-up), bulldozing of Palestinian homes and incarceration of Palestinian children who should be in schools instead of in prisons. Add to the list the restrictions on accessing water, tax revenue, and export income. 

Yet, the Palestinians are denied the right to resist, a right recognised by international law. When Ukraine found its territory occupied by the Russians, the West rushed to arm the Ukrainians, including the pro-Nazi groups, so that they could kill the Russians and liberate their country. When the West refuses to recognize the Palestinians’ right to resist occupation, it is nothing but unprincipled double standards or slavish obedience to Zionism, which shapes our thoughts through big-time media groups its members own. There is very little explanation in the Western media on the root causes of the conflict. The media portrays the conflict as a clash between two equally powerful states. The correct description of the crisis – the violent suppression of Palestinian resistance by Israel, a nuclear weapon state – is rarely mentioned.
Resistance never dies. Resistance cannot be equated with terrorism. Calling resistance terrorism is itself a form of terrorism.