On the Question of Revolutionary Violence
The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
Israel is laying siege to the Occupied Territories as we speak. Over 2.3 million people are without electricity, food, fuel, and freedom of movement. They are in an open-air camp, targeted by Israel’s heavily armed military every second of every day. Well over 1,500 Palestinians have been killed in the past few days [including at least 500 children] with the death toll continuing to rise.
Yet the [western] media is filled with support for Israel. That Israel has every right to retaliate in the wake of Hamas’ attacks. A small guerrilla army attacking a colonial settler state supported by weapons and over $3 billion in yearly aid are put on equal footing. Except that implicit in the mourning of Israeli lives lost and the silence over Palestinian deaths shows that there’s nothing equal about this situation.
The question of violence and retaliation is an important one. If we’re against oppression in all its forms, do we mourn both the oppressed and oppressor when there is violence that ends in death?
This is a question for history to answer. Do we mourn for the slave master killed during a slave rebellion? Do we feel sympathy for the neighbors of the settler family killed by Native Americans and feel their pain and fear that they might have been next?
When Vietnamese peasants were killing U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t defend the U.S. government’s right to retaliate over the loss of American lives. Instead, he said: “…I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed…without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”
A real end to violence can only come from the world rising up in solidarity with Palestinians. A one state solution where Palestinians (and everyone living in Israel) have equal rights and the full benefits of citizenship is the only way to end the conflict.
We shouldn’t have to qualify our support for oppressed people by feeling obligated to express condolences for the lives lost on the other side. As revolutionary socialists, we understand violence to be an expression of the social conditions under which oppressed people live, as well as an expression of their need to end those conditions. In this context, we understand and support the Palestinian resistance in all its forms as a manifestation of the desire for freedom and justice.
Amy Lerner is a longtime socialist and supporter of the Palestinian liberation struggle.
