Violence in the context of colonization
These are some of the dumbest comments that I have been hearing not only on the media, but on the street as well. You see, I am a member of a group called Palästina Antikolonial,
the one of the many Palestinian solidarity groups in Germany. We have been demonstrating the streets of Germany almost on a weekly basis. Almost every time aggressive bystanders shout at us such irrational assumptions.
Today I want to talk a little bit about peace & violence in the context of colonization. I shouldn’t need to mention that no one in their right mind prefers violence and war rather than peace and coexisting. But allow me to use this metaphor to explain to you how these people perceive the Palestinians. Imagine the following: imagine walking in the street one day and seeing someone breaking into a house. Let’s call this person, person A. Person A is so aggressive and furious and has only one target in mind which is to kick the shit out of the house resident – let’s call that resident person B – why does he wants to beat him, no one knows, some say that person A hates person B without a reason. If I ask you right now what you think of person A, you would probably say he is a psychopath and should try to defend person B right?. And this is what the media wants you to believe how the Palestinians are – psychopaths and that you should stand with Israel. But wait.. the story doesn’t end here. There is a context. What if I tell you that a week before this incident, the house actually belonged to person A and he was living in that same house! What if I tell you that person B even came knocking on the door looking for a refuge, a place to eat and sleep. And person A, out of his kindness, took person B in. In only a week, person B kicked person A out of his own house, kicked his family on the streets and took his clothes and money as well. Well, that does change your perspective doesn’t it?! Through knowing the whole story, the victim and the aggressor exchanged their roles. In that case every normal person would side with person A. Hell, I would even help him to try and get his house back. What if I tell you that this story is not a fictional one! Do you know Gigi and Bella Hadid the famous Palestinian models? Their parents were person A in that story. Their family took in Jewish refugees in their house and in 1948 their mother went to the hospital to deliver her baby and when they came back, the refugees, they took in, took over the house with weapons and without any remorse kicked the Hadid family out of their own house.
1948 was the beginning of the colonization of Palestine, by Israel, the colonizer. Colonization is a violent bloody process that I don’t wish upon any of you. It consists of massacres, oppression, dehumanization, land theft, rape, torture and enslavement etc… This is what Palestine has been unfortunately exposed to since 1948. To give an example, in 1948, 750 thousand Palestinians were forced out of their homes. 50 thousand Palestinians were massacred. 531 Palestinian cities and villages were raised to the ground. Since then, every day under the Israeli occupation is a violent nightmare for any Palestinian. Since then Palestinian lands have been colonized using violence. Violence, you see, has been rampant since those 76 years, you just either didn’t know or didn’t care about it. So, when you say stupid sentences like “Violence is not going to solve anything” I will disagree with you and remind you that at the end violence DID help the colonizer to colonize. It’s not like France held peace talks to occupy Algeria!
Even if we take a further look at the bloody murderous violent history of Israel, you will realize, that the only two times, that Israel actually gave a colonized land back to their natives, was when they were forced to, i.e. through violence! The first time was in 1973, when the Egyptian army took the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula back and the second time was when Hezbollah militias took the southern of Lebanon in 2006 back. Even if we take a brief look on how colonization across history has ended, it’s almost always through armed resistance, i.e. violence. Because you see nobody in the world, hell, nobody in history ever got their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of their colonizer. Ask the millions of martyrs the sacrificed their lives to get their freedom in Haiti or in Algeria or in Vietnam.
The great Nelson Mandela wrote in his memoir, it is not the oppressed but the oppressor that decides which form the struggle takes. If the oppressor chooses violence, then the oppressed has no other choice but to reply with violence. And I think its pretty clear what form Israel, the oppressor, chose since the beginning of its evil existence. Violence or non- violence were never the choices the Israelis gave the Palestinians. The only choices available to the Palestinians are to either die fighting or just to die. And we all damn well know what we would choose if we were in their place!
That is why I will never ask any oppressed person to accept their annihilation. I actually think it is a crime for anyone who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to protect himself. And this is what the Palestinians have been doing the whole time; they have been trying to protect themselves and fight against the colonizer.
The decolonization process starts in the mind. I think that people aren’t fully free until they are in a struggle for justice. And that means justice for everyone. It’s a struggle of such importance that they are willing, if necessary, to die for it. If you aren’t afraid to die for your cause, then nobody can get at you. Nobody can push you around: jail won’t do it, harassment won’t do it, beatings won’t do it, hell even death won’t do it, so you are free in your mind. There isn’t anything anybody can do to you but to kill you. That’s what liberation is, being willing to die for what you believe in. This is why I know that the Palestinians will never be defeated because they belief in their just cause and therefore not afraid of death.
So, at the end, what I want to say is that I will never condemn the Palestinian resistance. I would even say that condemning the Palestinians, the oppressed, the colonized, and blaming them for the violence, is nothing but victim blaming, it is exactly like trying to blame rape on women for what they were wearing. Rape is never justifiable under any circumstance and so is colonization! You never side with the colonizer, just like you never side with the rapist, both the colonizer and the rapist steal what is not theirs and afterwards they both look for justifications where there are NONE!