Seeing and Unseeing Violence in Palestine

Violence is horrible. Condemning the violent flashes of resistance from an oppressed and occupied people without first and primarily demanding an end to the greater forms of sovereign and structural violence that initiated and sustain that oppression is also profoundly hypocritical. It is a cry for peace in service of greater violence.

The Israeli state, its military checkpoint system, and its settler apparatus have been overtly murdering Palestinians at exponentially higher rates than anything Palestinians have done to them, and have done this every single year even outside of "wartime" (which is just a difference in degree of brutalization, rather than in kind) since its creation. This includes the casual murder of journalists, women, children, and the elderly, which news anchors in the U.S. suddenly care very much about. On top of this is the near-total economic collapse, resource theft, water shortages, food shortages, medical shortages, restrictions on movement, and other forms of structural violence intentionally engineered by Israel's policies that kill untold numbers of Palestinians every day (especially in Gaza), with or without the presence of Israeli soldiers.

There is nothing unprovoked, then, about Palestinian resistance to this oppressive colonial violence. Focusing on such moments of resistance as the starting point of the violence — rather on the oppressively violent relationship that prompts this resistance — helps perpetuate the greater violence that is part and parcel of that oppression. The selective outrage and convenient amnesia on display in media coverage of the attacks by Hamas in Israel only underscore one of the magic tricks of sovereignty in the modern state system: teaching people to conflate the perpetuation of orderly, persistent, and ubiquitous violence with peace.

The chorus of "Israel has a right to exist" is already going strong across the news outlets as a defense against the Hamas attacks, but it is at best a dishonest defense. The people of Israel, and Palestine, and the whole world have a claim to living freely and well. No state, however, and no social configuration within a state or between states should be seen as having an inviolable right to persist, especially at the expense of justice for millions. The people who are being crushed by a system have a right to exist, and to fight for their existence, especially when more institutionally-sanctioned attempts to pursue freedom and dignity have utterly and completely failed. It is the violence of the oppressing party that defines the viable options available to the oppressed.

by James Petrocelli