Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. Would that it were otherwise.

By Robert Hildebrandt 

I want to believe that mass protests, strikes, and boycotts will be more effective than violence at liberating the colonized. Yet how many liberation movements have felt forced to choose violence as the only path to freedom? Would that it were otherwise.

There is a dogged insistence in both mainstream American and Israeli discourse on denying Israel’s colonial history, structures, and power. This wasn’t always the case. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the height of Europe’s colonial empires, many Zionists openly proclaimed their colonial ambitions in “Eretz Israel,” creating institutions such as the Jewish Colonization Association and drawing on colonial techniques from French Algeria (as with Baron Rothschild’s coastal wineries) and from the Prussian colonization of Western Poland (as with the Jewish-only kibbutz movement). At the time, to be a colonizer, to insist on one’s need for an exclusive nation-state for one’s “people,” was to assert one’s right to be a member of the European community of nations, to be part of “the civilized world.” 

In the wake of the global decolonization movements following the end of World War II, open support for colonialism has become less socially acceptable, yet the structure of power that colonialism created, both in the U.S. and in Israel, has nonetheless survived. This structure was violently confronted over two weeks ago in Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilian and military outposts; it is being re-asserted through Israel’s counter-offensive carpet-bombing of Hamas targets and civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. In the process, hundreds of soldiers and militants, and thousands of civilians (a disproportionate number of them Palestinian) have been killed. In response, we (and here I’m speaking as an American to Americans) must figure out how we should respond to colonial and counter-colonial violence and our country’s role in its perpetuation.

The term “terrorist” has essentially supplanted the word “savage” in Western discourse. Both exist to reinforce the colonizers’ own sense of morality. While the colonizer has “rules of engagement” (rules that somehow still lead to killing large swaths of civilians), the “terrorist” and the “savage” are seen to have no such moral qualms about whom they target, seeking only to cause maximum death and destruction in the least predictable of ways. Consider how Natives’ raids were depicted in American discourse as wild, capricious, and vicious in their brutality — the symbol of the scalped head signifying the assailant’s inability to conduct the sort of polite violence that colonizers demand of their victims. 

But no violence is polite. Even in the Second World War, our most “just” war, U.S. military personnel convinced themselves that it was necessary to burn German civilians alive in Dresden to stop Nazism and to melt Japanese civilians into human puddles in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end Japanese imperialism.

Would that it were otherwise. Would that we could have reached the Good Friday Agreement without the IRA bombings, could have had the Sepoy Rebellion without the massacre of British women and children, could have liberated Algeria without the bombing of Pied-Noir cafes and restaurants, could have liberated Poland without the mass rape of German women, could have saved Kosovo from ethnic cleansing without the bombing of Serb children, and could have freed Vietnam without killing so many American conscripts who didn’t want to be there. The list goes on. 

How many liberation movements have felt forced to choose violence as the only path to freedom? How many have had that same violence, once begun, become uncontainable once liberation was achieved? The world is full of indigenous military elites who, following a violent independence movement, found new and novel ways to exploit their populations as effectively as any colonizer once did.

Violence is never neat, is never clean, is never, cannot ever, be fully moral. Of all the Hamas militants’ attacks, the one on the NOVA music festival, in which over 200 Israeli civilians were killed, has been routinely held up as the most unequivocal proof of Hamas’s savagery, of their inability to conduct moral violence, of proof that Israel cannot negotiate with them and should therefore seek out their violent destruction. 

In Israel, there seems to always be a constant drive to treat colonization as settled, as over, as done with. That the colonized are subdued, and that life can be lived like any “normal” country. In some ways, then, we can see the attack on the festival as the most violent of anti-colonial refusals — a refusal to let the children of a nation that ethnically cleansed one’s family party on that stolen land in peace. It violently reasserts that this land is stolen and that it can only be returned to its rightful owners through bloodshed.

Would that it were otherwise. To see these attacks as an understandable response to the conditions of settler deprivations is not to condone them as moral or inevitable. This does not have to be a zero-sum game in which the taking of an Israeli life is a gain for Palestinian freedom, and the taking of a Palestinian life is a gain for Israeli peace and security. The political leaders of Israel and the United States have, more than any other group, made it so. There is an alternative. There has to be, if we are to have any sense of a higher purpose as humans in a society. 

It has just been closed off. Humans are not inherently evil or inherently cruel. Quite the opposite. Throughout these past weeks, I have watched countless videos of Palestinians and Israelis risking their lives to save members of their own communities, giving food, shelter, and medicine to those in need. The lines of compassion could cross the separation wall — indeed, some of the bravest Israelis are calling on their government to do so but have been roundly hounded by society for it — it has just been prevented. Instead, Israel is preparing its populace to accept the genocide of Gazan Palestinians, calling Gazans “human animals,” dividing the world between “the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”

We have forgotten how genocide is so often seen, in its perpetrators’ minds, as a defensive act, that those who commit acts of disproportionate violence see these acts as a “just response” to an initial act of violence — a “protective measure” against further violence from the communities targeted for destruction. This language enables colonialism: Israel is not alone in naming its colonial army a “defense force” — it defends Jewish supremacy just as the Ulster Defense Force defended Protestant supremacy in Northern Ireland and the South African Defense Force defended White supremacy under Apartheid. This language enables genocide: 

The Ottomans justified the massacre of Armenians as a defense against a supposed “fifth column” of Christians who were secretly loyal to their Russian opponents in WWI; Nazis similarly saw Jews as part of a larger “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy threatening to destroy the German nation; Hutu leaders justified massacring Tutsis as part of a defense against the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front; Serb leaders justified the Srebrenica massacre as a prophylactic against Bosnian-lead ethnic-cleansing of Serbs. In each case, the taking of life was portrayed as the “protecting of life.” The same is happening now among Israeli officials and their U.S. backers.

Would that it were otherwise. I want to believe that there is another way, that mass protests, strikes, and boycotts will both be more effective than violence at both liberating the colonized and creating a just post-colonial society. The Palestinians have tried, again and again, to win their freedom through non-violent protest: through the 1976 Land Day strikes and marches in the Galilee protesting Israeli land confiscation; through the 1987-1993 First Intifada, itself sparked by the deaths of four Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; through the 2018-2019 Great March of Return, in which Gazans peacefully marching on the fence that cages them in and separates them from their grandparents’ homes were met with tear gas and snipers’ bullets; through the May 2021 protests in Shiekh Jarrah and the subsequent general strike of Palestinian citizens of Israel; through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that has tried to put the same non-violent pressure on the Israeli economy that anti-apartheid activists so successfully deployed in South Africa; and through the many small, daily peaceful protests around Israel, Palestine, and the world, that are led by Palestinians, Jews, and their international allies. Had those in power in the U.S., Israel, or the rest of the rich world listened, we might have been able to avoid the current bloodshed that now feels unstoppable.

The sad truth is that, for all the talk of the “complexity” of the conflict, all this death and destruction (on all sides) could have been avoided, still could be avoided, if the colonizers were willing to live with the colonized as equals. In my most optimistic moments, I wonder if most Israelis, when given a clear choice, would choose to live together with Palestinians — in one state, with a shared capital, with equal rights, and with the right of entry for all Jews and Palestinians living in their respective diasporas — if it meant a guaranteed end to the bloodshed. No more military service, no more separation walls, no more checkpoints, no more secret police, no more torture, no more rockets, no more suicide bombs, no more living in fear that you or your children might not live through the night. Obviously, the Israelis have more to lose and less to gain than the Palestinians with this. But isn’t it worth it? Maybe the one good thing to come out of all of this is that equality may start to seem like a good alternative, even for the occupiers.

The Israeli state has chosen death over equality. The death they are choosing is not only for Palestinian civilians — the parents, children, doctors, and reporters, and all the other innocent people whose lives have been ignored by America, Europe, and their media, but whose deaths have become front-page headlines these past two weeks. By continuing the war and amassing troops for a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli government is also choosing death for Israelis — for the hostages who could have been freed in a prisoner exchange, for the civilians who will die in new rounds of rocket fire, for the soldiers who will die fighting to eradicate something that cannot be eradicated. If Israel destroys Hamas, a new group will take its place, drawing support from this new generation of Palestinian youth who are currently being traumatized and orphaned by Israel’s bombing.

The choice, then, is not between Palestinian rebellion and submission; it is between a violent decolonization and a non-violent one. Palestinians have shown the world again and again that they will never abandon their dream of liberation, of returning home to the lands from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948. The U.S., if it wanted, could help force Israel to accept a peaceful decolonization. By sending weapons and warships, it is throwing its support behind ethnic cleansing, genocide, and violent resistance.

We, the American people, must make it otherwise. Some of us are already fighting to do so. There are currently mass protests organized in cities throughout the country, many of which, like last week’s march on Washington, are led by Jewish Americans who refuse to let Israel and the U.S. kill civilians in their name. Already, we have seen high-ranking State Department officials resign in opposition to the U.S.’s one-sided response to the violence. 

Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush — two women whose large black constituencies know full well the effects of colonial violence — have introduced a bill calling for an immediate ceasefire and an opening up of Gaza to foreign aid. Many Liberal representatives like my district’s Jimmy Gomez have yet to sign the bill but could be pressured to do so. 

Decolonization is never easy, but it doesn’t have to be a desperate, violent affair if we can prove to the colonized, in Palestine and throughout the world, that we are there to actively, materially, and politically support their rights to freedom.