Since Oct. 7th I have read a lot about the war between Israel and Hamas, I have done a small amount of protesting on the street, I have gotten a letter published in the Boulder Weekly (a widely-read alternative newspaper), I have sent a few messages (in support of the Palestinians) to federal politicians, and I have also taken part in a fair amount of email discussion among a lot of the Boulder County people supporting the Palestinians. In those discussions I encountered two ideas that I think overlap and which I would like to address in this essay. First is the idea that it’s okay for the Palestinians to kill civilians because it’s an “asymmetrical” conflict where the Palestinians don’t have the resources, power, and environment to fight in that the Israelis have. The second idea is that the Israelis have the power to wage peace and the Palestinians don’t and therefore it is the former who need to take the first few steps or so towards peace and the latter can wait until those steps have been taken to reciprocate.
This essay will address these two ideas and to a lesser degree some other aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Since Oct. 7th I have read something like 2,000 words a day about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict- 50% from the BBC, 10% from Juan Cole’s site Informed Comment, 10% from CNN and the rest is miscellaneous. Looking at the 30 years before that I probably read an average of 100-200 words a day about it and it broke down like this- 20% from Juan Cole and about 20% is from the BBC. The rest, about 60% is from various sources, some mainstream, some progressive, including The Nation, the Washington Post, the Times of Israel, etc.
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Although I only have a BA, it’s in Ethnic Studies and mine includes three courses taught by Ward Churchill (I don’t think this affected how much I learned from him, but he was my faculty advisor (I got an A in all three of the courses he taught)). I have also spent a huge amount of time studying the recent conflict in Northern Ireland (in the last 26 years about 1,000 words a day on average), and that included some things that made me more familiar with the violence than most outside observers (A: I heard a lecture in 2002 by someone who had just months earlier been Chief of Staff of the IRA and B: in 2002 I was in the middle of two riots with the security forces).
In general, I support the Palestinians- in some ways more than many people who support them (in 2002 I got a CU-Boulder group called “Students for Justice in N. Ireland” to endorse the campus Coalition for Justice in Palestine), but in some ways less so (I wasn’t among the brave young people who went there in solidarity with them around 2002). I did a post where I do a pretty good of taking down Zionism and explaining why a one state solution would be better than a two state solution. Here and there in the last six months I say that although I condemn what happened Oct. 7th, I would support something that resembled what the IRA did during The Troubles (a detailed explanation of how I reached the conclusion that the IRA were (OBJECTIVELY) not terrorists is here and a description of the Republican Movement’s (1970-1997) strategy is here).
On the other hand I hate Hamas and always have. Recently I decided that I no longer consider the Palestinian Authority/Palestinian Liberation Organization to be worthy of my support.
I did a post about how incredibly appropriate it is to use the word Apartheid in relation to Israel. That is largely about Israel, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In one way or another, to one degree or another, in the last 17 years residents of the Gaza Strip have had it worse than Palestinians in the West Bank (until recently Gaza was dominated by Israel even though it had no soldiers there (now it’s still dominated (if that’s the right word), in part because there ARE soldiers there)). Those Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza are state-less and thus very close to powerlessness.
So, it’s true that Israel is MUCH more powerful than the Palestinians, and is allied with the most powerful country in the world. The resistance is underground in East Jerusalem, Israel, and the West Bank. Israel has an advanced and conventional military that includes, for example, tanks. Does that asymmetry mean that Hamas shouldn’t be seriously criticized for focusing overwhelmingly on intentionally killing civilians Oct. 7th?
No, it doesn’t mean that. Crucially, the IRA almost never intentionally killed civilians and almost never unintentionally killed civilians and almost never TRIED to kill civilians (I explain how I came to those conclusions here). The IRA was of course an underground army and the British had, for example, many helicopters that were used extensively (especially in South Armagh, where, without helicopters, the British Army would have been defeated by the IRA). In the struggle against Apartheid, operations by the military wing of the ANC (in English known as “Spear of the Nation”) were even less likely to result in civilian death, and they were definitely fighting under difficult conditions.
I should say at some point here that I believe there is a spectrum between completely legitimate targets on one hand and completely innocent civilians on the other hand. This is reflected in my opinion of Hamas’ military wing and my opinion of the IRA, among others. It doesn’t mean that I think less-than-totally-innocent civilians are legitimate targets, but I don’t attach much value to such killings when deciding if I consider the group responsible to be a terrorist organization or something better.
Although I do not totally agree with international law on this, international law is so unfavorable towards the killing of civilians that I believe killing civilians is not excused by the conditions that an underground army fight under against a technologically and institutionally superior foe.
Although this may not be the fairest thing to say about them, it almost seems to me that progressive supporters of Hamas believe that there is something akin to a Law of Physics about the inevitability of underground armies intentionally killing civilians- their argument seems to be, “you don’t condemn an apple for falling to the Earth.” But there are at least two such armies that never or almost never intentionally killed civilians. One of them was totally successful (although it should be mentioned that their economic agenda was not realized, the ANC’s primary goal was the end of Apartheid) and the other was sort of successful (the Good Friday Agreement isn’t that bad and in recent years Sinn Fein and the EU have forced the British to create a border of sorts between N. Ireland and Britain).
The second and overlapping idea is that the Palestinians don’t have the power to wage peace and can only wage war until Israel takes the first few steps towards peace on their own. In my opinion Israel is a lot more responsible for the conflict than the Palestinians are. The average Israeli Jew is a lot more comfortable than the average Palestinian is and could survive the re-distribution of resources (i.e. water) that peace would require. I’m sure a lot of Palestinians would say that they have little or nothing to lose and that for decades now Israel has been brutalizing them and undermining the possibility of a two state solution and many of them will fight until Israel makes the first moves.
Although I am not a pacifist, A) I overwhelmingly support non-violent political efforts and B) what I’m about to say needs to be seriously considered by supporters of this theory that Hamas cannot wage peace at this point. The Black population in America was seriously dis-empowered in the decades before and during the Civil Rights Movement (there was SOME militancy and looking back at that history, I support some of that militancy). But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was almost 100% against the use of violence and saying that he “waged peace” is putting it mildly- it was a scorched Earth version of “waging peace.” I have a theory that intentionally killing civilians in war is further from “waging peace” than exclusively targeting combatants. I am not saying that liberation movements out there in the world need to completely abandon the use force in order to respect the legacy of Dr. King. But I believe progressives should be careful with who we support when it comes to armed liberation movements. And although I am not going to go into a lot of detail beyond looking at the Civil Rights/Black Power era and N. Ireland, I also think we should ask ourselves, “what would Gandhi think?”
The Republican Movement (Sinn Fein and the IRA), as I mentioned above, conducted a very honorable struggle and DID do a lot of non-violent stuff. In all fairness to Hamas, they did successfully contest an election in 2006 and didn’t have much more in terms of opportunities for non-violent political efforts. But I am still going to point out that starting in the mid-80s SF members who got elected to local councils took their seats and engaged their unionist opponents non-violently and democratically- a move towards waging peace in the acutely imperialistic Thatcher years. When the conditions seemed right, in 1994 the IRA went on cease-fire for about a year. After a brief return to war, they went on cease-fire again in 1997 and to a VERY large degree have become less and less relevant and I wouldn’t be surprised if they pretty much ceased to exist in the last 15 or so years.
Although I’m not gonna go into much detail here (I talk about this in a 2009 post) the RM and the Nationalist community in general bent over backwards to make the peace process work. It would have been VERY reasonable if they had refused to sign up to anything that failed to guarantee a United Ireland after some transitional period. The republican argument is something I go into some detail about here. Around 1997-2005 the IRA took several steps leading up to the full decommissioning of their arsenal, steps that kept the Peace Process going forward, despite frequent provocations by their opponents (i.e. for about 3 months in late 2001 loyalists terrified little Catholic girls (aged about 11) on their way to school just inside a Protestant area (there’s a fairly good article about it here)).
When the conditions seemed right, the IRA was quick to wage peace. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza have less power than the 1998 Catholic population of N. Ireland, but it’s also relevant that on a per-capita basis, Catholic civilians might have been slaughtered in The Troubles to a greater degree than was the case with Palestinian civilians since 1967 (that is, until Oct. 8th 2023 when that situation changed dramatically) (below, starting with the sentence “As I write elsewhere 856+” I try to illustrate how the Catholics were slaughtered). Even though the Catholics probably had more power in 1998, when it came to support from the global community, the Palestinians definitely have more (i.e. the Catholic population of N. Ireland didn’t have a representative at the UN) (and the British, although I don’t believe they used this to win diplomatic battles with Dublin, are permanent members of the UN Security Council and have a veto and they might have benefited from that in terms of discouraging support for the IRA). I talk about the Irish half of that comparison with South Africa in the middle third of a post here (starting with a paragraph that begins by mentioning South Africa). Crucially, the US government was, to one degree or another, on the side of the British as I describe in note #17 of a post here. As I said, the IRA waged peace not when they had the global community behind them, not just when British politics made peace more likely, but when it appeared there was an opportunity to stop the violence and the inequality, the hate and the injustice. In 1994 that meant after very few moves by the British and the Unionists. In 1996-1997 there were a few more moves by the British, but also some provocation by London and the unionists- which was ignored.
As I was typing this I increasingly came to understand that in terms of power, the Catholic population had more than their brothers and sisters in Palestine. But what I wrote about the latter having more support globally is true. Also, in terms of forgiving your oppressors and waging peace, you have to consider what I write below about the Catholic civilian population, on a per capita basis, being slaughtered to such a great extent that it was possibly worse on a per capita basis than what the Palestinians have been through between 1967 and Oct. 7th (it’s not a perfectly symmetrical comparison and for multiple reasons I am not going to hunt down solid figures for deaths of the Palestinians, but you might agree with me when you read that section after the next paragraph).
I don’t think anything excuses much less justifies what Hamas did Oct. 7th. I’m not saying that they are anywhere near as responsible for the conflict in general as Israel is but Oct. 7th was a massive and (sort of) unprovoked escalation (I say sort of unprovoked because it was disproportionate to what Israel was doing- nowhere near as disproportionate as Israel’s response to Oct. 7th, but still disproportionate (you have to consider that targeting civilians is more provocative than attacking soldiers)). If they were fighting offensively as the IRA did, I’d be pretty supportive. Coming back to reality, what do I think Hamas and the PLO and the Palestinian people in general should do? I think their allies worldwide need to continue to take a stand and communicate to Israel that it had better stop bombing Gaza and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza like never before, and stop going towards what I think would be something fairly genocidal. And they need to get the US to stop supporting Israel. (I believe that when it comes to genocide there is a spectrum between 100% dead and, at the other end of the spectrum, what Ireland experienced during the Famine). I have no idea how making Gaza livable for 2.2 million people will be accomplished in the immediate future. But worse than that is the possibility that Israel will try to push Gazans out of Gaza and into Egypt, which would be pretty genocidal. I have almost no idea what should be done beyond an end to the violence and a return of aid to Gaza and and an end to American support for Israel. Normally I would say that a one-state solution must be pursued as I argue here, but after what has happened to both the Jewish population and the Palestinian population, I am thinking of going back to supporting the two-state solution. I imagine the reality is there will be no peace process worthy of the name for a very long time.
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As I write elsewhere 856+ Catholic civilians were killed in the years 1969 to 2005 by either loyalist paramilitaries or the security forces. A comparable scenario in America would have meant around 67,000 unarmed people of color killed by cops or Nazi skinheads (etc.) in the same time period. A: based on what I’ll describe below, I would guess that the actual number for that was probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000; B: I'm not saying the racist system in this country wasn't, ideologically or programmatically, capable of killing 67,000 people of color in those years if the "rebellion" among people of color here had been as militaristic as the one among Catholics in N. Ireland; but the reality is that as bad as it was for people of color here in those years, it was, in terms of deaths, MUCH worse for Catholics in N. Ireland.
What makes me confident about my statement “probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000”?
1. Between 1996 and 2005 according to the FBI there were 38 racist murders. I have read that the Department of Justice officially estimates that for every hate crime reported to the FBI there might be 20-30 that aren’t reported because not all local law enforcement agencies report such crimes to the FBI. So I came up with 1,140 for those years.
2. I heard that in a 12 month period during a 2014 (apparent) surge in police murders of black people including those of Eric Garner in NY, Tamir Rice in OH, and Michael Brown in MO among other highly publicized such cases, that around 200 black people armed or unarmed, had been killed by cops in America. Although I’m very open-minded about accusations that cops plant guns, this country also has a ridiculous number of guns.
3. Bear in mind that decades ago the number of people of color and the number of cops in this country were both smaller or much smaller than they are today.
4. If it’s worth much, about 10 years ago I read a huge amount of what the Southern Poverty Law Center put on their web-site in the previous 10-15 years. I also got an Ethnic Studies degree if that’s worth much.
5. There was little or no talk about “Brown Lives Matter” so I get the impression that very few Latinos/Latinas/Chicanos/Chicanas have been killed by cops in recent years (as far as I know, even Arpaio’s sheriff’s department in AZ didn’t kill a single such person) and that might reflect the situation in earlier decades. I have practically never heard of Asian-Americans being killed by cops. And if Native Americans were being killed at a high rate in the 80s and 90s I would have heard (a massive chunk of my major was Native American Studies).
UPDATE 6/9/21 I just found a Democracy Now! story relevant to this. It's about the last 20 years, but there's a small overlap between that and the period I was looking at Catholics and people of color (1969-2005), and it's possible that what I said about this comparison is off a little. Bear in mind that the figure I refer to in item #2 above came from organizers of a Black Lives Matter protest.
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In that first part (ending just above this line) I addressed the issues of asymmetry in war and waging peace. Here I need to address some other aspects of Hamas that contribute to me being hostile.
I believe in being consistently against religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. Towards the bottom I will explain how I don’t have a racist double standard in the favor of the Irish.
Hamas is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” and they’re very friendly with Iran, so I think I am on pretty good ground saying they are fundamentalists. I’m not an atheist and I’m certainly not a NEW atheist (see this). I believe in the separation of religious institutions and the state, I believe in secular politics (although I have nothing against religious socialists I am not one myself) and I believe in “Intelligent Design” not creationism.
I won’t apologize for consistently being against social conservatism, including sexism and homophobia. I’m sure some readers are groaning at that sentence in this essay, but please read what I write below.
I get the impression there is something close to a consensus among American progressives that criticizing the allegedly misogynist attitudes of MANY Muslim men is inappropriate. Are Muslim women oppressed to one degree or another in many (perhaps most) muslim societies? I think the answer is pretty close to “YES, although I have gotten the impression that some progress has been made on the issue in recent decades. I need to make clear that I don’t support laws (in France, for example) where muslim women are banned from dressing in a way that might be considered religious and/or traditional and/or conservative. I believe that Muslim women are adults and don’t need the government, or male relatives, or random males in the street telling them what to wear, when men are not treated that way as well.
What about homophobia? In general I get the strong impression that the VAST Majority of Muslims are homophobes. I wish I had a lot of evidence specifically about HAMAS being homophobic, but I am comfortable just assuming that they are. I DO know that in recent years Hamas and Iran get along very well and Iran is DEFINITELY homophobic. I also read a brief accusation of homophobia that Meredith Tax leveled against muslim fundamentalists in her book “Double Bind.”
Do I have a racist double standard in favor of the Irish and/or Catholics? No. Republicanism is mostly secular. There were a few Protestants in the IRA (is Sinn Fein as anti-protestant as Hamas is anti-Semitic? See this), and there are a LOT of atheists in Sinn Fein. Going back to the IRA, I was told that at one point, perhaps in the mid-1990s, a significant minority of IRA POWs were housed together in the same part of the prison because they were all devout. But I am certain it was a minority and probably a small minority of the POWs.
The first (or at least close to the first) Vice President of Provisional Sinn Fein (the SF that Gerry Adams was President of for a long time), in the early 1970s, was a woman. In the era of the Civil Rights Movement (late 60s/early 70s), if there was only one leader of the CRM it was Bernadette Devlin (McAliskey). She was also perhaps the main leader of those, around 1980, who were supporters of republican POWs demanding political status. In the mid-1980s for one year SF was pro-choice and between then and now (or at least most of that time) their position was only MODERATELY pro-life, and they might be pro-choice today. In recent years the two most senior leaders of SF are both women. When Gerry Adams stepped down as President of SF he came out as pro-choice.
A handful of facts about SF and homophobia are here.
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(I believe that Hamas is anti-Semitic. This is primarily based on 2-3 facts. They’re religious fundamentalists and they went after Jews, and some of them raped Jews (if you can prove that they raped a lot of non-Jewish people, I’ll reconsider that statement). I have decided that the PLO are anti-Semitic (based on a BBC article here) and if THEY’RE anti-Semitic I feel comfortable assuming that the socially conservative religious fundamentalists are, too. When I have made this accusation in the past 1-2 American supporters of Hamas have said that the anti-Semitism of some Palestinians can be traced back to Europe- that doesn’t make it okay!)
There are two last things I need to say. This post is partly a response to a blog post by a woman named Helena Cobban here. The main theme of her post is that “it’s past time to end the demonization of Hamas.” Combined with everything else I have written above, I need to explain that Hamas weakens, it doesn’t strengthen, the cause of Palestine. Large numbers of people in the world believe it’s wrong for civilians to be targeted in war. Large numbers of people believe that anti-Semitism is wrong. Hamas’ targeting of civilians and their anti-Semitism turn people away from supporting the Palestinians. I mean Oct. 7th did nothing to increase support for their people. ISRAEL’S REACTION has, and that might have been Hamas’ plan, but I think that was a pretty bad plan and doesn’t change the fact that Oct. 7th was anti-Semitic. I guarantee you there would be more support for the Palestinians if they were not associated with Hamas.
I imagine that when anti-Semitism in the Palestinian population is not challenged by American supporters of the Palestinians, it might be noted by the younger and more impressionable progressive activists who might adopt that bigotry as their own. That means that ignoring anti-Semitism among the Palestinians can have an effect on how Jews are treated HERE.
We need to criticize Hamas MORE not LESS.
