7. Why do Palestinians use violence instead of nonviolent resistance?
It’s important to ground this question within the work of Walter Rodney, a decolonial African writer and organizer.
“We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?,” questions Rodney in his work, The Groundings with My Brothers.1 “By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
Rodney asks us to interrogate our conceptions of what “violence” is and looks like — is it violent to resist one’s destruction? Is it violence to refuse to submit to a system or state that commits very real, very physical violence against people every day? And if one believes this is violence, can so-called violent resistance which is driven by hopes of dignity and liberation be equated with the violence that oppresses and represses? Is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising considered an act of “violence”? And if so, should it be?
Many Palestinians reject this distinction between “violent” and “nonviolent” resistance, insisting that resistance cannot be characterized as violent when it serves the purpose of disrupting or dismantling a larger, more dangerous form of collective, oppressive violence. Instead, some refer to armed resistance.
It is important to interrogate our assumptions about “violent” and “nonviolent” resistance. Because the violence Israel imposes against Palestinians everywhere is carried out by a state, by politicians, or police or soldiers in uniform, it might be wrongly seen as sanitized, official, normalized, mundane, and not-quite-violence. Nonetheless, it is a grinding violence that continues daily all throughout historic Palestine.
Palestinians have a very long history of engaging in “nonviolent” resistance, whether one refers to the innumerable actions recorded about the First Intifada, which was largely “nonviolent” 2, or the more recent Great March of Return in Gaza.3 Demonstrations, protests, strikes, boycotts, counter-organizing, and unarmed political action are a central, cultural element of Palestinian political action. They are part of the popular toolkit that people engage with on a daily basis across historic Palestine.