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This question became seemingly ubiquitous following October 7. As
Palestinians defied the imagination, breaking out of Gaza after over a
decade and a half of living under total air, land, and sea blockade,
many found themselves having to face this question.

Whether it be from Zionists using the violence we witnessed on that
day as a means of creating story after story of atrocity propaganda —
to force well-meaning allies into a corner or even those who genuinely
considered themselves pro-Palestine who struggled with the reality of
decolonial violence — the question of whether or not Palestinian armed
resistance factions deserved support or criticism became a major point
of contention. It was easy for many to support the cause of
Palestinian liberation when they viewed Palestinians as perfect
victims, but when Palestinians fought back, suddenly the question of
solidarity became muddled.

Months later, after tens of thousands of Palestinians have been
murdered by Israeli Occupation Forces in Gaza amid an ongoing
genocide, and after thousands in the West Bank have found themselves
imprisoned or under regular attack, sympathy for those resisting their
own annihilation has grown, with the conversation becoming more clear
than it was in the days proceeding October 7. As videos spread by
resistance factions across Gaza and Lebanon find a regular and
enthusiastic audience and chants in support of those putting their
lives on the line take root in protests nationwide, it is clear many
have grown to accept the necessity of armed struggle in the
Palestinian context, though a true consensus has yet to be achieved.

To that end, the answer to the question “Do you condemn Hamas?,”
particularly for those of us on the Left as we analyze the history of
Palestine and why resistance occurs in a colonial context, should have
always been clear.

A violent phenomenon

As Frantz Fanon’s oft-cited statement from Wretched of the Earth has
made clear, national liberation, national reawakening, restoration of
the nation to the Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the
latest expression — decolonization is always a violent event.
Palestine is not an exception to this reality.

The colonization of Palestine by Zionists, like all colonialism
throughout history, brought with it widespread and constant violence
levied in all forms against the Palestinian people. This was by
design, as the very nature of settler colonialism is a necessarily
brutal one given the end goal of the wholesale elimination of the
Indigenous population in all forms but nostalgia. This violence does
not simply manifest itself through the military campaigns waged by
Zionist settlers and the Israeli occupation army, but through every
part of the colonial endeavor itself — an endeavor that can only be
sustained through the suffering, exploitation, repression, and death
of Palestinians and all else that the colony wishes to conquer. 

Palestinians, whether in Occupied Palestine, in refugee camps in
bordering nations, or in the diaspora around the world, are forced
every single day to wrestle with the reality of this settler colonial
violence. The very existence of the Zionist project poses an
existential threat to the lives of millions, who have in some cruel
twist of reality been deemed existential threats by the project for
the simple reason that their existence undermines its legitimacy. 

This violence does not occur without resistance. Throughout history,
whether it be in Algeria, South Africa, Ireland, or Palestine,
colonized people have risen up in the face of brutal violence to free
themselves from the shackles of their own oppression. This resistance
does not generally start as armed struggle, but through civil
disobedience, protests, general strikes, and similar tactics. Yet when
these tactics fail, as they often have, or when exceptional violence
is waged against the people in response, armed struggle becomes a
necessity. 

The colonial power, its legitimacy owed solely to the force it
undertakes to maintain its existence, creates the conditions for the
resistance that will rise against it. The more violence and repression
colonized people face, the more they resist. Violent resistance
becomes mainstream out of sheer necessity given their material
conditions. This creates a cycle of violence, one perpetuated first
and foremost by the violence of the colonial entity itself. 

Even before the official foundation of the Zionist project in 1948,
this cycle was well established. The Balfour Declaration came into
existence in 1917, signifying Britain’s official endorsement of
Zionist aspirations. By 1929, a fifth of Palestinians found themselves
landless. By the 1930s, many Palestinians found themselves unemployed
and economically destitute, as Zionist capital, backed by favorable
imperial British laws and treatment, began flowing ever more
intensively into Palestine, according to Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal
work on the 1936 Great Palestinian Revolt.

These factors spurred resistance of their own variety, including the
Buraq Uprising of 1929, efforts by Palestinians to pool resources to
purchase land, sporadic violence, as well as Palestinian notables
lobbying for better treatment from their British overlords. This blend
of violent and non-violent efforts would all be suppressed or
ultimately met with limited success.

In 1936, when British forces murdered Syrian revolutionary figure
Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Palestinian popular resentment turned
into a general strike, and ultimately into popular revolt, which was
put down brutally by Zionist and British forces by 1939. Only a few
years later, Zionists would ethnically cleanse more than 750,000
Palestinians from upwards of 530 cities, towns, and villages and kill
thousands more in what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or the
“catastrophe”. These ethnic cleansing campaigns continue up to the
modern day.

Palestinians would rise up as a result of the subjugation they faced,
again through a combination of violent and non-violent struggle that
would be met with even more violent oppression. When Palestinians
waged cross-border raids into occupied territory, they were met with a
Zionist invasion in Lebanon and massacres at Sabra and Shatila. When
Palestinians rose up during the First and Second Intifadas, they were
met with violent crackdowns, mass arrests, and widespread violence
that would lead to the intensification of their own violent resistance
efforts. When Palestinians in Gaza took to marching to the wall that
surrounded them in the March of Great Return, hundreds were killed and
thousands more injured by Israeli soldiers. The cycle of violence
continued and intensified.

Fast forwarding to today, Palestinians continue to live in bantustans
in the West Bank, and what could functionally be described as a
concentration camp in Gaza, with Palestinians in the 1948 and 1967
territories living under brutal apartheid management structures. They
have resisted every step of the way, each time seeing thousands
imprisoned, murdered, displaced, and millions utterly subjugated and
exploited as the Zionist project continues toward the ultimate goal of
eliminating them in all forms but nostalgia.

When armed struggle becomes material necessity

In the face of all of this violence, armed resistance organizations
have risen up and established themselves amongst the people, whether
they be Fatah, the PFLP, the DFLP, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas,
or others. These groups, and the violence they employ, did not come to
exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are the result of decades of brutal
colonial violence, and the culmination of Palestinian efforts to
liberate themselves from it.

The tactics they employ on the ground are the culmination of this same
struggle. These groups chose to undergo operations they determined may
advance their liberatory struggle. Many outside of Palestine, and even
Palestinians themselves, may have disagreements with these tactics, or
on a grander scale, disagreements with the core principles and
ideologies of one or several of the groups deploying them. For those
of us in the Western Left, however, removed from the reality of
on-the-ground struggle, this cannot mean that we undermine the very
legitimacy of armed struggle itself.

Hamas is a key example of this. Like them or not, the efforts they
have waged and continue to wage have made more of a material impact
toward the liberation of Palestine than anything any of us in the West
will ever make. They are taking on the brutal violence of colonial
power and waging a campaign of armed struggle that has, at the current
moment, with coordination with other resistance factions, made the
Zionist colony more of a pariah than it has ever been on a global
stage and shattered the image of military invincibility and overall
stability it has spent decades cultivating. Countless years of
struggle have culminated in this flashpoint. 

The path forward, as history has repeatedly shown, will be largely
forged through the armed struggle of resistance factions on the
ground. Their very survival depends on it, and it continues to
challenge and erode the power of the Zionist entity itself.

Palestinian armed resistance has forced the Zionist project to wage an
increasingly violent campaign that is sharpening contradictions in
such a way as to lead to its continued unraveling. As the masses in
the imperial core, specifically those of the United States, come to
realize that their interests are at odds with the interests of the
Zionist project and their government leaders who are sustaining the
project’s ongoing genocide, the traditional support base the project
relies on has eroded. In its place is an ever-increasing mass standing
in firm support of Palestinians, rather than their colonizers. 

In Palestine, the Palestinian struggle for liberation has developed
what can be called a “Popular Cradle” of resistance — a state of unity
and cohesion that has developed between the Palestinian armed
resistance and broader Palestinian society. That “popular cradle,” as
the Palestinian Youth Movement has so aptly described it, has worked
as an organ of the liberation struggle by conceptualizing resistance
as both a normal and necessary state of being. This has led to a
reality where the resistance is sustained by the masses themselves,
who support them and readily accept the consequences of their
continued fight for liberation. 

That armed struggle, a material necessity, is reaping material
results, even in spite of mass violence, crackdowns, and a campaign of
outright genocide. In Gaza specifically, that very struggle in no
small part led to the withdrawal of Zionist settlers from the
territory which forced Zionist planners to rework how they went about
their occupation of Gaza. The struggle has kept Israeli Occupation
Forces from entering Jenin and other refugee camps across historic
Palestine without serious consequence. In many ways, the resistance
struggle has been a key element of continued Palestinian survival.

Moving past the question

The question of whether we condemn Hamas is more than just a question
of condemnation. At its core, we are being asked to disavow decolonial
violence altogether — to support Palestinians only when they are
perfect victims or only when the groups waging liberatory struggle
align with the values of our ideologies and fraternal parties. It is a
question that acts as a trap and misses the point entirely.

We cannot make the mistake of engaging seriously with such an
obfuscation. It is on us, especially those of us on the Left, to
understand that the core driver of the violence we are seeing is and
always has been Zionist settler colonialism. This cycle of violence is
perpetuated not by the colonized, as they seek to liberate themselves
from the state of total subjugation and brutal reality of genocidal
liquidation, but by the Zionist project and those advancing its
interests.

The question we have to ask ourselves, and indeed answer, is not
whether we condemn Hamas, but whether we condemn a settler colonial
regime that makes armed struggle necessary for survival. 

https://mondoweiss.net/2024/06/do-you-condemn-hamas/