Month: October 2023

To the People in Gaza and all of Palestine

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine:  we have no platitudes, no pity, no piety, no passivity; we pronounce instead our sadness and rage. 

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine:  we vow never to apologize for the oppressor. 

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine:  your light nourishes our joy; your darkness ignites our consciousness. 

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine:  we will never forgive the silence; we will never forgive the treachery; we will never forgive the obedience.  

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine:  we will vote for no president. 

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine:  we do not condemn you. 

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine:  we will remind anyone who tries to forget. 

To the people in Gaza and all of Palestine:  we love you without any of the conditions imposed by the West. 

A Practical Appraisal of Palestinian Violence

Palestinian violence, a complicated and ambivalent category, requires thoughtful analysis, not Orientalist commonplaces and liberal platitudes.

I. Terror and Jubilation

When I was a graduate student many years ago, I got to spend time in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.  Life in the camp was challenging, but community bonds were strong despite the adversity.  Internal tensions existed, but return to Palestine served as a unifying principle. 

It was an active era of Palestinian resistance—what Western journalists and intellectuals lazily refer to as “Palestinian violence.”  A major tactic at the time was the suicide bomb.  Sometimes the attacker would go after a military installation.  At other times, he (or she) targeted public spaces.  Western pundits and intellectuals, along with a fair number of their counterparts in the Arab World, declared the tactic a byproduct of atavistic evil and collected the usual plaudits in return.  To even suggest the possibility of sociological factors was a monstrous breach of professional standards.  According to the orthodoxy, Palestinian behavior was rash and unreasoned. 

Continue reading “A Practical Appraisal of Palestinian Violence”