A few weeks and thousands of innocent Palestinian lives ago, in the early days of the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, a video by the military wing of Hamas, the Al-Qassam Brigades, went somewhat viral in online Palestine resistance circles. The above image from the video has become its primary online imprint. The video shows a militant come up from underground, run towards an invading Israeli tank regiment, and place a bomb precisely under a tank’s turret. The fighter then runs back to shelter, part-concealed by olive branches, where he fires a rocket and destroys the tank. It is a classic image of guerilla warfare; a man with simple weapons destroying military hardware worth millions of euros, and encapsulating that sense of spirited resistance of an individual, long-wronged, defending their home against invasion; a spirit that has never failed to eventually win-through, from Algeria to Vietnam.
It is enshrined in international law that a population under occupation by an external aggressor has the right to resist that occupation. One of the big inconveniences for Western elites in the current timing of the conflict in Palestine is that they had, through their ongoing proxy war in Ukraine, also for the past two years primed their publics in the sanctity of the right to resist. Longstanding supporters of Palestine — already long-frustrated at Palestinian resistance being treated as terrorism, rather than of a legitimacy no different to the one the US and Europe threw billions of taxpayer euros, and much public celebration, to sponsor in Ukraine — had been left to stew with their indignation at the obvious double standard.
Since the operation, known as Al-Aqsa Flood, that took place on October 7 and saw Palestinian militants break out of Gaza and take over numerous military positions, it has become impossible — regardless of the regrettable loss of civilian life to Israeli and Palestinian fire — to separate that act of resistance to occupation from that same act of resistance to occupation the West has championed in Ukraine. That the Ukrainian resistance has been supported purportedly to uphold the “rules-based order”, and “international law” — while the Israelis have always flouted both things with territorial violations in in Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria — has also made the objection to Palestinian resistance conspicuously hypocritical, even by Western standards.
If one of the conditions of success under modern capitalism, and adaptation to the insanity of a modern news cycle, is the ability to unlearn that which you have learned, the ability to learn and entirely unlearn this language of resistance within two years has obviously proved a tall order even by contemporary standards of required amnesia. Combined with the anyway broad and deep consciousness of the Palestinian cause, and the integration through media, diasporas, civil society, NGOs and others, between Western publics and Palestine, it has proven impossible for Western elites to entirely strangle as they might have hoped the rush of support for Palestinian resistance in pursuit of a Palestine one day free for all peoples between the River and the Sea.
In some ways the Western reception to Palestinian armed resistance is besides the point. Armed resistance will happen whether or not Western society and state consent to it. To an extent, armed resistance became an inevitable necessity for Palestinians precisely because of Western refusal to use their undoubted influence to demand better behaviour out of the Israeli state project they have backed since its inception in Palestine in 1948. Within the last decade, Hamas has reformed its founding Charter saying it would recognise an Israeli state on 1967 lines. The Israelis were unmoved. In 1993, Fatah accepted the Oslo Accords and its two-state solution as a blueprint for peace. The Israelis were unmoved, continuing to build settlements and operating a military apartheid, with a Jewish extremist assassinating for good measure the Prime Minister who’d signed the Israeli side of a deal that had hardly been favourable to Palestine. Palestinians, as such, have generationally been left a choice of either some form of armed resistance, or being asked to die quietly. The choice is obvious.
Resistance and social stigma
It is again instructive, and relevant to the above video, to compare the coverage of Palestinian and Ukrainian armed resistance. Aside from the very obvious taxpayer billions pumped into the floundering Ukrainian army, the early coverage of the Ukraine war was a time in which Western politicians and journalists — quite apart from personally rushing to the Ukrainian front — were clearly thrilled at images of Ukrainian fighters exploding Russian tanks, or gruesome images of consumer drones being adapted to fly over Russian soldiers and drop improvised explosives. All were shared enthusiastically and freely by people in media and politics who rushed vicariously online to join the front.
Unsurprisingly, things are not quite the same in Palestine. Not only are the same members of polite society — who suddenly don’t believe in international law, rights to resist, or the rules-based order — not sharing such images personally, there are of course varying degrees of social and professional stigma, and ultimately potential legal penalty, to anybody doing so. Hamas, despite having a political and military wing, is near-enough, thanks to Islamophobic grooming, a proscribed word. Lebanese resistance to the Israelis, led primarily through Hezbollah, is also a name that has been cultivated to likewise invoke phobias and an implicit illegitimacy in Western ears and eyes.
While none of this directly alters Palestinian resistance on the ground, which is detached from Western approval and connected only to Palestinian refusal to surrender and die quietly, there are certain ways in which Palestinian armed resistance and Western support of Palestine, or any resolution in Palestine, are intrinsically if invisibly related.
Resistance spectrums
Palestinian resistance has over the years taken both non-violent and — in response to Israeli violence — also violent forms. The Israeli state has been merciless in seeking to crush both forms. Predominantly if not exclusively, armed resistance has played out inside Palestine, while non-violent resistance has remained the sole tactic available outside of Palestine, and particularly in the heavily pro-Israeli spaces that make up Western states. If we look at this spectrum as having Speech as the least-physical means of resistance, and Armed Resistance as the most-physical, along that spectrum of resistance we might see something that looks like this:
Speech > Street Protest > Boycott > Legal Campaigns > Direct Action > Armed Resistance
Westerners can, with various and mounting degrees of harassment by the Israeli lobby and its loyal gatekeepers, employ most of the spectrum, but with mounting certainty of social penalty, professional penalty and legal penalty as they move left-to-right. The contrivances of so-called counter-terror legislation, which criminalise Palestinian resistance but not the manifest state terror of an Israeli genocide, ensure the prospect of criminal penalty for encouraging or exercising the right to armed resistance either in solidarity with, or alongside, Palestinians. This too, it should be noted, stands in marked contrast with entreaties from Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, who was lionised by Western media and political class even as he encouraged Westerners to take up arms in fighting Russia alongside Ukrainian resistance groups, many of them with overt links to neo-Nazi groups.
A result of this proscribed status is that the Western engagement with the Palestinian resistance spectrum is - certainly publicly - obliged to look more like this:
Speech > Street Protest > Boycott > Legal Campaigns > Direct Action >
Where does this leave Westerners?
Conscious of so many cruelly and avoidably recent amputees in Palestine, I use the metaphor hesitantly, respectfully, and with an apology for it, but I liken the experience of this for Western engagement with Palestinian resistance as being akin to a phantom limb. There is a fundamental — arguably the ultimate — facet of Palestinian resistance, that certainly exists, and is even moving currently in Palestine, but that Westerners are not permitted either to engage with or even acknowledge the existence of.
The results of this are, I believe, best formulated as a series of questions and, for what they are worth, my thoughts. I will say at the outset that, though constantly enraged and overtly pained at its horror, of the many online pro-Palestine accounts I observe, those who are staying most lucid, upbeat, humorous, and in all ways mostly sane in the current Israeli killing spree are those who document Palestinian (and Yemeni, Lebanese, Iraqi and Syrian) armed resistance to the Israeli project and its US backers. While it is hard to make such judgments for sure, I would propose that this apparent ease is a result of making the supremely logical deduction that violence can legitimately if not exclusively be resisted by violence. This is equally to claim the internationally-sanctified right to resist as yours to wield, and this, in turn, is your insistence on existing as a full human.
By contrast, those who have in both actions and mentality acquiesced to the proscription of armed Palestinian resistance, appear to exist in by far the worse emotional state as the current horrors mount. This is not to lessen their sacrifice, nor to belittle the (also sacred, precious) insistence on non-violent resistance, but it is to outline some of the vulnerabilities that this mindset might fall victim to. Because, quite simply, to pass-up one’s right to armed resistance is to put one’s faith for the liberation of Palestine in US Presidents like the cowardly, racist and enfeebled Joe Biden, or his no-less cowardly “top diplomat”, Antony Blinken. It is to put faith in Protestant fanatics like the EU “President” — a ceremonial role and herself a Nazi heiress — Ursula von der Leyen, or Germany’s Olaf Scholz. It is to entrust Palestinian liberty to the cretinous likes of social climbers such as Rishi Sunak, pathological liars like Keir Starmer, or the Murdoch media and other billionaire moguls who created the conditions time and again for Palestinian destruction. It is, in short, to believe in either false hope or hopelessness, and to believe that those who have been bent upon, or indifferent to, Palestinian destruction, are actually those best-placed to deliver Palestinian liberation. In this, of course, are the conditions for a mental unmooring from sanity, and with it an endless despair.
None of this is to lessen the amazing, brave, innovative and tenacious insistence evident in so many courageous direct actions, of simply standing in a street for Palestine, of refusing to let your social media channels revert to normalcy, of boycotting Israeli or US companies. All these acts are also essential to the struggle and will take their place eventually in liberation, but as they are being undertaken it is maybe important to know that armed resistance is also a legally sanctified part of the resistance, and so — if it helps — people might be well-advised to take that existence as a component if not an anchor in their sanity, for it is only by the existence of a full spectrum in resistance that one’s own resistance can make full sense.
Where does this leave Palestinians?
Because, as noted, an armed Palestinian resistance to efforts at genocide of Palestinians is inevitable and just, whether or not there is a reluctance or inability for Westerners to support or even witness this resistance is in some respects immaterial.
There are, however, certain ramifications to this. I recently heard a UK journalist, well-meaning enough, suggest that the best way to help Palestinians is to find the most wronged victim of Israeli aggression and amplify their story. This at times might not be entirely incorrect advice, though it poses significant questions and risks. Is coverage of Palestinian life, views, experience and struggle conditional on their being a victim? Does this create a perverse incentive to being made or perceived to be a victim? Does this not — criminally — require Palestinians to be harmed before they can be heard? Does this have a pernicious effect on Palestinian psyche where they are encouraged to see that they will only be seen where and if they are helpless or already wronged?
While these are all real risks and faults built-in to the Western demand for victims, the imperative is to understand that this psychology is a product of Western weakness and Western fault — Palestinians are not guilty for Western stupidity. Firstly, this leaves Westerners prey to the basic fault of living in error, of failing to make basic effort to understand the world correctly. As I recently saw one Palestinian activist note, it secondly leaves Westerners failing to learn from the invaluable strategic lessons that Palestinians have taken and refined in resistance to the despicable cruelty of Israeli military occupation. Given the different version of subjugation that Westerners clearly suffer under their own elites, this is a badly missed opportunity. The presumption must be that this Western insistence on our own stupidity and saviour role leaves Westerners the worse-off, while Palestinians should not internalise our failings as their own.
There are other, more practical, considerations. Just as the Revolution will not be televised, there is however also something to be said for not seeing acts of Palestinian resistance. Those videos and images released by Al-Qassam Brigades or Hezbollah are carefully framed not to give away locations. Informal footage, shot mostly on phones, that reveals Palestinian positions, particularly in gunfights as the Israelis invade West Bank refugee camps, are quickly condemned by resistance communities for jeopardising combatants and revealing either identities or positions. Given that “Middle East” war reporting has so often relied on the management of artificial spectacle, it is apt that the most significant front, the apex, of resistance to US regional domination— Palestine — is one we cannot be shown. Instead, stock images like the one that I head this essay with are often inserted.
Finally, relatedly, and again looking to Ukraine, it might be helpful to ask, as Ukrainian forces fall short and falter badly against Russian occupation, if an enhanced, televised spectacle of resistance tailored to and for Western audiences doesn’t in fact impoverish that resistance anyway. In the same way that a sugar-high is not sustaining, dopamine surges arguably make for poor barricade structures. Perhaps, relatedly, there is an invisible power, rather than indulging the outlet and the displacement of spectacle, to each of us doing the absolute utmost we can in our own arena to force the outcome we demand, while knowing that in a different arena that is a different utmost that is you can be sure being performed by someone else. Without even needing to be visualised, a chain of insisting upon our outcome takes global shape.
Where does this leave the Israelis?
It might seem an odd question to ponder what difference it makes to the Israelis whether Westerners do or don’t see Palestinian armed resistance. Nonetheless the question seems worth asking.
Firstly, depending on the extent of the censorship, a total outside unawareness of what is currently the most meaningful Palestinian resistance can cause despondency in Palestinian support, and thus for Palestinians connected to global attention; this is in turn an asset for the Israelis. In a war full of psy-ops and manipulated propaganda, this is a real threat.
Secondly, Israelis are impressionable; they are a small and heavily brainwashed country that actually places a great emphasis on Western attention to them. This is one of many reasons that a total boycott, cultural and academic, of the Israelis should be seen as a valuable long-term strategy against the occupation. As some of the sick messages written by Israelis on warheads destined for Gaza attest, some referencing US popular culture, Israelis consume significant amounts of Western culture and media. In some respects, there has been no better example of the shallow, imported and violent culture brought by the Israelis to Palestine than a warhead marked with a message for Matthew Perry, an actor in the nineties US sitcom, Friends.
In all of this, the fact that Westerners have disappeared or invisibilised Palestinian resistance helps Israelis in the conviction that they are not fighting an adversary that is globally validated. They need not see that adversary because nor has that opponent been seen by the Westerners from which Israelis take so many social and cultural cues. This absence of a globally viewed resistance personhood, one that the Israelis must ultimately sit and make a full and fair peace with, in turns lessens the sense of impetus or possibility among Israelis to see that both that collective person, and that moment, is coming upon them anyway. In its own small, psychological way, this hinders the mental preparations for resolution of the conflict. People find it easy to feel sorry (or not) for those represented as victims, but far less likely to respect them. When you are a society as steeped in supremacist, colonial violence as the Israelis have been, people are less likely again to feel compelled to make peace with those who are represented as victim. There is an incredible tradition of Palestinian writers and intellectuals who do rightly command international respect, but Western liberals need only look to their own sorry societies for an answer on whether violent thugs willingly make peace with intellectuals and artists.
Thirdly, lastly, the absence of reporting, in its failure to accurately express the potential threat, to express the capacity of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian resistance, from West Bank to Gaza, to Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria — resistance across, in short, an entire region that the US and the Israelis have made enemies out of — encourages the Israelis to walk into escalation after escalation, each new one of which accumulates on top of the last until a final threshold is reached, crossed, and an unstoppable conflict spreads across many countries. This is a conflict from which the deeply complicit US and European militaries will not be immune, nor will Western societies be immune from those civilians escaping the conflict, or those carrying it to genocide-complicit Western governments, just as Western governments have carried conflict to the people of Palestine.
Accurate reporting of resistance quite simply then, and perhaps most importantly of all, obliges the Israelis to see clearly the mistakes they are making.
**In some respects this piece of writing is a follow-up, but can also be continued, by reading this fantastic essay on Mondoweiss. It is an exceptional and essential outline of how the Al-Aqsa Flood operation needs to be understood as military strategy and not as random violence. The latter framing contributes to an understanding of Palestinians as irrational, or hateful. The former, correct framing, accurately describes a psychology of resistance.