15 October 2023:

Even through all the years since the Nakba, when war crimes have been commonplace, when we count Palestinian deaths in the hundreds every year, and when “humanitarian disaster” is continuous and only changes by degrees, events in Palestine and Israel in this early October 2023 are testing us – our limits of understanding, our commitment, our moral certainty, and our sumud in the cause.

As soon as we learned the news on October 7, we anticipated the U.S. response to Stand with Israel in its self-defense, but what we are actually seeing is next level. The savagery of “like ISIS” scaremongering, the calls to 9/11 fears, and the undisguised, unashamed calls for genocide from officials of the U.S. government have left me reeling. Secretary of State Blinken’s call for considering a ceasefire had to immediately be deleted because members of Congress had not yet had enough deaths of Palestinians to satiate their nostalgia for a War on Terror; indeed, more instruments of war are on the way. Presidential candidate Nikki Haley asked Netanyahu to “finish them”, at various times seeming to refer to Hamas, Tehran, and/or Palestinians. The United States government has signed on for war crimes and genocide. In Israel, the widespread demonstrations against the Netanyahu government and concern over his far-right policies are gone and forgotten as the drums of war grow louder.

In a very different context and time, Thomas Paine wrote, “these are the times that try men’s souls”. Despite the male patriarchy of his perspective, the phrase is still apt. These days since October 7 do indeed try us; they test and afflict us and subject us to strain. And it happens in our souls, the most intimate place in each of us where we find our morality, our compassion, our strength of purpose. The pain we experience as we read the reports and view the images of death and destruction is deep, coming from the place that determines who we are and what we stand for. It lingers in every waking moment.

In such times, our cause of Palestinian liberation is under assault. We are a lonesome few in a crowd calling us to stand with Israel. Isolated at the best of times, withstanding these storms of fury in response to Palestinian resistance can try our commitment and require us to sound its depth. October 7 was different in that Hamas clearly took first action. It appeared to include seeking and killing Israelis who were not in uniform and not armed. This was a different sequence than we’re used to and some in the movement struggled to know how to respond to that violence. Some of us are happy to have Hamas as standard bearer, some of us are not. But the Palestinian Authority long ago squandered its claim to authority or even respect. The lack of unblemished resistance leadership does not negate or even compromise the validity of the cause.

The response to violence, what form it takes and when and by whom it is used, has been a challenge for some of us. But these trying times not only bring stress and strain, they also bring opportunities to deeply examine the cause we support. Can we go beyond the outraged righteousness when Palestinian teenagers are shot in the street by the IDF or children are detained or a home is demolished, and find our voice when Palestinian resistance takes such a violent turn? Can we recognize and acknowledge Hamas’ action as part of the resistance struggle?

Some of us have been reluctant to discuss Israel’s regime as one of settler colonialism. We argue that the terminology is too esoteric, too erudite for the people we want to reach. Checkpoints and occupation are more accessible concepts. But we must learn to think in anti-colonial terms and to use this language to help others understand what is at the core, at the root, of Palestinian oppression. Without this fundamental understanding, we run the risk of continuing to lose our bearings in the hardest times like these.

Hamas’ action is unmistakably part of the anti-colonial struggle that is necessary to liberate Palestinians, and decolonization is always violent. History affirms it over and over. Questioning the morality of that violence is a cynical imperialist ploy to deflect us from the root cause of the violence. To be in solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle, we must find our place in the hard truth of that.

The struggle for Palestinian liberation has entered a new phase and will continue to evolve as this new chapter develops, unpredictable though it is now, however horrifically destructive it proves to be. Amjad Iraqi’s recent analysis gives us the context and guidance that we need:

“Palestinian activists no longer care to tiptoe around diplomatic language or references to international laws that have failed them. They reject the amnesiac narrative that their grievances began in 1967 rather than 1948, and that their future lies in a quasi-state on only a fifth of their homeland rather than its entirety. They are tired of apologising for the use of violence, however ugly, as if violence were not an inherent part of all anti-colonial struggles, as if it were more egregious than the oppressive system they are trying to dismantle, and as if their non-violent efforts at boycotts and diplomacy were not similarly crushed and demonised as ‘terrorism’. For them, the enemy is and has always been a settler colonial movement bent on their erasure. Invoking decolonisation shouldn’t entail a zero-sum position that refuses to sympathise with what happened to Israeli families on 7 October, but neither should the killings be an excuse to consolidate Israel’s apartheid regime and abet its wrath.”

These are trying times. We can endure them and prevail, together, toward liberation and return.

Harry Gunkel