The moral indignation and anger at Israel’s prolonged apocalyptic war on Gaza is transformative. Israel’s genocidal tyranny has moved the conscience of the whole world, triggered a huge global protest movement in the West against its colonialism and occupation, and radicalized a new generation of young activists. For a global majority, Palestine is now a cause for justice, democracy, and freedom.
Understandably, however, the yearlong war’s continuation and the United States’ unfettered support for Israel has brought deep frustration and anger. As US arms continue to flow to an Israel that remains protected from the wrath of global public opinion, protesters and activists legitimately feel ignored and sidelined by warmongering elites. They are right to be enraged at the continuation of the war, the ceaseless stream of images of death and destruction they see through their phones, and the degradation of their own democracy through the clampdown on support for Palestine.
But it would be a huge mistake to take one’s political cue from a very small minority of vocal activists who have turned legitimate anger and frustration at the drawn-out suffering of the Palestinians into a mindless embrace of violence — not least because this would play into the hands of those who want to see a popular antiwar mass movement discredited.
To be effective and political, moral outrage should feed strategic thinking. Political organizing is about identifying mechanisms and tactics that work in a given context — not embracing purist notions and magical formulas that discredit the movement and tar it with support for indiscriminate violence.
Most worryingly, some voices in the Palestinian solidarity movement have glorified Hamas’s October 7 attacks. Those are premised on the reasoning that the oppressed have a right to resist and that, therefore, the job of activists acting in solidarity is to defend and justify everything they do. But the former…
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Auteur: Bashir Abu-Manneh
