Response to Branko Brkic on Blaming Hamas for the Gaza Genocide
Dear Mr Brkic,
I am a Daily Maverick Insider and the website is my first stop for South African news and journalism. You published an Opinionista piece, My personal struggle in a time of global pain. I wanted to reply and for some reason comments are disabled this morning on DailyMaverick.co.za, so here we are.
Firstly, I want to agree with you on the principle of humanist compassion. As we are excruciated watching Israel commit a “textbook genocide” of the Palestinian people, our compassion for suffering people ought never to be contingent on their identity, and atrocities remain atrocities, no matter who commits them. I’m sure we are in agreement so far.
Compassion demands a clear-eyed discernment, based on facts, of the gradients of ethics and responsibility involved in the catastrophe in Gaza and the West Bank. Universal compassion transcends the question of sides, but it does not blind us to situations of domination and oppression. It compels us to ask questions about facts and justice. Your newspaper exemplifies this principle.
Further, if we are willing to maintain a single standard, we should not expect anyone to have equal empathy with the oppressors as with the oppressed, as though there is a moral parity between them. It is alarming how quickly South Africans have forgotten this. Why would we condemn equally the use of violence towards resistance and liberation, which is legal in international law, as the use of violence towards oppression and subjugation, which is illegal? Why would we express equal empathy with an ethnocratic, settler-colonialist, apartheid state as with the indigenous population that state displaced, dispossessed, imprisoned and now murders en masse every four years? We might find it uncomfortable to answer these questions.
Compassion requires that we discern right from wrong. We must support the rights of oppressed people and we must condemn oppression — and as I’ll argue, condemn first and foremost — the structural violence inflicted by the settler-colonialist apartheid regime of Jewish-Israeli domination on the Palestinian people. And these words are not hyperbole; they are accurate to an objective account of evidenced facts, grounded in decades of systematic observation by academic and legal experts. Anyone who wants to take issue with that should first read the Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International reports, and/or listen to UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.
This is why I want to take factual issue with two lines from the same paragraph in your piece.
An act that defies comprehension
The 1,200 souls that perished and the 240 people who were taken hostage were victims of an act that defies comprehension.
Hamas’ attack on October 7th “defies comprehension” only if one is blind to the material realities that gave rise to it. That it included atrocities against civilians is true (and a minor note on this: an unknown number of civilian deaths on 10/7 were certainly caused by Israeli helicopters firing rockets indiscriminately at targets they could not identify as friend or foe). And atrocities need not preclude an understanding of their material causes. And when one appreciates the causes and conditions that gave rise to the Hamas attack, it becomes eminently comprehensible.
The Gazans who carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood were mostly young men, many of whom would have been born into a concentration camp (a term used approvingly by Israeli ministers, disapprovingly by others).
They could not leave.
Their entire lives since birth were contained and systematically oppressed by a belligerent occupying power who allowed a minimum level of calories into Gaza and could turn off electricity and water at will, and did so. In the West Bank, Israel forbade Palestinians to collect rainwater.
By age 20, young Gazans would have survived five, totally asymmetric wars, directly witnessing civilian massacres inflicted by Israel’s US-funded bombs and burned into their skin with white phosphorus. They would have heard Israelis describe this as “mowing the lawn in Gaza.” Very likely they would have had family members and friends killed by the IDF.
And for as long as they can remember, their every avenue for escape, political change, or self-determination has been denied and seems certain to be denied in perpetuity — unless they resist.
Does it defy comprehension that a violent act of resistance arose from people who want to break out of their prison, who have received no hope from the ‘international community’, who hate their oppressors because of the cruelty they have inflicted, and who want to take hostages to gain leverage against the occupying regime?
I think you will agree, this does not defy comprehension. The moment we understand the situation of people in Gaza, Hamas’ motivations become relatable, as though a mesmeric spell had been lifted. And this on its own is something of a disgrace, because we could not have been surprised by Hamas’ actions unless we had failed to empathise with Gazans. Our empathy has been selective, normalising the perspective of the apartheid occupiers over that of the indigenous occupied people.
To describe Hamas’ attack as an act beyond comprehension is to preclude understanding it, which is helpful only to the brutal, genocidal status quo. If it defies comprehension, why ponder it? Without context, Hamas’ actions arose without motivation, without cause, just mindless brutality. Perhaps they are militant, Jew-hating terrorists. Anyway, their attack on 10/7 was the uncaused cause of all this trouble and they can be blamed for all the consequences — as you then proceed to do.
They knew what they were doing
What was so shocking was that Hamas obviously knew very well what they were doing and what kind of suffering would be inflicted on their own people in return — and yet they went ahead in pursuit of destabilising the geopolitics of the region, betting on a violent response.
This line of thought is bankrupt.
To break it down logically at first:
- Hamas acted deliberately.
- Israel was sure to retaliate.
- Therefore, Hamas bears responsibility for the sufferings incurred by Israel’s retaliations and for the broader aftermath.
This just does not follow.
Firstly, we must note the view from international law: that a people under military occupation have the right to resist that occupation using force. The use of violence towards liberation is legal (as well as just) while the use of violence towards oppression and ethnic cleansing is illegal (as well as unjust). Hamas is a democratically elected indigenous resistance movement, while Israel is a belligerent military occupier. The view from international law is hardly ever mentioned, even though it ought to be the decisive final word in settling questions of justice in Palestine.
Secondly, if we condemn Hamas because Hamas knew what it was doing on October 7th, we need two qualifications.
The first is a factual note: as Ha’aretz reported, “There is a growing assessment in the security establishment that the terrorists who carried out the massacre on October 7 did not know in advance about the Nova festival held near Kibbutz Re’im, and decided to come to the place after discovering that a mass event was taking place there.” Hamas forces encountered the festival accidentally, after its location was changed at late notice, ending up situated between the exit point from Gaza and the military base Hamas was aiming for. Certainly what Hamas did at the festival included atrocities — however, that “they knew what they were doing” is not an altogether accurate way to characterise what took place.
The second is the principle of maintaining a single standard. If Hamas knew what it was doing on October 7th, Israel knew what it was doing on October 6th, October 5th, and every day since 1948. If we are willing to maintain a single standard, even setting aside that Hamas’ resistance is legal while Israel’s is illegal, why do we not place at least equal responsibility on Israel, given how much more wealthy and powerful its patronage has made it?
Subsequent to those two qualifications, we must face this challenge: if we regard violent reprisals as grounds for condemning the violent acts of resistance that preceded them, we will find ourselves condemning Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831, which killed 50–65 civilians in the American South, after which more than a hundred blacks were killed in retribution by militia and vigilante mobs. Or we might condemn the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, when a small group of poorly armed Jews resisted their Nazi occupiers, after which the Nazis razed their ghetto to the ground and killed the populace or sent them to death camps. Do we condemn these resistance fighters because “they knew what they were doing” and major retributive atrocities ensued? Do we realise how absurd it is to wish such an oppressed, desperate people might have thought more carefully about the bigger picture before “destabilising the geopolitics of the region”?
The argument blaming Hamas for Israel’s murders “because Hamas knew what they were doing” is a selective and fallacious sleight-of-hand by which we are invited to forget entirely the ends towards which each act of violence is a means: for Israel, ethnic cleansing; for Gazans, an eventual end to their 75-year systematic oppression by Israel and a return to their land. I don’t think it’s an acceptable argument from an editor who is serious about human rights, international law, and intellectual integrity.
While I want to reiterate my agreement with you on the importance of humanism, and reiterate my commitment to the principle of unconditional compassion, I’m also not aware of any revolution against injustice that has occurred without bloodshed. The idea that “no “leaders” should ever strive to destroy anything in the name of their people” strikes me as a wishful, liberal thought. It decries the violence of resistance in the same breath as the violence of oppression. It fails to make clear the ethics of justice in Israel/Palestine and suggests a parity of responsibility between the parties to the conflict that is the opposite of reality.
As you say of the horror unfolding in Gaza, “it has to stop”. That will be helped by also stopping the intellectually dishonest even-handedness of our condemnations. Israel is committing a genocide that is the inevitable result of its decades-long, ethnocratic, settler-colonialist project. We must stand unequivocally with the Palestinians against it.
Yours faithfully,
Patrick Madden
