What is the Ethical Way to Climb Out of Hell?
“We revolt simply because, we can no longer breathe.” — Frantz Fanon
Over the past week, the western left has fallen over itself in “denouncing terrorism.” Despite mainstream liberal support for Palestine when the world mostly saw videos of children throwing rocks at tanks, the moment Palestinians formed a strategic attack in response to 75 years of ethnic cleansing and living in an open-air prison, unprincipled leftists have joined the mainstream news in spreading war propaganda. We have heard unsubstantiated claims about Hamas beheading 40 babies, sexually violating a woman at a concert, photographs of children in cages — claiming to be Israeli children… only for every single one of those claims to be debunked, even by mainstream news such as CNN and BBC.
Despite this debunking, western leftists are still “condemning Hamas,” a political position that functionally supports the “both sides” narrative that Israel has crafted to justify what can be described as nothing less than war crimes: illegal use of white phosphorus bombs, bombing humanitarian corridors, forcing a mass exodus, use of collective punishment, bombing hospitals and ambulances; shutting off electricity and water, depriving Gaza of food, fuel, and medical aid; the murder of 1,000 children, beheading children (as reported by Noor Harazeen for CGTN); declaring war not just on Hamas, but the all citizens of Palestine (referring to Palestinians as “human beasts” who need to be wiped off the earth — rhetoric that is provoking hate crimes in the U.S and materially invokes the use of collective punishment).
The U.S. and NATO have a long legacy of faking news stories to manufacture support for war and genocide. In 2011, the U.S. (particularly Hillary Clinton) reported that Gaddafi was supplying Viagra to soldiers in order to sustain sexual violence as a weapon for war. This same accusation was weaponized against Russia last year. In 1990, a 15-year-old girl named Nayirah gave testimony before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus, detailing a story about Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and leaving the babies to die on the floor. After 9/11, George Bush and Dick Cheney claimed that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction, and that we needed to protect America by invading Iraq. In 2022 U.S. celebrities and internet influencers claimed that Iran had murdered 15,000 people in a single day, despite the shear impossibility and zero evidence.
All these accusations have been proven false with unreliable narrators and a lack of evidence, but it is always too late. These lies were used to justify and gain support for U.S. and NATO war mongering, which has destroyed entire countries, sanctioned countries (cutting off basic resources and supplies), slaughtered children, cost billions of dollars and countless lives, and made defense contractors and politicians filthy rich.
Meanwhile, understanding the history and reality of Hamas seems to uninterest the western left. It doesn’t matter that Hamas released a press conference explaining their cause and that they are not hurting children and women — further clarifying that such acts would go against Islam. It does not matter that despite the western world calling Hamas “terrorists,” that the UN has never classified Hamas as a terrorist group and that Netanyahu has funded ISIS and has labeled human rights organizations as terrorists. It doesn’t matter that Hamas is one of many political organizations in Gaza fighting for sovereignty and liberation. It doesn’t matter that Hamas was elected by the people. It doesn’t matter that Hamas’s charter explicitly states that they do not seek war with Jewish people, but rather Zionism as a settler-colonial project. It does not matter that Hamas has agreed to a two-state solution and has tried peace talks, which Israel rejected and sabotaged.
When the western left vaguely acknowledges these facts, they scoff: how can you believe what they say? They’re lying! I answer that, if Hamas was a terrorist group, they would have no need for slight-of-hand trickery or double-speak. Terrorist groups terrorize. They don’t water down their tactics because that would defeat the purpose of terror. Terrorists make videos that are meant to invoke fear, not reasonable calm press conferences, detailing how they are committed to treating the Israeli hostages with humanity.
The reason these details and facts don’t matter is because the western left suffers from a condition I call flat earth thinking. Flat earth thinking is a kind of cognitive dissonance, where the power dynamics of a political landscape are flattened, the historical context and facts are erased, and it is driven by the belief that the truth is always found by identifying the two binaries of any situation and seeking the middle ground. This is how people make conclusions about “both sides” being wrong. This is how people make perfunctory statements like “why can’t humans just get along.” This is how the left can make historically inaccurate statements like, “this war is just about religion.” This is how the western left functionally supports war and genocide under the guise of nuance.
A further example of flat earth thinking is when western leftists invoke Audre Lorde’s essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, arguing that violence is a tool of the colonizer and that to use violence to seek liberation, is just as bad. The missing context for this argument is that Lorde used that analogy to talk about how our differences should not merely be tolerated or tokenized, but rather seen as necessary to strengthening our interdependency; that the tool of “divide and conquer” will not create the solidarity needed to fight settler-colonialism and racial capitalism.
To understand Lorde’s stance on violence, we can look at her essay Uses of Anger. Here, Lorde details how our appropriate anger at racism is a fuel for creative growth and for creating clarification in our political ideologies. Lorde speaks to power dynamics by differentiating between hatred and anger, detailing the differences between the way oppressor groups use anger for racist and sexist violence, versus the way oppressed groups use anger for fighting back and liberation.
As the western left ignores history and power dynamics while denouncing “both sides,” many of us ask: what is the ethical way to climb out of hell? The answer invokes the words of Arundhati Roy: “Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theater. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.” Even the United Nations “reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid, and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”
Asking Palestinians to defend their own resistance is a product of flat earth thinking, which intentionally ignores Israel’s daily acts of violence and the 75 years of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, while Gaza does not even have a standing army in which to defend itself. To “denounce Hamas but stand with Palestine” is to promote the very narrative that Israel is using to justify genocide. Grief for the cost of violence is natural, but asking Palestinians to surrender to their own extinction for the sake of nonviolence is siding with the oppressor.
Do you think Palestinians do not feel their own grief? Are not in touch with or aware of the sacrifices that need to be made to protect their culture, land, homes, families, children, and future? Palestinians are demonstrating the deepest act of love we can know: the willingness to sacrifice their immediate safety for the future, the land, and the children.
Their bravery is a lesson to the world: if we want to save the people and the planet from the existential threat of imperialism and settler-colonialism, we must be prepared to fight. As Frantz Fanon writes in The Wretched Earth: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”
Preach pacifism to the defense contractors and politicians whose stocks skyrocket during war. Demand an end to genocide and land back to Palestine. Do not preach nonviolence to the Palestinians who have already tried nonviolent tactics and are now forced into defending themselves by any means necessary — or face extinction.
Violence is awful. Empire makes it inevitable. But even nurses find their place in war.
