Palestinians have the right to armed struggle and we should support them

The daily atrocities committed against Palestinians – the murders, the massacres, the raids, the bombing, the starvations, the demolitions, the invasions, the theft, the jailings, the blockades, everything – there's no amount of verbal support that can help the Palestinians confront this ceaseless nightmare of grief and loss and an unceasingly, utterly merciless and cruel, genocidal, nuclear-armed, technologically-sophisticated state that has never shown any intention of stopping even for the most simplest of human needs and dignities – not even for pallbearers at the funeral of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, who was very likely assassinated by israeli snipers, and so many more.

Palestinians have every right to self-defence under international law to fight invaders and massacrers on their own land.

But international law has failed nations from Palestine to Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya and more which have been left torn apart and in complete poverty after the most despicable western imperialism. Even before that, international law held no sway.

In the time of the Soviet Union, there was at least a power that provided support to some nations facing the wrath of the Western colonial and imperial powers. Not only that, but it was the Soviet Union that liberated many Jewish people and more who were under genocide from Nazi Germany in concentration camps.

Especially after the collapse of the USSR/CCCP – which was engineered by the US with the toppling of an Afghan socialist government after which the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and was also economically drained against the arms race with the US – the West has gone further largely unchallenged as it has killed and maimed millions, torturing people, without a single consequence under international law.

The violent and rich have been left to roam as they please, stealing other countries' resources and massacring and wading in blood.

It has gone almost totally unchallenged. The only avengers have been those labelled as terrorists who use the most extreme means, but what they are talking about and rallying against is what countless others in occupied and colonised nations have also rallied and fought against. In "Letter to America" in 2002, Osama bin Laden highlighted what the Palestinian people face.

(1) As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.
(a) You attacked us in Palestine:
(i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And, of course, there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. […]
(ii) It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah. Anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact is accused of anti-Semitism. This is one of the most fallacious, widely-circulated fabrications in history. The people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites. It is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be upon him) and the inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed. Muslims believe in all of the prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, peace and blessings of God be upon them all. If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.
(iii) The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.

(b) You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon.[…]

(c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis;
(ii) These governments give us a taste of humiliation, and places us in a large prison of fear and repression.
(iii) These governments steal our resources, the rightful wealth of the Ummah [the People of Islam], and sell them to you at a paltry price.
(iv) These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people.
(v) The removal of these governments is an obligation upon us, and a necessary step to free the Ummah, to make shariah the supreme law and to regain Palestine. And our fight against these governments is not separate from our fight against you.

(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.

(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sacred places, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.

(f) You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern!!

(g) You have supported the Jews in their idea that Jerusalem is their eternal capital, and agreed to move your embassy there. With your help and under your protection, the Israelis are planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque.

(2) These tragedies and calamities are only a few examples of your oppression and aggression against us.

I would wish nothing less for the Palestinian people than for my own people – total freedom and independence, total dignity of life.

Going further, this is a situation where I would call for support to arm and liberate Palestine. My people in Việt Nam received arms support as they fought against the French colonisers and American imperialists on their land.

Calls for Israel to stop, or for it to agree to a ceasefire are not stopping it. In the meantime, Palestinians have the right to armed self-defence, in the face of genocide and occupation. We should not leave them to this fate, not in the least to face it alone.

The Third World has been engaged in armed struggle since the beginning of colonisation and especially over the last few decades.

It is well-known, the saying, "those who make non-violent revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."

Pioneering Australian dissident journalist Wilfred Burchett wrote this about A Spurned Olive Branch back in Việt Nam, published back in 1977.

President Johnson's reaction to all this was astonishingly close to that predicted by Nguyen Duy Trinh. At a TV press conference on February 2, the President backed away from all his previous proposals and called for "reciprocity" in exchange for a bombing halt, something which he knew in advance was unacceptable to Hanoi. He spoke of "mutual steps" of de-escalation, but the point was that Hanoi was not bombing the United States—it was the U.S. that was bombing North Viet-nam. 

Why should Palestinians and freedom fighters and Hamas have to agree to "mutual de-escalation" when it's not them simultaneously starving, bombing, murdering, and raiding the home of Israelis and countless more, but Israel is to Palestinians?

Burchett also wrote:

All that Wilson and Kosygin got was the customary snub reserved for all those who—no matter how high their status—tried to take the Vietnam War away from the Pentagon.

If all this is mentioned in some detail, it is only to underline that at every stage of the Indochina conflict—going all the way back to Dien Bien Phu—the United States could have had an infinitely better settlement from its viewpoint than the rat-like desertion of sinking ships that took place in Phnom Penh and Saigon in April 1975 and in Vientiane a month later. […] They had fallen into the trap which snapped tight on many distinguished U.S. diplomats—that of believing that U.S. policies were those which were publicly proclaimed by U.S. presidents and secretaries of state—when half the time these were soporifics to calm public opinion at home and abroad. That the Wilsons and Kosygins, or Fanfanis in Italy and De Gaulles in France, earnestly worked away to produce solutions which they were convinced were those the White House wanted, was the least of the worries of the Johnsons, Nixons and Fords. The bombings had been halted for just five days—too impossibly short for any serious diplomatic follow-up of the Nguyen Duy Trinh opening. The tonnage was steadily increased until, within six months, it was running at about twice the figure at the time of my interview with the foreign minister.

About settlement and compromise, for example: Russia finally had to resort to armed force when it realised that the West would not agree to a single compromise or ceasefire. Russia came to the table in Istanbul, Turkey, before former UK prime minister Boris Johnson screwed over those talks; in Minsk, Belarus for the Minsk I & II agreements before the relevant leaders from France and Germany admitted their intention was not for peace, but to buy time to arm Ukraine which was waging war against the people in the Donbass region; in Kiev, 2014, before the opposition broke an agreement to compromise on the EU economic deal and began Maidan; and more.

Palestine is not anywhere as resourced as Russia. It cannot fight for itself with that military power. And Palestine has so much more of a case for armed struggle.

There are endless cases where things could have been settled infinitely better beforehand. But the US and the West spurn them at every turn which just highlights their true intentions – settler-colonial states depend on the total annihilation of everyone and everything, physically and culturally, that was there before them. They cannot call themselves a new identity and they cannot call a new state into existence while there is evidence of anything otherwise and while there are any voices saying otherwise.

For settler-colonisers, Israel is a getaway and power projector just too convenient to lose.

Independent journalist Richard Medhurst highlights how Israel is a Western / European settler colony in the Middle East:

The Middle East is the latest front to be facing the atrocious barbarisms that the West has inflicted upon the world across hundreds of years – colonialism, genocides, slavery, occupation, invasion, theft, more – from Africa, to North and South Americas, to Asia, to Oceania.

The US has funded Israel to the tune of $4 billion a year before this, and supported Israel in various local wars over the past few decades. Israel is a nuclear-armed state with the most advanced technology, killing refugees and their descendants who have been violently driven out of their homes and massacred over more than the last 75 years. It is the most powerful against the most powerless.

Professor Norman Finkelstein has written about how Israel could have chosen peace with its neighbours but instead chose war:

But ultimately in my view it was not an intelligence failure, it was a political failure. Israel could have had peace, but born of the racist assumption that Arabs would not resist, it chose conquest. That was the problem then, and it seems to me, as I think Mouin will get to, it's the problem today. It's not fundamentally an “intelligence failure,” it's fundamentally a political failure because the political calculus of the Israelis was, and is, that you can so humiliate, so subdue the Arabs, and they’re so inherently incompetent, that at the end of the day, force will prevail and the Arabs in general – or the Palestinians in particular – will acquiesce.

[Source: Norman Finkelstein on Substack]

There is no accident in any of this.

To stop the exterminations and genocides, there is nothing less than this:

We, the peoples of the world, must unequivocally support Palestine, politically, financially, militarily and by all other means necessary.

If Australia and all these other states pull out funding for the UNRWA, then let millions of us in the world provide funds for Palestinians in response.

If Israel keeps denying Palestinians food, electricity and fuel, let us forge ways to connect Palestinians with access to the most basic of human needs again.

In declaring war, extermination and genocide on Palestinians and countless more, let Israel and the West know that it already has declared war on every single one of us, and let us fight back.

Because if the West could invade and occupy countless of indigenous nations in the Americas and in Oceania and the Pacific, it could do that to anyone else, as it has in Palestine. Because if the West could bomb Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia without a single legal consequence, it could also bomb Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and more without a single legal consequence. Because if the West could brutally colonise and enslave Africa, it could brutally colonise and enslave everyone on the rest of the planet. War on any single one of us means war on us all. We must understand that.