Waleed Hammad - وليد حماد

I find nothing less morally or philosophically interesting than pontificating on how the traumatized prisoners of a horrible concentration camp should have conducted themselves once they broke free of its confines. As far as I'm concerned everything that happened on that day was the result of generations of Israeli abuse, the British decisions which made it all possible, and the American backing which has kept it going. Israeli policies created Hamas. I don’t mean this in the usual “Netanyahu boosted Hamas to sabotage peace and undermine its more moderate rivals” sense, I mean it in the "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable" sense. If you stomp out every possible peaceful avenue of resistance, naturally you’re going to see the rise of factions which favor violent resistance. One of my most formative experiences in understanding this conflict happened in 2018 when I watched Israeli soldiers firing on protesters with sniper rifles and live ammo. B’Tselem explicitly denounced this as unlawful. There’s nothing that could possibly make such a thing okay, and it was a very clear illustration of the way Israel has cut Palestinians off from all the normal pathways toward peaceful resolution. I said when all this started that I believe the Hamas attack will ultimately be a net negative for Palestinians, but that I can’t in good conscience “condemn Hamas” because nobody can articulate a positive direction that Palestinians should be taking. The fact that all peaceful avenues of resistance have been cut off is not the fault of the Palestinians, and it’s not the fault of Hamas. It’s the fault of the Israeli government. Hamas is just what you get when you create an intolerably abusive apartheid state which keeps millions of people in a concentration camp whose inhabitants are cut off from basic human needs. Hamas isn’t the disease, it’s a symptom of the disease. The disease is an apartheid settler-colonialist project which cannot exist without endless violence, warfare and abuse.