In defence of Palestinian resistance
18 December 2023
Greg Mills accuses me of having no ‘moral compass’ because I support the right of all oppressed people to resist, and to resist armed oppression with armed resistance. My principles are universal, they apply in all situations. In the same way I oppose all forms of racism. Naturally this includes anti-Semitism which is a form of racism.
Mills, however, appears indifferent to the lives of Palestinians, and other Muslims. He has been directly involved in imperialist oppression, and remains complicit with it. In 2006 he was a special advisor to the commander of the Nato forces occupying Afghanistan.
Today the board of the Brenthurst Foundation which Mills directs includes Richard Myers the Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the USA and Nick Carter, the Former Chief of the Defence Staff, in the United Kingdom. Myers and Carter both took leading roles in the destruction of Iraq following the invasion led by the US in 2003.
The destruction of Iraq, at the price of over a million lives, is widely recognised as a war crime and yet Mills happily consorts with perpetrators of the most horrific war crime in a generation. He does not show an ounce of the concern he lavishes on the lives of people in Israel and Ukraine for the lives of Iraqis and other Arabs. His racism is rank.
I oppose all forms of racism, support the right of all people living under military occupation to armed resistance and opposed and regret all loss of civilian life. I hold these principles without regard to the race of the oppressor or the oppressed.
Mills does not engage with the situation in Gaza or the West Bank with any factual rigour, and the same is true of his attack on myself where he wholly ignores the context of my remarks. For instance, he says that Hamas has an “ideology to eliminate Israel and Israelis” and uses this claim to compare Hamas to Nazis.
The 2017 Hamas Charter, which remains current, clearly states it is in conflict “with the Zionist project not with the Jews” and that it “rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds." It correctly describes the Zionist project as a "racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist project based on seizing the properties of others" and correctly asserts the right of the victims of Zionism to take up arms against their oppressors but does not, in anyway, call for attacks on Jewish people because they are Jewish people. The Hamas Charter reveals the Palestinian Struggle to be no different to the South African struggle which was waged against the abominations of the Apartheid system and colonial dispossession of land, not against Whites because they were White.
My personal view is that there should be a single secular democratic state with rights for all – along the lines of post-apartheid South Africa – in the territory of historical Palestine but the 2017 Hamas charter does not call for the replacement of the Israeli ethno-state with a single inclusive state and clearly accepts a two state solution with a Palestinian state contiguous with the 1967 borders.
In terms of his attack on myself Mills takes a statement out of context - always a shortcut for those who decline to stay the course of critical thinking and journalistic integrity.
In an address at a private meeting of approximately 40 trade unionists and activists on 24 November, my words on the success of the military raid on the Israeli Gaza Division undertaken by Hamas on 7th October, were as follows:
“They swept on them and they killed them and damn good. I was so pleased and people who support resistance applauded, absolutely. If we had been able to spring a surprise on the Boers and knock down a hundred of them, the people would have been rejoicing to the rooftops. It's the struggle, the armed struggle and in International Law, the occupied people are [justified]. It's accepted International Law that they have the right to that kind of resistance.”
In the context of my talk and discussion I was referring to the Israeli military garrison, cruelly imprisoning the people of Gaza for over sixteen years, having tormented and killed thousands in that period – “mowing the lawn” as the IDF phrase describes massacre after massacre.
Palestinians have the same right to armed resistance as black South Africans had under apartheid, and as all oppressed people do. The October 7th raid penetrating the militarised Gaza border followed 16 years of the brutal Gaza siege and a history of oppression going back to 1967, and indeed all the way back to 1947-48. Supporters of the oppressed will always rejoice in their achievements against the oppressor.
At the same time empathy for any civilian victim is felt. This is felt for civilians who died on 7 October. Such rejoicing is no different to the way in which we celebrate military defeats against every oppressive state – from Nazi Germany to Apartheid South Africa - while regretting civilian causalities.
Those who wish to say that all celebration of military success is perverse are silent about the fact that the Zionists of what was deemed a Jewish Resistance Movement celebrated foul atrocities committed in the founding of a state on land soaked with the blood and tears of its indigenous Palestinian population. They forget that the IDF and Settler militias continuously celebrate their abhorrent undertakings growing more brutal by the day, as seen in the wild settler pogroms on the West Bank, in East Jerusalem as in the Gaza genocide. We may ask who has the true right to celebration, the oppressor or the oppressed?
The 7 October incursion by Hamas and other resistance groups comprised two elements:
the legal and justifiable military operation against the IDF and the illegal taking of civilian captives. The latter admittedly a breach of international law but an action holding validity in terms of the intention to secure an exchange for detainees, including women and children, held in Israeli prisons without charge, with little chance of fair trial and under appalling conditions. The offer of an exchange of captives was extended by Hamas within 48 hours of the event.
With regard to the tragedy of violent civilian deaths, completion of the initial phase of military attack was compromised by the music festival, an obstacle to access to command centres. The ensuing carnage was exacerbated by the IDF's chaotic arrival on the scene, which as the shooting of three Israeli hostages by Israeli soldiers on 15 December showed, is far from a model of military efficiency.