Resistance vs. Terrorism
My last post got me thinking about what I meant by the terms 'terrorism' and 'resistance'. Militant Palestinian actions are always portrayed as terrorism in the US, without a critical assessment of whether Palestinians hold the right to at least some forms of resistance, and if so whether the actions of various Palestinian organizations including Hamas constitute terror.
First, let's take up the issue of resistance. I will assert that if a person considers the US' war on Iraq to have been legal, then that person, to maintain consistency of thought, must also hold that Palestinians have the legal right to militant resistance. I am deliberately using the term legal, as I'm not sure if violent action of any kind is ethically justifiable. That is an altogether different, and far more difficult, issue. But again, conditional on your judgment of the US war as legal, then the Palestinians also have a legal right to resistance.
The argument is quite simple really, and straightforward. Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, according to several UN Security Council resolutions. An indigenous population has the right to militant resistance under illegal occupation, also according to UN resolutions. Thus if you consider the UN to be a legally meaningful and binding authority, then the Palestinians have the right to resist, both peacefully and violently.
To close the loop, the US asserted its own right to invade Iraq as having been drawn from UN Security Council resolutions with respect to Iraq's responsibility to disarm and prove its innocence from maintaining a nuclear weapons program. The US' international pretext of war on Iraq was thus based on the same legal metric as the one I'm using for the Palestinians' right to resist. Thus, if you believe the US had the right to invade, then you must also believe that Palestinians have the right to resist. Good ol' sentential logic is sufficient for this.
The second issue is whether the current forms of militant resistance, as practiced by say Hamas, are legitimate forms of resistance. On the whole, and I'm saying this with the caveat of not being a Palestinian and never having set foot on Palestine, I think that those tactics are not legitimate. They have repeatedly invoked haphazard acts of violence, whose object were military and civilian targets alike. Granted Israel has engaged in egregious acts of collective punishment, and the US' war on terror has had its share of ethical lapses and debacles. Furthermore in both of the latter cases those nations were in positions of power, rendering a moral equivalence between Palestinian actions and Israeli actions untenable. Nonetheless, if we were again to take the UN's definition of legitimate resistance, the various Palestinian groups' inability to only target military targets, and limit civilian casualties, constitutes an illegitimate form of resistance. Not right or wrong, simply illegal.
First, let's take up the issue of resistance. I will assert that if a person considers the US' war on Iraq to have been legal, then that person, to maintain consistency of thought, must also hold that Palestinians have the legal right to militant resistance. I am deliberately using the term legal, as I'm not sure if violent action of any kind is ethically justifiable. That is an altogether different, and far more difficult, issue. But again, conditional on your judgment of the US war as legal, then the Palestinians also have a legal right to resistance.
The argument is quite simple really, and straightforward. Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, according to several UN Security Council resolutions. An indigenous population has the right to militant resistance under illegal occupation, also according to UN resolutions. Thus if you consider the UN to be a legally meaningful and binding authority, then the Palestinians have the right to resist, both peacefully and violently.
To close the loop, the US asserted its own right to invade Iraq as having been drawn from UN Security Council resolutions with respect to Iraq's responsibility to disarm and prove its innocence from maintaining a nuclear weapons program. The US' international pretext of war on Iraq was thus based on the same legal metric as the one I'm using for the Palestinians' right to resist. Thus, if you believe the US had the right to invade, then you must also believe that Palestinians have the right to resist. Good ol' sentential logic is sufficient for this.
The second issue is whether the current forms of militant resistance, as practiced by say Hamas, are legitimate forms of resistance. On the whole, and I'm saying this with the caveat of not being a Palestinian and never having set foot on Palestine, I think that those tactics are not legitimate. They have repeatedly invoked haphazard acts of violence, whose object were military and civilian targets alike. Granted Israel has engaged in egregious acts of collective punishment, and the US' war on terror has had its share of ethical lapses and debacles. Furthermore in both of the latter cases those nations were in positions of power, rendering a moral equivalence between Palestinian actions and Israeli actions untenable. Nonetheless, if we were again to take the UN's definition of legitimate resistance, the various Palestinian groups' inability to only target military targets, and limit civilian casualties, constitutes an illegitimate form of resistance. Not right or wrong, simply illegal.
Comments
Post a Comment