The Hamas incursion was less Israel’s 9/11 and more a Palestinian Tet Offensive, says John Wight. No ugly oppression has ever given rise to a pretty resistance.
Frantz Fanon during a press conference of the Writers Congress in Tunis in 1959. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
By John Wight
Special to Consortium News
“When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.”
— Frantz Fanon
Israel’s murderous assault on the people of Gaza — over this past year — with the material, diplomatic and political support of the collective West — has been tantamount to witnessing a rabid dog ripping the flesh from the bones of what many had allowed themselves to believe was a world worth living in. At this point, it is not.
Israel’s ongoing exercise in mad slaughter is of a piece with the rage unleashed by the slaveowner in response to recalcitrant slaves daring to break out of the plantation. And it is here where we understand the real “crime” of the Palestinians of Gaza – refusal to remain in the place accorded them by their colonizer and oppressor. That is, on their metaphoric knees, defeated and broken in mind, body and spirit.
This is the true significance of Oct. 7 2023. It proved to the Israelis and their Western backers that despite their condition as a people confined to a latter-day reservation, that despite the racist disregard for their humanity, the Palestinians remain defiant. It also revealed a level of planning and ingenuity that no colonized people is ever supposed to be able to achieve.
Nobody understood or articulated the psychology of the oppressed better than legendary anti-colonialist militant and thinker, Frantz Fanon: “Violence,” he once wrote,
“frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”
Fanon may have died in 1961, but his analysis of Western colonialism, its brutality and the dehumanizing impact it has on its victims — forging psychological chains of oppression and self-hatred which can only be broken via a “murderous and decisive struggle” against the colonizer — remains apposite over five decades since it appeared in his classic work, The Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon wrote the book in the midst of the epic struggle for national liberation that was taking place between the Algerian people and their French colonial masters, pitting the might of a first world European power against a poorly armed, but popularly supported anti-colonial insurgency. It was a fierce and bitter conflict which raged over eight long years, between 1954 and 1962.
Ultimately, the Algerian people’s quest for national liberation proved stronger than France’s ability to retain a North African colony it had possessed since the 1830s. By the time the conflict ended, marked by French President Charles De Gaulle’s pronouncement that the Algerian people had the right to determine their own future, 1.5 million had perished, of whom the vast majority were Algerian.
Oct. 7 was less Israel’s 9/11 and more a Palestinian Tet Offensive. It was a scream from the bowels of structural oppression, a reassertion of the self-respect Fanon recognized in the violence of a colonized and oppressed people. It was, in sum, the killing rage of those who refuse to accept the status of an unpeople.
In the spirit of Geronimo, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. In the spirit of the Mau Mau, the spirit of Irish revolutionary leader James Connolly of Easter Rising 1916 fame. In the spirit of Bobby Sands and the other Irish Hunger Strikers who gave their lives for freedom in 1981. In the spirit of every anti-colonial resistance movement and struggle there has ever been, the Palestinians of Gaza on Oct.7, 2023, dared to say ”No!”
Palestinian protesters in Gaza on Oct. 17, 2023. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
The resulting wave of total violence unleashed upon the Palestinian people since is not that of a just cause. It is precisely the opposite. As with the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, and the British in Ireland, this Zionist settler-colonial project has failed on its own terms. It can only be sustained by extreme violence and slaughter, such is its unsustainability on the basis of its supremacist idea.
The simple and unvarnished truth is you cannot keep 2.2 million people confined to a latter-day Indian reservation for 17 years, control their access to electricity, clean drinking water, and all the necessities of life, while also denying them freedom of movement, dignity, hope and a future. No, you can’t do all that and expect next-to-no resistance.
This is the context in which Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, launched by Palestinians in Gaza one year ago today, must be understood. No ugly oppression has ever given rise to a pretty resistance. History leaves no doubt of it.
The pretext for this audacious Palestinian operation was the repeated violation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem — Islam’s third holiest site, during Ramadan in 2023. It was also predicated on the unrelenting refusal to accept the normalization of their condition as a colonized and dispossessed people across the Arab and Muslim world.
Gaza today lies in ruins. Over 40,000 have been killed so far in Israel’s orgy of revenge. There will be those, understandably, who will question the rationale behind Oct. 7, given the extent of the suffering that has been visited on the people of Gaza in its wake. But there is a marked difference between chronological and historical time. And with the latter in mind, it is still too soon to tell if it was worth it.
But thinking about this particular question on a deeper level, this would impose the norms of the uncolonized onto the colonized. In truth, the real question we should be asking ourselves one year on is this: What choice did they have? When the choice is between living on your knees or dying on your feet, is there really any choice involved at all?
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Nothing about the holocaust perpetrated by Zionists in Palestine is limited to the past year or even to the past century. It is as much the implementation of a long term plan of mass murder and ethnic cleansing as has ever been carried out by any group utterly lacking is scruples or decency, none excepted. It reflects the low point of humanity.
Well said.
Sadly nothing in MSM or media websites has acknowledged from what I can see though not researching it, the focus is only on October 7 for Israel full of images and videos of vigils. And yes, they lost loved ones but next to nothing to zero of the genocide in Gaza, the maimed, shredded children and civilians dead and more under the rubble.
The death toll will eventually treble whilst compared to a census if those records even exist anymore. All has been said and discussed by historians and I am not one, the plight of the Palestinians is well documented. Were it not for the South Africans plea and I have read this judicious document, the Palestinians would still be languishing in their prison forgotten by the world.
It’s a sorrowful political tand in my view the flailing empire of Great Britain had no right to give away land to foreign people that was not their land to give away.
In spite of the U.S. National Security having little or no clue about some aspects of their responsibilities, continuous lying misrepresenting factual evidence, creating their own reality in the process and the U.S. Intelligence community falling to the same errors using common sense, the U.S. government has performed miserably over the last sixty years or so.
In my opinion this is all traced back to the lack of leadership from the White House and Congress and the domination of these services by right winged zealots.
More and more war like and less and less creative and a void of humanistic values.
We now have groups striving to take control, the Zionists and Christian Nationalists leading the drum beating and foreign lobbyist controlling congress by feeding cash to those who support the MICCIMAT.
Look around do you feel safer not than you did with JFK.
Oh, darn I forgot the evil doers stood by and watched as he was murdered No, 22, 1963. Those of you who were not born until after 1951-1952 are clueless because you government has with held the truth about that murder.
Get over it and get your damned heads on straight, it’s your duty if you expect to find freedom and liberty that is genuine.
Great stuff here.
Thanks CN
The obfuscation and lies is blinding. Less war and less reinvention of the truth. Broadcast live minute by minute by brave Palestinians – because we all see it live. All the journalists, doctors, ambulance services and more services murdered is not self defense . It is silencing the truth. We see it as IDF soldiers gleefully post their murderous rampage in women’s underwear whilst dancing and singing on social media. The western world remains silent. The most moral army?
Tremendous article… Many thanks to Mr. Wight for this brilliant work..
And the date the Nakba commenced has no meaning at all??? Over 75 years of suffering just shoved under the rug (made in Iran!).
The meaning of Oct. 7th was clearly shown by Netanyahu in Sept. 2023. Netanyahu stood up at the podium of the UN and held up his map of the “New Middle East” which showed Palestine completely obliterated and gone and only a big area of Israeli blue covering it.
That picture said more than 1000 words, and very clearly illustrated the “Meaning of Oct. 7th”.
Interestingly, the picture is mostly missing one year later. Even though that one picture explains everything that has occurred in the last 12 months.
Fanon is always relevant!
While I greatly respect Fanon, his comment about the murderous history of Europeans appears to omit acknowledging, say, Aztecs, Mongols, the incessant intertribal warfare that characterized the indigenous nations of both the Americas and Africa, etc.
The “Left” tends these days to quote Mr. Fanon very selectively. We might do well to remember these words of his as well, from “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952): “My black skin is not a repository for specific values. I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission; there is no white burden…I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.”
“you cannot keep 2.2 million people confined to a latter-day Indian reservation for 17 years” !!
A typo surely ? This has been ongoing since, at least, 1948 – 76 years.
Arguably (& without understanding this comments ironic intent), this commenter cites the history of say the Seminole tribe…
Just to clarify Steve, the 17 year reference in the article denotes the period during which Gaza has been under siege after the Israelis withdrew in 2005. Of course, you are absolutely correct, this crime has been ongoing since 1948, when the State of Israel exploded in the midst of the Palestinians with the force of meteorite.
Since then, the record show, the Palestinians have endured countless October 7s.
Regards, J
Indeed. I would argue that the world is still trying to emerge from the horrors of colonialism. The old “colonial powers” don’t seem to understand that most people don’t like being pushed around and controlled by a foreign power. Thus we see France being totally baffled while their efforts to control their old colonies by way of financial control rather than the imposed political system are being rebuffed. Britain has much the same problem.
Yes Frantz Fanon is always relevant when it comes to the need to understand oppressors masquerading as freedom protectors.
Viva Gaza!
Wight’s Medium site is under the name johnwight1
A terrific and to the point article. Exactly.
In America in the South during the slavery years, the ugly word that was used to describe slaves that refused to completely submit was “getting uppity.” Slaves who got uppity, like not keeping your eyes down when in the presence of a white man or woman, were harshly punished. Getting uppity was the first step toward outright rebellion and had to be squashed. The whole despicable situation of one person purporting to own or control another, like also the situation with the Palestinians, is summed up in that phrase “getting uppity.” Apparently, the US has not outgrown but rather expanded its slave-owner mindset. I would include coups, regime change and sponsoring “color revolutions” in sovereign nations in that, as well.
“And with the latter in mind, it is still too soon to tell if it was worth it.”
Inasmuch as Oct 7 has awakened the world to the plight of Palestinians and provoked some of the most attended protests, it has at least revealed the despicable rhetoric and heinous actions of the zionist entity named israel. This support for Palestine and now Lebanon will never diminish in the eyes of those who have seen the truth of the genocidal israelis.
For over a half century the despicable rhetoric and heinous actions of Israel should have been obvious to anyone paying attention and especially to the U.N. whose international laws and covenants have prohibited them (though even longer ago than that). The principal obstacle to U.N. action has been the U.S. veto in the Security Council but the U.N. could have been taking steps to remove that obstacle had it had the courage to try to.
Given that Israel professes to be a democracy its citizens will bear the stain of their atrocities just as long as the Nazi’s (from whom they obviously learned their behavior) will forever bear theirs. I’m not an absolute pacifist until Israel is brought to heel and takes every possible step to make reparations for its decades-long horrors.
Very well said, Mr.Todd!
Very well said!!