There is an episode in “The Mosquito Coast”, an Apple TV+ drama series about a family on the run from the US government, in which Margot, an environmentalist wanted for her role in a botched bombing of a biotech lab, and her teenage son Charlie converse on the topic of violence.

Asking her if it’s ok to use violence, Margot responds, “Sometimes I kind of do, yes. I think if your cause is a good one and if you’re left with no other choice. In fact, sometimes I think it’s more than okay. Sometimes it’s an obligation.”

I recently watched the series and this scene instinctively reminded me of the Palestinian armed resistance in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, fighting to stop the annihilation of their people, and the double standards by which Euro-Western discourse treats the issue of violence: viewing colonial violence as inherently good and anticolonial violence as fundamentally bad.

The West has propagated this perverse inversion of reality from Day 1 of Hamas’s October 7 revolt against "Israel", routinely engaging in poorly executed victim-perpetrator reversal antics. Most notably, the whataboutist Do-you-condemn-Hamas schtick and the Orwellian self-defence mantra that espouses an offender's right to defend themselves against their victims.

Manipulative gimmicks like these have desperately tried to obfuscate any truthful analysis of that historic date, described by novelist Susan Abulhawa in an October 12 opinion piece for The Electronic Intifada as the day “brave Palestinian fighters overtook Israeli colonies built on their ancestral villages.”

We can still see the real-world application of this upside-down, binary division between good and bad forms of violence in the continued asymmetrical treatment of the warring parties: Colonial violence is fêted and shielded at all costs, while anticolonial violence is punished.

According to journalist Abby Martin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is overseeing the Zionist settler colony’s genocide in Gaza, received a staggering 58 standing ovations as he spewed his putrid lies in front of a joint session of the US Congress. The UK's Stop the War coalition has described the speech as "the most shameful and dystopian congressional address in US history."

Israeli athletes representing said genocidal entity have been awarded 24-hour protection by French authorities at the Paris Olympics, despite it having come to light that one of their flagbearers has engaged in the truly evil Zionist pastime of signing bombs targeting civilians in Gaza.

Related News

Economy of Genocide: Albanese's report accuses, but doesn't dismantle system

Why Netanyahu’s Gaza takeover merits substantial pushback

The German government is actively delaying the ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his security minister, who are wanted by the Hague court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

But woe to those resisting colonial violence! Staying in Germany, which has proven to be an impassioned participant in "Israel’s" industrial-scale slaughter of Palestinians by lending its unconditional moral and military support to the fascist regime in Tel Aviv, Berlin banned an Islamic centre in Hamburg for alleged ties to Hezbollah. Designated as a terrorist organisation in Germany since 2020, the Lebanese Resistance group is widely considered to be a legitimate political actor across the non-Western majority world.

Euro-Western discourse, designed to uphold global inequities and oppressive structures exclusively benefitting Western capitalist interests, routinely fails to understand the psychology behind anticolonial violence. A quote from Frantz Fanon’s seminal The Wretched of the Earth provides a valuable teaching moment for obstinate eurocentrists and their oppressive ideology of colonial domination, “Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”

Taking back the agency of liberation when diplomacy and peaceful resistance have failed is a defining hallmark of anticolonial violence. That is why Nelson Mandela, the icon of the non-violent, anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, founded uMkhonto weSizwe, the paramilitary wing of the ANC, in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre. Remember that the US government listed Mandela as a “terrorist” until 2008, as this is irrefutable evidence of the arbitrariness and all too often sheer imbecility of such imperial designations.

Fanon’s psychoanalysis of violence manifests itself in the tragic, yet liberatory trajectory of countless Palestinian lives across the Occupied Territories and beyond; the social, political, and economic determinants of the Israeli occupation inevitably leading them to a life of bottom-up, violent resistance and organised militancy.

It is embodied by the words of a fighter from the Tulkarm refugee camp featured in the red. short doc “Inheriting Resistance”: “We are fighting to live a decent life. I just wanted to live like everybody else. That’s why it was natural for me to become a fighter.”

It explains the ever-widening support among Palestinians for the Islamic Resistance since "Israel" launched its genocidal onslaught on Gaza, even in the PA-run West Bank where Israeli occupation forces have ramped up their deadly attacks. Prior to October 7, Hamas was relatively unpopular among a wide segment of Gaza’s population: according to a 2019 poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 27 % of Gazans blamed Hamas for their poor living conditions in the densely populated strip blockaded by "Israel" and Egypt since 2007.

“Good cause”, “no choice”, “obligation”: these descriptors from Margot’s philosophical musings on the legitimacy of violence in “The Mosquito Coast” perfectly capture what drives the anticolonial struggle against "Israel". A Resistance led by tenacious Palestinian armed groups and supported by equally resilient allies as far afield as Yemen, the sophisticated military capabilities of its Ansar Allah government grossly underestimated by Euro-Western discourse’s arrogant and lazy orientalism.

What better cause is there than liberation from oppression? When all other avenues of resistance have been exhausted and the oppressed are left with no other choice than to turn to violence, who can blame them?

As the Israeli settler colony’s genocide of Palestine’s Indigenous population is about to enter its tenth month and the official Palestinian death toll will soon surpass 40,000, with a recent study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimating that the accumulative effects of "Israel’s" war could put the true number of dead at over 186,000, Euro-Western discourse should ask itself one simple question: If stopping what has been described as our generation’s Holocaust is not an acceptable scenario in which the use of violence is not only ok, but an obligation, then what is?