That’s a pretty loaded question. What do you mean by “support”?
I do support the Palestinian resistance—the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, the acts of resistance, the fight for resistance, the means of resistance. It just so happens that Hamas, qua Al-Qassam Brigades, is the largest and best equipped group providing armed resistance for Palestinians’ liberation from occupation in the Gaza Strip. In that sense, yes, I support Hamas and Al-Qassam, because they happen to be the ones who satisfy the description—and thus are in fact the ones being referred to by the description—“the leading resistance force that is standing up for and fighting for Palestinians’ liberation and freedom from occupation”. In a different possible world, some other political-military group would satisfy that description, and in that possible world I would support that group instead. I don’t support Hamas and Al-Qassam because they are Hamas and Al-Qassam; I support Hamas and Al-Qassam because they are leading the resistance.
Consequently, if you want to support the Palestinians in their resistance and their fight for liberation, freedom, and self determination, and you are not against armed and potentially violent resistance on principle, then you have to support Hamas and Al-Qassam in some sense, because they are leading the resistance right now. (Yes, with help from other groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad; but Hamas outnumbers them all by far.) If you refuse to support them, then your position is self-contradictory and you’re a hypocrite.
I know you might already be thinking, but what about their beliefs and ideology? I will get to that later, in a future essay. But suffice it to say at the moment that, for the most part, their beliefs and ideology are irrelevant.
[Just an fyi: I am not doing much editing and cleaning up of my writing, here and recently and in the near future, due to time constraints. Because when I do that for my writing, I am obsessive and perfectionist about it and it takes a long time; but these days, I just don’t have the time available for that kind of editing, and I’ve already spent way too many days writing this particular essay. So, yes, my writing is rather messy and rambling and disorganized and has some “stream-of-consciousness” feel to it.]
If you want to support the Palestinians in their resistance against occupation and their fight for freedom, then you cannot ignore Hamas and Al-Qassam and avoid addressing the issue of support and what it means to support them. (For ease, I’m just going to use the term Hamas; when I need to distinguish them, I will.) In the West, people want to dismiss Hamas, and the reason really just comes down to racism (and Islamophobia, which is just a more specific type of racism); but they don’t want to admit that because they don’t like the idea that they might be holding racist views without realizing it.
But it’s not hard to see it: anywhere in the Global South (or non-West) where an oppressed people are trying to fight against their oppressors and there is some armed militia group doing most of the actual fighting, people in the West always want to support the people fighting for their freedom, but they don’t want to support the armed militia that’s doing the fighting, because they find the violence distasteful. (Although they wouldn’t use that word. But I am using it because I think it’s more accurate, because I’m not talking about Western pacifists, which means there’s something that distinguishes violence that is permissible to them and violence that is impermissible.) We’ve been trained to automatically see those militias as “violent”, sometimes as “gangs”, sometimes as “rebels”, oftentimes also as “extremist”; and we’ve been trained to see what they are doing as an insurgence, whereby that term comes imbued with negative connotations. We’ve been trained to insert tropes and slogans and draw conclusions so that we see these groups as “terrorists” even when that term hasn’t been explicitly used. (I’m not getting into the issue of terrorism here; that will be in another essay.) We’ve been trained to not question why those armed militia groups exist and fight; we’ve been trained to see those people in general as less civilized, more “tribal”, and thus of course more prone to violence and fighting; we’ve been trained to simply accept as a matter of natural fact that armed and violent militias and gangs just exist in those places where those people are. And the only thing all of those people in all of those various places have in common is that they aren’t white Westerners.
So it really is just racism, and I absolutely own that I was also trained and “brainwashed” to think that way, to see things from a racist perspective without realizing it. Even though I am very leftist and thought I was seeing things from a leftist perspective, I had for a long time been seeing things from a racist perspective. But there is a difference between being racist and seeing things from a racist view. That is the reason I was able to overcome that trained racist way of thinking, because I am not actually racist. Once I started asking questions about some of the things I’d been trained to see and believe about those militia groups, or any people fighting against governments, oppressors, I realized that the answers and explanations usually given here in the West just didn’t make sense or didn’t actually explain anything; unless you are racist and already automatically see those people as somehow beneath you and less intelligent, less civilized, more primitive and closer to their animalistic nature, etc. Quite literally, we in the West are trained to see ourselves as more evolved, without actually using that word specifically, in addition to seeing ourselves as more civilized. And this is the fundamental belief undergirding the colonialist perspective.
We in the West believe in freedom and self-determination and so we believe oppressed peoples should resist their oppression and fight against their oppressors. Except, not in that way, with armed resistance that usually involves some violence; people in the West want them to resist and fight for their freedom peacefully and diplomatically. I believe the reason they find armed and (even slightly) violent resistance and uprising distasteful and perhaps even disgusting is because they are so trained into that racist and colonialist perspective that they cannot help but see non-white, non-Western people engaging in violence as inherently “barbaric”, even if they believe it’s for a noble cause. For example, I am pretty sick of hearing Westerners who are pro-Palestinian rebuke Hamas for “atrocities committed on Oct 7” while claiming in the same breath that they understand and support the Palestinian cause for which Hamas carried out its operation on Oct 7. Furthermore, they either want Hamas gone because they’ve bought into and are following in step with the Zionist and colonialist narrative that they’re a “terrorist” organization, or they want Hamas to lay down arms and not engage in violence in their fight for Palestinian liberation and then to renounce violence altogether.
Let me make a comparison that I hope makes clear my point. It’s like black people here in the U.S. protesting against racist treatment of one kind or another—such as police brutality—and a whole lot of white folk being “offended” or “disturbed” or feeling “disrespected” or “unsafe” by the ways in which they protest. They will say they believe in black people’s right to protest, sometimes even believe in what they’re protesting, just not protest in that way. But “that way” usually ends up meaning in any way that’s actually noticeable. They don’t have a problem with black people protesting, they should just do it quietly and respectfully over there out of my sight and out of my way and without causing a disturbance…
(And I just strained a muscle rolling my eyes so hard…)
But when it’s white people protesting, they’re allowed to do whatever they want, because otherwise you’re trying to violate their first amendment rights.
Let me drive the point home harder. If a bunch of people are protesting and then a group of white men in military-like clothing and gear, or even actual fatigues, and carrying assault rifles shows up and they claim they are there to “protect the protesters”, no one bats an eyelash. But if those men were black, how do you think people would react? You know exactly how they’d react. Even if all of those black men were active duty servicemen wearing their official U.S. military uniforms with all their pins displayed and everything, it wouldn’t make a difference. (Maybe, hopefully, for some not insignificant percentage of the public, that would make some difference.) We in the West have been trained to see white men with guns as “protectors” and black or brown or otherwise non-white men with guns as “attackers” or “criminals” or “violent” or “terrorists”.
But, I’ve digressed enough.
So, my dear reader, if you say you support the Palestinians in their resistance, including armed resistance, then you will have to accept support of some kind for Hamas. If not, why would you deny the Palestinians their currently most effective force of armed resistance? Because you “don’t like” Hamas? If you say it’s because of their violence, then you’re either naive or disingenuous, because such violence is not specific to Hamas; so any other resistance fighters would be no different. If you say it’s because of their extremism, well, what do you mean by “extremism”? And even if you can define that term in a way that allows us to determine what counts as extremism, why, exactly, is that a problem for their being an acceptable force of armed resistance? Because that’s what matters here, their capability for armed resistance, as well as other forms of resistance, regardless of whatever “isms” they adopt and represent. Their ideology and some aspects of how they’ve governed I most definitely do not agree with and do not support. But to quibble over and object to such things is, to be frank, extremely insulting and condescending to Palestinians in their currently dire circumstances. Perhaps if the situation for them wasn’t existential, perhaps if they weren’t being severely oppressed and dehumanized and brutalized, and now ethnically cleansed and genocided, maybe then we could be picky about who to support. But furthermore, who the fuck are we to decide for them?! To think we have any right or justification in deciding for them which political-militia group is best for them is precisely the kind of colonialist thinking that got us here in the first place!
We in the West have to let go of the (colonialist) idea that we can and should decide how others in the world should live their lives and govern themselves, etc. I am definitely NOT saying we can’t talk about it and hypothesize or theorize about it and offer our thoughts and ideas. I think such discussions are worthwhile and valuable, even if nearly everything said is wrong. (I think this about any topic; it’s a general principle of mine.) There is nothing wrong with telling someone else, or another group of people, that you think how they are living is wrong in some way or other; you just can’t force them to change and live how you want them to live. I hope it is obvious that I think anyone from the non-Western world is equally allowed to tell us in the West how they think we are completely wrong in how we live and govern, etc.
Supporting the Palestinian resistance and thus supporting Hamas because they are the leading force of the resistance does not mean you have to support and endorse everything Hamas does and believes. Just as, if you support some political party, you would never think that means you have to literally support and endorse everything every member of that party says and does; because that’s obviously absurd, and guaranteed to force you to hold a bunch of contradictory claims.
Let me stop there, so this doesn’t get too long and so I can finally get it posted.
I do have plenty more to say, so… to be continued…
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