Brutality is not ‘resistance’

RECENT letters by Thabisi Hoeane and Israel Tshetlhane once again prove that even if we assume good intentions by critics of Israel waging war against Hamas, the distortion of facts and blatant ignorance of the history and current reality of the region is nothing short of staggering.

I agree with them that the loss of every innocent Palestinian life is tragic; that war is hell and that farright extremists like Bezalel Smotrich should absolutely be called out. I can’t say I agree with much else. Instead, let me focus on a key point in Tshetlhane’s letter: October 7 being an act of “resistance” for the freedom of the Palestinian people. If you consider the unspeakably savage rape, torture, dismemberment, and murder of 1 200 men, women and children and the kidnapping of a further 240-plus as “resistance” then you are the problem.

Palestinian leadership and the Arab countries that prop them up have been using this violent “resistance” against Israel and instilling anti-Semitic hate in their populations for 75 years. What has this actually given the Palestinian people other than decades of misery, disempowerment and death?

Tshetlhane mentions Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so let’s look at post-war Japan. This nation suffered a crushing defeat with its cities destroyed and millions dead. And lived under the military occupation of their enemy, the US. But did they spend the next 80 years violently “resisting”? Did they wage wars? Did they kill civilians in coldblooded terror attacks in the name of “resistance”? No, they renounced violence, and worked with their occupiers to create a country that is the envy of most of the world. Japan is what Palestine could have been. Until people like Tshetlhane and Hoeane stop excusing repugnant jihadist ideologies, stop celebrating the murder of innocents as a path to Palestinian self-determination, and start holding Palestinian leadership responsible for utterly failing the Palestinian people, that’s tragically all it will ever be.