When trying to make sense of the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, few among the supporters of Israel concede that Hamas had anything in mind but trying to kill Jews. The goals of the Palestinian people are always attributed to a hatred of Jews. Why is this? People point many times to a Hamas charter[1] which states a policy akin to wiping out the Jews in the current Israeli state. I acknowledge this. I also point out that similar rhetoric was used by some Black and Native American activists in America’s civil rights movement, both before and after the U.S. Civil War, yet such rhetoric would not be seen as reason (especially with a historical eye) to invalidate the larger movement or as justification for inflicting horrific punishments, collective or otherwise. Why is it, then, that such rhetoric is still so often cited for the purpose of invalidating Palestinian resistance? It is because this sort of framing is a tool used by a group which intends to oppress another: Israel intends to oppress Palestine, so they frame Palestine as the aggressor despite all material evidence, and invoke the well-understood right to self-defense. The logic underpinning this is convoluted but it can be expressed using Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment.
I am going to be self-indulgent briefly and talk about philosophy-as-such, so forgive me, but I do believe that my philosophical point does support the sociopolitical point I am making with this essay. I have said before that ressentiment does not explain anything and I stand by that statement in an objective sense. Ressentiment can be used as a lens, however, one that lets us look into the mind of Nietzsche and those who think like him: aristocrats, elitists, and conservatives. Colonizers. What I think grabbed people about Nietzsche’s work is that he was audacious enough (or witless enough) to sort of codify the conservative worldview in philosophical terms, not idealized and universal but raw and clannish. Nietzsche did not invent this worldview, he merely expressed and defended it. This concept of ressentiment—that the oppressed instinctively harbor a special malice for their oppressors—is a hallmark of the thinking of slaveholders, feudal lords, robber barons, and all other dominating classes throughout history.
Why is the current genocide in Gaza a fitting reprisal for the Hamas attack but the Hamas attack was not just reprisal for at least 1500 home demolitions that Israel forced on Palestine just from January 2022 to October 7, 2023[2][3]? What about for Israel’s repeated airstrikes on Palestine, all of which are orders of magnitude more deadly than rocket attacks from Palestine? There is an assumption being made that Palestinian resistance is inherently unjust, that they are simply not allowed to respond in a way which anyone else would be justified in doing. Not every action would be condoned by the wider world in such resistance, but no one in the west thinks it’s wrong for a Ukrainian (in this current climate in 2024) to throw a rock at a Russian soldier, and Russia is not doing anything on the scale of Israel’s sustained aggression against Palestine. This difference in reaction comes from an assumption that Palestinians are afflicted by ressentiment, which displays itself in two core accusations: malice and weakness.
Israel, Malice, and Self-Defense
Antisemitism is, distressingly, a major tool of Israel’s political arsenal; that is, accusing its opponents of antisemitism is used to attack said opponents. Of all ideologies, antisemitism is the most offensive to the contemporary Western mindset, connected as it is to centuries of European oppression of Jewish people which had culminated in the Holocaust and, thereafter, some soul-searching by Western culture. Like all forms of racism, antisemitism does not come from a place of strict logic and it has been held by people from all walks of life. Especially coming from Israel, which has become the country with the most Jewish people in the world, such an accusation has great weight. It is essentially an accusation of unreasoning, outsized malice which is capable of great atrocities. Faced with such an opponent, it seems natural that Israel would go to even despicable lengths to defend itself.
One of the primary ways that Israel makes this accusation stick is to claim to be acting in self-defense. I don’t simply mean that Israel uses “self-defense” as an excuse for launching their own attacks. In a broader sense, Israel never claims to be motivated by Islamophobia or anti-Arab sentiment, even though both are frequent aspects of Israeli pro-settlement demonstrations & political rhetoric. The Palestinian resistance, on the other hand, is constantly called antisemitic regardless of how it acts. When Israel elects outright fascists and avowed racists to its legislature, Israelis are allowed to claim that these elements are really fringe groups, that they don’t represent Israel. When Hamas updates its charter to remove references to Jews and to properly reference the Zionist ideology which is based on dispossessing Palestine[4], this is not accepted as a move away from antisemitism, if the 1988 charter should even be understood that way. Even those who suggest mercy for the Palestinians are labeled antisemitic.
Yet by claiming self-defense for its part rather than Islamophobia, Israel portrays itself as not being hateful, not being like their opponents who are full of hatred and ressentiment. The fact that Israelis are at least as racist as Palestinians (and likely much more so) never becomes a factor in judging Israeli actions because Israelis are not seen as the kinds of people for whom racism is supposed to matter. Like a Caucasian uncle, being who they are ensures that they never get kicked out no matter who they offend or who they injure.
This difference in perception is an outcome of the second aspect of ressentiment: weakness. Israel is positioned as a nation of masters over a subservient population of Palestinians (primarily). Israel is assumed to be a country of the strong, even noble, for several reasons (including simply claiming it about themselves). As a strong, noble people, racism is just a character flaw for Israelis, like being bad with names. No one denies it but neither does anyone punish it. The same goes for escalations like murders and other crimes against Palestinians; the criminal might be punished but the act doesn’t invalidate the project of Israel.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, are presumed to be weak, and as such their actions against the strong must come from malice. Every evidence that can even kind of look like antisemitism is considered a reason for all Palestinians to lose their rights, every rocket launch on Israel justifies a village being demolished. Reprisal attacks from Israel are justified, but those from Palestinians are turned into more proof of Palestinian unfitness for liberation. It is the perception of Palestinian weakness which makes actions correct for Israel but malicious for Palestine, as only by such malice (so Israel believes) could Palestine prevail.
Many Israeli hostages taken by Hamas have attested to their care and compassion. Many others have been killed by Israeli forces who were more intent on killing Palestinians than on saving fellow Israelis. Israeli soldiers are well known for personal expressions of rage against Palestinians. It is for a variety of reasons, key among them being the Israeli political and economic leverage over Palestine, that Israel is able to focus attention on the supposedly malicious intentions of Palestinians while casting its own actions as being interested only in security, not their own malice. This perception, then, is clearly not a function of malice (real or perceived), it is a function of power. That being the case, it can only be Israel’s doing that the Western world has such a skewed view of this conflict. The idea that Palestinians bear a special malice towards Israelis is not based in reality, it is part of the Israeli strategy to communicate their own superior position and justify their continuing oppression of the Palestinian people.
The Poisoning of Palestine
A detour. The last film I saw in theaters was Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Lily Gladstone as Molly Burkhart (nee Kyle). I will talk briefly about the plot. The film depicts a conspiracy among American whites to murder and steal the assets of the Osage Nation, of whom Molly is a member. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a stupid white man who is led through this conspiracy by his uncle William King Hale, played by Robert De Niro. Molly ends up marrying Ernest, as their names suggest, and she is poisoned by him over years. Ernest Burkhart is not depicted as a virulent racist. King Hale guides Ernest (and others) through the conspiracy with a constant refrain: “they [the Osage] are on their way out.” Anything was justified against the Osage because they were simply doomed for destruction. Nevermind that King Hale had orchestrated marriages between whites and Osage that allowed the whites to inherit Osage land, then had the Osage murdered. Nevermind that King Hale had a family home blown up or that he regularly hired (and freely betrayed) dangerous mercenaries. The Osage were simply weak, they were on their way out; they did not count.
There was not a great deal of reprisal from the Osage against the whites in the film, but this film is a microcosm, an image in miniature of the American project known as manifest destiny. In this light, we can look at the American national response to Native peoples who did resist: they treated the Natives as savages who did senseless violence, they accused the Natives of simply hating whites or hating civilization. They said that Native people were inferior to whites and justified that opinion by the Native peoples’ occasional refusal to be friendly, conveniently forgetting the basic fact of the whites’ invasion of the land.
“A land without a people for a people without a land” is the ludicrous slogan Zionists use to advertise their colonization, a clear echo of the logic of manifest destiny which rhetorically erased the millions of people who, for any sensible observer, have the right to inhabit and control the land. For colonists, though, natives are not people, at least not the kind of strong, noble people whose rights have any weight for the likeminded. As I’ve said, this is an absurd and offensive logic. It only becomes convincing when it is paired with the idea of malice or some other dangerous aspect (such as savagery or apostasy) which is related to that inferiority. The idea is to render resistance illegitimate by turning the inevitability of reaction against oppression back against the oppressed, justifying the continuation of that oppression.
This tactic has clear advantages for Israel. While there is a lot of U.S. popular support for a ceasefire in the current “war”, a majority of Americans still seem to believe that Israel is justified in prosecuting its genocide. It is well-known that dead U.S. president Ronald Reagan ended Israel’s assault on Lebanon in 1982 with what amounted to a single phone call; it is also widely accepted that President Biden could have similar influence today. The belief that Israel is justified is a major reason why no concrete steps have been taken to curtail this atrocity. This sense of justification has been manufactured by Israel to appeal to two groups of people: those who agree with Israel’s worldview and the larger number of people who have empathy for others in danger but who will not investigate how such a situation came about. They care enough to listen and even speak out but not to understand that they are only getting news from those who have the freedom to send a messenger.
It would be wrong to act as though this rancid ideology is a sin unique to Israel. As I’ve noted, it was (and perhaps is) a major aspect of mainstream American ideology and thus was also featured in Nazi ideology, transformed from manifest destiny into lebensraum. England applied a similar ideology in dealing with its subjects Scotland, Wales, and Ireland (I consider the English/British to have run later colonies like India with a different corrupt approach). We can even see an echo in Rome’s forays into Gaul, Germany, and Britain. This ideology has always been used by oppressors to legitimize their oppressive acts when confronted with any sophisticated understanding of justice which would tell them—as it did many in all these societies, including Israel—that this continued oppression and violence is unjust.
The bravery of the Palestinian people, especially the resistance, cannot be understated. It is perhaps not brave to simply live in a dangerous situation, but it is brave to cling to your identity even under the gravest threat, when abandoning it might preserve your life and future. When asserting your right to the land desired by one of the most advanced militaries in the world, despite being starved and assaulted for nearly a century, that is brave. While I find praising Palestinians to be worthy on its own, I’m actually doing so now to make this point: Palestinians are not a weak people. Palestine is not doomed to die by some prophecy or natural process.
Palestine is not simply ill, it is being poisoned. Only with such an ideology, one that accuses the sick of some inherent weakness or wrongness, can someone convince you that it’s okay to keep giving that poison. Only by invoking ressentiment can people be convinced that Palestinians don’t have the right to their land, that it wasn’t stolen by the British and given to Jewish settlers who were determined not to be in community with native Arabs[5]; only by this can people be convinced that the Palestinians did not even really exist. Somehow we must reverse this and end this ideology of masters and slaves, where some are doomed to die and others award themselves the right to live. Justice is on the side of Palestine. If we pray for it, it will bear fruit.
[1] 1988 Hamas Charter https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp, which has been replaced by a more recent charter in 2017
[2] https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/west-bank-demolitions-and-displacement-overview-november-2022
[3] https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/west-bank-demolitions-and-displacement-overview-january-march-2023
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20170510123932/http://hamas.ps/en/post/678/
[5] Yazbak, Mahmoud. “From Poverty to Revolt: Economic Factors in the Outbreak of the 1936 Rebellion in Palestine.” Middle Eastern Studies 36, no. 3 (2000): 93–113. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4284093. doi:10.1080/00263200008701319.