Hamas and freedom fighters are not the same
Over and over again, it has been said that what Hamas has done is how people fighting for their freedom and dignity conduct themselves.
It’s been implied that decolonization involves targeting partygoers at a rave with kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder. According to these people, war crimes, parading raped women around as trophies, and murdering children are how liberation happens.
Not only is this reasoning grotesque, it’s also simply factually wrong, even when decolonization happened violently.
How Decolonization Actually Happened
Broadly speaking, there have been two great waves of European imperialism. The first started with the Columbian exchange in 1492. The last wave started in the late 1800s with the colonization of Africa and Asia. Christopher Columbus would set many of the patterns with how European imperialism in the New World would function.
Violent conquest, enslavement, systematic mass rape, and genocide to “clear space” were crimes against humanity that Columbus committed against the Taíno people of what is now Hati and the Dominican Republic. His atrocities horrified many of his contemporaries, including Queen Isabella of Spain.
Other Spaniards, albeit mostly a minority of the clergy and monastic orders, recognized Spanish conduct in the Caribbean as a crime against humanity even as it was occurring. Pedro de Córdoba and Bartolomé de las Casas were clear examples of people whose faith demanded they fight systemic injustice.
A minority of the clergy recognizing these horrors for what they were would repeat in the 1800s.
Nevertheless, Spain and Portugal built great wealth and power on committing genocide and crimes against humanity in the New World, both against the Indigenous people and Africans they bought on the Ivory Coast. Despite how hard the Indigenous people fought for their freedom and dignity, they were sadly no match for Spanish weapons, technology, and, most significant of all, disease.
The Black Legend, the idea that Spanish colonizers were uniquely brutal, is not wrong per se, but it is incomplete. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British (along with their descendants) could match and exceed the Spanish in brutal conquest and systemic cruelty while colonizing the Americas.
Put another way, the monstrous crimes of the Spanish were not confined to just them.
During the roughly centuries that European-based empires ruled the New World, Black and Native people never stopped resisting or fighting for their freedom and dignity.
What caused the fall of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires in the Americas that was bad management by the Iberian Empires that meant they could no longer control their possessions in the New World. Turmoil caused in large part by the Seven Years’ War along with the French Revolution caused Britain to lose the thirteen colonies that would eventually form the United States, while France would lose its North American territory in the Seven Years’ War, along with what would become Haiti (then known as Saint-Domingue) in the Haitian Revolution.
It is worth keeping in mind that although the Haitian Revolution was an exceptionally brutal conflict, the enslaved fighting for their freedom never sank to the levels of depravity that Hamas did, despite what exaggerated French reports said. Plantations did go up in smoke and many overseers met a well-deserved and bloody fate, but those fighting did not systematically parade half-naked women as trophies or murder babies in their cribs. In fact, when one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, ordered a massacre of all White French after years of betrayal and decades of depravity at their hands, even women and children, his men often only complied when he or his direct subordinates were in person to compel obedience.
Indigenous warfare was a brutal affair in the defense of their homeland, but again, they were beyond any shadow of a doubt defending their homes against invasion and only rarely committed what we would call war crimes against civilians, particularly against women and children.
By contrast, it was the policy of the US military during the Indian Wars to systematically massacre entire tribes and to target people who were clearly noncombatants. Rape, torture, kidnapping, and mass murder were all tactics used during one of the two original sins of the United States, the genocide of the Indigenous people.
These are tactics employed by Hamas during its invasion of Israel.
When the enslaved fought for their freedom either directly or by running away, they again demonstrated discretion in who they targeted, despite what racist propaganda and stereotypes would have you believe.
In contrast, it was common policy to treat enslaved people no better than livestock, with methods of torture that make the Saw franchise look tame being common practice. During this time, enslaved children were targeted for horrific abuse (in fact, witnessing one such episode as a child radicalized John Brown into being the fervent abolitionist we all know in history today).
The seeds for the second wave of decolonization were planted in the aftermath of World War I with the death of several European empires, along with the grievous wounding of the French and British Empires. Both empires were fatally wounded in the aftermath of World War II, along with all other European empires. It is quite difficult to sustain overseas holdings when the entire home country is struggling just to rebuild.
From Africa to Asia, the people who fought for their country’s liberation and decolonization, sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently, had a variety of different fates. Most of them struggled quite a bit to gain their footing, some succeeded, some struggled along, and others fell to strongmen like Idi Amin, who again practiced similar policies of brutalizing their own people as Hamas does.
But again, even the most ruthless leaders did not sink to the levels of depravity that Hamas did.
For those of you who bring up Malcom X and the Black Panthers, keep in mind the main targets for their violence (when they engaged in it) were law enforcement and other White people directly terrorizing them, not women and children.
Not only do many of the people glorifying Hamas’s actions on college campuses not understand the reality of fighting oppression and decolonization, they inadvertently promote the ugliest stereotypes about people of color.
Violent conquest, enslavement, systematic mass rape, and genocide to “clear space” were crimes against humanity that Columbus committed against the Taíno people of what is now Hati and the Dominican Republic. His atrocities horrified many of his contemporaries, including Queen Isabella of Spain.
Other Spaniards, albeit mostly a minority of the clergy and monastic orders, recognized Spanish conduct in the Caribbean as a crime against humanity even as it was occurring. Pedro de Córdoba and Bartolomé de las Casas were clear examples of people whose faith demanded they fight systemic injustice.
A minority of the clergy recognizing these horrors for what they were would repeat in the 1800s.
Nevertheless, Spain and Portugal built great wealth and power on committing genocide and crimes against humanity in the New World, both against the Indigenous people and Africans they bought on the Ivory Coast. Despite how hard the Indigenous people fought for their freedom and dignity, they were sadly no match for Spanish weapons, technology, and, most significant of all, disease.
The Black Legend, the idea that Spanish colonizers were uniquely brutal, is not wrong per se, but it is incomplete. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British (along with their descendants) could match and exceed the Spanish in brutal conquest and systemic cruelty while colonizing the Americas.
Put another way, the monstrous crimes of the Spanish were not confined to just them.
During the roughly centuries that European-based empires ruled the New World, Black and Native people never stopped resisting or fighting for their freedom and dignity.
What caused the fall of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires in the Americas that was bad management by the Iberian Empires that meant they could no longer control their possessions in the New World. Turmoil caused in large part by the Seven Years’ War along with the French Revolution caused Britain to lose the thirteen colonies that would eventually form the United States, while France would lose its North American territory in the Seven Years’ War, along with what would become Haiti (then known as Saint-Domingue) in the Haitian Revolution.
It is worth keeping in mind that although the Haitian Revolution was an exceptionally brutal conflict, the enslaved fighting for their freedom never sank to the levels of depravity that Hamas did, despite what exaggerated French reports said. Plantations did go up in smoke and many overseers met a well-deserved and bloody fate, but those fighting did not systematically parade half-naked women as trophies or murder babies in their cribs. In fact, when one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, ordered a massacre of all White French after years of betrayal and decades of depravity at their hands, even women and children, his men often only complied when he or his direct subordinates were in person to compel obedience.
Indigenous warfare was a brutal affair in the defense of their homeland, but again, they were beyond any shadow of a doubt defending their homes against invasion and only rarely committed what we would call war crimes against civilians, particularly against women and children.
By contrast, it was the policy of the US military during the Indian Wars to systematically massacre entire tribes and to target people who were clearly noncombatants. Rape, torture, kidnapping, and mass murder were all tactics used during one of the two original sins of the United States, the genocide of the Indigenous people.
These are tactics employed by Hamas during its invasion of Israel.
When the enslaved fought for their freedom either directly or by running away, they again demonstrated discretion in who they targeted, despite what racist propaganda and stereotypes would have you believe.
In contrast, it was common policy to treat enslaved people no better than livestock, with methods of torture that make the Saw franchise look tame being common practice. During this time, enslaved children were targeted for horrific abuse (in fact, witnessing one such episode as a child radicalized John Brown into being the fervent abolitionist we all know in history today).
The seeds for the second wave of decolonization were planted in the aftermath of World War I with the death of several European empires, along with the grievous wounding of the French and British Empires. Both empires were fatally wounded in the aftermath of World War II, along with all other European empires. It is quite difficult to sustain overseas holdings when the entire home country is struggling just to rebuild.
From Africa to Asia, the people who fought for their country’s liberation and decolonization, sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently, had a variety of different fates. Most of them struggled quite a bit to gain their footing, some succeeded, some struggled along, and others fell to strongmen like Idi Amin, who again practiced similar policies of brutalizing their own people as Hamas does.
But again, even the most ruthless leaders did not sink to the levels of depravity that Hamas did.
For those of you who bring up Malcom X and the Black Panthers, keep in mind the main targets for their violence (when they engaged in it) were law enforcement and other White people directly terrorizing them, not women and children.
Not only do many of the people glorifying Hamas’s actions on college campuses not understand the reality of fighting oppression and decolonization, they inadvertently promote the ugliest stereotypes about people of color.
Unfortunate Implications
To those who valorize Hamas’s crimes as how the oppressed fight, do you understand the implications of what you are saying?In case you (those who valorize Hamas’s horrors) are not picking it up, you are validating the worst stereotypes of Black and Indigenous people as uniquely bloodthirsty rapists and baby murderers.
These are false notions that have gotten countless Black men tortured to death, along with other horrors.
If you do still say Hamas’s atrocities were justified and even heroic, then I will keep my eye on you as a potential threat.
I get the feeling many of the people, in particular the men, who think this way have fantasies about committing mass rape against young women and other horrors, which is more evidence that populists are uniquely dangerous.
Hamas behaved more like a lynch mob carrying out a pogrom than a people fighting for their rights and freedom.
I will concede that in war things get messy very fast and that no one emerges with clean hands. But guerrilla fighters even today across the globe who fight for righteous causes and armed forces who are fighting to free their country from invaders such as the Ukrainian Armed Forces do not treat rape or the deliberate murder of children as something to celebrate but something to be ashamed of.
It is an unfortunate reality that in war civilians are inevitably caught in the crossfire. The difference is that the IDF does not target civilians or use them as human shields. Hamas does.
If you can’t tell the difference, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Am Yisrael Chai.