Did Nat Turner “Start It”?
Missing the Forest for the Trees in Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
In the aftermath of the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that began 7 October, I was struck by how commonly it was claimed that “Hamas ‘started it.” Even a story about a Palestinian father and his infant who were massacred by Israeli bombs drew the response from a Texas conservative named Faith: “Hamas started it. You voted for them. You brought this on yourselves.” There were countless comments to the same effect—apparently, Israelis had nothing but love for their Palestinian brethren and vice versa before Hamas decided to ruin the love-fest on 7 October.
However, this idea didn’t just suddenly pop into people’s heads; rather, it was shaped by how the current phase of the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been framed by the Israeli government itself and its backers in the Western political establishment. According to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), “This is a war started by Hamas. Our soldiers are ready to do more than respond—Hamas terrorism must cease to exist.” US House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries characterised the Hamas-led military action as a “violent, unprovoked, and despicable terrorist attack against the State of Israel.” On 7 October, President Joe Biden stated, “Today, the people of Israel are under attack, orchestrated by a terrorist organisation, Hamas.”
UK Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer said that there was “no justification” for the Hamas-led “act of terror” and uttered the tired old DARVO cliché that “Israel [the coloniser of Palestinian lands] has a right to defend herself.” And Bernie Sanders, who frequently justifies Israel’s violence, said of the 7 October military operation that “there is no justification for this violence.” In short, the standard view in Western imperialist centres of power is that the 7 October operation was an unprovoked bolt from the blue directed against poor, innocent Israel by a bunch of crazy terrorists. It was as though there was mass collective amnesia among the Western political elite regarding Israel’s 75-year history of brutality toward the Palestinians. But this is nothing new. As I will discuss below, this perspective that portrays members of oppressed groups who engage in armed resistance as aggressors whose attacks were unprovoked—and that, in general, strips oppressed groups of their humanity—has a long history.
Who “Started It” is Rarely Those Who We’ve Been Led to Believe Did
Consider, for example, the case of the US war in Vietnam. Vietnam supposedly “started” the Vietnam War by twice attacking a destroyer, the USS Maddox, that “mysteriously” was within Vietnamese territorial waters just off its coast. (At least one of the attacks didn’t even occur according to declassified US government documents.) The Gulf of Tonkin resolution, passed by the US Congress with only two “nay” votes, marked the beginning of major US military involvement in Vietnam. But this notion that Vietnam “started” the war by supposedly firing on a warship that had invaded its territory ignores not only the provocation itself but the fact that Vietnam had been subjected to decades of brutal French colonial occupation and war, followed by the installation of the brutal US-backed puppet government of Ngo Dinh Diem in the southern half of the country. In fact, the Vietnam War, or Second Indochina War, began in 1954 between the Diem government and the National Liberation Front, a South Vietnamese guerrilla group.
A more recent example is the claim that Russia “started” the Ukraine War when it invaded Ukraine in February 2022. In reality, a civil war in Ukraine had been going on since 2014, following a US-backed coup that resulted in fascistic forces, including literal Nazis, becoming a dominant military and political force in Ukraine. One of the results of the coup was relentless persecution of and violence towards the ethnic Russian population that comprised the majority of residents of eastern Ukraine, but an oppressed minority within Ukraine as a whole. Residents of the province of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and become part of Russia, while residents of the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk declared them to be independent republics. The coup government promptly began waging war on the latter, resulting in 14,000 deaths between 2014 and 2022. Russia only entered the conflict after the Donetsk and Luhansk governments asked for its help in fending off an expected ground invasion by Ukrainian troops, in addition to various Ukrainian provocations of Russia including threats to invade Crimea, to join NATO, and to acquire nuclear weapons. As in the case of the Vietnam War, the notion that the Ukraine War began with an unprovoked attack by the US’s “enemy” falls apart upon scrutiny.
The Central Fact of Most Armed Conflicts: They Involve Oppressors vs. Oppressed Groups
The title of this article references what I hope readers universally recognise as an absurd claim, the notion that slave rebellions such as that in 1831 led by Nat Turner “started” the violent conflict, culminating in the US Civil War, between slaveowners and slavery abolitionists. Turner and about 70 fellow slaves attacked numerous Virginia plantations, freeing the slaves and also killing about 60 plantation residents, including slaveowners and many of their wives and children. They even decapitated children, something that Hamas was falsely accused of doing during the 7 October uprising. The response was eerily reminiscent of Israel’s brutal response to the Hamas-led military action, which in one month has killed over 10,000 Palestinian civilians, including over 150 in the West Bank where Hamas does not exist: Not only were Turner and many of his collaborators hanged, but slaves who had not participated in the rebellion were also killed. In the ensuing months, hundreds more Black people were murdered by angry white mobs. It’s not implausible to imagine members of these lynch mobs saying in their “defence,” “But Nat Turner started it!” But of course, if they hadn’t been enslaved, Nat Turner and his colleagues would presumably never have murdered any white people. In reality, the Europeans who colonised North America “started it” when they kidnapped Africans and enslaved them, and the violence the Turner-led uprising meted out was a tiny drop in the bucket compared to that of the inherently violent institution of slavery.
Likewise, although some of the attacks on European settlers by Native Americans were quite bloody—in the so-called Jamestown Massacre of 1622, nearly 350 men, women, and children were killed by members of the Powhatan tribe—they paled in comparison to the genocidal violence perpetrated against Native Americans by the colonists and later by US troops. The pattern is much the same in other cases of resistance against colonisation. In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) was known for its nonviolent resistance to apartheid. However, it had an armed wing, Umkhonto We Sizwe, whose activities included many bombings, mostly of government buildings or military installations but also of banks, restaurants, bars, and supermarkets in “whites only” neighbourhoods. India is also well-known for the Gandhi-led nonviolent protests against British colonial occupation. Yet, as in the South African case, in India there was considerable armed resistance to the British that in some cases included killings of civilians. Similarly, in Algeria, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) mounted armed resistance to French colonial occupation that included assassinations of French administrators and Algerian collaborators with the colonial regime. Naturally, such groups were often characterised as “terrorists” by the colonial occupiers they were resisting, even though colonisation is an inherently terroristic and violent act.
Seeing The Trees And The Forest
Today, most of us do not think of Nat Turner, Native American armed resisters to the European colonisers of North America, Umkhonto We Sizwe, the FLN, or other armed groups resisting colonial occupation, ethnic cleansing, slavery, and/or genocide as nothing more than “terrorists,” nor do we think that they are the ones who “started” armed conflicts with their oppressors. Who “started it” is not only almost certainly those whose goal was to dispossess people of their land, resources, and freedom, but irrelevant given the nature of the oppressors’ goals. And while it is certainly reasonable to condemn violence against the innocent—young children of European colonisers or slaveowners are not responsible for the sins of some of their elders—if one fails to place that condemnation in the context of the incomparably greater violence of the colonists or slaveholders against the colonised or enslaved, or bearing in mind the reason (colonisation or slavery) why all of that violence is occurring in the first place, one is missing the forest for the trees.
That applies equally to the conflict that has been in the headlines for the past month, that between Israelis and Palestinians. Although the Israeli government and its allies pretend otherwise, it certainly did not start with the Hamas-led 7 October breakout from the open-air prison known as Gaza. Even decades before Israel’s 1948 founding, Jewish settlers from Europe and other far-flung places were moving to Palestine and violently evicting its native inhabitants from their land—and they were quite explicit about wanting to ethnically cleanse the land of Palestinians, who from the beginning were dehumanised and invisibilised. Conveniently, the slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land,” implying that Palestinians as a people did not exist, became quite popular among early Zionist ideologues. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir infamously declared in a 1969 interview that there was “no such thing as Palestinians. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”
Never mind that, despite not formally having a country, Palestinians had both a vibrant and unique culture and a national identity as Palestinians for quite some time before Zionist settlers began arriving—or that Palestine was their home. As far as the proponents of the Zionist colonial project were concerned, Palestinians, if they were thought of as human beings at all, were just “Arabs” who could live in any Arab nation—a convenient rationalisation for making them move elsewhere. After all, they claimed, the “Arabs” were only getting in the way of the colonisers’ efforts to “make the desert bloom.” As “founding father” of Israel David Ben-Gurion put it, “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.”
Thus began the process of getting them out of the way by any means necessary, which typically included brutal attacks on Palestinian villages. Aided by the British, the settlers had the upper hand in these violent clashes, and steadily took over Palestinian lands. This process dramatically accelerated in 1948, when Israel was granted statehood based on a United Nations partition plan that called for 55% of Palestinian land to be granted to the new state of Israel despite Palestinians comprising more than 2/3 of the population at the time. But that was not enough for the more fanatical elements of the Zionist movement such as the fascist Irgun militia and its political wing, the “Freedom Party” (predecessor of today’s ruling Likud Party), which the most famous Jew of the time, Albert Einstein, characterised as “a political party closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” What is now referred to by Palestinians as the Nakba (“the catastrophe”), an all-out military offensive aimed at ethnically cleansing the new Israeli state of as many Palestinians as possible, was launched soon after Israel’s founding. Wholesale massacres of the inhabitants of scores of villages took place, and ultimately more than 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed, approximately 15,000 were killed, and more than 750,000 Palestinians—the vast majority of the Palestinian population—were forced to flee for their lives. By the end of the one-sided war the following year, Israel controlled 78% of Palestine.
To make a long story short, at varying paces from year to year, the same pattern of brutality and ethnic cleansing has been ongoing for 75 years now, including during the years leading up to the 7 October uprising, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The reason for its name is the many violent attacks on worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by police, the IDF, and Jewish settlers that have taken place in recent years, including within the past few weeks. Other provocations include the holding of thousands of Palestinians as political prisoners in Israeli jails (which makes recent one-sided calls to “release the [Israeli] hostages” a particularly cruel example of Palestinian invisibilisation); the continuing expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank; and the frequent bombings of Gaza as well as the state of siege (limited supplies of basic necessities, including food) that Israel has maintained against Gaza for the past 17 years—in other words, life under Israeli apartheid is a brutal, ongoing provocation.
People under military occupation—and the military encirclement of Gaza by the Israeli military is not materially or morally different from literal occupation—have the right under international law to resist that occupation through whatever means are at their disposal, including armed struggle. Palestinians have certainly engaged in nonviolent resistance on many occasions, most famously the 2018 Great March of Return, during which, over the course of several months, tens of thousands of unarmed Gaza residents approached the fence separating Gaza from Israel in protest of their imprisonment within Gaza and the blockade. From the very first day of this peaceful protest, Israeli snipers gunned down members of the crowd, ultimately killing more than 200 and injuring approximately 8000. Moreover, the international sympathy that the protesters hoped would be evoked by the Israeli military’s brutality never materialised to any significant degree.
Thus, there is plenty of reason to believe that, as has been the case with successful decolonisation movements in the past, armed resistance will be a necessary component of Palestinians’ struggle for freedom—and that is what many Palestinians have concluded. “Will you condemn Hamas?” they are inevitably asked by those who either “both sides” the issue or unconditionally support their oppressors. But why should Palestinians and their allies in the struggle for their freedom be compelled to condemn Hamas? Should American slaves have been expected to condemn Nat Turner? Should black South Africans have been expected to condemn Umkhonto We Sizwe? Should Algerians have been expected to condemn the FLN (National Liberation Front)? Why?
To be sure, there is evidence that—as in these other struggles—civilians were killed, in some cases deliberately, by Hamas and other militants. But there is likewise evidence that Israeli civilians were killed by the much more heavily armed Israeli military in fairly large numbers, including through air strikes, gunfire, and tank/artillery shelling deliberately targeted at places where its commanders knew that both Israeli civilians and Palestinian fighters were hiding out. The commander of the Gaza division, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld, even ordered an airstrike on his own military base in Erez (while he was in a bunker deep underground) in a desperate attempt to regain control of the base from Hamas, killing large numbers of his own troops in the process. In short, it could very well be that the majority of both civilian and military Israeli deaths during the Hamas-led assault of early October were the result of Israeli fire. That is to say nothing of the indiscriminate attacks on men, women, and children in both Gaza and the West Bank over the past month.
But Hamas is whom we are compelled to condemn? Must our solidarity for Palestinians in their struggle for freedom be contingent on their being “perfect victims”? Apparently so, from what I’ve seen from all too many people commenting on this issue. As Palestinian-American academic and activist Hala Alyan puts it: “The task of the Palestinian is to be palatable or to be condemned. The task of the Palestinian, we’ve seen in the past two weeks, is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it. To earn it.”
This insistence that those of us who agitate for Palestinian liberation must “condemn Hamas,” full stop, or else our advocacy for their cause, perhaps even their cause itself, is illegitimate implicitly takes the side of the oppressor. The Hamas-led attack was planned as an assault on Israeli military installations, with the stated objectives being to seize control of military bases and checkpoints, inflict major damage on them, and capture and bring back to Gaza enough prisoners to have leverage for negotiating the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners. Those objectives were achieved beyond even Hamas’ and other armed Palestinian groups’ expectations. It is certainly unfortunate that, as has been the case with countless armed uprisings against colonial occupation in the past, civilians were killed in the process. But, again, focusing on that alone misses the forest for the trees. The struggle for Palestinian liberation is indubitably a just cause, armed resistance is a necessary facet of that struggle, and, like Umkhonto We Sizwe, the FLN, and countless other predecessors, groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are legitimate actors in that struggle. With their help, one day, Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.
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