Acts of sheer evil

“An act of sheer evil” is how President Biden condemned the recent incursion of Hamas militants into what is now southern Israel, but which the Palestinian refugees incarcerated in Israel’s open-air prison, the Gaza Strip, still call home. To be sure, anyone actually committed to peace and to nonviolence, to genuine security and justice, will condemn the killing of noncombatants, no matter who the perpetrator may be. It is hard to do so, however, when such condemnation is hypocritically exploited to sanction a far greater and uglier violence. 

“Sheer evil” is an epithet that seems pretty rich when it falls from the lips the former Democratic Senator who never opposed the Clinton administration’s vicious sanctions on Iraq that caused the death of half a million Iraqi children and who voted for the endless wars on Afghanistan and Iraq that have left both nations’ defenseless noncombatant populations decimated by loss of life and material destruction. It’s pretty rich from the former Vice-President who embraced the Obama-era drone program responsible for the deaths of uncounted Afghan civilians, including children and wedding parties; it’s nauseating from the President who talked in bland euphemisms about continuing to conduct the so-called war on terror “from over the horizon,” that is, by remotely controlled killing machines. It would be no less rich falling from the lips of any U.S. politician who has urged the continuing supply to Israel of the munitions it needs to conduct its ruthless and ongoing campaigns against Gaza and the West Bank — campaigns that long preceded the current relentless and merciless collective punishment of the utterly vulnerable population of Gaza.

This is not to equate the killing of Israeli civilians or military personnel by Hamas militants with the organized violence of the United States or its NATO allies, former colonial powers who rushed to express their unstinting support for Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza. It is not to place Hamas morally on a level with Israel, a state founded in bloody acts of terrorism, led periodically by former terrorists and openly committed to ongoing crimes against humanity, including collective punishments, the dispossession and displacement of occupied populations, the detention and torture of children, and the denial of freedom of movement to Palestinians everywhere. A state, in short, founded in settler colonial violence and racial supremacy that can only persist as an ever-more fascistic apartheid regime whose service is to bring to light the racist state that Israel has always been, no matter what the political complexion of its governments.

Not only any condemnation of Hamas’s resort to armed resistance without an equally forceful condemnation of Israel’s 75-year assault on Palestinian society but equally any assertion of equivalence between two such incommensurable forms of violence is morally grotesque. In every anti-colonial struggle, wherever an armed resistance movement has engaged in “asymmetrical” warfare against a colonial power, from Ireland to Algeria to South Africa, noncombatants have been casualties in what have been condemned as barbarous acts, terrorist atrocities, or “acts of sheer evil.” Yet whatever the “barbarism” of armed insurgents, the truly brutal and barbarous evil is the civilized violence of the modern colonial state. Its evil is compounded precisely by its calculating rationality, its supposedly “surgical” accuracy, and the continual technological perfecting of its means of destroying both human life and the material infrastructure upon which life depends. The sanctity of life may, in principle, be extended to all, but the sanction to destroy it with impunity has been appropriated by colonial states whose very existence demands the utter dehumanization of their victims. The inhuman and annihilating excess of organized state force, whose untold destructive powers are now unfolding in total violence on the helpless people of Gaza, can never be morally equated with even the most atrocious acts of the colonized committed in the hope of liberation from an unbearable colonial regime. Any demand that the colonized desist from the use of armed force, a right in any case guaranteed to them under international law, becomes arrant hypocrisy in the face of the technical storm inflicted by state powers. 

This is not an easy acknowledgment for those who are committed, whether for ethical, religious, or politically pragmatic reasons, to nonviolence. Whether because we shrink from the infliction of violence on another or seek to maintain a belief in the moral virtue of the oppressed, the spectacle of atrocities committed by those to whose right to resist we may, in principle, assent is still viscerally repellent. Yet anyone whose sensibility had not been entirely dulled by generations of counter-insurgency language about the savagery of the natives and the brutality of “gunmen” and terrorists, from the genocidal wars against the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the occupation of the Philippines and the colonization Palestine, will have imagined the surge of liberation those militants must have felt as they glided over the colonizer’s military bases or bulldozed the fences that have imprisoned them in a condition of slow genocide for years. Recoil at the particular atrocities they afterward may have committed will not keep us from naming the sheer evil of Israel’s ongoing assault, an assault that is not an act of retaliation but the next and most vicious phase in its serial planned massacres of Palestinian noncombatants and militants alike—for indeed, so far as Israel is concerned, the mere existence of the Palestinians, their refusal simply to disappear from the land that has been their home for generations, is a crime to be punished by death. Dread at the unconscionable fate still to come for Palestinians in Gaza and across historic Palestine is matched only by revulsion at the sanctimonious pronouncements that mask absolute evil in the guise of righteous outrage.