Visible and Invisible Violence

Last month, Representatives Mark Pocan and Jamaal Bowman travelled with the pro-Israel, anti-occupation lobbying group J Street to Susiya, a Palestinian village in the West Bank that the Israeli government has repeatedly threatened to demolish. Pocan tweeted a photo from their visit. Given that Susiya’s plight has repeatedly made international headlines, and that more US legislators visit Israel than any other country, you’d think members of Congress would visit the village often. They don’t. That’s because most members of Congress visit Israel with AIPAC. And AIPAC’s trips aren’t designed to help American politicians understand the Palestinian experience. They’re designed to help American politicians understand how Israeli Jews understand the Palestinian experience. Most members of Congress who visit Israel spend much more time talking about Palestinians than talking to Palestinians. Pocan is an exception. He’ll join us this Friday, December 3, at Noon EST, to discuss what he’s learned.

I’ve been thinking about terrorism.

In recent years, many Americans have learned about the horrifying abuse that Uyghurs suffer in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang. According to Amnesty International, China has imprisoned more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslims in internment camps. Human Rights Watch accuses the Chinese government of “crimes against humanity.” The United States and various other governments have termed Beijing’s behavior “genocide.” 

But according to Chinese leaders, the real problem in Xinjiang isn’t oppression. It’s terrorism. In September, an article in Global Times, a newspaper controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, declared that there were “several thousand terror attacks in Northwest China's Xinjiang region from 1990 to 2016.” This spring, the Chinese embassy in Belgium published a statement rebutting US “lies” about Xinjiang. It employed variations of the word “terror” 23 times.   

Most Americans, myself included, consider this transparent propaganda. But the Chinese government cites evidence. In October, for instance, the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, which goes by the name of ISIS-K, carried out a ghastly suicide bombing of a Shia mosque in the northern city of Kunduz, which killed at least 43 people and injured more than 140. In claiming responsibility, ISIS-K announced that the bomber was a Uyghur. The implication is that ISIS views its war against the Taliban, which receives support from Beijing, as part of a war to free Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Chinese officials could also note that until relations between Washington and Beijing soured, the US government itself often parroted China’s rhetoric about Uyghur terrorism. Until the Trump administration lifted the designation last year, the State Department for 18 years labeled the East Turkistan Islamic Party—East Turkistan is what many Uyghurs call Xinjiang—as a terrorist organization. In the early years of America’s “war on terror,” the US rounded up close to two dozen alleged Uyghur militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and held them at Guantanamo Bay. As recently as 2017, Paul Wolfowitz, George W. Bush’s former deputy secretary of defense, declared that while Beijing exaggerates the threat of Uyghur terrorism, it is nonetheless “real.”

The essential point is this: On the subject of Xinjiang, the Chinese government is lying. But it’s not lying because it claims that some Uyghurs have committed terrorism—defined as intentional violence against civilians—as part of their national struggle. Some Uyghurs almost certainly have. It’s lying because it claims that this terrorism discredits the Uyghur cause and justifies China’s oppression.

There are humane and inhumane ways to resist tyranny. The methods of resistance matter. But inhumane resistance doesn’t justify tyranny. And an honest moral accounting requires viewing inhumane resistance as connected to, not separate from, the inhumanity of state oppression. When it comes to Uyghurs, I doubt many Americans would find this controversial. Nor would they in many other contexts. The Irish Republican Army, for instance, was wrong to plant bombs in British pubs and department stores in the 1970s and 1980s. But that inhumane resistance did not justify Protestant subjugation of Northern Ireland’s Catholics, which involved far more pervasive violence.

When asked about Black Americans who resisted racism violently in the 1960s, Martin Luther King made this point again and again. After more than 150 riots broke out in America’s cities during the “long, hot summer” of 1967—including one in Detroit that took the lives of 43 people—King declared, “It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos.”

King’s point stands even if one believes there is a moral problem not only with the methods that people use to resist state oppression but with the political vision they espouse while carrying it out. In retrospect, it’s easy to view the anti-apartheid movement as consisting solely of people who wanted to replace white rule with liberal democracy. But the African National Congress was closely aligned with the South African Communist Party (SACP), which had clear illiberal tendencies. It had defended Moscow’s invasions of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979. In 1990, the year Nelson Mandela was released from prison, top SACP leaders were still praising Joseph Stalin and justifying the Berlin Wall. Another powerful anti-apartheid party, the Pan-Africanist Congress, didn’t admit whites. It’s military cadres favored the slogan “one settler, one bullet.”

None of this undermines King’s basic point: Which is that violent resistance—even when carried out by organizations with illiberal inclinations—does not justify oppression. To the contrary, oppression and violent resistance are often inextricably intertwined. That was true for the ANC and PAC during apartheid. It’s also true for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The Brotherhood isn’t a liberal movement; its support for an Islamic state has alienated many Egyptian liberals. But that doesn’t justify President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi murderous dictatorship, whose repression only spawns more violence in response.

Which brings me to the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian affiliate, Hamas. Last week, one of its members murdered an Israeli tour guide in East Jerusalem. When I heard the news, I felt sick. I felt sick because the murder was an appalling crime. I felt sick because the victim was a South African Jew, a member of the community from which my own family comes. And I felt sick because I have had friends killed by Hamas. But I also felt sick because, predictably, some on the Israeli right used this act of inhumane resistance to justify Israel’s inhumane oppression.

All life is equally precious. Because all life is equally precious, violence against civilians is wrong even when those civilians benefit from a system of oppression. And because all life is equally precious, one can’t understand violent resistance without understanding the state oppression that fuels it. That was King’s point. And when it comes to Uyghurs in Xinjiang or Catholics in Northern Ireland or Black South Africans under apartheid or even Black Americans in the 1960s, most Americans grasp it. They recognize that understanding violent resistance is not the same as justifying it. To the contrary, understanding the connection between illegitimate violence by the state and illegitimate violence against the state is crucial to ensuring that both forms of violence end.

Unfortunately, many Americans who embrace these insights in other contexts do not apply them to Israel-Palestine. In US public discourse, Palestinian lives are not considered equal to Jewish lives. And as a result, violence against Palestinians is routinely justified and ignored. That not only makes life less safe for Palestinians. Ultimately, it also makes life less safe for Israeli Jews. When King said human beings are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” he was talking about Palestinians and Israeli Jews too. The US political system just hasn’t recognized that yet.

Other stuff:

On Tuesday, Nov 30, Jewish Currents is sponsoring a discussion entitled, “Unchecked and Unbalanced: The Precarious Position of Israel’s Supreme Court.”

On December 2, I’ll be discussing “Palestine-Israel – where to look for hope,” with Diana Buttu, Daniel Levy and Rebecca Abou-Chedid.

A new poll finds that Palestinians in the West Bank now favor one states over two but Palestinians in Gaza don’t. I asked folks on Twitter to explain the discrepancy and got some interesting answers.

Two friends separated by the Nazis reunite after 82 years. 

See you Friday,

Peter