Can violence be moral?

Fanon perceptively diagnosed the disease of colonialism that Israel continues to propagate as it replicates its primary pathology: the obliteration of Palestinians. As a recent UN report states: “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure. For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group - demographically, culturally, economically and politically - seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources.”

 

Settler-colonialism operates through the elimination of Indigenous people’s existence on the land. Without this reducible element, settler colonialism cannot operate. Settler colonialism is not interested in simply exploiting the “natives”. Rather, it attempts a totality through eradicating its negation, the existence of Indigenous people, and reducing them to an invisible, a persona non grata. This is why the Palestinian-Israeli impasse should not be seen from the angle of a particular event, but rather as a structure that operates on the elimination of Indigenous Palestinians as an entity.

 

If one examines the history of colonialism (and settler colonialism), there appears to be a consistent pattern: the moral dismissal of non-state perpetrators of violence - via the label “terrorist” (for example: with the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and many others throughout history). Perpetrators of violence are always portrayed as acting outside the boundaries of morality, and violence itself is regularly dismissed as irrational or subject to reductive explanations: the assertion of the perpetrators lack of self-control, their dehumanization (as they are usually an or ascribing to them sadistic and psychological tendencies. But is it justified to lump all acts of violence in the same category with resistance movements such as those in Palestine, fighting against foreign occupations that they consider illegitimate? Why are those that are engaged in acts of physical violence deemed “extremists” while those who accept or work with foreign occupying forces deemed “moderates” Who decides, and what is the criteria?

 

The excerpts below (from The Wretched of the Earth) highlight both the practical and psychological reasons for violence against the colonizer:

“He [the native] (Palestinians in our context) of whom they have never stopped saying that the only language he understands is that of force, decides to give utterance by force. In fact, as always, the settler (Israeli Zionists in our context) has shown him the path he should take if he is to become free.”

At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect”

 

According to Fanon, colonial rule is sustained by violence and repression. With violence as the “natural state” of colonial rule, it follows that in fact it is the colonizers [Israeli Zionists] who only speak and understand the language of violence. As such, only the use of violence by the colonized [Palestinians] can physically restructure society.

 

Furthermore, Fanon argues that psychologically, violence returns agency to the colonized [Palestinians] who were hitherto dehumanized, and allows them to recreate themselves in a light that is not tainted by the colonizers. In Black Skin, White. Masks, Fanon states that freeing oneself of colonialism through violence can be “cathartic”.

 

In the context of the Algerians, violence was cathartic as it allowed them to restore the “self” which was systematically destroyed by colonialism. Thus, Fanon theorizes that violence enables the colonized to restructure their country politically, and also recreate themselves and resume a self-determining existence.

 

Their violence and ours

Fanon emphasized the distinction between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed. Moreover, he deepened our understanding of the undeniably emphasized, or “re-cerebralizing”, effect of revolutionary violence. Occasionally, in his political practice, Fanon did elevate armed resistance to the status of the sole “real struggle” that would “radically mutate” the oppressed. Nonetheless, in his last book The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon demonstrates that he was a subtle and complex thinker on how violence could reverse a profound sense of inferiority among the poor and oppressed. He never advocated violence as the prime political instrument.

 

Fanon understood the deep paradox of the violence of resistance, which is that it is both necessary and, at the very same time, a curse. Suffering from extreme violence and inflicting that violence left both parties, though not moral equivalents, permanently marked. To use Fanon’s language, both were “mutated”. No emancipation - partial, flawed, and uneven as it was after national liberation - could be achieved without the “equalizing” violence of the oppressed. This violence punctured the settlers’ self-image as superior; it asserts, and to some extent reverses, the profound sense of inferiority in the colonial subject. Interestingly, Fanon was clear that after independence, those colonizing “jackals” who had inflicted the worst violence of the colonial state, and those who had suffered this violence would only be redeemed by psychiatry.

 

Without denying the potential of violence to be moral or immoral, understanding Fanon’s thoughts on violence as both a creative and cathartic, yet limiting, power for the colonized, allows us to look at other revolutionary movements, whether anti-colonial or anti-establishment, as surges or collective movements acting against perceived aggressors, rather than in conformity with universal moral norms.

 

The struggle in Algeria ended with the defeat of France and the independence of Algeria. We are at a point of no return for Israel and its Western backers. Palestinians are at the mercy of the world’s most powerful military machine armed by the United States, with only Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraqi militias and the Yemeni Houthis backing them with a blockade of the Red Sea and strikes on US and Israeli forces. But politically, in the global South and among the public in the West, the cause of Palestine has never been stronger, and the West’s position never so unpopular.