We are Norm. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
Norman uses an article in The Guardian as a starting point to ruminate on the rights and wrongs of resistance. He concludes: “[N]othing … entitles those resisting tyranny or occupation to murder the innocent”. It’s worth noting that in listing possible motives for resistance: psychological release, national identity, a sense of not being defeated, Norm neglects to mention perhaps the most important: resistance to tyranny. Also missing is any explicit statement of the obligations of a state resisting resistance. Shouldn’t what’s good for the goose be good for the gander? Israel has laid virtual siege to the entire population of Gaza denying them food, fuel and freedom of movement. She has also dropped hundred tonne “smart bombs” in “targeted assassinations” and used munitions containing white phosphorus and flechettes on the densely crowded streets of that territory. It seems pretty obvious that these actions will, as Norm puts it, result in murdering the innocent. So to ask one side to play by the rules while the other does as it pleases seems, at the very least, to be the height of hypocrisy.
Here’s an exercise in making what is already a difficult subject into an impossible one – impossible because now hopelessly muddled. It’s a piece by Peter Beaumont, and it begins by looking at the complex motivations involved in Palestinian resistance: psychological release, national identity, a sense of not being defeated. This is apropos, among other things, the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel. Beaumont then goes on to ask, ‘when do we regard armed resistance as being acceptable?’
In the traditions of political and legal philosophy, there is a widely-recognized right of resistance against tyranny (or oppression), and this is matched by a right against foreign domination or occupation, as one variant of tyranny. The correlate of this right to resist are the rights to freedom and national self-determination. There are difficulties of application. How bad does non-democratic rule have to be to count as the kind of tyranny against which armed resistance is justifiable? Are there other viable roads to change? What are the chances of success? But, in any case, nothing in any of the several rights aforesaid entitles those resisting tyranny or occupation to murder the innocent. And according to well-established international norms governing military conflict, deliberately targeting civilians is a crime; it is a form of murdering the innocent.
Therefore, to write as Beaumont does as if armed resistance and targeting civilians were one and the same is to bury the discussion within a central, unhelpful obfuscation. Along with one or two other confusions which I shall bypass here (he considerably loosens Michael Walzer’s concept of ’supreme emergency’), Beaumont arrives, finally, at no conclusion:
None of the above should be read as a defence of terror, or even as an argument for armed resistance.
You end up not only without any answer to the question Beaumont posed, but without the intellectual resources – widely available on this subject – to think about the question clearly.
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