Oppression and atrocity

This post deals with the accounts of sexual violence in the Hamas-led assault on Southern Israel on October 7, 2023. It thus necessarily includes references to rape, homicide, and crimes of extreme violence.

A United Nations investigative team has now submitted a report, finding credible evidence the Hamas fighters committed acts of sexual violence, both during the initial assault on southern Israel on October 7, and also against those they held hostage.

In all the things people can say, and have an obligation to say about this report, a number of things stand out. Start with the obvious: "credible evidence" does not mean certainty. If subsequent investigation should disprove these allegations unfounded, we should all celebrate: any woman  not suffering rape, not violated in life or death, is good news. But that is also to say there is no excuse, whatever, for this kind of violence. Nor, now, do we have any excuse for ignoring or dismissing the possibility Hamas fighters, or people associated with them, did commit these atrocities. 

We can't justify the violation of Israeli women by Hamas by pointing to claims, also under investigation, that Israeli soldiers have assaulted and violated Palestinians. Nor do we have to justify, or ignore, claims about brutality by Hamas to uphold Palestinian rights. The children of Gaza are innocent, and their suffering is unjust. No actions of Hamas cancel or reduce the rights of Palestinians who had no hand and no say in them.

Among the calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, among the myriad of accusations against Israel, I see disturbingly few efforts to address or even acknowledge the need for investigation of the accusations of gender-based violence against Hamas and its fighters. Even writers of posts explicitly linking International Women's Day with the war in Gaza have somehow managed to ignore the violation of Israeli women.

Most of those responsible for ignoring the accounts of crimes by Hamas are not bothering to justify their omission, but one argument for the reluctance to discuss the credible accusations against Hamas stands out, because it betrays a fundamental error about the nature of oppression.

This argument rests on the claim the rest of us, living in peace and safety, have no right to judge the means by which an oppressed people resist. This may sound like a liberating acknowledgement of oppression, even support for rough justice, bit it is nothing of the kind. It is, in fact, a surrender. It is an acceptance of one of the oldest and most vile tools of the oppressor.

The first target of the oppressor is the human dignity of their intended victims. That first theft enables all the thefts to come: land, resources, labour, bodies and lives. The first action is the taking of dignity. To facilitate that first robbery, the oppressor offers a devil's bargain: the oppressor will refuse to acknowledge the humanity of the victim, but in return will not hold the victim to any of the normal standards of decency or self-restraint. Thus, slave owners encouraged promiscuity among their slaves as they refused to acknowledge slave marriages. Thus, the Nazis designed brothels into their concentration camps. Thus European colonizers supplied whisky to Indigenous people and opium to China. Degradation is not an incidental product of oppression; it is the foundation on which oppression is built. 

Thus the first, most fundamental form of resistance to oppression is the determination to live up to ordinary standards of conduct, to behave with dignity even in the face of an oppressor who does not recognize your dignity (and in refusing to do so, devalues their own). This is why Paul of Tarsus wrote to slave populations in the Roman Empire calling upon them to live with the dignity fitting a redeemed people. This is why the great liberation movements among African Americans, from the civil rights movement to the Nation of Islam, emphasized dignity and self restraint in the face of imposed poverty and degradation. 

This is why it is profoundly wrong to minimize, or ignore the accusations of atrocities levelled against Hamas fighters. These accusations must either be convincingly refuted, or they must be named, and those responsible must be held accountable. It is not for us to determine what this will mean in practice, but I believe everyone who stands for the Palestinians has a responsibility to separate anyone guilty of these atrocities, and any organization accountable for them, from the Palestinians as a people. Not to do so allows the atrocities alleged against fighters for one organization to stain a whole people, and that serves the worst of their oppressors.