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Do you condemn? [1]
['The Battleground', 'Matthias Berg']
Date: 2023-12-27
This article was written by Wieland Hoban, and was originally published in the Battleground on Dec 1, 2023. An edited version is republished on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement.
Among the many speech acts reflecting the delegitimization of Palestinian resistance — even in its non-violent forms, such as protest and boycott — is the question, “Do you condemn?”
Time and again, it is directed at Palestinian guests by interviewers as a ritual to be performed before the conversation can proceed, or against supporters of Palestinian rights, as demonstrated recently by the British TV host Piers Morgan in a conversation with Jeremy Corbyn.
In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Queen Rania of Jordan pointed out the double standard:
Why is it that when people are coming to represent, you know, the Palestinian issue, at the top of an interview, they have to have their humanity cross-examined, they have to present their moral credentials: “Do you condemn?” We don’t see Israeli officials being asked to condemn, and when they are, people are readily accepted by “our right to defend ourselves.” I have never seen a Western official say the sentence: Palestinians have the right to defend themselves.
While the queen was treated a little more gently than most Palestinians and not been confronted directly with this demand, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, was subjected to a particularly undignified interrogation by the presenter Kirsty Wark on the BBC programme Newsnight.
Zomlot had just lost six family members, including two children, in Gaza. This, however, did not prevent Wark from insisting that he — a representative of the PLO — condemn the actions of Hamas. Zomlot showed incredible restraint, maintaining his composure despite his grief.
To anyone familiar with the history of how oppressed peoples — whether those colonised by other states or those treated unjustly by their own — have responded to their oppression, this is only the latest instance of a time-honoured phenomenon.
Because the oppressor is not only politically and physically but also discursively dominant, any refusal to accept their terms is presented as evidence of savagery, reinforcing the idea that the oppression is justified, even necessary.
A potent example from recent history can be found in an interview with the Black civil rights icon Angela Davis from 1972 when she was imprisoned.
Davis expresses bafflement that her questioner should ask her if she approved of violence in the Black struggle when she had grown up in a community that was subject to constant violence by racists.
Again, this is not a blanket justification for whatever is done in the process of resistance, and the attack of October 7 crossed the line drawn by international law. But the use of the term defines the context, not the morality.
When Native Americans were fighting against genocide, they committed massacres against unarmed settler families, but the verdict of history has clearly not been that such acts of brutality invalidated the anti-genocidal struggle itself.
One does not have to go back to 1948 to highlight the constant violence by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere; it is enough to go back 16 years to the decision to place the Gaza Strip under blockade.
This was an act of collective punishment that has been internationally condemned, and its many ramifications constitute a state of violence.
Violence breeds counter-violence, and the armed resistance in Gaza — which includes not only Islamists like Hamas but also the Marxist-Leninist PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) — acts in response to the violence of the occupation.
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