On Saturday, Oct. 7, the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (acronymized as ‘Hamas’) nationalist group launched an open assault on Israel, marking the largest series of attacks since the raid of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israeli police in 2021—which Hamas cites as impetus for what they claim is retaliatory violence against an occupying, colonialist force. The response from Western politicians has been ubiquitous condemnation of the actions of Hamas, with outspoken support for Israel’s right to an avenging military effort. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that the full force of Israel’s military will be utilized to oust Palestinian militants from Israeli land—and that Palestinians remaining in Gaza should “get out of there.” 

Where is there left to go? Historically Palestinian lands have slowly been overtaken by ever-increasing Zionist colonialist occupation since the late 1940s—with a still-mounting loss of nearly four million acres of land. Since the inception of the state of Israel, upwards of seven hundred thousand Palestinians have been expelled from their homeland, and thousands upon thousands of people have died, whether that be due to explicit state-sanctioned violence or the subversive abuse of the militarized apartheid state they now are subjugated under. Within the Gaza Strip, two million people live under complete domination of the right-wing Israeli government, a government which controls their access to travel, drinking water, and electricity, and has actively enforced a blockade of Gaza’s access to trade for 15 years.  

None of these conditions justify the actions of Hamas, nor do they retroactively justify terroristic violence from Palestinian groups. The murder of Israeli civilians is wrong, and the taking of civilian prisoners is morally repugnant. No amount of justified anguish will ever be grounds for inflammatory violence against unwitting bystanders—reactive violence does little to serve the creation of a holistic solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. However, the collective (and selective) Western condemnation of Hamas does reveal an uncomfortable truth: that apartheid violence against Palestinians is not particularly concerning UNLESS those same Palestinians fight back in existential desperation. The implied American attitude derived from this reaction is a chillingly familiar one: the evil realities of colonialism are simply par-for-the-course, unspoken, boring, and are accepted with a mundane complicitness. Where has Western outrage been for the starving children of Gaza? Or for the countless injustices of Israeli police? American liberals often cite an equivalence of power between the sides of the conflict as justification for their selective reaction. The premise of this false neutrality is that violence from both sides is equally detestable and that a nonviolent compromise is the idyllic solution to the conflict—therefore, Hamas’s terroristic attacks are a betrayal of how Palestine is expected to behave in regard to achieving its liberation, and therefore worthy of mass Israeli retaliation. Further still, this view also implies an equal application of fault to both parties, and therefore equal responsibility for the violence we see now. This position of false neutrality, though innocuous at face value, is (and has been) incapable of creating a satisfactory praxis for its own sought-after “equal compromise,” as it ignores the historical and ongoing disparity of power between the right-wing Israeli government and the people of Palestine. An equal compromise implies an equal concession of power. How can there be an equal concession of power when the parties are not equally powerful? There are occupiers, who happen to be backed by the most powerful country in the world, and there are the occupied, who live in an open-air prison. How can these two diametrically opposed and unequal groups somehow share equal fault? Are we to believe that the Palestinian people are equally as responsible for their own subjugation as the people who displaced them? Are they equally as implicated in the conditions that led to the Hamas attacks as the Israeli government that ignored their attempts at peaceful resolution in the first place? If we agree Hamas are unjustified in their attacks on Israeli innocents, then why is Israel’s retaliatory violence against Palestinian innocents justified and co-signed by American politicians? Even this centrist perspective still neglects to explain America’s selective outrage! The assertion of equivocacy quickly falls apart when one compares America’s response (or lack thereof) to violence against Palestinians to its response to violence against Israelis. Again, the implied attitude is clear: Palestinians are to be vaguely pitied up until they upend the colonialist chokehold that they exist under, at which point they become terrorists for whom no empathy will be spared—a belittling and paradoxical reality that exists at the core of all colonialist justification. 

In the minds of American liberals, some people are more equal than others.