By introducing the ‘by any means necessary’ norm into the prosecution of violence, we disavow any reliable set of principles and ethics through which we can hold each other to account. It spells the collapse of a rules-based order.
‘So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead.
“I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.” – Arundhati Roy, 19 October 2024: “No propaganda on Earth can hide the wound that is Palestine,” Pen Pinter Prize 2024 acceptance speech.
Arundhati Roy needs little introduction. As an erudite writer and activist whose intellectual acumen and commitment to progressive values are well established, Roy is widely lauded and respected.
In her acceptance speech for the PEN Pinter Prize 2024, she offered the rationale in the abovementioned quote as a rejection of the “moral equivalence” between Israel’s ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people and the devastating war on Gaza, and the brutal attacks of 7 October 2023, declaring her personal position on Hamas as simply not possessing the moral high ground to “tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be”.
Of course, as would be the case with any individual, Roy has every right – at a personal level – to hold this view, and indeed to profess it openly. Indeed, it is a view that has increasingly taken hold among left-wing and progressive supporters of Palestinian’s right to self-determination in their homeland.
Yet while this view may be reasonable and defensible at a personal level, attempting to universalise this view hosts a set of potential dangers that must be carefully considered.
There are two levels at which universalising this view – ie, beyond merely the expression of an individual opinion or judgement – is simply not feasible.
The first is at the collective level, say for example, as a country or member of regional and global compacts of nations. The second is at the level of institutions, particularly the very institutions charged with considering evidence of wrongdoing before them, making judgements on them and taking legal action (eg the United Nations, International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice).
At these levels, collective and institutional voices are expected to clearly and unequivocally adopt sound positions on matters that threaten and/or subvert the rules-based order on which regional and global cooperation depends.
It is now well known and established that the 7 October attack went beyond targeting military and infrastructural targets on the Israel-Gaza border, instead attacking unarmed civilians who are now known to have been brutally murdered, kidnapped, tortured, mutilated and raped.
Civilian homes and cars were burnt, along with the people inside them. Hamas fighters filmed themselves committing atrocities, having been instructed to cause as much destruction and mayhem as they possibly could, extending the terror far beyond the immediacy of the attacks.
On 8 October 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Law for Palestine (L4P), which was accredited by the UN Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People in 2022, released a brief article providing a legal-based rationale explaining why Palestinians have the right to mount armed resistance.
However, the article ends with a clear declaration of the limits of resistance, as follows:
“Finally, it is worth emphasising that the right to resist and self-defence is subject to the rules of international humanitarian law, including the respect of the principle of distinction between civilians and combatants. So, in short: Right to resist, including armed resistance: Yes. Right to indiscriminately kill or target civilians: No. It’s as simple as that.” (L4P 2023; emphasis added)
It must be noted that international humanitarian law, as invoked in the quote above, applies to all actors, groups and/or countries who act either in resistance to oppression, or in self-defence, which hence includes the Israeli state itself.
What we have here is derived from a simple principle; that civilians should not be deliberately targeted either in acts of armed resistance or self-defence. Of course, armed resistances or acts of self-defence may incur civilian casualties as collateral damage, but the core principle is that civilians should not be deliberately targeted in these operations.
This kind of principle is core to how ethics and ethical positions are arrived at. Ethics differs considerably from morality for this reason. Morality is relative at the individual or group level, ie morals differ from person to person or group to group based on their core beliefs and belief systems.
In contrast, ethics differ in that ethics are derived from principles on which we find broad agreement. Put another way, one’s moral position may derive from one’s spiritual or cultural beliefs, which renders it relative to the morality of others, but ethics are derived from principles that we can find broad agreement on, so act as organising principles for the rules-based order that we establish, whether within nations or between them.
The ethics of a democratic nation state such as South Africa, for example, can be derived from the principles as espoused in its national Constitution. Similarly, the ethics of resistance espoused by resistance groups around the world are often expressed in their founding documents and declarations of purpose.
For any organisation that possesses the power and determination to engage in armed conflict – whether resistance-based or not – the idea that they can achieve or pursue their desired ends “by any means necessary” begs deep reflection. This is simply because by introducing the “by any means necessary” norm into the prosecution of violence, we disavow any reliable set of principles and ethics through which we can hold each other to account.
That is, it spells the collapse of a rules-based order and opens the door to coordinated, intentional violence being mounted by self-declared victims whose victimhood is informed by nothing other than a set of subjectivities that go untested and unscrutinised.
What is to prevent the Oklahoma Bomber, Timothy McVeigh, or the Unabomber, or currently aggrieved right-wing groups of all persuasions, for that matter, from making the claim that their cause was so dire, or important, that it needed to be achieved by any means necessary? What is to prevent a state from mounting wars on the basis of the same claims?
This collapse of the rules-based order spells disaster for the outcomes that result from the armed actions of both resistance groups/oppressed peoples and nation states alike. It legitimises a dangerous race to the bottom.
The means by which the objectives of armed conflict are achieved matter. A country that uses indiscriminate violence on its enemies can very easily turn that violence inwards upon its own people, and often do.
Similarly, armed resistance groups who fight against oppression using indiscriminate violence and abuse of power typically lead to the formation of violent totalitarian and/or authoritarian “liberation” regimes that oppress the very people they claim to be liberating.
Simply put, the means through which armed resistance and/or armed self-defence is conducted matters; both for those subjected to violence and those perpetrating it.
This is precisely what establishing a rules-based order entails. It stipulates the means through which we agree that ends can be achieved ie, in an ethically sound manner that remains faithful to our common principles and values.
As far as that is possible, we are bound to uphold it, even if it does not work perfectly and is often found severely wanting. This in turn necessitates holding whoever grossly violates the rules-based order to account in full, whether they are neutral, oppressor or oppressed.
In the absence of a rules-based order, there is little meaning to collective governance – ie, whether of people, planet or country – and there are no institutions or “rules of the game” through which global planetary civilisation can organise to face and navigate the pressing, multiple existential challenges of the 21st Century.
Hence the rules-based order is not simply a means for co-regulation of state and non-state actors at the global scale. It is also essential to tackling the grand challenges of this century such as poverty and inequality, urbanisation, climate change, Fourth Industrial Revolution, disinformation, migration, pandemics and so forth.
In the absence of a rules-based order, raw power will determine the “rules of the game” instead. In this scenario whoever can exert direct, coercive power over others will rise to authority and power in the different countries and regions of the world. Such untrammelled power poses a great threat to the stability of societies and regions everywhere. Namely, the threat of unchecked local and national totalitarianism and authoritarianism rising to prominence.
To reiterate the position being posed in this piece, at a personal level the matter of whether one can pass judgement on the means through which oppressed peoples wage armed resistance may understandably be difficult. This is because personal morality is relative and as such may differ considerably from person to person.
However, at a broader collective and institutional level we cannot escape our duty to uphold the principles and ethics that ascribe the rules-based order, despite its imperfections and the many challenges associated with it.
Both Israel and Hamas have been accused of violating the rules-based order. Israel has been accused of maintaining an apartheid state – comprising segregation, occupation, land-grabs, illegal settlements and settler violence – in which Palestinian rights are violated. It has also been accused of genocide, war crimes and atrocities in the war on Hamas-run Gaza, where civilian deaths have skyrocketed.
Hamas is accused of committing war crimes and atrocities in its ongoing war against Israel, but particularly so in the 7 October attack of 2023. While the common objection to Israel and Hamas’s actions is that they have both deliberately targeted civilians, there is little else to compare in respect of establishing a moral equivalence between their actions. Beyond the vast differences in power between both, there are substantive differences between them that negate any sound prospect of comparison.
From an ethical perspective, labelling mutual criticism of both Hamas and the Israeli governments’ actions as invoking a “moral equivalence” between victim and oppressor is an oversimplification.
Indeed, this piece is arguing that it is not so much a matter of moral equivalence as it is a matter of ethics. It is only by embracing the principles and ethics that underpin the rules-based order that we can produce and maintain the “guardrails” that we need to ensure that armed conflict is waged in a manner that does not precipitate a “slippery slope” scenario that descends into all-out destruction.
We need to be able to call out deep ethical flaws that threaten the rules-based order, particularly at collective and institutional levels. This means that we need to be able to hold two or more – apparently opposing or contradictory – perspectives at the same time.
We can, on principle, condemn the devastating war in Gaza and its heavy civilian death toll. We can also, on principle, condemn the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. We can recognise this as an “and” relationship and not an “or” one (ie, a “non-binary” relationship).
This is important to reflect on because when engaged in struggles and resistances, not everyone who stands by you is your ally, and not everyone who criticises you is your enemy. These are hard-learned lessons from experience of struggle and resistance; ones that speak directly to the reality of struggle and not romanticised and utopian fantasies of what it should be.
The rules-based order is not perfect. It itself can be subverted and abused – and often is – to maintain power relations that are oppressive and discriminatory. There is no doubt that the law, and the systems that administer it, can be unjust.
However, there is room within the rules-based system to challenge and change it. It is a system that allows for continual improvement, with devoted effort and commitment from all who subscribe to it.
Relinquishing the rules-based order – or picking and choosing from it in a piecemeal manner – is essentially to capitulate to fragmentation of the rules-based order, from which manipulation, coercion and raw power can take hold. We need clarity in collective action to forge trajectories towards affirmative visions of the future and the rules-based order provides that.
The breakdown of the rules-based order through the actions of either side in the Middle East conflict will likely only worsen the situation. Indeed, it may be argued that the non-adherence to the rules-based order, open defiance towards it, and patently unethical actions and positions on either side of the conflict have steadily precipitated the situation in which the Middle East now finds itself.
One only need refer to the dozens of rules-based order-informed norms – and the very many UN declarations, resolutions and requests – that go ignored by regional actors engaged in the Middle East conflict, which includes Israel, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. That is, the rules-based order may itself be less of a problem than the non-adherence to it.
When parties are warring or in conflict, it is up to the rest of us to uphold the principles and ethics that underpin the rules-based order we aspire to universalising. Even though at a personal level we may feel ill-equipped to adopt a position on a sensitive matter that can be interpreted in a variety of ways, this should not – and cannot – serve to universalise reluctance to adopt a firm position at the collective and institutional levels of society.
To the contrary, we should seek to uphold these principles fervently at these levels precisely because the reproduction of a global rules-based order depends on it.
We cannot simply remain silent or become complicit with violence that has no boundaries and/or is wholly unrestrained. It does not matter who is behind the violence. What matters is that violence itself is recognised as possessing a power in and of itself that requires ethical constraints.
Arundhati Roy goes further, invoking the Struggle against the apartheid state in South Africa as a parallel to the plight of the Palestinian people, a comparison that has become a common refrain:
“… An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.”
As someone born and raised in the anti-apartheid Struggle in the 1970s, and having lived two decades under the oppression of the apartheid state, I can attest first-hand to the close affinity that the majority of South Africans have towards the Palestinian people and their struggle for freedom and justice.
I also understand full well the hopelessness that drives one to pick up arms against an unjust regime and spent much of my teenage years preparing to do precisely that. So did many others of my generation.
However, as much as the desperation that drove many of us towards joining the armed Struggle was palpable and understandable, in all my years of rage and frustration with the apartheid regime, there was never any genocidal sentiment directed towards white South Africans.
This was especially the case in how the armed Struggle was conceived of and fought for. There was never any sense that simply slaughtering whites in their homes and in the streets where they lived could constitute a resistance that we could defend or stand by. Nor were there any illusions that this would bring about our freedom.
The ideology that fuelled the armed Struggle of the African National Congress (ANC) was one of non-racialism. It was not exclusionary but inclusive, and it was secular and political in essence, not cultural, ethnic or religious.
We did have extremist armed groups that conducted indiscriminate terror attacks on civilians, such as the Azanian Peoples’ Liberation Army’s attacks on the Heidelberg Tavern and the St James Church massacre. However, these attacks were roundly condemned and rejected by the vast majority of South Africans as needless massacres designed to destabilise the peaceful transition to a democratic dispensation.
Hence, projecting an idealised (even romanticised) version of the South African struggle against apartheid on to the Middle East conflict presents its own challenges. We cannot ignore that there are some critical differentiating factors between the respective contexts, even though there are compelling parallels at the same time.
The heterogeneity of South African society is mediated by factors that even during apartheid allowed for the formation of broad-based societal coalitions – drawing from all religions, races, classes, ethnicities, sectors and identities – to challenge the apartheid regime. These may well simply not be – historically or currently – present in the Middle East in the same way.
This complexity begs further, more in-depth inquiry, particularly with respect to South Africa’s armed Struggle against apartheid. For those who may be interested, Terror and the Ethics of Resistance, by left-wing writer Brian Morton provides a well-informed account of the deep and sincere ethical reasoning that the ANC underwent in arriving at the decision to take up arms.
Moreover, the armed Struggle itself was strategically and tactically heavily governed by its own ethics of armed resistance, which was wholly contrary to a “by all means necessary” approach.
Suffice to say that while comparisons to the apartheid state – and resistances to it – can be made, making these comparisons simplistically and without a nuanced appreciation of context can lead to misleading conclusions. Ignoring these complexities leads to the invocation of a very simplistic logic: that the negotiated compromise that was achieved in South Africa can be achieved in the case of the Middle East conflict.
South Africa and Palestine have profoundly different histories, leaderships and regional contexts, and mounted their struggles and armed resistances very differently. Clearly, whatever solution will present itself in the case of the Middle East conflict will have to be produced by the people involved in the conflict themselves if it is to have any prospect of brokering sustainable peace and stability.
It is important to caution against the notion that the experience of one group of oppressed peoples is transferable to another, particularly the modes through which their freedom is obtained.
What may have been achieved in the South African context seemed unachievable for a long time until it was achieved. Its achievement required careful, patient, ethical leadership that put the people of the country first; leadership that was prepared to negotiate and compromise so that a new future could be created.
Thirty years into democracy, South Africa is now a nation; imperfect, riddled with challenges and struggles, many of which have been inherited from our past, but we are a nation now.
Indeed, we can wish for the same for the Palestinian people, and we can stand up for them within a rules-based order, as South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice demonstrates.
However, if we are truly vested in the actualisation of a mutually peaceful future for Palestinians and Israelis, we must also be willing to unequivocally express both our support and our criticism equally where appropriate and necessary.
Indeed, as close allies of the Palestinian people, it may reasonably be expected of us to do so, for their sake as much as ours. We need to be able to clearly state our ethical positions without fear or favour to friend or foe alike.
We have a rich tradition of struggle, one in which our values and ethics as a nation in struggle eventually came to define who we are today, even if imperfectly. Rather than allowing the means through which we fight to define us, we need to define how we fight by who we are.
The notion that oppression can or should be resisted “by any means necessary” is simply a recipe for disaster. It erodes the humanity of both oppressed and oppressor alike.
As Morton succinctly puts it, “How we fight is who we are”. DM
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