Justice or Peace? (Part 2)

Considering the Historical Differences

Following from this previous discussion which framed the issue in more general terms and concluded that:

So justice or peace?

Peace first. Stop the violence. Stop the killing. Stop the war. Stop the blatant acts of vengeance. Stop the jihad. Stop the kidnapping. Release the hostages unconditionally. And start a negotiation! Pick up the phone and talk to the leaders on the other side like adults!

I want to further explore why this is particularly relevant to this particular conflict, and why discussions around justice and peace relating to other conflicts—such as for instance, the civil rights struggle in the United States, or the struggle against apartheid in South Africa—are qualitatively different.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a conflict, it is a series of wars. And it reached this state many decades ago. While it is often said that the conflict did not start on October 7th, it didn’t even really start with partition in 1947 or the end of the war in 1948 either. There were massacres in the 1920s and 1930s! The pre-partition Palestine that existed previous to that was divided into not just different social classes or differing ideologies, but into what today has evolved into entirely different national movements, movements which do not hold the other in high regard whatsoever.

By contrast, the struggles in apartheid South Africa, or the segregationist United States never reached a situation like this. Martin Luther King did not fire rockets at Washington DC. And by the same token, Bull Connor did not drop bombs on civil rights activists. It did not escalate to the status of a militant con.flict The violence that took place in apartheid South Africa was sporadic and limited, and did not lead to war.

This makes it much easier to focus on questions of justice. Had the ANC or the SPLC adopted the same ideology and strategies as Hamas—and to be very clear, Hamas’ goal is to dismantle Israel, take over every part of their society, and either subjugate or expel the Jewish population—we would have surely ended up in a completely different situation. That situation would have been called a war. And the resolution would have been a lot more complicated, and difficult than a “rainbow nation” one state solution.

War is an inherently extreme thing, and in a war there are only two ways out—victory, or a conflict resolution process that would lead to something like a peace treaty. And even for the Palestinians like myself who reject Hamas and their ideology, once there is a war, we find ourselves dragged along for the ride regardless of our political beliefs or preferences.

Now to be clear, this does not mean to say that there was not violence involved in the struggles that I am contrasting the Palestinian struggle with. Apartheid in South Africa, and Segregation in the United States were extremely unjust systems. When there are political or material injustices, historically, there have often been acts of violence. But acts of small-scale violence are not necessarily going to lead to war, or to the division of one society into multiple different nations.

The decision to take up arms and resort to armed conflict or not is incumbent upon groups themselves. There is no doubt that Martin Luther King could have chosen to become a militant leader in the mould of a Che Guevara, a Lenin, or an Osama bin Laden. But of course, he didn’t, and the elements that engaged in revolutionary violence had only a minor impact. Nelson Mandela in fact did resort to a level of armed struggle, but chose to limit it by only targeting regime infrastructure, and not civilians. He also chose to emphasise equality, and reconciliation.

By contrast, internal political struggles that escalated beyond this level, such as the French colonisation of Algeria, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, or the partition of India and Pakistan ended in either a peace treaty, or a victory. Once it’s war, questions of justice are swept aside until there are legal mechanisms in the post-war period to address injustices.

This is rather revealing. Those who seek to de-emphasise the path towards peace and emphasise justice are not arguing for justice so much as they are arguing for victory. French Algeria is so often the counterexample held up by Hamas supporters. The Algerians were colonised by France for more than a hundred years, and then they fought to kick out the French colonists, and after a long and difficult struggle, they won.

That is the notion of justice that comes with no peace.

Any notion of justice based upon legal judgments, or political reconciliation, or coexistence is thrown out of the window.

That is what “no justice, no peace” really means. Fight on until victory. Struggle for victory. Defeat your enemies.

For Algerian Muslims, who wished to kick out the French colonists, that is what they eventually won. Indeed, the same can be said of Israeli Jews who chose to fight for their self-determination against not only the British empire, but also the surrounding Arab states. They won their victory, and got their statehood.

There is no guarantee that the Palestinians will win such a victory against a technologically dominant Israel, and against an Israeli population who have no motherland to return to, and who do not want to be displaced.

Without victory and without peace, life is miserable and precarious for those who remain stateless.

And so, if there is even the faintest glimmer of a possibility for peace, it must be pursued—not later, but now. It is not a luxury. It is a necessity.