First and most important: I can only assume, hope, that Ronnie Kasrils had no idea about what, exactly, Hamas did. Or how it treats the people of Gaza.
Mass rape is not, under any circumstances, a tool of resistance.
Mass murder is not, under any circumstances, a tool of resistance.
We don't murder children. We don't take children hostage. We don't rape children. We don't support these acts, much less celebrate them as resistance.
Some people maintain that "no settler is innocent" or w/e. That argument, if correct, would mean everyone in the United States should not just get the death penalty: we should be raped, mutilated, and burned in extrajudicial killings.
No trial, nobody checking to see if we're indigenous, or even if we're citizens.
Hamas didn't check: their victims included people in the country on work visas, people visiting to go to the music festival, and at least one Palestinian who was working as an EMT at the music festival. Who thought he'd be okay staying to help the victims.
Nelson Mandela was famous for ending apartheid through peaceful resistance. I cannot imagine what or who Kasrils means by "in the same way that we did."
The entire thing about Oct 7 is that nobody has ever done anything quite like this in one day. Hamas flattened 22 towns, killed 1,200 people, and took 242 hostages, in one day. Hamas has as much military funding per capita now as Iraq or Ukraine, but Israel has a million times the military power.
And yet, Hamas killed almost twice as many people in one day as Israel ever has. Without even an airplane. With knives and guns and fire and explosives and their bare fucking hands.
This is not a strategy of resistance. Heck, this is not AN EXPRESSION of the RIGHT TO RESIST. This is not some kind of performance art or creative protest.
This is fucked up and bad and wrong.
It's also truly baffling to see him say that Israeli Jews should react to this attack by accepting a nonexistent proposal to give Palestine land it hasn't asked for and live under Palestinian rule.
Like... Imagine if trans people rose up and killraped our way across America, and Canadians were like, "Cis Americans, you're not gonna have peace until you live with them as citizens in a single, democratic, transgender-ruled state, and compensate them for all the oppression."
It's one of those things where the end sounds ideal, and we can't REALLY imagine the means, so we just sort of.... Our brains sort of glide smoothly right over it and retcon it as good.
The Palestinian Authority has not asked for this. The Palestinian Liberation Organization has not asked fot this. Even Hamas has not asked for this. It wants to rule the land, sure, but not democratically, and not with Jews on it.
I can only assume that Kasrils did not know that the Palestinians have never had leadership that wanted a democratic state, whether with or next door to Israel.
He cannot have known that Palestine hasn't had an election in 18 years. That President Abbas is now entering the 19th year of his four-year term. That Hamas staged a violent coup 16 years ago to kick the Palestinian government out of Gaza, and has run it as a dictatorship ever since.
I am an optimist. I am determined to believe that people would care about these things and fight for Palestinian freedom within Palestine too, if they knew these things.
He can't know how many Israeli Jews actively work with Palestinians toward peace. That one of the kibbutzim Hamas destroyed had a community fund which collected money and sent it to kids in Gaza.
As for the other quotes: A 1995 quote claiming Israel had been committing genocide, and that the Palestinians are the indigenous people, should automatically be scrapped for both being outdated and blatantly inaccurate.
At most, the Palestinians have been there for 1,300 years. That's a long time. But there have been Jewish people there for more than 3,000 years.
And both before, and since this statement was made, the Palestinian and Israeli populations have grown at about the same rates. That is not what genocide looks like. This statement is deeply disrespectful to the people of Sudan, of Myanmar, of Syria, of all the places where genocide has occurred. Where people have perpetrated incredible horrors.
It is also wild to see a quote claiming Israel had been committing genocide in 1995, when before and since then, the Palestinian population has grown as quickly as the Israeli one.
Anyway, this shit needs to stop. I am NOT fighting for my own personal liberation as a trans person, a queer person, an autistic and mentally ill person, an abuse survivor, or a victim of capitalism, alongside anybody who thinks these atrocities are a form of fucking activism.
If you need me, I'll be in the woods, talking to some damn rocks.