The Palestine struggle for self-reliance, land, and independence has long reached the point of no return. The people of Palestine did not begin to resist the zionist settler colonial project only last week as some corporate media outlets would like to make us believe.
The moment Israel began to invade, dispossess, enslave, capture, kill, and proletarianize the sons and daughters of Palestine, since the 20th century, that was also the moment when the Palestine struggle began. The moment the settler violence of the coloniser begins, the people’s decolonial struggle for independence also begins, immediately.
There are no human beings that can sit and tolerate abuse, violence, and dehumanisation. The colonising power, globally, uses a set of misleading measures to create the illusion that the colonised is tolerating and accepting of being dominated.
The two strongest tools of control that colonial power use to craft its illusions is the media and the police. The media acts as a tool of words, information, definitions, perspectives, and knowledges. Its targeted damage is aimed at twisting the logic of the population, distorting its imaginations, and killing its potential to think in alternatives.
The media agenda extends to the universities, schools, and churches of the colonising power, trumping all of them up as sites of a common message of illusions, distortions, and propaganda.
The way specific words and images are used are all tools utilised actually to foreground meaning. Words such as justice, violence, kill, death, struggle, freedom, self-defence, majority, minority, ownership, citizenship, history, and politics are all deployed at various degrees to communicate a particular political agenda.
The state of Israel, supported by the United States, and the European Union, which are all but a single and historical geopolitical centre of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, capitalism, and whiteness – have long launched unspeakable crimes against humanity in Africa, in the Americanas, in the Australisia, in the Middle East, Asia, in the Pacific Islands, and in Palestine. We feel and live their colonisation today.
The response of the colonised to such gruesome crimes therefore must be understood within the context of seeking justice, freedom, and independence from colonisation. When the slaves revolt against their master, the slaves are seeking justice, freedom, and independence. This response can take any means necessary to be realised. Because the violence of the coloniser is displacing, dehumanising, littered with armed episodes of genocide, racial cleansing, land dispossession, rape, torture, and humiliation – the slaves therefore have no other option but to also take up arms and fight for belongs to them, their land, their humanity.
Frantz Fanon is therefore accurate to term decolonisation as a violent struggle to disrupt the colonial problem. The colonised are created by the coloniser. The response of the colonised therefore is determined by the conditions imposed by colonisation. The colonial suffocation is giving us no other option but to take arms and resist. In the language of the colonised therefore this is not violence. This is justice.
The armed struggle is a people’s struggle for their independence. It is an action for justice, and all peace loving people of the world will also see it as a justified action for justice. There can never be freedom and the reclaim of the land, the land which will give us bread and dignity, without a violent armed struggle for decolonisation. The struggle against settler apartheid colonisation in South Africa was also waged with this principle as well.
The emerging reports by corporate media houses concerning the Palestine struggle in recent days must also be viewed with the same understanding. Israel is a blood thirsty regime that is on an aggressive mission to commit mass genocides in Palestine. The people of Palestine are defending themselves and their land, they are seeking justice, by using art, education, activism, mobilisation, and arms. These are all instruments necessary for decolonisation. Through the Palestinians we see ourselves.
The entire world must begin to see that the moment justice has finally arrived. We are now living in the era of Dewesternisation, Dedollarisation, DeEuropeanisation, Deracialisation, Depatriarchisation, Deproletarianisation, and Decolonisation. The deployment of the media to enslave our minds will fail. The deployment of the police to discipline our activism, to silence our voices, and to eliminate us from the surface of the earth will also fail.
This is our time. Freedom or death. Forward to the freedom of the Palestinians. Forward to the freedom of the world.
Dr Pedro Mzileni teaches sociology in South Africa, writes in personal capacity
