After the news of Israel declaring war on Palestine, Whitman’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter (SJP) hosted a teach-in, taking their time to educate the Whitman community about this conflict. When the collective of students finished their presentation and opened the floor to audience questions, it wasn’t too long until a student asked SJP members if they “believe that Hamas is a terrorist organization,” or if they “acknowledge the history of Hamas.” This is a prime example of why productive conversations about the Palestine and Israel conflict are currently failing on campus. Affiliating 2.2 million people with a terrorist organization does nothing but disregard the oppression and dehumanizing apartheid and occupation Palestinians have endured.

 Life under occupation for Palestinians is one of constant surveillance and terror. In a 2022 report, Amnesty International, a worldwide human rights organization, highlights Israel’s intentional ways of maximizing their power to create a land that’s only beneficial for Israeli citizens, and not the Palestinians that have been residing in these territories for years. According to Amnesty, Israel systematically discriminates against and criminalizes Palestinians by dispossessing Palestinians of their homes, by Israel’s military force’s daily routines of brutality and by the implicit endorsement of this violence via other nations like the U.S. The history of Palestinians’ struggle for freedom has long been ignored. Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians is unacceptable but we must question why this form of retaliation happened in the first place.

Killing innocent people can never be justified; this is not up for debate. But when you use Hamas as a scapegoat to delegitimize the Palestinian resistance, which is happening on social media platforms like Israel Defense Force’s Instagram page, you’re refusing to acknowledge the history of this movement, and the documented history of Israel’s oppressive apartheid tactics. 

Oppression isn’t only embedded in how Israel occupied Palestinian’s land, it’s also embedded in how Israel’s occupation regulates the lives of Palestinians. To help walk readers through the current ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza, I interviewed Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, and Director of Indigeneity, Race and Ethnicity Studies.

“The everyday existence for Palestinians is a state of terror, any day Israel defense soldiers can come in, smash your door, kill your sibling, take somebody in custody with no type of warning,” Zalloua said. “Palestinians living in the occupied territories are already seen as suspicious, so overwhelming force is what Palestinians deal with all the time.” 

Zalloua described how this constant state of terror is fundamentally different from Israelis’ everyday lives.

“Israelis live their life, while Palestinian life deals with unprovoked suffering,” he said. 

The Israeli government’s response to Hamas’ attack has been relentless bombing of schools, hospitals and Palestinian’s homes, including the use of white phosphorus gas on civilians, which causes life-threatening burns.

“Israel’s social life has been punctured due to Hamas’ attack,” Zalloua said. “Israeli citizens’ everyday life has been put on pause.”

Zalloua explained that this feeling is normalized for Palestinians, and is felt even without large-scale conflict. 

“Suffocating violence [is] always there, especially in Gaza,” Zalloua said.  

The lack of freedom Palestinians deal with is inhumane, and this is shown by how freely Israelis can live compared to Palestinians. Current critiques of the Palestinians’ fight for freedom are mainly due to people’s fixed mindsets. 

Zalloua argued that current conversations obscure the past.

“There’s a failure to understand the situation. For the average Western viewer, you see Hamas as the first act of violence. The originary violence is the occupation,” he said.

Palestinians have protested against Israel’s occupation essentially since the ‘Nakba,’ or the first violent displacement of Palestinians by British and Israeli forces, including  the United Nations’ partition plan. 

“If one wants to question the tactics of Hamas, you can’t question the tactics without simultaneously questioning Israel’s occupation,” Zalloua said. “You can’t do one without the other.” 

In order to accurately process the catastrophe unfolding in Palestine, we must first look at the war with settler-colonialism as our framework of analysis. Any other attempt to understand this violence will ultimately fall short. Our solidarity begins with education.