Accountability, Asymmetry, and the Trial of Resistance
Arcade Joe — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and ordered provisional measures requiring Israel to prevent acts falling within the Genocide Convention. The ruling changed nothing. Fifteen months into a campaign that has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and erased entire cities, the bombs continue. The siege continues. The demand—pressed in parliaments, newspapers, and universities across the Western world—that Palestinians justify Al-Aqsa Flood continues with undiminished urgency, as though the court had ruled on some other matter entirely. What the juxtaposition revealed was the international order functioning as designed: an order in which Palestinian suffering generates demands for Palestinian accountability, while Israeli colonial violence generates demands for Palestinian restraint. October 7 made the asymmetry impossible to look away from. The asymmetry preceded it by decades.
The demand for justification has a specific structure worth examining, because it is constructed to foreclose the questions it appears to be asking. Pressed by governments that fund the genocide, amplified by media organizations that normalize it, and sustained by political institutions that have absorbed the ICJ ruling without altering their position, it assumes that Hamas, not Israel, initiated the violence with Al-Aqsa Flood—that what preceded that date was not occupation, siege, dispossession, and systematic violence but a condition of relative peace disrupted by Palestinian action. It assigns Israel’s response, however catastrophic, to the category of reaction, and Palestinian action to the category of initiative requiring justification. And it assumes that the suffering visited upon Gaza’s civilian population is the consequence of Hamas’s decision rather than of Israel’s.
Each of these assumptions is constructed for a purpose: to ensure that the question of colonial violence is never permitted to arise alongside the question of Palestinian resistance against it, relocating accountability from the structure of colonial violence to the act of resistance, leaving the structure intact and the resistance permanently on trial.
The historical record does not support this assignment of initiative. Israel’s violence against Palestinians has never required Palestinian resistance as its occasion—not in 1948, not in 1982, not across the decades of occupation and siege that preceded Al-Aqsa Flood. The demand for justification is structured to erase precisely this record: a century of colonial violence that required no Palestinian provocation, that preceded Palestinian military organization, and that has continued through every phase of negotiation, agreement, and declared ceasefire.
In a Beirut interview in 1970, Ghassan Kanafani named the structure that the demand has always served: negotiating with the power that imposed Palestinian subjugation, he said, was “a conversation between the sword and the neck”—not a path toward resolution but the mechanism by which subjugation is sustained under the name of process. The demand sustains that mechanism through a particular maneuver: converting objective loss—the measurable destruction of life, land, and homes—into subjective despair, the manufactured belief that resistance has no future, making the occupied experience their losses not as the cost of resistance but as the argument against it. To answer the demand on those terms is to concede the premise—that Palestinian action requires authorization from the colonial structure it is directed against.
The historical record, read honestly, makes a different form of accountability available—one that begins not with the act of resistance but with the condition that makes resistance the only rational response. That condition includes a documented pattern: when the Oslo Declaration was signed in 1993, there were 110,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza; by the time the process collapsed seven years later, there were 195,000; by 2023 there were more than 700,000—the expansion having accelerated without interruption across every phase of negotiation, agreement, and declared ceasefire. Every political concession was met not with reciprocal acknowledgment but with accelerated ethnic cleansing, deepened fragmentation of Palestinian territory and society. Occupation without horizon, siege without legal basis, dispossession without acknowledgment, and violence that has never, across more than a century, required Palestinian provocation to sustain itself.
The Oslo process had already demonstrated this logic—requiring Palestinians to account for their resistance as the precondition for any political recognition, recasting capitulation as vision and security coordination as strategy. That precedent should not obscure how precisely the demand operates now: by fixing attention on the operation of October 7 and its immediate antecedents, it ensures that the longer structure, the one that produced Al-Aqsa Flood as surely as it produced the First Intifada, the second, and the Great Revolt of 1936, remains outside the frame of the question being asked.
The demand intensifies in direct proportion to Palestinian suffering, treating that suffering as evidence of Palestinian culpability—treating the genocide Israel is perpetrating against Gaza’s civilian population as an argument against Palestinian resistance, when it is, in every particular, the most unambiguous demonstration yet of the conditions to which Palestinian resistance is a response. This inversion—in which the occupied bear responsibility for the occupation’s violence against them—is not an analytical error but the demand’s purpose, deployed consistently across a century to ensure that the greater the violence visited upon Palestinians, the stronger the case against their resistance becomes.
To refuse that demand—to decline to answer the question on its own terms—is not to evade accountability but to insist that it be applied where the evidence places it: on the structure that has produced, across more than a century, the conditions from which Al-Aqsa Flood and every comparable moment before it have emerged. That the demand will continue to be pressed is itself part of the structure’s design; its urgency is inversely proportional to the urgency of the question it displaces. What the full weight of the historical record makes unavoidable is the recognition that the condition from which Palestinian resistance emerges—the occupation, the siege, the systematic dispossession that has never required Palestinian provocation to sustain itself—will continue to generate resistance in direct proportion to its intensity. The demand for Palestinian justification has never addressed that condition. It was always designed to ensure that the condition was never what required addressing.
The world is waking up.
The truth is being seen.
The sun will not stay behind the clouds and Gaza is not alone.