GOODENOUGH MASHEGO

In western political discourse, there is a parlance called ‘Palestine exception’. It has been in use since 1948 when historic Palestine was lost and contemporary Israel was founded. In simple terms, it means that everything else goes into paralysis when it comes to the issue of Palestine. The rules-based order that has prevented the breakout of global bloodshed since 1945 applies everywhere else, but not in the Holy Land of Palestine. By ‘Palestine’ they (and subsequently all of us) mean ‘from the river to the sea’. This 25 585 km² piece of real estate has become a guillotine for civilised norms and standards.

Palestine wasn’t always a frontier. It became the Wild West in 1920. After slipping from the grip of the Ottoman Empire until 1948, it was the kind of place where young British soldiers, still fresh from Bulford Camp went on tours of duty only to be brutalised by the Haganah and Irgun; their mutilated corpses rigged with explosives to further kill the British military equivalent of Chevra Kadisha or unassuming medics. A Wild West where a mainstay 237-room King David Hotel would be a legitimate bombing target for the Irgun. Palestine was the first post-World War II geopolitical space where naked terrorism was rewarded with a state.

Since then, Palestine became exceptional, because exceptional historic things happened only in Palestine. In Palestine, miracles – like music, books and Black Lives, still matter.

In the Spring of 1964, the indigenous people of Mozambique took up arms against their Portuguese colonisers. Portuguese East Africa was a land grab that began in the 15^th century with the arrival of a Portuguese ‘spy’ named Vasco Da Gama; recorded by history as an innocent explorer and navigator. One wonders how many noblemen (another one of his titles) had unfettered access to power circles.

Four hundred years later, after numerous attempts to bridge dialogue with their colonisers had failed, the people of Mozambique had had enough of brutal oppression and wanton looting of their resources. They took up arms. Estado Novo’s response, like that of their fellow colonisers in other parts of the world, was to deploy violence to try and quell native dissent.

As resistance intensified and the Portuguese fought to hold on to this piece of warm Indian Ocean territory with turquoise waters, white-washed ocean sandy islands and abundance of natural resources, their foreign troop footprint surged to 55 000 men. They committed massive atrocities; the one history chose to record as most brutal being the Wiriyamu Massacre of 400 unarmed villagers which then Prime Minister of Portugal António Costa called, “An unforgivable act that dishonours Portuguese history.”

During the resistance, which resulted in the deaths of both Portuguese settler civilians and soldiers, a recorded 10 000 soldiers lost their lives to FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique), the resistance movement that took up arms against the occupiers. FRELIMO, led by Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel, and patroned by Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere was operating from military bases in that country, which had achieved its independence from Britain in 1961. As resistance dragged on, and with the Portuguese digging in, FRELIMO resistance fighters had to up the ante; which included attacking civilian targets and inflicting pain on Portuguese settlers who were aiding and abetting the occupier’s military effort. Sometimes they lynched fellow Mozambicans accused of collaborating ‘with the enemy’.

Unrestrained violence by Portugal was already causing discontent in the British House of Commons. A hansard entry dated 17 July 1973 contains notes on then opposition leader Harold Wilson’s view of the situation. ‘It is a régime where there is not even a pretence of democratic institutions either in the metropolitan country or in the colony, and where there is a total suppression of Press freedom in both. I do not think one can sustain the argument about the fact that it has been seven months (of the Wiriyamu Massacre) in Mozambique. There has been no freedom of Press reporting in Mozambique and no independent journalists free to observe and file their reports except under Army supervision’. Sounds familiar?

Weighing in on the occupying power’s proclivity to dehumanize its victims, Wilson asked, ‘Were all those children of a few months and all those teenagers detailed in the Spanish priests’ reports Frelimo terrorists? Were all the women murdered in these atrocities—those who were pregnant and those perhaps fortunate enough not to be—also Frelimo terrorists?’

He then shredded the West and its colonial partners’ use of ‘terrorist’ to denote any resistance to their hegemony. Wilson dug deep into Europe’s own history of encouraging dissent against despotic authority, citing the case of Guiseppe Garibaldi in Italy, Lajos Kossuth in Hungary et al. ‘In those days they were not deterred by any fear of guilt by association with those whom authority called terrorists. Garibaldi and the heroes of the Risorgimento, Kossuth in Hungary, the freedom fighters in the Ottoman Empire, the patriots who fought the Carlists in Spain, and the Miguelites in Portugal, were terrorists. They were terrorists because they could obtain freedom only by fighting’.

Europe was unified and formed by people who ‘could obtain freedom only by fighting’, as was the case with the ‘partisans’ resisting Nazi occupation during WWII. If Wilson, whose country had colonised and labelled indigenous movements ‘terrorists’ in the past had a Damascus Experience, how is it possible that in 2025 it’s Piers Morgan, a British man at the helm of a podcast with a whopping four million subscribers who now questions people who achieved their liberation through armed resistance to condemn the actions of another indigenous resistance movement doing what Wilson posited 52 years ago?

It is thus interesting that even at the height of Mozambique’s war of liberation, the United States of America did not designate FRELIMO a ‘terrorist organisation’. It did not even impose sanctions on its leaders either or condemn its military actions. It notably condemned Portuguese actions, by virtue of Portugal being a NATO member.

Since October 2023, acclaimed broadcaster Morgan, a conservative, and one can safely say ‘white nationalist’ has made a habit of asking any brown and Black guest at his show whether they condemn Hamas for launching a military attack it christened (pun intended) Al Aqsa Flood.

For context, Al Aqsa Flood, also known as October 7, was carried out by fighters from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and those of Al Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Resistance Movement, abbreviated Hamas. Hamas, a grassroots indigenous movement was founded in 1987, on the 20^th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, where the organisation is headquartered. More than half of the people of the strip were, in 1987, refugees from what later became the state of Israel. They still had keys to the houses their parents locked as they fled Irgun terrorists, who later became the Tzahal, or Israeli Defence Forces.

They fled believing they wouldl return once the violence had subsided.

By 1987 it had been 40 years that they had not been able to go back to their homes. And on that anniversary, following a truck incident where four Palestinians were killed, Gaza refugees demanded their right to return home where trucks would not willy-nilly plunge on them. It became known as the First Intifada – or uprising.

Similar to a Portuguese response in Mozambique after years of simmering tensions, Israel’s then Defence Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, rather than realising the jig was up, instead instructed his soldiers to break the bones of stone throwers who were a mix of children, teenagers and adults – largely children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of refugees. It was such non-redeemable actions that led to the founding of Al Qassam Brigades, which was only established in 1991, four years after the sprouting of Hamas. It was complementary pressure exerted by those brigades against settlers and soldiers in the Gaza envelope that contributed to Israel being dragged grudgingly to the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which was equally exhausted after decades of fighting and dying in its liberation war against Israel.

Israel chose the PLO because it knew how compromised it was; how corrupt and aloof their leadership, who had gotten used to the largesse of Tunisian patronage had become. It knew they were unlikely to corner Israel into any concession because of the dossiers it held against their leaders; dossiers which often contained compromising details that in Islamic Brotherhood societies could easily result in one hanging by a lamp pole in the morning.

When their ‘Abrahamic’ treachery didn’t, as intended, improve conditions on the ground, another uprising sprung up in 2002, labelled the Second Intifada. It resulted in more brutal suppression, deeper oppression, home demolitions and administrative detentions which invited harsher retribution methods from the resistance. They included arbitrary lynchings of suspected Israeli collaborators within Palestinian society. Those cold-blooded methods contributed to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon finally uprooting undefendable Jewish colonies from the Gaza Strip in 2005 – to save both skin and treasure.

What Wilson alluded to in the House of Commons was that, while in a resistance struggle there are usually two parties, there are no ‘both parties’. The oppressor is so in the wrong to the point that it cannot do right. The oppressed are so righteous in their cause they can do no wrong – even if it means, in the case of South Africa’s armed struggle, bombing Magoo’s Bar in Durban, killing three and injuring 73 civilians.

In 1995, then Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin said, ‘Today there are 450 Israelis in the municipality of Hebron and 120 000 Palestinians. I have to keep three battalions to protect them. I believe, with all due respect, that values – Jewish and universal values – have to guide our policy. I can’t call Hebron a Jewish city. It was, but to impose on 120 000 Palestinians the fact that there are 450 Jews there and for that reason to have military rule? I don’t feel the justification for that”.

Such moral clarity was absent during his earlier tenure as Defence Minister in 1987 when he ordered wrists of stone-throwers to be broken.

Clarity was also lacking in Israel’s disastrous military support for apartheid South Africa during its 70-years occupation of South West Africa (Namibia) and subsequent invasion of post-colonial Angola. In Namibia, apartheid troops were met by local resistance led by South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). In its early years, SWAPO fighters planted landmines along farm roads in border districts of their country, causing deaths of settler white farmers and their families. South Africa spun it as SWAPO’s war on unarmed civilians. It alleged that, in its deranged communist onslaught, SWAPO’s targets were innocent farmers whose only crime was embracing universal Christian-values.

Such evoking of religion as the root of the hostility gained traction with myopic Christian evangelicals in the US and other Protestant groups in Europe. Christian South Africa was seen as doing their dirty work; fighting communists on behalf of ‘God’s civilised’ world. It was against this background that World Council of Churches Programme to Combat Racism Director, Reverend Barney Pityana had this to say,

‘The church is the life and soul of the people of Namibia. In times of sorrow, of struggle and in times of joy, Namibians have known their church leaders to stand alongside them. SWAPO pioneered the programme of providing chaplaincies among Namibians in exile. The SWAPO leadership petitioned the church to ordain some among their number who would symbolize the presence of the church among them as they struggle for liberation. Such was the foresight of the SWAPO leadership and their insight into the needs of the Namibians in the Diaspora. The SWAPO team of chaplains has direct access to the President of SWAPO, Dr Sam Nujoma, who is ready to listen to the needs of his people’.

It was the church, under the banner of the Christian Church of Namibia that came to SWAPO’s defence when it was accused of wholesale purges in its McCarthyist pursuit of alleged South African spies among its ranks. CCN defending SWAPO led to a break-away by some of the church’s white members.

A truth not told by South Africa then was that farming communities along the border, like Israeli kibbutz communities on the Gaza envelope, were intended to serve a security purpose. They were positioned as a frontline in any colonial occupier’s defence plan. To a non-discerning public, those farms look like commercial undertakings while in the case of South Africa in Namibia they were the first line of defence – what would cynically be referred to as human shields. Farmers along the border were subsidised not to farm, but to spy and also provide their farms as assets for counter-insurgency operations.

During Namibia’s protracted struggle, farming communities were regularly targeted. As was the practise with farming communities along South Africa’s borders with Botswana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Swaziland. If one studies the history of farm-murders, they will realise that they spiked during the liberation struggle; with government providing so-called Area Force Units to provide security. The curve was flattened after 1994, even with the dissolution of the commandos – who were white farmers’ own militia. It would have been tempting for someone like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, speaking to foreign media to condemn the overnight murder of a farmer and his family during a cross-border incursion because it would put him on the spot not to; and that’s precisely what Western governments did when presented with evidence that such attacks happened.

Similar targeting, but of Portuguese ‘tourists’ happened during fighting in colonial Angola. What could be called abhorrent atrocities which were used to sully the resistance were curated details colonisers allowed to filter to the world – while concurrently barring the media from reporting on their own regular massacres. Engineers working at a reservoir supplying water to a military base were legitimate targets, yet prescribed as civilian targets. Electricians fixing power supply lines damaged in a sabotage operation would be legitimate targets because their activity abets colonisation. Portuguese ‘tourists’ visiting the Angolan coastline would be targeted as spies; because there was no reason for any European traveller to be keen on visiting a countryside during a conflict. Such were ‘atrocities’ everyone was expected to condemn as legitimising a heavy response by the occupier.

Cahora Basa Dam project, a civilian hydroelectric plant in Mozambique supplying South Africa with electricity had to be protected by the army from potential bombing by FRELIMO. In a resistance war, it’s not only military assets that are of value but also commercial ones such as SASOL (bombed May 31, 1980) and ESKOM (bombed in 1988).

As a result of relentless foreign lobbying and uneven power dynamics, some human rights organisations and UN diplomats ended up voicing unhelpful concerns about acts of resistance without considering the context under which they were committed; such as the purging of ‘spies’ within the ranks of a liberation movement. The backstory remained just that, a story pushed to the back of the line. That’s how the biggest Public Relations coup was achieved in Angola; the American portrayal of MPLA leader Dr Agostino Neto as ‘a drunken psychotic Marxist’ character that deserved no ear nor levers of power.

At the same time, UNITA’s bearded Christian Jonas Savimbi (son of a Protestant preacher) was paraded as a potential statesman capable of ‘saving Angola from its miserable communist path’. If Savimbi didn’t prevail, world opinion was influenced to believe the only acceptable alternative was an openly fascist colonial regime incapable of stymying a rebellion at home.

Between 1945 and 1959 the sole adversary of Western imperialism (read ‘Christian evangelism’) was perceived to be the Soviet Union (communism). After 1959 the USSR was joined by Cuba (communist) as it sought to export its Bolivar-inspired revolution to Western vassals such as Mobutu Sese-Seko’s Zaire (Catholic) and Angola (Catholic). After Muammar Gaddafi’s 1969 coup they were joined by Libya (Islamic) as the West licked its wounds following the toppling of King Idris and the nationalisation of Libya’s vast oil fields. After the events of 1979 they were joined by the Islamic Republic of Iran (Islamic) as it also sought to export its branch of Shia Islam to newly-formed Hezbollah in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon. It’s not a coincidence that in its occupation, Isael aligned with Christian Phalangist militias and not communists in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Since Israel (Judeo-Christian)’s colonisation was violently challenged in the first intifada, in 1996 the West introduced a new tool in its toolbox; designating (sanctioning) anti-Israeli resistance as terrorism and proscribing any such support. After the 1972 Munich Olympics, Western (Christian Crusader) media was given a script to apportion the violence to ‘Arab terrorists’, not the Black September organisation. It was a deliberate attempt to ignite global Arab hatred. The New York Times reported, “Eleven members of Israel’s Olympic team and four Arab terrorists were killed today in a 23-hour drama that began with an invasion of the Olympic Village by Arabs’. A narrative was being created that a whole ethnic group was responsible for the actions of eight hooded men. Imagine reporting that ‘More than 60 000 people in Gaza have been killed by Jews’? The NYT reporting of the time alone could have put at risk every member of the Egyptian team which was also competing in the Olympics. A future agenda was already being set; which explains why there is little empathy after Israeli attacks on churches; because they are owned by ‘Arabs’.

In 1994, in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem, about which Rabin spoke with candour that it cannot be a Jewish city, an Israeli-American right-wing Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein attacked Palestinians in the Ibrahimi Mosque, murdering 29 worshippers. He was killed after the fact. Was there any international condemnation of his massacre? You will have to dig deep for that detail.

Goldstein’s action was not self-defence or resistance but a continuation of what the Crusaders started in the 11^th century and the Irgun continued in the 1930s. That massacre, as is the case with Jewish settler pogroms of 2025, never attracted warranted international rebuke.

Western bile was reserved for peasant villagers such as the Mau-Mau, who mutineered in the 1950s after their land was stolen by the British and 11 000 thousands of their kin killed. Given what they had been subjected to for years, it would have taken a person lacking empathy to condemn people claiming what is theirs by any means necessary; including killing their own countrymen who collaborated with Britian to perpetuate the dispossession.

The Mau-Mau’s conduct could be compared to the 1831 Nat Turner Slave Rebellion, in which in an attempt to attain freedom, Turner and a small group of Black slaves rampaged through Southampton County in Virginia USA, killing 55 white people in their freedom march. That rebellion, like the 1943 Warsaw Uprising (where 700 Jews resisted the German Army’s efforts to deport them) and October 7, are the same Play, same Act, just a different Scene and Actors. They were all climaxes to years of subjugation and dehumanisation. And they were all violently suppressed by the oppressor.

October 7 was also exacerbated by the IDF’s Hannibal Directive, which killed more would-be hostages than the rag-tag resistance ever could. Thus, if anyone succumbs to pressure and condemns the events of October 7, they should be allowed to condemn everything that happened in those crucial 24-hours; including reported use of tank fire inside kibbutz Be’eri, Apache gunships firing missile salvos at tens of cars (filled with kidnapped hostages) fleeing into Gaza and bombing of homes suspected of occupation by resistance fighters while hostages were still held inside. October 7 cannot be reduced to a mere six hours.

In Morocco today there are thousands of Saharawi who are occasionally bombed from the air by the Moroccan Air Force, trained by the Israeli military and equipped by Western powers. Their leaders in the Polisario Front are monitored and often killed by Moroccan intelligence using Israeli spy technology. The Saharawi’s state is occupied by Morocco; a colonisation only recognised as fait accompli by two other countries – yeah you guessed it, the US and Israel. Moroccans, who serve in the military from 19 to 50 have been complicit through their silence and lack of dissent. How does that not make them legitimate targets of the Polisario Front? When not in active combat they are army reserves – just like every Israeli. Interesting enough, the Polisario front does not target Israelis and other Westerners, regardless of their glaring complicity.

International law grants any occupied people the right to armed resistance.

Movements designated and proscribed terrorists by Western powers are in 95% of cases those not embracing Christian evangelical doctrine – except when they are both Christian and Arab. A Christian value system is expansionist in nature. The challenge with condemning without discerning is, it often means one inadvertently joins a Crusader agenda without noticing. You end up participating in culture wars on the side of bigoted Christians without having been baptized a Christian.

Most of the movements hated by bigots did nothing wrong to them. Indigenous Lebanese political party and resistance movement Hezbollah poses zero threat to US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, 10 000 kilometres away. Palestinian Islamic Jihad poses no threat to UK Tory leader Rishi Sunak in his constituency of Richmond, 3 000 kilometres away. Hamas does not pose a threat to Rev Kenneth Meshoe in Vosloorus or Gayton McKenzie or John Steenhuisen 10 000 kilometres away. Polisario Front’s activities don’t threaten anyone outside the Moroccan kingdom.

There’s irrefutable evidence that hatred for the contemporary resistance movement is rooted in them not perpetuating a Judeo-Christian evangelical agenda. In a 4 April 2003 The Guardian piece titled ‘Bringing Aid and the Bible, the man who called Islam wicked’, in reference to bigoted US Reverend Franklin Graham’s planned proselytising crusade into war-torn Iraq, Jonathan Bonk, editor of International Bulletin of Missionary Research said, ‘The difficulty in Iraq won’t be because the evangelists are Christian, but because they’re western. If they aggressively evangelise, that’s a problem. But they’re going to be in danger whether they say anything or not. As symbols of the west, and what the west represents, they are targets’.

Graham, who previously called Islam a ‘violent, wicked’ religion was myopic to the fact that 600 000 Iraqis already practised Christianity. That Iraq’s then Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was a devout Catholic. It was back to the narrative that an Arab-Christian is still a terrorist.

Indigenous resistance movements are sullied on the same premise that propaganda was spread to encourage crucifixion (pun intended) of African anti-colonial movements when they were all demeaned as communist – which was punted as tantamount to being anti-Christ. Contemporary ones are condemned not for committing atrocities but for not warming up to Christian evangelists; which should not be a surprise because in most cases it’s Christian ideologues who occupy and oppress others.

The Palestinian Boycott Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement, like India’s Mahatma Ghandi, is not a darling of the West; not because it advocates intifada – but is presumed to obstruct the manifestation of an evangelical Christian myth of an impending rapture. US based Israeli chief lobbyist Alan Dershowitz argued, ‘My major reason for opposing BDS is that BDS is directed only against Israel’. It used to be directed against apartheid South Africa when it practised apartheid.

Where should a tool to fight apartheid be directed if not at a state currently practising apartheid?

Most contemporary resistance movements are proscribed and designated terrorist for embracing ideas different from their coloniser. They are the communists of the second half of  the 20^th century. The cultivated hatred and disdain for these movements is a manifestation of the Second Crusade.

Christianity didn’t spread all over the world through proselytizing. It was through the use of wanton violence and often genocides.

And it will, once again, if it feels its dominant position slipping, use violence to preserve pole position. That is what is happening today; a combination of lawfare and brutal violence.

Which is why I refuse to join the condemnation brigade, because it falls short of addressing the cause but is preoccupied with the symptom. Christian evangelicals, (who now proudly call themselves ‘Christian Zionists’) obsession with Israel is not about their love for Israel, but their belief that all ethnic Jews (Orthodox, atheists, agnostics et al) must converge on the land, mass-convert to Christianity to enable the rapture to happen. They hate every resistance to Israel because if the land of Israel becomes Palestine, it means Jesus will not come and whisk them to heaven. 

Well, I supported the first Palestinian uprising; the one many protesters had their bones broken by the occupier for partaking in. I supported the second uprising, which was sparked by Ariel Sharon visiting the Al Aqsa Mosque compound on 28 September 2000. The now-dead Sharon galloped on hallowed grounds while his hands still glistened with innocent blood from Sabra and Shatila.

One needs not be drawn into condemning carefully curated highlights such as the bus bombings of the second intifada; or rudimentary rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli cities and being intercepted by the Iron Dome; because those are attempts to shift attention from the original sin – a 58-years old brutal military occupation and apartheid. To condemn six hours of a jailbreak is to sully the legitimacy of the jailbreak – because it does not benefit the prisoner but the prison guard. The prison guard wants those pursuing justice to spend their capital condemning a resistance he instigates through his refusal to end his brutal imprisonment.