Palestinian Resistance and The Peaceocracy

White supremacy masking as more ethical than thou

Mural and child in the rubble, Gaza 2025

Being for peace

Over the past 20 months, various (white, privileged) people I know have expressed to me that they do not support Palestinian armed resistance, or “violence” in general. They declare they are for “peace” and “both sides sitting down to talk.”

Judging by their vibe when they make these pronouncements, I can reasonably assume that my friends and acquaintances believe they are walking a spiritual or ethical high road and that their stances speak to their more refined values.

Peaceocracy: standing for 'the higher' value of peace as a cover for supremacy.

In contrast to what I’m being groomed to feel upon hearing these statements, I actually feel grief. Looking at the photo accompanying this writing, putting it alongside the pronouncements of the peaceocracy, I also feel a kind of helplessness.

Grief is a rich teacher. But in the end, I’m not willing to give in to helplessness.

Some facts about Palestine and armed resistance

It’s a fact that international law grants people living under occupying, colonialist regimes the right to armed resistance.

You may be an unshakeable proponent of nonviolence, but Palestinians are not breaking the law simply by taking up arms.

It’s also a fact that Palestinians have attempted non-violent resistance and have been met with nothing but more violence at the hands of internationally-backed Israeli forces.

Did you know that the first Intifada in 1987 in Palestine was an instance of largely non-violent resistance consisting of mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, general strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods and institutions, refusal to pay taxes, and the creation of parallel Palestinian institutions such as underground schools and health clinics?

Israel responded with many of the same tactics it is using today: military force, beatings, abductions of civilians including women and children, and cutting off food, water, fuel, and medical supplies.

Even so, Palestinian resisters still attempted to deploy nonviolent strategies during the Second Intifada, although armed resistance became more prevalent in the face of Israeli brutality.

This is not a debate about October 7th. But whether you view Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups as terrorist or as legitimate responses to occupation or something in between, what they did on October 7th pales exponentially in comparison to the crimes committed by Israel during 77 years of brutal occupation and what has been called by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, an "incremental genocide."¹

As Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, wrote: “Moral authority doesn’t come from selective memory.”²

Now, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has reached holocaust intensity.

What would you do?

This essay is about how mostly white, privileged people from colonialist countries relate to Palestinian armed resistance and attempt to retain definitional, positional power. I hope it can serve as mirror so that we can more clearly see ourselves and move forward to end the genocide in Gaza and all supremacies.

So I'm 100% sure that the vast majority of you calling for exclusively peaceful forms of resistance would pick up a weapon in a heartbeat if your children, families, and friends were being murdered, abducted, thrown into prisons without charge or due process, brutally tortured, starved, and sexually abused. For decades. Right?

And wouldn’t most of you support armed resistance—even if you didn’t participate in it directly—if your homes were violently appropriated, if you were forcibly displaced for generations on end, if your movements, sources of food, medical care, and water were tightly controlled by a foreign power, and if you and your neighbors were regularly bombed in brutal forays such as those that the Israeli occupation forces call “mowing the lawn”?

And for spiritual folk: We surely all desire a world in which mutual respect reigns and guns need not apply. Yet even the Dalai Lama—a staunch advocate of non-violent political solutions—has famously said that "If there is a clear indication that there is no alternative to violence, then violence is permissible.”³

As you likely know, many monks, nuns, and other renunciates in Tibet and elsewhere have participated in armed resistance when no other alternative was viable to secure life and liberty.

Given our real and various situations, there can be no rule such as “peaceful good, armed resistance bad” that is skillful in every instance. We can usefully borrow a maxim from Ayurveda: for whom and when.

If you have read this and recognized, “yes, I would pick up arms to defend my loved ones and home, or at least support someone else to do that,” think about what is actually fueling your self-branding pronouncements of being “for peace” and against “violence” when it comes to Palestinians.

Let’s sober up

What would be perfectly acceptable and appropriate for privileged folks and our loved ones is condemned on principle and from a distance when it comes to Arab-Muslim brown people from the Middle East.

Even if you truly would never pick up arms, even to save your own life or the lives of your loved ones, pronouncing sententiously from our armchairs and meditation cushions about what resistance movements of people living under a sadistic, apartheid, genocidal regime should look like precisely reflects the supremacist, colonialist mindset.

It’s also lacking in an understanding of the history and the facts on the ground.

But this expression of the peaceocracy is not the worst in my book.

The worst is the “everyone should just sit down and talk” line.

Trauma deformed

Okay, Palestinians have come to the negotiating table. Many times.

But this is because the enablers of Israel will not do the right thing.

What should happen: the entire world should protect Palestinians and all of the other people currently being bombed by Israel.

What is happening: A small group of countries led by racist, self-interested leaders is condemning Palestinians to genocide and holding the best aspirations of the entire world hostage while Israel goes on a totally depraved destruction and killing spree.

Think about it, sensitive folk:

Because we have left them with no alternative, we are forcing Palestinians to sit at tables with their torturers, their sexual abusers, their mass murders, the abductors of their children, and the destroyers of their ancestral lands, their crops, their schools, their libraries, their temples, their homes, and their hospitals.

We are forcing them to sit at tables with those who are systematically starving 2 million of their family, friends, and neighbors.

Because so many of us remain silent and in willful ignorance of the facts, Palestinians must “make deals” with bad faith criminals who are still actively abducting, torturing, starving, and slaughtering their loved ones while agreement after agreement is broken by the perpetrators.

Are you “trauma informed”? What about applying that framework to Palestine? Is it compassionate to support victims of abuse to negotiate with their abusers? What we do is protect them, not subject them to more pain and trauma. Right?

Or does only our trauma matter?

If we want actual peace and not the continuance of violent inequalities and supremacist violences, we must protect Palestinians.

Before October 7th, a widely-cited study found that 53% of children in Gaza met the criteria for PTSD due to witnessing or directly experiencing atrocities committed by Israel.⁴ Multiple recent studies put that number at 85-95%.

The road ahead

Even in the midst of this incredibly painful moment, we can glimpse the end of all of these supremacies. The empire is fighting back, but the people are slowly, slowly moving on.

Palestine has been the major catalyst for coalescing a multi-faceted, global movement.

Many more people are actively involved in dismantling the systems of thought, feeling, governance, and culture that are destroying our world.

The pain, anger, shock, and grief that we feel are serving as gateways to fierce self-reflection and action steeped in greater clarity and reality-based compassion.

Clarity, compassion. . . and courage. These are the beacons lighting the road ahead.

with infinite love,

Shambhavi

Palestine resource learning list >>

1. Ilan Pappé, “Genocide in Gaza,” The Electronic Intifada, Sept. 2, 2006: Accessed on May 29, 2025.

2. Published on X (formerly Twitter), May 15, 2025: Accessed on May 30, 2025.

3. Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival, 313 (1999).

4. Taha, Amira Mohamed et al., “Addressing the mental health crisis among children in Gaza,” The Lancet Psychiatry, Volume 11, Issue 4, 249 - 250: Accessed on May 29, 2025.

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