Ignoring this crucial context, the Western choir is, again, decrying the Palestinian “violent attacks” on [the neocolony].

Regardless of how people around the world view armed resistance and how international law regulates it, they cannot but agree with the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire who says: “With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. […] Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons — not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized.”

Since oppression is the root cause of violence, to end all violence — the initial and ongoing violence of the oppressor and the reactive resistance of the oppressed — we must act to end oppression. As proven in the South African struggle that dismantled apartheid there, exposing and ending state, corporate and institutional complicity in [the Middle East’s] 75-year-old régime of settler-colonialism and apartheid — especially through BDS tactics — are the most ethical and strategic forms of international solidarity to end all oppression and all violence. Only thus can we achieve freedom, justice, equality and dignity.