In telling the story of Kenya’s struggles for independence, Wairimu Gathimba reminds us that the issue of Palestine is part of an unfinished journey of national liberation for all colonized people that began in the last century. Gathimba argues that the current war will only end with the decolonization of Palestine and a democratic state for all.
By Wairimu Gathimba
Over the last 75 years, the Israel settler colony has denied Palestinians their fundamental rights, including the right to self-determination, and subjected them to an institutionalized and systemic regime of racial domination and oppression. Palestinians have resisted this dispossession since its imposition in 1948, both through legal means, including UN-led negotiations whose resolutions Israel has repeatedly failed to respect, and armed resistance.
This is a story Kenya is all too familiar with. In our struggle for independence from the British settler colony that treated us as subhuman on our own land, our freedom fighters first pursued non-violent means, even in the face of daily settler violence. Similar to the non-Islamist, non-violent Palestinian resistance, organizers such as the Young Kikuyu Association and the East African Association were subject to the same violent repression despite pursuing non-militant means. In Kenya we rremember the massacre following the general strike of 1922 after the arrest of Harry Thuku who was himself an advocate for peaceful negotiations for independence.
As our ancestors were to find out, there is really no way to appeal to a colonizer’s sensibilities; decolonization is often a violent struggle.
Disillusioned by unforthcoming change, our ancestors took to armed resistance under the Kenya Land and Freedom Army in a fight that significantly weakened the settler colony’s hold and led to our sovereignty less than a decade later. This is common knowledge to us Kenyans, heavily featured in our history textbooks. President Ruto himself has made statements reflecting on this knowledge, even promising to build a museum in Nyandarua to honour the Mau Mau (the Kenya Land and Freedom Army) who contributed immensely to the struggle for independence.
Yet, how can the president acknowledge the role of armed resistance in freeing Kenya and then proceed to proclaim solidarity with Israel?
In an act that echoes our own Dedan Kimathi‘s sentiment of “It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees”, Hamas, a faction of Palestinian resistance, took the fight back to the most religious and hardline right-wing government in Israel’s history on 7 October. Since then, we have seen Hamas branded “terrorists” who seek to “kill Jews” most notably by the United States, and in the words of President Biden in his statement on the 7 October attacks.
Given the use of such language to describe Palestinian armed resistance, you would be forgiven to think that the violence in Israel began that day, but a quick social media search would suffice to convince you otherwise.
In July this year, a video of Israeli settlers pouring concrete into a Palestinian well was trending on Twitter. Just four days before the 7 October attacks, Al Jazeera featured a story on the storming of the Al-Aqsa mosque by Israeli settlers. The West does not condemn such violence, and why would they?
A quick look into the history of the Israeli state will reveal that Israel exists only because of European antisemitism. Many antisemites who believed that Jewish people did not belong in Europe supported the establishment of an ethno-state for them. So in true British imperialist spirit, Palestinian land occupied was considered empty, in the same way that “wasteland” and “unoccupied” land in the East African Protectorate “occupied by savage tribes” had been declared empty, justifying its control and occupation by the British crown two decades earlier in 1899.
Arthur Balfour, famous for the Balfour Declaration, which promised Palestine to Zionists in exchange for support during World War I himself, passed the 1905 Aliens Act to stop Jewish people fleeing attacks in Eastern Europe from getting asylum in Britain. For European countries, to confront Israel and its violence, would be to acknowledge the role of their antisemitism in its creation.
Of course, there is also the issue of Israel serving as an imperialist outpost for the interests of the United States and Europe in a sea of undependable Arab allies. In his book Orientations, the British governor for Jerusalem at the time Ronald Storrs wrote in support of the establishment of a Zionist colony, claiming it would be “forming for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”
Israel, since its inception, has been a vanguard of Western imperialism in the Middle East. Israel has served this purpose well, from its collaboration with Britain and France in attacks against Egypt to prevent the nationalization of Suez, intervening militarily in neighbouring Arab countries numerous times, and acting as a conduit for the US to sell weapons to countries it couldn’t openly be seen to support, including apartheid South Africa. In fact, Israel is so integral to the United States’ interests that Joe Biden has said not once but twice (in 1986 and in 2022) that, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.”
This is why the West is so quick to label Hamas’ resistance terrorism, to use a word meant to destroy empathy towards Palestinians. A free Palestine threatens the hold of the West and its interests in the Middle East.
What do the words terrorist and terrorism even mean anyway? Who is and is not a terrorist, who decides, and why does it matter? Our own forefathers were called “terrorists” in their fight for independence against British settler colonialists. Assuming a monopoly on violence and its deserving applications -to serve the interests of capital – the West is quick to label any violent actions inconsistent with its interests as terrorism.
In telling the story of Palestine and its struggles for independence alongside parallels from our country’s struggle, our podcast Until Everyone is Free seeks to reject the revisionism of a people’s history and the deradicalization of their resistance and independence struggles. Our latest episode titled Uhuru wa Palestina ni Uhuru Wetu, traces the story of Palestine from its existence as part of the Ottoman Empire and the continuous loss of its land from the UN 1947 partition and the subsequent annexation of its land till its existence today in the form of “bantustans” in West Bank and the Gaza Strip. We discuss the growth of Zionism, its attempts to acquire a Jewish ethno-state since the 19th century, including how part of the British East Africa Protectorate was proposed as a Jewish national home in a desperate move by Joseph Chamberlain to profit from the “Lunatic Express” that was proving to be a bad investment.
We also highlight the role of Western imperialism in Kenyan and Palestinian struggles, including little-known information such as that the tactics used by the British colonizer in Operation Anvil, which was used to suppress the Mau Mau based on Operation Shark which was used to suppress Palestinian uprisings in 1946.
By invoking the story of Kenya’s struggle for independence, we hope to remind our audience that the issue of Palestine is part of an unfinished journey of national liberation for all colonized people that began in the last century. This is not a “conflict” between two sides, it is a settler colonial struggle that will only end with the decolonization of Palestine and a democratic state for all.
Solidarity with Palestine and all other oppressed people!
Wairimu Gathimba is a Kenyan writer and cultural worker with the Kenya Organic Intellectuals Network in Nairobi. Wairimu writes for The Elephant and This is Africa.
Good article.