At this moment we are seeing the same moral outrage and screeching of pacifism fetishists as we saw during the struggle for South African freedom. It’s easy to take a stand against things like necklacing or killing concert goers when you are sitting safely at home on your comfortable couch. Not so easy to wring your hands when you are staring down the barrel of apartheid and all its horrors. Palestinians must do whatever they deem necessary in order to survive genocide at the hands of their colonial occupiers. And westerners who have supported - whether in word, or in deed through the material actions of their governments - the Israeli settler project and their genocidal campaign, have no right to judge the actions of Palestinians taken in pursuit of survival.
Westerners consistently supported the Apartheid government. Western mobilized resistance to apartheid outside SA was always a tiny minority. Westerners just absorbed the victory over apartheid into their own mythology, immediately canonized Mandela while stripping his radicalism from their narrative, and proceeded to largely ignore SA (leaving it to be exploited).
Westerners have never learned to oppose settler-colonialism. Not once. They’ve either tried it and succeeded or tried it and lost the war to people they don’t consider Western.