resistance as survival

On the very last day of my trip with Interfaith Peace-Builders, we met with Omar Barghouti, one of the founding members of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and a leading advocate of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) as a nonviolent form of resistance against Israeli colonialism and apartheid.

I knew we were in for a treat because I've heard Omar speak before and he is teh awesome. Calm, logical, humane, amazingly articulate, often funny, angry but never hateful, he's just one of those people who manages to say ten inspiring things every time he opens his mouth.

We talked a lot about BDS and Omar said a lot of smart things, but there was one thing he said that really stuck with me. "If you're not resisting this system, it can kill you." He talked about his firm belief that resistance is liberating and empowering and sometimes the only means of maintaining your humanity under oppression.

This stuck with me because it fit with something I started thinking about in Gaza, where so many people had endured things that would seem to be unendurable. While I was there, something clicked in my head, about how sometimes resistance isn't so much a conscious choice but an instinctive survival mechanism. How sometimes it's the only way to hold on to your sanity in the face of so much pain. The only way to feel like you have some agency when your oppressor controls everything in your life down to when the lights go on and off.

Systems of oppression are not stable. They are governed by their own internal dynamics, which force both sides into confrontation whether they're prepared for it or not. Oppressors, unchecked, grow into bottomless pits of power-hungriness. No concession, no degree of passivity and submission and boot-licking is ever enough for them. If you give them an inch, they'll take everything you've got. At the same time, very few human beings can stand to be ground down indefinitely. Eventually one of two things will happen. Either they'll push you so hard against the wall that you have no choice but to fight back--resistance or death--or some particular injustice will just be too much to bear, snapping some deeply-buried tripwire of defiance that makes you explode in a spontaneous, instinctive act of rebellion.

Of course, in a system of oppression any resistance will be punished, and often punished with disproportionate and spectacular cruelty. It seems paradoxical that the thing that can free you will also make you suffer. But you must remember that something else happens when you fight back. All of a sudden you remember that you are a human being, with agency and choices and control over your actions. You stop being paralyzed by fear and remember that they don't control everything you do. When you're busy being compliant and obedient, all you feel is their power over you. But when you resist you start to feel your own.