Uprisings against colonial rule are violent because violence is an inherent part of imperialism and colonialism. 

That’s why the resistance by Palestinians against the racist Israeli terror state is wholly justified. All the deaths, horrors and destruction—all of them—are rooted in violent Israeli occupation and dispossession. And this is the case not just in Palestine. Wherever imperialism has gone, violence has followed. 

Colonialism means states viciously enforcing their rule, snatching resources for themselves and subjecting citizens to dire inequality and reigns of terror.

That violence took its form in how 48 million died in major famines between 1770 and 1943 in India caused by British colonial rule. It manifested in over a million dying in famines manufactured by the British in Ireland.

Violent colonisation led to the elimination of Indigenous populations by the Spanish and British and to European nations carving up and ransacking Africa for their own greed and domination.

Such violence led to violence in return from those in revolt. But their violence was on a massively smaller scale compared to the slaughter by the imperialists.

The anti-imperialist violence was a fight to liberate society from a system of torture and murder. The violence of the oppressed is therefore utterly different to the violence of the oppressor. 

The slave who murders the slave master, who torches the master’s house and perhaps kills the “civilian” slavers’ family and servants is wholly justified in their act. 

Palestinians in Gaza breaking from their open-air prison for the first time were taking part in an act of liberation against Zionist and the imperialism that defends it.

Yet every time the oppressed have ­confronted the violence of the system and retaliated, they have been met with criticism and moral condemnation. 

Resistance should stay peaceful, liberals say, and not have a bloody side. Or else, they warn, it is comparable to the violence of the oppressor.  

But why should the oppressed listen to this advice? Why should they sit back and take whatever violence their oppressors deem necessary?  Should the Algerian people have remained peaceful when the French invaded in 1830, stamping their authority on the country through violent massacres and rapes? 

France killed up to three million Algerians in 30 years. Up to 1951 the French lost just 3,336 soldiers. After an anti-colonialist demonstration in 1945, with the movement growing after the Second World War, French authorities killed some 40,000 in Setif. 

The horror led to an armed fight and sparked the war for independence nine years later. The independence-fighting group the National Liberation Front (FLN) attacked military and civilian targets of the French state and the French settler middle class, the Pied Noirs.

Anyone associated with France was a target. More Algerians fell behind the pro-independence fighters as France ramped up its violence with torture, bombardment and napalm.

The FLN and its supporters advocated for violent revolution. Independence fighter Frantz Fanon described colonial ­society as one entirely shaped by violence. 

He wrote, “Colonialism is not a thinking machine. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” We disagree that only “greater violence” can win. 

We stress the crucial role of organised workers, strikes and workers’ militias in an insurrection. But Fanon was right about the core of colonialism.

Random raids, shootings and bombings by the FLN led to the French declaring a state of emergency. The massacre of Pied-Noirs european settlers in 1955 in Philippeville was the first major FLN attack on non-military and government targets. Some 123 people were killed, with the French then killing 1,273 Algerians.

By 1956 there were 500,000 French troops in Algeria. The FLN had 20,000 with fewer weapons. The French guillotined two FLN fighters in Algiers in June 1956 so in retaliation, the FLN shot 49 Europeans in the streets over four days.

All of this was part of the justified struggle by the Algerians. And today the vast majority of people across the world would recognise that it was a legitimate struggle. 

The Palestinians deserve the same respect. There are many other important examples. The British forced their way into Kenya in 1888 and 1895 to set up the East Africa Protectorate. By 1920 Britain turned it into a colony. The British seized around seven million acres of land in the fertile hilly regions, becoming rich off its produce.

By 1952, the Mau Mau, also known as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, began a campaign of attacks against settlers. Mau Mau was the militant wing of a growing movement for political representation.

Its guerrilla attacks happened at night using improvised and stolen weapons. It made its first killings in October 1952. The racist British rulers saw the Mau Mau as savages rather than an independence movement that could cause damage. Britain declared a state of emergency and arrested 180 alleged leaders. 

The racist British used the Mau Mau’s attacks on civilians to dehumanise their fight. Their rhetoric used terms similar to “human animals” to describe their opponents.

Within 18 months, over one million Kikuyu tribe members were forced by the British to live in reserves surrounded by trenches and barbed wire. In total up to 320,000 people were taken to concentration camps.

Some 1,090 Mau Mau suspects faced capital punishment. Prisoners were flogged, set alight, sexually assaulted, castrated and electrocuted.

It was not until December 1963 that the Colony of Kenya ended, but the Mau Mau’s resistance still managed to shake their colonial masters to their core. 

Revolutionaries should always support the resistance of the oppressed against their oppressors.  The brave resistance to the violence of colonial and imperialist rule shows that their victims still have agency and can fight for themselves. 

Our slogan is that our support is “unconditional but not uncritical”. Socialist revolutionaries do not agree with Hamas over class politics women’s and LGBT+ rights or many other questions. 

But we don’t make our support for Hamas against Zionism and imperialism conditional on their adoption of a socialist position around these issues.

We are for the Palestinian resistance always and everywhere, even if it does not accept our views on other matters. Anything less is a collapse into pro-imperialism. 

Today much of the left says it can’t support the resistance because Hamas is “backward” or uses violence.  The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin faced the same argument in 1916 when the Irish Republicans rose against British rule.  They used armed struggle, and many of those involved were heavily influenced by religion and cross-class nationalism. 

But Lenin pointed out, “To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, is to repudiate social revolution. 

“So one army lines up in one place and says, ‘We are for socialism’, and another, somewhere else and says, ‘We are for imperialism’, and that will be a social revolution! 

“Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it.  “Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.”

We are in unconditional support of anti-imperialist revolt even when it’s tough to do so—as it is now in some quarters. And we are critical even when it’s easy to be supportive. 

Even at the height of the popularity of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, it was necessary to point out the cross-class politics of the ANC would be disastrous.

Our criticism is not that of detached observers. It’s because we want to see real victories over imperialism and the capitalist system that produces it.  Overcoming the imperial might of states like Israel or the United States won’t happen just through military resistance or guerrilla tactics.  

There has to be a wider strategy in place to tear up the systems that are rooted in violence. Crucial to that strategy is class struggle. Turning resistance into a socialist revolution that can topple a system that creates unimaginable levels of brutality and violence is the only way to win complete change.