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On August 6, The Islamic Resistance Movement of Hamas announced they had chosen Yahya Sinwar, 61, as the head of their political bureau, succeeding Ismail Haniyah who was assassinated on July 31 in Tehran by Israel.

Sinwar is regarded as the mastermind behind the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, the deadliest attack in Israeli history. The attack left around 1,200 people dead and about 240 taken as hostages in Gaza.

Israel began a revenge attack on the people of Gaza which has left 40,000 dead, mostly women and children, with hundreds of thousands injured, or missing under the rubble, and millions displaced from their homes.

The international reaction has called for a ceasefire to save lives, and a fresh push for negotiations on a two-state solution which is supported by the US and the majority of UN members.

Sinwar, formerly the head of Hamas in Gaza since 2017, was born in Khan Yunis refugee camp to a family who had been expelled from Ashkelon during the 1948 Palestine War.

Sinwar was sentenced to four life sentences by Israel in 1989, and served 22 years until his release in a 2011 prisoner swap for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.  Sinwar was one among 1,026 Palestinians set free after being held in Israel without charges, trial or family visits, including women and children.

On May 16, 2018, in an unexpected announcement on Al Jazeera, Sinwar stated that Hamas would pursue “peaceful, popular resistance” to the Israeli occupation.

After three weeks of conflict in the Gaza war, Sinwar proposed the release of all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli confinement in exchange for the release of all the hostages kidnapped in the conflict.

Although the Israeli public, and especially the families of the hostages, have demanded vocally for the Israeli government to agree to a ceasefire in exchange for the hostages, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused.

Yasser Arafat, 1929-2004, was chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1969 to 2004 and president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) from 1994 to 2004.  Arafat was a founding member of the Fatah political party, which he led from 1959 until 2004.

From 1983 to 1993, Arafat began to shift his approach from open conflict with the Israelis to negotiation. In 1988, he acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and sought a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In 1994, he returned to Palestine, settling in Gaza.

He engaged in a series of negotiations with the Israeli government, including the Madrid Conference of 1991, the 1993 Oslo Accords and the 2000 Camp David Summit. The success of the negotiations in Oslo led to Arafat being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, alongside Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1994.

The PLO and Fatah had laid down their arms and pledged to seek the freedom of Palestine through non-violent means.

Over time, Fatah’s support among the Palestinians declined with the growth of the armed Hamas. In late 2004, after living under siege for two years in Ramallah by the Israeli army, Arafat died without having achieved freedom for his people, despite using peaceful means and negotiations, instead of arms.

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013, is regarded as the father of modern democratic South Africa. Mandela remained on US terrorist lists until 2008 because the African National Congress (ANC), the political party with which Mandela was associated, had used armed resistance to the apartheid government in South Africa.

In 1960, the ANC went underground, and Mandela became the head of the military wing of the ANC. In 1964 Mandela was convicted of terrorist activities and imprisoned until 1990.

Mandela said in one of his interviews from prison, “‘The armed struggle [with the authorities] was forced on us by the government.’”

In a 1986 speech, US President Ronald Reagan warned of “calculated terror by elements of the African National Congress,” including “the mining of roads, the bombings of public places, designed to bring about further repression, the imposition of martial law, and eventually creating the conditions for racial war.” The Department of Defense included the ANC in a 1988 report billed as profiles of “key regional terrorist groups” from around the world. Indeed, ANC actions during this period would include nighttime raids that destroyed fuel storage tanks and nearly two days of fires in 1980, a bombing at a bar in Durban that left three dead and more than 60 wounded, and a car bomb that killed 19 outside of the headquarters of the country’s Air Force in Pretoria in 1983.

Mandela had always been willing to talk, but violence was his recourse when the other side would not listen.

The White South African government had used increasingly brutal police and military actions, many of them filmed by news cameras and televised to appalled viewers around the globe. These ugly spectacles increased international pressure for economic sanctions against South Africa. Whites saw their nation becoming an international pariah, and the apartheid state of South Africa fell, with Mandela emerging as a democratic President.

In July 2008, US President George W. Bush signed a bill that authorized Mandela and the ANC to be taken off the terrorist list.

In September 2005, the IRA’s last remaining weapons had been destroyed, bringing an end to the organization’s military struggle against the British in Northern Ireland through a decommissioning process begun in 1997.

“Today it is finally accomplished. And we have made an important step in the transition from conflict to peace in Northern Ireland,” said Tony Blair.

Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Féin chief negotiator, said that would “bring the final chapter on the issue” of the IRA’s weapons.

“Of course, this is about more than arms. It is about reviving the peace process, it is about the future of Ireland,” he said.

The IRA had fought an armed struggle against British forces in Northern Ireland that saw the Unionist and Nationalist communities fighting until the 1998 Good Friday agreement.

Sinn Féin had trouble convincing IRA lieutenants to give up the weapons which fueled its 36-year war while 10,000 British soldiers remained in Northern Ireland.

Sinn Féin expected concessions from the British government as a result of the decommissioning, including a halving of British troop numbers in Northern Ireland and the right of IRA members on the run to return home without fear of prosecution.

Most thought the Northern Ireland conflict had been settled with the historic Good Friday agreement in 1998. However, the New IRA, one of the two armed republican groups still committed to the armed fight for a united Ireland, and the Continuity IRA demand that armed struggle continue until Irish unity is achieved.

Both groups continue to organize and recruit, and remain capable of launching attacks.

According to Stanley L. Cohen, US based attorney and human rights activist, wars of national liberation have been expressly embraced, through the adoption of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, as a protected and essential right of occupied people everywhere.

The General Assembly of the United Nations (UNGA) December 3, 1982. At that time UNGA resolution 37/43 removed any doubt or debate over the lawful entitlement of occupied people to resist occupying forces by any and all lawful means. The resolution reaffirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle”.

In relevant part, section 21 of the resolution strongly condemned “the expansionist activities of Israel in the Middle East and the continual bombing of Palestinian civilians, which constitute a serious obstacle to the realization of the self-determination and independence of the Palestinian people”.

Cohen documents how European Zionists founded Jewish terrorist groups called the Irgun, Lehi and others which slaughtered not only thousands of indigenous Palestinians but murdered British police and military personnel from 1938 through 1948 the Jewish terrorists bombed trains, shot officers and  soldiers, and attack British police stations injuring hundreds of British officers.  The Jewish terrorists used landmines, and suitcase bombs to attack train stations, trains, streetcars, and blew up the Shell oil refinery which destroyed some 16,000 tons of petroleum.

To justify their terrorist actions, the Irgun called the British a criminal terrorist organization, and the Army of Occupation, which was “responsible for the torture, murder, deportation, and denying the Hebrew people the right to live”.

In late 1946-47 a continuing campaign of Jewish terrorism was directed at the British. Acts of sabotage were carried out on British military transportation routes in Germany.  The Lehi also tried, unsuccessfully, to drop a bomb on the House of Commons from a chartered plane flown from France and, in October 1946, bombed the British Embassy in Rome. A number of other explosive devices were detonated in and around strategic targets in London. Some 21 letter bombs were addressed, at various times, to senior British political figures.

The American freedom fighter, Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, wrote of struggle.

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Original article: Mideast Discourse