Echoes of Rebellion: Drawing Parallels Between the American Revolution and Palestinian Resistance
Exploring the Complexities of Armed Struggle for Liberation and the Human Cost of Resistance
The idea to juxtapose the American Revolution with the Palestinian resistance emerged unexpectedly during a podcast discussion between Anthony Aguilar, Mel, and Jenin. Aguilar’s assertion—that both movements represented oppressed peoples rising against imperial powers—resonated deeply. I shared this perspective on social media, and it quickly gained traction, sparking intense debates. Among the flood of responses, one Zionist interlocutor stood out, challenging the comparison and focusing obsessively on October 7, 2023.
That challenge became a turning point. It forced me to strip away the noise and ask: on what grounds do we defend one people’s right to resist while denying another’s?
The Debate That Revealed the “Key Question”
The video went viral—triggering the predictable storm of backlash. Most replies were the usual noise: insults, recycled talking points, and bad-faith outrage. But one voice claimed to engage seriously. That was my mistake.
I relied only on Israeli sources for evidence, citing records, media, and firsthand accounts, expecting a substantive debate. Instead, the Zionist interlocutor suddenly tossed in a random post from an X user, claiming there had been only a single casualty during a Hannibal Directive. No sources, no verification—just a text. In that moment, it was clear: this was not going anywhere.
Debating hasbara is like peeling an onion. The outer layers are thick with propaganda—beheaded babies, mass rapes, wild fabrications—all later debunked. But beneath those layers lies the undeniable reality of civilian harm. Civilian harm, tragic as it is, has existed in every liberation struggle—from the American Revolution to Palestinian resistance. The difference is context, recognition, and who gets to tell the story.
The breakthrough came when I abandoned chasing vague claims and asked a single, direct question—the one I now believe should be posed to anyone attempting to strip Palestinians of their right to defend themselves on their land:
Saif Musallet, an American citizen, was lynched by Israeli settlers. Witnesses—including Jonathan, an Israeli Jewish citizen—confirmed the IDF was present while Saif was murdered. His village remains under siege. Under international law: do you accept that Saif’s family, as Americans, and Palestinians in the West Bank have the right to armed resistance against occupation and settler violence?
Video: Witnesses, including Jonathan, an Israeli Jewish citizen, testify to IDF presence while Saif was lynched by settlers.
Saif was not a statistic. He was a son, a neighbor, a man with ties to America. His life was stolen in broad daylight, and the world still has no answer. That question cut through all slogans, all propaganda, and all distractions. It ended the debate—not because anyone answered, but because it forced the conversation onto undeniable facts: the violence, the occupation, and the right of a people to resist.
From Saif to the Principle of Resistance
This is where the conversation shifts from propaganda to principle. International law is unambiguous: peoples living under occupation have the right to resist foreign domination and settler-colonial subjugation—by all available means, provided the principles of distinction and proportionality are upheld. That is not a matter of opinion but of law, codified in decades of UN resolutions and reinforced by ICJ rulings.
Even Ami Ayalon, the former head of Israel’s Shin Bet (the Israeli equivalent of the FBI), admitted publicly that if he were Palestinian, he too would “fight Israelis by all means possible.” That acknowledgment, coming from the highest levels of Israel’s own security apparatus, exposes the core truth: resistance is not pathology, it is the predictable and lawful response to occupation.
The following video features Ralph Wilde, an international lawyer, explaining how international law — as affirmed by the ICJ — classifies Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza as war crimes and an illegal occupation:
The following video also features Ralph Wilde explaining how armed resistance against perpetual occupation is legally permitted under international law:
The point is not to romanticize violence, but to clarify its legality when no political remedy is available. Every struggle for self-determination has carried this burden: civilians inevitably suffer. That is the tragedy of resistance—but also its inevitability when oppression is systemic and remedies are denied.
And here lies the irony: my Zionist interlocutor condemned Palestinian resistance as illegitimate without realizing he was standing on ground won through exactly the same logic. American colonists, too, faced an imperial power that denied them sovereignty and representation. They, too, turned to arms after petitions failed. Their revolution produced a republic, not a pariah.
That is why the comparison matters. Not because the contexts are identical, but because the principle is: when a people are occupied, denied basic rights, and stripped of remedies, history shows us the outcome. Violence comes. The question is not whether Palestinians have the right to resist—it is whether we are willing to recognize in them the same humanity we retroactively celebrate in ourselves.
The First Revolution, the Longest Struggle: America and the Question of Palestine
If you strip away the noise—the petitions ignored in London, the boycotts dismissed as nuisances, the colonial assemblies dissolved by decree—what’s left is painfully simple: resistance is born of dispossession. The American Revolution proves the point. Colonists demanded redress and recognition; instead, they were met with taxes without representation, soldiers quartered in their homes, and the iron hand of empire. That was the soil in which rebellion took root—not abstract malice but daily humiliation, economic strangulation, and the knowledge that every peaceful door had been closed.
Under those conditions, resistance became not a mystery but an inevitability. From the Boston Tea Party to the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, violence was not the first instinct but the last resort after lawful petitions failed. That truth makes the Revolution not just a chapter in history but a reminder of how power behaves when it refuses compromise—and how ordinary people respond when stripped of alternatives.
The American Revolution is our familiar origin story of liberty—the colonies rebelling against imperial rule, forming new institutions, and proclaiming rights. But the Revolution’s tidy mythology obscures darker realities. Irregular militias and partisan bands, frontier reprisals, and scorched-earth campaigns inflicted brutal suffering on Indigenous peoples and Loyalists. The Gnadenhutten massacre of 1782—ninety-six Christianized Lenape and Mohican men, women and children murdered by militiamen—was not an aberration in the sense of being unknown to contemporaries; it was an atrocity that shocked some and was waved away by others as the grim arithmetic of war. The Sullivan Expedition a year earlier flattened Iroquois villages in a campaign of collective punishment; the Cherry Valley attacks and other frontier violences blurred the lines between combatant and civilian until those distinctions often meant little. Those episodes are woven into the American founding even though they sit uncomfortably beside the rhetoric of liberty.
This is not offered as moral equivalence or as an excuse for any unlawful act. It is an insistence on intellectual consistency. If one accepts—historically or ethically—that colonists who took up arms against Britain can be read as insurgents resisting imperial domination, then the same category of analysis must be allowed for other anti-colonial struggles.
What changes is not the human calculus of suffering but the story that gets told afterward: winners become patriots, losers become terrorists. Narrative, not only conduct, determines legitimacy.
Context matters. Israeli occupation, settler violence, legal asymmetries and the denial of political remedies create a different kind of battlefield—one in which civilians are chronically vulnerable and institutional recourse has been exhausted or denied. Under those pressures, armed response can appear as the last available avenue of defense or retaliation. International law constrains methods—distinction, proportionality, protections for civilians—but it does not erase the historical causes that give rise to insurgency.
Nor should it blind us to double standards: the same tactical horrors memorialized as “founding wars” for some are cited as proof of barbarism for others.
This is the pivot. Before we examine the names and claims of today’s Palestinian brigades, and before we catalogue the abuses and the lawful violations on all sides, we must first recognize how memory and power shape judgment. When a people invoke Izz ad-Din al-Qassam or Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, they are not inventing heroism out of thin air—they are reaching for ancestors who lived under denial and tried to fight back. Understanding that genealogy does not sanctify every tactic; it explains why resistance looks, from the inside, like continuity rather than chaos.
What follows now is a reckoning with the other half of that ledger—episodes of organized violence that, once absorbed into statehood, rewrote which forms of force were permitted and which were condemned.
The Forgotten Ledger: How Zionist Terror Shaped Israel’s Birth
Read against each other, the founding myths of Palestinian resistance and the recorded tactics of Jewish underground militias in the Mandate period expose a bitter symmetry: both sides drew on violence to pursue existential aims, but the scale, the targets, and the way memory was institutionalized left a particular moral stain on the Zionist project that still shapes the conflict today.
Irgun and Lehi (the Stern Gang) practiced a brand of militant politics that embraced spectacular violence and direct attacks on civilians and symbols of authority. The 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem — carried out by the Irgun against the British administrative headquarters — remains emblematic: 91 people were killed, including British officers, Arab and Jewish civilians, and hotel staff, and the blast was immediately debated across the Jewish world as both a tactical hit and a moral catastrophe.
The April 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin—carried out by the Irgun and Lehi militias—was not merely an episode of wartime violence, but a foundational act of terror. Hundreds of villagers were slaughtered in a manner so brutal that the news alone triggered widespread panic, fueling the mass displacement of Palestinians and accelerating the Nakba. Its reverberations have remained etched in Palestinian memory as a wound of both blood and betrayal.
The atrocity was so notorious that Albert Einstein, alongside other prominent Jewish intellectuals, condemned it directly in the New York Times, warning the world that Menachem Begin—leader of Irgun, mastermind of Deir Yassin, and later Prime Minister of Israel—was a “terrorist” at the helm of a movement bearing “the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism and misrepresentation are weapons.”
Einstein’s words, equating Begin’s politics with Nazism, stand as a moral indictment not only of that massacre but of the ideological lineage it produced. That lineage is alive today in the Likud party, which Begin founded and which is now led by Benjamin Netanyahu, architect of the current campaign of destruction in Gaza.
Deir Yassin was not an aberration—it was a template, an early chapter in a project of organized terror that Israel still denies while reenacting its logic on Palestinian life.
Irgun/Lehi operations also included targeted political assassinations that shocked international opinion. In 1948, members of Lehi murdered United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte — the first assassination of a UN official — after he proposed controversial ideas for resolving the Palestine question; Bernadotte’s death was a turning point that underscored how militant tactics could reach beyond the battlefield and into diplomacy.
Jacob Israël de Haan deserves more his historic work in Palestine. He was a Dutch-Jewish poet, journalist, and lawyer who moved to Jerusalem in 1919, taught law, and reported for De Telegraaf. There he became a prominent Orthodox (Agudath Israel) voice arguing—unfashionably in Zionist circles—for negotiation with Palestinian Arabs and for Jewish–Arab coexistence. He met Emir/King Abdullah to explore political compromises and openly criticized the rising cult of militancy. On June 30, 1924, de Haan was shot dead outside Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital—widely regarded as the Mandate era’s first political assassination in the Yishuv. Subsequent reporting and historical work have tied the killing to the Haganah; decades later, a Haganah operative, Avraham Tehomi, described it as a movement decision to silence him. The aim was simple: remove a Jewish dissenter who insisted that Palestinian rights and Arab consent mattered.
Those operations did more than inflict immediate casualties. They helped produce a post-war political culture in which a violent logic was absorbed into the emerging state apparatus: fighters who had once been labeled “terrorists” were later lionized as nation-builders; painful acts were reframed as necessary steps toward survival and sovereignty. Prominent Jewish intellectuals and leaders of the era — from public figures to scientists — voiced moral objections at the time, warning that such methods would consume the moral authority of the movement if left unexamined.
It is important to be precise about consequences. The Irgun and Lehi campaigns contributed materially to the collapse of local Palestinian society in parts of the Mandate territory: villages emptied, social orders fragmented, and a refugee crisis took shape that has lasted generations.
Seen in that light, comparisons with contemporary Palestinian armed groups are not gratuitous attempts to “moralize” one side or the other; they are a historical corrective. If anything, the resort to asymmetric, often decentralized armed tactics by Palestinians today — however morally fraught and legally contested — has so far produced less organized state machinery of dispossession than the combination of paramilitary campaigns plus state-building that followed the end of the Mandate. The zionist militias of the 1940s operated within a broader project that culminated in the creation of state institutions; their violence was folded, ultimately, into policies and bureaucracies with sweeping, long-term consequences for Palestinian life and law.
Taken together, these events show how militant operations in the late Mandate period were not isolated incidents but formative acts whose political aftershocks shaped policy, memory and law. That historical ledger helps explain why many Palestinians invoke names like Izz ad-Din al-Qassam and Abdul Qadir al-Husayni today: such names signal a claim to an older lineage of anti-colonial struggle. It also forces a clear conclusion: when assessing modern resistance, context and asymmetry matter — and so does the genealogy of violence that rendered some methods acceptable and others unforgivable depending on who told the story afterward.
The Roots of Defiance: Birth of Palestinian Resistance
Palestinian resistance is not a sudden improvisation of the present, but an ongoing argument with history — a living dialogue with the region’s memory, its symbols, and its past defeats. When fighters invoke old names, they are not inventing a genealogy but reaffirming one. Strip away the propaganda (for more, see disclosure section below), and what remains is a people whose politics are forged by generations of struggle: first against a colonial power, and later against its successor and ally, determined to erase the indigenous people and their historical rights to the land.
When I asked the question about Saif Musallet in that viral debate — “an American citizen lynched by settlers while IDF soldiers stood by; do his family and Palestinians in the West Bank have a right to armed resistance under international law?” — everything shifted.
The point was not to celebrate violence. It was to force a conversation that many in my feed refuse: that resistance does not arise from abstract malice but from concrete, lived conditions — doors slammed in people’s faces, repeated displacements, leaders begging for weapons and being told no, daily life under military rule and the legal architecture that supports it. Put simply: when political remedies and humanitarian protections are withheld, resistance becomes less a mystery than a predictable outcome.
The long arc of Palestinian resistance explains why fighters so often cast themselves as a besieged David facing a mechanized Goliath. The image is not mere rhetoric; it is a cultural shorthand born of lived asymmetry. From the Intifadas to present-day footage, stone-throwing endures as a visual emblem of defiance: a small, vulnerable people hurling back whatever they can grasp against an occupier armed with tanks, jets, and nuclear weapons. Yet Palestinian resistance never stopped at stones. Under siege, necessity became the mother of invention: from clandestinely built rockets, improvised drones, and locally manufactured weapons of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades to smuggling networks sustaining their survival, each innovation underscored both creativity and desperation in the face of overwhelming technological superiority. Against the backdrop of an Israel supported by the most advanced Western arsenals, these makeshift tools are less an equal counterweight than a symbolic echo of David’s sling — a reminder that moral legitimacy, not firepower, defines the heart of asymmetric struggle.
The appeal to deep roots is not only symbolic. Recent population-genetics work shows a strong thread of biological continuity across the Levant: modern Palestinians, like other Levantine populations, carry substantial ancestry from the ancient peoples of this land. In plain terms, scientific genetic studies find that many inhabitants of the region today share a measurable genetic legacy with the Bronze–Iron Age Levantines — the same population substrate often described in biblical and classical sources — underscoring that multiple modern communities claim common ancient ties to the same soil. That shared Levantine ancestry is not a political trump card; it is a historical fact that complicates simple narratives of who “belongs” here.
That is why names matter. When a brigade calls itself al-Qassam, or crowds chant al-Ḥusaynī, they are invoking a history of blocked pleas and defensive organizing — not inventing a monstrous origin story overnight. To understand the present you must trace the ancestors those fighters invoke. Below are two of the most consequential of those ancestors — told as people, not merely as labels.
The preacher who became a countryside organizer
Izz ad-Din al-Qassam was not born into the story people now attach to his name. A Syrian by birth, an imam and social organizer by trade, al-Qassam moved through a region shaken by colonial domination and rural dispossession in the 1920s and 1930s. Parishioners came to him for counsel; what he saw on the ground was deeper: chronic land loss, tenant evictions, and the erosion of customary protections that had kept village life intact. When legal and political channels failed, he began organizing small volunteer bands to defend villages, escort harvests, and resist the steady encroachment of outside forces — first the French in his youth, later the British Mandate system and settler transfers in Palestine.
Al-Qassam’s turn from preacher to organizer was not a romantic conversion; it was an exhausted civic calculus. He believed the mosque and the village were under threat and that ordinary people needed coordinated protection. He was killed in a clash with British police in 1935; within months his name had become a talisman across Palestinian villages — the story of a local leader who, after every institutional door closed, picked up the only tools he had to protect his community. That symbolic lineage is intentional: when modern units call themselves the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, they are claiming continuity with an anti-colonial biography of communal defense, not the creation of a fresh mythology. (See Mandate-period histories and standard Palestine historiography for fuller documentary trails.)
Jerusalem’s commander who begged for weapons and received few
Abd al-Qadir al-Ḥusaynī was a Jerusalem son and a public commander whose biography looks less like the loner guerrilla and more like a desperate wartime organizer. In 1947–48, as British authority crumbled and political maps were being rewritten, al-Ḥusaynī worked to convert disparate volunteers into an organized defense force for Jerusalem. His letters, appeals and public statements repeatedly begged neighboring Arab governments and notables for arms, training, and diplomatic support. Those appeals largely foundered on political paralysis, competing interests among Arab regimes, and British strategic calculations.
When fighting intensified, Palestinian groups around Jerusalem were often outgunned and outmatched. Al-Ḥusaynī fell leading men to defend village approaches and supply routes in April 1948; his death became a lasting symbol for many Palestinians of a leadership that tried to organize defense but never received the external support it needed. His memory is not of deliberate transnational terror but of local defense and collective vulnerability — a commander who asked for equipment and was refused in the geopolitics of the moment. (See Mandate-era dossiers and Institute for Palestine Studies materials on Jerusalem 1947–48.)
Breaking the False Symmetry: Palestinian Defenders vs. Colonial Terror Architects
It is important — and politically necessary — to be precise. Many of the Zionist militias of the late Mandate period (Irgun, Lehi) used spectacular political violence: hotel bombings, political assassinations, and operations that deliberately targeted colonial authority and, on occasion, civilian hubs (the King David Hotel bombing, the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, the killing of Jacob Israël de Haan). Those operations left deep legal and moral scars and were debated ferociously even at the time. They are part of the ledger that shaped the politics of 1948 and beyond.
By contrast, the two Palestinian leaders I describe above were not architects of widespread terror campaigns against civilians in the organized, political-terror sense. Al-Qassam’s bands defended villages and struck isolated outposts; al-Ḥusaynī struggled to marshal defenses for Jerusalem, pleading repeatedly for weapons and coordination. That distinction matters. It reshapes how one interprets the names—al-Qassam or al-Ḥusaynī—when invoked today. Their memory signals continuity with local defense and anti-colonial organization, not the institutionalized terror that became a hallmark of the Mandate’s paramilitary landscape.
Palestinian resistance is therefore not an improvisation of the present but a conversation with history—rooted in memory, symbols, and the unfinished struggles of earlier generations. When fighters reclaim old names, they are not inventing a lineage but pointing directly to it. Strip away the propaganda, and what emerges is a people shaped by generations of resistance: first against a colonial power, and later against its successor, which imported settlers and sought to dispossess the indigenous population of their rights and ties to the land.
One striking example of this historical dialogue can be seen in a recent report from journalist Jon Elmer on Electronic Intifada (See video below). He describes how the al-Qassam Brigades framed a defensive action as The Stones of David—a deliberate invocation of history that both asserts Palestinian rights and reclaims ancient symbolism. The name itself insists on stripping away zionist mythologies by reminding the world that Palestinians are deeply rooted in the same land where ancient Jewish communities once lived, while most Israeli leaders—including 15 prime ministers of overwhelmingly Ashkenazi background—trace genetic and cultural lineages to Europe.
DNA studies consistently show that Palestinians maintain stronger historical ties to the soil of Palestine than those who seek to erase them.
Naming as Genealogy of Resistance
Names are compressed arguments. When a brigade calls itself “al-Qassam” it is making three claims at once: first, that resistance is older than this moment; second, that it arose where political remedies had failed; and third, that the actors who bear the name see themselves in a defensive genealogy. That framing forces a crucial question: if a people have been systematically deprived of recourse — denied recognition, blocked from legal redress, and subject to dispossession and settler violence — how should outside observers expect them to respond?
This is not an endorsement of unlawful attacks on civilians — such acts are crimes and must be treated as such.
That compression matters politically because it changes the framework of culpability. If you accept that systematic denial of political remedies, mobility, and material survival can push communities toward arms, then the moral frame shifts. Resistance becomes not a pathology to be treated with blanket condemnation but an outcome to be understood and addressed — with both moral clarity about unlawful attacks on civilians and political urgency about occupation, blockade, and the legal regimes that enable them.
If the American Revolution is read as a founding story that justifies armed uprising against an empire, then the Palestinian claim to resistance asks the same historical question in reverse: why is one anti-imperial struggle canonized while another is declared criminal?
If we sanctify the violence that built America or Israel while condemning the violence that resists them, we are not making a moral argument. We are only choosing which empire we forgive.
In the end, this is not a moral absolution for unlawful acts or for attacks on civilians. It is a demand for context, for even handedness, and for a public conversation that recognizes how occupation, denials of redress, and violent settler campaigns feed cycles of resistance. If our conversations begin with names — al-Qassam, al-Husayni — and move from there to the material circumstances that produced them, we stop treating resistance as a pathology and start treating it as a historical phenomenon that needs both rigorous moral criticism and honest policy answers: accountability for unlawful acts, and a political pathway that addresses occupation itself.
Disclosure:
This analysis is based on multiple sources and statements:
Hamas acknowledged that the October 7 incursion emerged from chaotic battlefield conditions—Israeli forces collapsed faster than anticipated, and fighters from al-Qassam and other factions entered through multiple breach points. While Hamas asserts they targeted military sites only, they deny deliberate attacks on civilians.
Israeli media reported that Hamas had no prior knowledge of the Nova (Supernova) music festival; fighters encountered it by chance, identifying it only during the incursion and without prior planning.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly refused calls for an immediate independent investigation into the security failures and the Nova festival incident, stating that the government’s priority is “winning the war” and claiming that investigations can only follow afterwards.
Core sources consulted:
International Court of Justice, South Africa v. Israel, Order on Provisional Measures (28 March 2024).
Institute for Palestine Studies — essays and archival notes on Mandate-era militancy and 1948 Palestinian leadership.
Al-Jazeera and BBC background pieces on Izz ad-Din al-Qassam and 20th-century Palestinian resistance.
Standard histories of 1948 and Mandate Palestine (Benny Morris and others — for names/chronology; Institute for Palestine Studies for Palestinian perspectives).
Deir Yassin coverage and archival analyses (BBC, Institute for Palestine Studies, academic journals).
Sullivan Expedition and Gnadenhutten — National Park Service, Britannica, and scholarly histories of the American Revolution’s frontier campaigns.
Legal primers and public lectures by Ralph Wilde (on YouTube and legal commentary pages) explaining IHL, the right to resist, and ICJ jurisprudence.