Is protesting the injustice you seem to suffer from a crime?

Is Protesting Injustice that You Suffer a Crime? 

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to Brett Stephens, “Gaza’s Miseries Have Palestinian Authors,” May 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opinion/gaza-palestinians-protests.html?comments

Is Protesting Injustice that You Suffer a Crime? 

(In today’s political climate in this country and elsewhere, this question should seem ominous).  

Stephens appears to defend Israel's actions and yet does not. An effort to deflect blame, his piece is also a defense of authoritarianism that demands obedience and calls dissent violence. 

The killings have no justification, and he presents none. Except that: Israel is defending its borders, the protestors want to (but obviously cannot) abolish the State of Israel, Hamas is bad leadership, and protest is wrong if stems from the belief that one is a victim. 

Most incredible is this last. By definition, protestors are against something and/or for something else, and more often than not the matter is framed as one of justice or injustice. Does Stephens actually wish to deny that Palestinians are victims? Even if they have bad leadership, which bears some of the blame for their plight, and even if it is a bad or unrealistic idea to demand the end of a Jewish state, any person of intelligence and humanity will agree that the people of Gaza are victims (of Israel).

If Hamas were to invade Israel and present the prospect of its military destruction (which is absurd), then one could speak of Israeli self-defense. What their people are engaged in is not an act of war but a protest. 

Israel doesn't like Palestinians to protest, and would prefer to keep them walled in in Bantustans. Like it or not, the Jewish state is also a neocolonial state. The militarily almost powerless Palestinians have the sole weapon of international censure, and are right to use it.