Palestinians are inherently angry and violent.

Violence comes from the colonizer, not the colonized resisting domination. For over a century, Palestinians have lived under the brutal violence of Zionist colonization: mass killings, bombings, torture, imprisonment, home demolitions, forced displacement, and now genocide. Colonial violence also shapes everyday Palestinian life through the denial of the right to return to their stolen homes, humiliating checkpoints, family separation, and economic suffocation. Palestinian resistance emerges from this system of violent colonial domination.

For nearly a century, Palestinians have led some of the most significant popular resistance movements in anti-colonial history: the 1936-1939 Great Revolt, which included one of the longest anti-colonial general strikes in history; the 1987-1993 First Intifada, marked by mass boycotts, strikes, and civil disobedience; and the BDS movement, a global campaign advocating boycott, divestment, and sanctions to pressure Israel. Popular resistance has long been central to the Palestinian struggle, and every major movement has been met with systemic Israeli repression.

The Great March of Return alone exposes this claim. For two years, tens of thousands of Palestinians protested every week along the Gaza fence, demanding an end to the siege and their right to return. Israeli snipers responded with live fire, killing over 200 unarmed protesters, including journalists, medics, and children, and maiming thousands more. When even grassroots protest is met with lethal force, it reveals who is sustaining violence.

The issue is not how Palestinians resist, but that they resist at all. Every form of Palestinian resistance is suppressed, criminalized, or attacked: unarmed protesters are shot, social media posts lead to arrests, human rights organizations are designated as "terrorist," and even international courts and UN experts are sanctioned and smeared. By suppressing every avenue for resistance and accountability, Israel and its allies sustain the very conditions that make resistance inevitable.

This myth manufactures a false moral equivalence between colonizer and colonized while ignoring the vast asymmetry of power. Israel is a nuclear-armed state with one of the most advanced militaries and surveillance systems on earth, backed by the world's most powerful governments. Palestinians, by contrast, are a colonized people living under occupation, siege, apartheid, and exile, and criminalized and attacked globally. Yet Palestinians are expected to be perfect victims while enduring relentless structural violence.

This myth is rooted in racist and orientalist portrayals of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims as inherently violent and irrational, while stripping away the imperial context. In Palestine, this stereotyping obscures the colonial reality by fixating on armed struggle and Palestinian men. This narrative manufactures fear and alienation in order to justify further Israeli violence and repression.

From Algeria to South Africa to Vietnam, anti-colonial movements have resisted colonial domination through all available means. These struggles shaped international law itself, leading to UN resolutions affirming the right of peoples under colonialism, apartheid, and foreign occupation to resist, including through armed struggle, in pursuit of self-determination. Palestinian resistance exists within this broader global history of anti-colonial liberation struggles.