The coming days are going to be full of western news media slyly reversing the aggressor-defender relationship and reporting as though all the violence began with the Hamas offensive, spontaneously out of nowhere.

The problem with oppressing a population with maximum force is that at some point they start figuring they've got nothing to lose by fighting back.

Do I think this latest uprising will end in more positive results than negative for Palestinians? No. Does that mean I'll condemn the Palestinian resistance for fighting back? Also no.

This is because doing so would be nonsensical, for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, because nobody can tell me what the Palestinians should do instead that is both realistic and reasonable. It would be easy for me to sit here in my armchair and say the Palestinians should either maintain the status quo or lie down, relinquish their homes and homeland and accept whatever table scraps they're able to get, but we can see from the Palestinian perspective that that's not reasonable. It would be easy for me to sit in my armchair and argue that Palestinians should just focus on securing a one-state or two-state solution, but we can see from the Israeli political landscape that that's not realistic.

So what else can they do? What reasonable and realistic options do they have? No one can provide me a satisfactory answer.

Secondly, it would be nonsensical for me to condemn the actions of Hamas on the grounds that it will make things worse for the Palestinians because the fact that Israel always responds to Palestinian resistance by killing a lot of Palestinians is itself a very concrete manifestation of the abuses the Palestinians are resisting. It would not be legitimate for me to sit in my armchair and tell someone to stop resisting their abuser just because it will cause them to receive more abuse; that's not a valid reason to condemn resistance.

Ultimately this is just Palestinians doing what they feel they need to do out of total desperation, because they feel backed into a corner with no other options. And they feel backed into a corner with no other options because that does appear to be the case. There are a lot of people I could blame for their being in those circumstances, but the very last on that list would be the victims of the abuse themselves.