BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY
“By any means necessary” is a permission slip. In ordinary speech it can signal determination or urgency, a refusal to wait or back down. In antizionist use, especially after October 7, 2023, it usually does more than that. It lifts Palestinian liberation above the normal limits on what may be done, and it leaves the method deliberately blank. That blank is precisely where the danger sits.
The phrase rarely says “kill civilians” or “take hostages” or “fire rockets at towns” in plain words. It just declines to draw the line. Applied to Palestinian armed action against Israel, that open boundary becomes a way to excuse attacks on civilians while keeping the speaker one polite step removed from the specifics. Nobody has to endorse the massacre out loud. The slogan does the endorsing by refusing to forbid anything. And it carries an American pedigree that lends it borrowed dignity.
The phrase entered American memory through Malcolm X. At the founding rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity in New York on June 28, 1964, he said the OAAU sought freedom, justice, and equality “by any means necessary.” He was speaking about Black self-defense against racist violence and the failure of the state to protect Black life. The OAAU charter also invoked the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That setting matters, because it was never a blank check to harm uninvolved people. The words assumed a victim defending himself, not a gunman choosing targets.
The laws of war flatly reject the notion that a just cause licenses any method. The principle of distinction requires fighters to separate civilians from combatants. Hostage-taking is forbidden. Deliberate attacks on civilians are war crimes. A movement may call itself liberation or resistance or self-defense, and not one of those names erases the protection owed to civilians.
After October 7 the phrase traveled in company—“resistance in all its forms,” “From the River to the Sea,” “Globalize the Intifada.” Together they helped translate Palestinian violence into a story of liberation while stepping around the specific acts committed against Israeli civilians. The clearest campus instance is National Students for Justice in Palestine’s October 2023 Day of Resistance Toolkit. The toolkit called the Hamas-led attack a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance,” urged chapters to “normalize the resistance,” and said confrontation was required “by any means necessary.” It listed armed struggle among legitimate forms of resistance and asserted that settlers are not civilians in the sense of international law. That last claim is not rhetorical heat; it is a direct assault on civilian status itself.
In this setting the phrase stops behaving like a general civil-rights cry and becomes part of a vocabulary that treats October 7 as a breakthrough. That is why the borrowed Malcolm X language matters so much: his words grew out of self-defense under racial terror, while the later use bolts them onto an armed assault that murdered civilians and took hostages. The urgency survives the transfer; the limiting facts do not. The Majdal Shams attack of July 27, 2024 exposes the flaw in any slogan that blesses resistance before it identifies the target. A rocket struck a football field in the Druze village of Majdal Shams and killed twelve children and teenagers. Israel and the United States blamed Hezbollah, and Hezbollah denied responsibility. The dead were not combatants by any definition. A slogan that cannot bring itself to condemn that strike has already surrendered the one rule it most needs to keep.
The premise underneath the phrase is that the goal governs the act. Civilian protection and the prohibition on hostages, the whole body of the laws of war, all become secondary to liberation. The slogan never has to approve a particular massacre in so many words. It makes room for approval by refusing to name a limit, and the refusal is the work. A speaker need not say “I support the murder of civilians at a music festival.” The speaker says “by any means necessary” or “resistance in all its forms,” and the distance between the sentence and the bodies does the rest, leaving the violence available for praise without fingerprints.
Frantz Fanon’s influence runs through all of this. In The Wretched of the Earth he gave anti-colonial violence a psychological and redemptive meaning, not merely a tactical one. Transferred to Israel, that thinking lets violence be recast as dignity or return or liberation even when the victims are civilians. The plain question of what actually happened then matters less than the meaning assigned to it. The lineage has three strands, and they braided together after October 7. The American force comes from Malcolm X and the OAAU, whose 1964 speech tied the famous words to self-defense where government failed to protect Black life. A second strand runs through anti-colonial theory: Fanon argued that violence could be part of how a colonized people recovers its agency, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface carried that argument into European intellectual life, after which campus writing absorbed it in simplified form until decolonization meant struggle, struggle meant resistance, and resistance grew hard to judge by any ordinary limit. The third strand is Palestinian militant doctrine. Hamas’s 2017 Document of General Principles and Policies calls resistance to occupation “with all means and methods” legitimate and places armed resistance at its core, in the same text that refuses to recognize Israel and demands the full liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea. In that company “all means” is no abstraction; it sits inside a standing program of armed conflict. Malcolm X supplied the English prestige, Fanon the decolonial vocabulary, and Hamas the militant creed, and campus groups turned the blend into toolkits and chants and teach-ins.
What the phrase finally does is pre-clear the violence. It never shows that a given attack was lawful; it dodges the test altogether and asks the audience to judge the act by its aim instead of its victim. It also functions as a loyalty test, since a person who declines to bless “resistance in all its forms” can be cast as weak or colonial or indifferent to Palestinian suffering. Jewish students feel this pressure most sharply, because they are so often asked to denounce Israel while no one is asked to denounce Hamas. And the phrase reverses the burden of scrutiny: raise Nova or Be’eri, the hostages or the sexual violence or the rocket fire, and the very question gets recast as bad faith. That is the slogan’s deepest function—it trains an audience to excuse the next attack before anyone knows what the next attack will be.
A cause does not lose its explanation here. A people may have powerful reasons to fight, and saying so takes nothing from this entry. The narrow, unmovable point is that reasons do not legalize attacks on civilians or the taking of hostages, however urgent the reasons sound. The toolkit’s claim that settlers are not civilians under international law is not a minor flourish but the exact hinge on which civilian protection is meant to swing open. Strip away the slogan and the legal questions remain, plain and answerable: Who was targeted? Were civilians attacked directly? Were hostages taken? “Any means” exists to keep those questions from being asked, which is why it operates in advance, telling its audience that whatever comes next may already be justified so long as it can be called resistance.