To understand the present, we must look to the past. In the current struggle in Gaza, many in the West see an unprecedented barbarism. But for those who know history, this is not a new story.
The fighter in Gaza today is the direct descendant of the freedom fighter in the forests of Kenya seven decades ago. Hamas is the Mau Mau of Palestine, not a rough approximation, but the same phenomenon arising from the same conditions of violent oppression and stolen land.
The most powerful parallel is in the language of the oppressor. The British Empire labeled the Mau Mau as terrorists, bloodthirsty, irrational savages. This was not a description; it was a political tool. By dehumanizing the Kikuyu rebels, Britain could justify its own brutal counter-insurgency: the mass internment camps, the systematic torture, the hangings, and the theft of land. The term “terrorist” was used to erase the context of the rebellion—the profound injustice of colonial rule, and to frame the conflict as one between civilization and barbarism.
Today, we hear the same script with a different cast. Israel and its allies designate Hamas as a terrorist organization. Its tactics are condemned as the ultimate evil, while the context that created it, the decades-long military occupation, the blockade of Gaza, the displacement of Palestinians, and the denial of their basic rights, is systematically ignored. The label “terrorist” serves the same purpose it did for the British: to legitimize a disproportionate military response and to shield the occupying power from scrutiny. The bombing of civilian infrastructure, the mass casualties, the humanitarian crisis—all are framed as a necessary war against fanaticism, just as Britain’s crimes were.
Critics will rush to point to differences. They will say the Mau Mau fought a colonial power, while Hamas fights a nation-state. This is a distinction without a difference. The reality for the Palestinian is the same as it was for the Kenyan: a foreign power, backed by immense international support, controls your land, your resources, and your destiny.
The Israeli project, from its founding in the displacement of Palestinians to its ongoing settlement expansion, fits the definition of a settler-colonial enterprise. The power imbalance, the disenfranchisement, and the systemic violence are the same.
The British did not just seize land; they legalized theft. The creation of the Kikuyu Land Unit and the use of ’emergency regulations’ provided a legal façade for mass displacement. This echoes the Israeli state’s use of the Absentee Property Law and declaring thousands of dunams as “State Land” in the West Bank to dispossess Palestinians, turning colonial violence into a bureaucratic procedure. .
Others will point to Hamas’s Islamist ideology as a divergence from the Mau Mau’s more secular aims. But this misses the point. The form of resistance is shaped by the tools available. The Mau Mau drew on Kikuyu tradition and oaths. Hamas draws on Islam. In both cases, the ideology is a mobilizing force, a source of identity and resilience in the face of annihilation. The core goal is identical: the liberation of their homeland from a foreign occupier.
The methods, too, are tragically similar. The Mau Mau committed atrocities against Kenyan “collaborators” and white settlers. Hamas commits atrocities against Israeli civilians. This violence is horrific, and it must be condemned. But to focus on this alone is to fall into the oppressor’s trap. It is to demand that an occupied people fight a “clean” war against F-35s and one of the world’s most advanced armies with one hand tied behind their back. As Frantz Fanon argued in The Wretched of the Earth, colonial violence is a cyclical force; the violence of the oppressed is a direct and inevitable reflection of the violence enacted upon them.
The cycle of violence created a deep internal rupture, particularly targeting ‘collaborators’ who served as the oppressor’s eyes and hands. In Kenya, the Home Guard assisted the British, only for the new independent state to later largely sideline them. This internal conflict finds its mirror today in the profound political hostility between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA), where the latter is seen by many as collaborating with, or at least facilitating, the continuation of the occupation.
Furthermore, the oppression was never purely local. The British counter-insurgency benefited from the geopolitical realities of the early Cold War, allowing the UK to justify its actions as a bulwark against ‘disorder’ in a globally contested space. Today, the occupying power is shielded by the overwhelming and consistent diplomatic and military support of the United States, exemplified by its frequent use of the UN Security Council veto. This external backing is the indispensable ingredient that allows the settler-colonial project to persist for decades.
The legacy of the Mau Mau is instructive. Though reviled as terrorists in their time, history has vindicated them as essential freedom fighters in Kenya’s journey to independence. The British narrative has crumbled under the weight of its own hypocrisy.
The comparison between Hamas and the Mau Mau is not a moral endorsement of their tactics. It is a historical and political argument. It asserts that what we are witnessing in Palestine is not a unique evil, but a familiar chapter in the long, bloody story of decolonization. To call Hamas a terrorist organization and stop there is to willfully ignore the lessons of history. The freedom fighter of the past is the terrorist of the present, and the terrorist of the present may be the founding father of a future free nation. The world condemned the Mau Mau, just as it condemns Hamas today. But history’s judgment falls not on the methods of the resistance, but on the justice of the cause itself.