Palestinian Resistance Quotes

Yes, Marcos is gay. Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10pm, a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying `Enough'. He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable -- this is Marcos.

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. "Never let them know they hurt you" was their creed

The important issues in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination are minimized and rendered invisible by those who try to equate Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid with terrorism.

The Palestinians were offered two options: 1) to accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers’ rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder.

The repression of Palestinian resistance offers a profound example of the elasticity of violence as a concept and shows how, while the powerful can wage war on particular communities with impunity and claim innocence, the oppressed can be deemed a violent threat simply for attempting to assert their rights or defend their humanity.

The Palestinians must no longer define themselves by what they resist (the Ottomans, the British Mandate, the Zionists, etc.) but instead by what they want to create. And they need to get real with a very basic question: What is the Palestinian national ambition really about? Is it about having a state and living side by side with Israel? Or is it about wiping Israel off the map and creating a Sharia state?

I got a number of very thoughtful responses to the email I sent out last night, most of which I don’t have time to respond to right now. Thanks everyone for the encouragement, questions, criticism. Daniel’s response was particularly inspiring to me and deserves to be shared. The resistance of Israeli Jewish people to the occupation and the enormous risk taken by those refusing to serve in the Israeli military offers an example, especially for those of us living in the United States, of how to behave when you discover that atrocities are being commited in your name. Thank you.

Placing the question of violence at the forefront almost inevitably serves to obscure the issues that are at the center of struggles for justice. This occurred in South Africa during the antiapartheid struggle. Interestingly Nelson Mandela—who has been sanctified as the most important peace advocate of our time—was kept on the US terrorist list until 2008. The important issues in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination are minimized and rendered invisible by those who try to equate Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid with terrorism.

The seventh myth was that Israel intended to conduct a benevolent occupation but was forced to take a tougher attitude because of Palestinian violence. Israel regarded from the very beginning any wish to end the occupation—whether expressed peacefully or through struggle—as terrorism. From the beginning, it reacted brutally by collectively punishing the population for any demonstration of resistance.

So the ultimate question is, Do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres, or is it incumbent upon them to lie down and die?

In the words of one scholar, “by virtue of Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish state and the state’s exclusionary policies and laws, what was conferred on Palestinians was in effect second-class citizenship.” Most significantly, the martial regime under which the Palestinians lived granted the Israeli military near-unlimited authority to control the minutiae of their lives.57

Had Jews merely wanted to live in Palestine, this would not have been a problem. In fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians had coexisted for centuries throughout the Middle East. But Zionists sought sovereignty over a land where other people lived. Their ambitions required not only the dispossession and removal of Palestinians in 1948 but also their forced exile, juridical erasure and denial that they ever existed. So, during Israel’s establishment, some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes to make way for a Jewish majority state…. This is why Palestinians have been resisting for more than seven decades: They are fighting to remain on their lands with dignity. They have valiantly resisted their colonial erasure…. This resistance is not about returning to the 1947 borders or some notion of the past, but about laying claim to a better future in which Palestinians and their children can live in freedom and equality, rather than being subjugated as second-class citizens or worse.5

Significantly, the overwhelming Arab majority of the population (around 94 percent at that time) went unmentioned by Balfour, except in a backhanded way as the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” They were described in terms of what they were not, and certainly not as a nation or a people—the words “Palestinian” and “Arab” do not appear in the sixty-seven words of the declaration. This overwhelming majority of the population was promised only “civil and religious rights,” not political or national rights. By way of contrast, Balfour ascribed national rights to what he called “the Jewish people,” who in 1917 were a tiny minority—6 percent—of the country’s inhabitants.

Growing up, I’d heard that Israel’s founders said of the Palestinians they forced from their homes to create their state, “The old will die and the young will forget.” But my generation is living proof of the contrary. The resistance of our grandparents lives on through us, and in truth, we perhaps have even more patriotism and energy than our elders.

Palestinian identity, much like Zionism, emerged in response to many stimuli, and at almost exactly the same time as did modern political Zionism.

Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends.

. . . published the Road Map to Peace. The premise of this plan, as the Palestinian historians Samih Farsoun and Naseer Aruri point out, "is that the nearly forty-year-old impasse is not caused by an abnormal and illegal occupation but by the Palestinian resistance to that occupation. Progress was thus linked to ending the intifada and all acts of resistance rather than ending the occupation or reversing decades of colonial impoverishment of land, resource, and institutions.

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.

Palestinianism was for Said a condition of chronic exile, exile as agony but also as ethical position. To remain aloof from the group while honouring one’s organic ties to it; to exist between loneliness and alignment, remaining always a bit of a stranger; to resist the resolution of the narrative, the closing of the circle; to keep looking, to not feel too at home.

Just like Zionism, Palestinian and other Arab national identities were modern and contingent, a product of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century circumstances, not eternal and immutable. The denial of an authentic, independent Palestinian identity is of a piece with Herzl’s colonialist views on the alleged benefits of Zionism to the indigenous population, and constitutes a crucial element in the erasure of their national rights and peoplehood by the Balfour Declaration and its sequels.

Jabotinsky and Dayan wanted to crush Palestinian resistance. Kohn turned against a Jewish state. Leibowitz urged Israel to return the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But none saw Palestinians as Nazis, pogromists, or Amalek. They understood that violent dispossession and violent resistance are intertwined.

In response to this fatal alliance of savage capitalism in the West with Israeli racism, exclusion and colonial subjugation, the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel presents not only a progressive, anti racist [3], sophisticated, sustainable, moral and effective form of civil non-violent resistance, but also a real chance of becoming the political catalyst and moral anchor for a strengthened, reinvigorated international social movement capable of reaffirming the rights of all humans to freedom, equality and dignity and the right of nations to self determination.

With Hamas now in control of the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed a full-blown siege. Goods entering the strip were reduced to a bare minimum; regular exports were stopped completely; fuel supplies were cut; and leaving and entering Gaza were only rarely permitted. Gaza was in effect turned into an open-air prison, where by 2018 at least 53 percent of some two million Palestinians lived in a state of poverty,24 and unemployment stood at an astonishing 52 percent, with much higher rates for youth and women.25 What had begun with international refusal to recognize Hamas’s election victory had led to a disastrous Palestinian rupture and the blockade of Gaza. This sequence of events amounted to a new declaration of war on the Palestinians. It also provided indispensable international cover for the open warfare that was to come.

Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends.

The main rule was that our grassroots resistance movement had to be unarmed. The aim was to struggle and resist without hurting or killing anyone.

Beyond this, for the purpose of negotiations, the Palestinians ought to treat the United States as an extension of Israel.

The lopsided 43:1 scale of these casualties is telling, as is the fact that the bulk of the Israelis killed were soldiers while most of the Palestinians were civilians.27

Wars are motivated by the need to seize the wealth of our neighbours, to wield power, to protect ourselves from real or imagined threats: in short they have, as we have seen, political, social, economic or demographic causes. There is no need to refer to Islam or the clash of civilizations to explain why the Afghans or the Iraqis resist the western military forces occupying their countries. Nor to speak of anti-Jewish sentiment or anti-Semitism to understand the reasons why the Palestinians are not overjoyed by the Israeli occupation of their lands.

The actions of people resisting brutal occupation can be condemned as criminal and politically foolish, but those who offer no alternative have no moral standing to issue such judgments.

A senior Israeli intelligence officer explained that the IDF attacked “both aspects of Hamas—its resistance or military wing and its dawa, or social wing,” the latter a euphemism for the civilian society.

In the words of one scholar, “by virtue of Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish state and the state’s exclusionary policies and laws, what was conferred on Palestinians was in effect second-class citizenship.

Resistance, in the Western mind, is a mutating concept. While Ukrainian resistance is glorified for its guerrilla warfare tactics, Palestinian resistance—termed “terrorism”—is puzzling, perverted, and pathological. Mainstream media’s insistence on these framings is not due to any fundamental differences in the ways both peoples exercise violence. Nor is it solely because of Ukrainians’ skin color; one needs to look no further than the Irish Republican Army to see that whiteness alone is no golden ticket—at least not in a war against British colonialism. Rather, the tonal shift employed in media coverage is simply in service of the West’s strategic interests. While the Israeli settler-colonial regime is the United States’ most important ally in the Middle East, and practically an offshoot of Europe, created to protect Western imperialism, Russia represents an “existential” threat to the West.35

To some degree, every US administration since Harry Truman’s has been staffed by people making policy on Palestine whose views indicate that they believe Palestinians, whether or not they exist, are lesser beings than Israelis.

I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends.

This put the Palestinians in a very weak position to confront the now invigorated Zionist movement, which had gone from strength to strength during the revolt, obtaining lavish amounts of arms and extensive training from the British to help them suppress the uprising.68

The plan (Dalet) included the following clear reference to the methods to be employed in the process of cleansing the (Palestinian) population: 'Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously... Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.

Indeed, there are striking parallels between these portrayals of the resistance of Native Americans to their dispossession and that of the Palestinians. Both groups are cast as backward and uncivilized, a violent, murderous, and irrational obstacle to progress and modernity. While many Americans have begun to contest this strand of their national narrative, Israeli society and its supporters still celebrate—indeed, depend on—its foundational version. Moreover, comparisons between Palestine and the Native American or African American experiences are fraught because the United States has yet to fully acknowledge these dark chapters of its past or to address their toxic effects in the present. There is still a long way to go to change Americans’ consciousness of their nation’s history, let alone that of Palestine and Israel, in which the United States has played such a supportive role.

Yet for all its might, its nuclear weapons, and its alliance with the United States, today the Jewish state is at least as contested globally as it was at any time in the past. The Palestinians’ resistance, their persistence, and their challenge to Israel’s ambitions are among the most striking phenomena of the current era.

Hamas’s assertions of positive plurality were strongly contested, most scathingly in a report issued by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, which accused the Executive Force and al-Qassam of a wide range of human rights abuses, including attacks on journalists, policing of public spaces, illegitimate arrests, torture and inhuman treatment of prisoners, and intimidation of civil servants.

These included repeated cuts in aid to the Palestinian Authority, the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization offices in Washington, a specific declaration by the State Department that settlements were legal, and the passage of a law forbidding aid until the Palestinians ended a fund that paid families of Palestinians imprisoned for acts of resistance, including violent ones, against Israel.

Every house in the Occupied Territories has a number. The number gives you basic intel on the people inside the house. If the people inside the house are somehow involved in any resistance, if someone in the family was imprisoned, if anyone was even blacklisted, that’s a house you will not take, because then you’re risking your troops. So you enter houses of people you know in advance are innocent. Now, we never called Palestinians “innocent.” They were always “involved” or “not involved,” because no one’s “innocent.

In the half century since, with American help, Israel has driven a coach and horses through this linguistic gap, which has permitted it to colonize the occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories, some of which—East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights—it has formally annexed, and to maintain its unending military control over them. Repeated United Nations condemnations of these moves, unsupported by even a hint of sanctions or any genuine pressure on Israel, have over time amounted to tacit international acceptance of them.

One of the more surprising things I learned is that as a population living under occupation, we are granted by international law the legal right to resist through armed struggle. It’s protected under the Geneva Conventions, reaffirmed in a 1982 UN General Assembly resolution. The resolution reaffirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.

Very few Americans seem to know, for instance, that when the U.N., in 1947, proposed the creation of two separate states, Jewish and Arab, the Jews accepted the provision for the political independence of the Palestinian Arabs. It was the Arab nations which rejected the U.N. plan, vowing to resist partition by force and assaulting the Jewish community in Palestine. The Arabs have succeeded in persuading American public opinion that the Jews descended upon Palestine after World War II and evicted the native population with arms.

This provision meant that dispossessed Arab owners could neither buy back nor lease what had once been their property, nor could any other non-Jew. Such moves were crucial to the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a Jewish state, since only about 6 percent of Palestinian land had been Jewish-owned prior to 1948. The Arab population inside Israel, isolated by military travel restrictions, was also cut off from other Palestinians and from the rest of the Arab world. Accustomed to being a substantial majority in their own country and region, they suddenly had to learn to make their way as a despised minority in a hostile environment as subjects of a Jewish polity that never defined itself as a state of all its citizens. In the words of one scholar, “by virtue of Israel’s definition of itself as a Jewish state and the state’s exclusionary policies and laws, what was conferred on Palestinians was in effect second-class citizenship.” Most significantly, the martial regime under which the Palestinians lived granted the Israeli military near-unlimited authority to control the minutiae of their lives.

It’s the brown skin of Palestinians that is stopping the entire world from stopping in their tracks. It’s Islamophobia, it’s racism. The complete destruction of a white majority population would have ignited the resistance, the uproar and action of all. Your favorite multicultural European city reduced to rubble would ensure unanimous outpouring of rage, support and sympathy. No one would care about losing opportunities, no one would say it’s complicated. Heinous acts of violence against black and brown skin has been so normalized it’s created apathy. Starving African children-the norm. A blow-up in the Middle East-the norm and ‘White saviors’ in the mix of it all-the norm.

The prevailing inability or unwillingness to talk about Hamas in a nuanced manner is deeply familiar. During the summer of 2014, when global newsrooms were covering Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip, I watched Palestinian analysts being rudely silenced on the air for failing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization outright. This condemnation was demanded as a prerequisite for the right of these analysts to engage in any debate about the events on the ground. There was no other explanation, it seemed, for the loss of life in Gaza and Israel other than pure-and-simple Palestinian hatred and bloodlust, embodied by Hamas. I wondered how many lives, both Palestinian and Israeli, have been lost or marred by this refusal to engage with the drivers of Palestinian resistance, of which Hamas is only one facet. I considered the elision of the broader historical and political context of the Palestinian struggle in most conversations regarding Hamas. Whether condemnation or support, it felt to me, many of the views I faced on Palestinian armed resistance were unburdened by moral angst or ambiguity. There was often a certainty or a conviction about resistance that was too easily forthcoming. I have struggled to find such. I have struggled to find such certainty in my own study of Hamas, even as I remain unwavering in my condemnation of targeting civilians, on either side.

In the wake of the defeat of the Arab armies, and after further massacres of civilians, an even larger number of Palestinians, another 400,000, were expelled and fled from their homes, escaping to neighboring Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank and Gaza (the latter two constituted the remaining 22 percent of Palestine that was not conquered by Israel). None were allowed to return, and most of their homes and villages were destroyed to prevent them from doing so.38 Still more were expelled from the new state of Israel even after the armistice agreements of 1949 were signed, while further numbers have been forced out since then. In this sense the Nakba can be understood as an ongoing process.

between 1970 and 2001, Israel established twenty-one Jewish-only settlements in the Strip. This not only greatly aggravated the political situation, but also placed pressure on the available land and water resources, which the settlements, whose population never rose above some eight thousand Israeli Jews, used in quantities vastly disproportionate to their demographic representation.15 This was a predictable effect of an occupying power settling its citizens in a territory that it controlled through military rule—and in the midst of some 1.1 million Palestinians.16 It could be similarly anticipated that people living under such conditions would resist occupation, producing tension that would become more pronounced over time.

This is an ancient text that corrects an even more ancient text. And now we read this ancient text in our contemporary moment of deciding. Ours is a time of scattering in fear. We are so fearful that we want to fence the world in order to keep all the others out: –Some of the church still wants to fence out women. –We build fences to keep out immigrants (or Palestinians). –The church in many places fences out gays. –The old issue of race is still powerful for fencing. We have so many requirements that are as old as Moses. But here is only one requirement. It is Sabbath, work stoppage, an ordinance everyone can honor—gay or straight, woman or man, Black or White, “American” or Hispanic—anybody can keep it and be gathered to the meeting of all of God’s people.

While Rabin had done something no other Israeli leader had ever done by formally conceding that there was a Palestinian people, accepting the PLO as their representative, and opening negotiations with it, obtaining in return its recognition of the state of Israel, this exchange was neither symmetrical nor reciprocal. Israel had not recognized a Palestinian state or even made a commitment to allow the creation of one. This was a peculiar transaction, whereby a national liberation movement had obtained nominal recognition from its oppressors, without achieving liberation, by trading its own recognition of the state that had colonized its homeland and continued to occupy it. This was a resounding, historic mistake, one with grave consequences for the Palestinian people.

Gazans hypothesized that the brutality of the offensive was a tactic to force them to turn against Hamas. In many instances this worked, particularly when Hamas showed its own merciless face. Under the heavy toll of bombing, Hamas used the chaotic environment of war to settle its own political scores and carry out extrajudicial assassinations of its domestic enemies, including members of Fatah who were held in its jails, as well as suspected collaborators or informants for Israel.40 More disturbingly, in the early days of Operation Protective Edge, Hamas’s Ministry of Interior called on citizens not to respond to evacuation orders by the Israeli army, asserting that these were only issued as a form of psychological warfare to create panic.41 Many in Gaza criticized Hamas, not least for its role in dragging the coastal enclave into another conflagration. Others were critical of Hamas’s governance record and its authoritarian streak.

Although under Carter the United States had come close to endorsing the Palestinians’ national rights and their involvement in negotiations, the two sides found themselves farther apart than ever. Camp David and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty signaled US alignment with the most extreme expression of Israel’s negation of Palestinian rights, an alignment that was consolidated by Ronald Reagan’s administration. Begin and his successors in the Likud, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and then Benjamin Netanyahu, were implacably opposed to Palestinian statehood, sovereignty, or control of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Ideological heirs of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, they believed that the entirety of Palestine belonged solely to the Jewish people, and that a Palestinian people with national rights did not exist. At most, autonomy might be possible for the “local Arabs,” but this autonomy would apply only to people, not to the land. Their explicit aim was to transform the entirety of Palestine into the Land of Israel.

If a one-state solution is a nonstarter, what are the prospects for a two-state solution? Put simply, they appear very bleak. Bleak primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, in the deepest fibers of their being, oppose such an outcome, demanding, as they did since the dawn of their national movement, all of Palestine as their patrimony. And I would hazard that, in the highly unlikely event that Israel and the PNA were in the coming years to sign a two-state agreement, it would in short order unravel. It would be subverted and overthrown by those forces in the Palestinian camp—probably representing Palestinian Arab majority opinion and certainly representing the historic will of the Palestinian national movement—bent on having all of Palestine. To judge from its past behavior, the PNA would be unwilling and, probably, incapable of reining in the more militant, expansionist factions—Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and so on—who would represent themselves as carrying on the patriotic, religious duty of resisting the Zionist invader. No Palestinian leader can fight them without being dubbed a “traitor” and losing his public’s support.

Statement on Hamas (October 10th, 2023) When Israel strikes, it's "national security" - when Palestine strikes back, it's "terrorism". Just like over two hundred years ago when native americans resisted their homeland being stolen, it was called "Indian Attack". Or like over a hundred years ago when Indian soldiers in the British Army revolted against the empire, in defense of their homeland, it was called "Sepoy Mutiny". The narrative never changes - when the colonizer terrorizes the world, it's given glorious sounding names like "exploration" and "conquest", but if the oppressed so much as utters a word in resistance, it is branded as attack, mutiny and terrorism - so that, the real terrorists can keep on colonizing as the self-appointed ruler of land, life and morality, without ever being held accountable for violating the rights of what they deem second rate lifeforms, such as the arabs, indians, latinos and so on. After all this, some apes will still only be interested in one stupid question. Do I support Hamas? To which I say this. Until you've spent a lifetime under an oppressive regime, you are not qualified to ask that question. An ape can ask anything its puny brain fancies, but it's up to the human to decide whether the ape is worthy of a response. What do you think, by the way - colonizers can just keep coming as they please, to wipe their filthy feet on us like doormat, and we should do nothing - just stay quiet! For creatures who call themselves civilized, you guys have a weird sense of morality. Yet all these might not get through your thick binary skull, so let me put it to you bluntly. I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends. However, I do have one problem here. Why do civilians have to die, if that is indeed the case - which I have no way of confirming, because news reports are not like reputed scientific data, that a scientist can naively trust. During humankind's gravest conflicts news outlets have always peddled a narrative benefiting the occupier and demonizing the resistance, either consciously or subconsciously. So never go by news reports, particularly on exception circumstances like this. No matter the cause, no civilian must die, that is my one unimpeachable law. But the hard and horrific fact of the matter is, only the occupier can put an end to the death and destruction peacefully - the resistance does not have that luxury.

A poll produced by Birzeit University in the West Bank at the time confirmed Hamas’s fears, showing that 77 percent of Palestinians favored recognition of Israel, less than five months after voting Hamas into the legislature.120 Under Haniyeh’s leadership, Hamas’s cabinet sought to limit the fallout as it worked with president Abbas’s office to reach a compromise.121 Haniyeh’s pragmatic efforts faced significant obstruction as both Israel and Palestinian factions, as well as internal Hamas forces, sought to prevent a rapprochement from emerging.122 In early June 2006, Prime Minister Olmert leaked information that Israel had approved three presidential trucks with approximately three thousand arms to be delivered to Fatah across the Allenby Bridge from Jordan, further inflaming tension among factions.123 From the Gaza Strip, rocket fire increased. This raised suspicions that Hamas’s external leadership, along with leaders within Gaza who were committed to Hamas’s project, were encouraging al-Qassam to prevent Haniyeh from adopting a moderate position in discussions with Abbas.124 On June 9, Israel carried out an air strike that killed a family of seven in Beit Lahiya, Gaza, who were picnicking on the beach. Officially breaking the ceasefire that had lasted since the Cairo Declaration the previous summer, al-Qassam promised “earthquakes.”125

When Israel strikes, it's "national security" - when Palestine strikes back, it's "terrorism". Just like over two hundred years ago when native americans resisted their homeland being stolen, it was called "Indian Attack". Or like over a hundred years ago when Indian soldiers in the British Army revolted against the empire, in defense of their homeland, it was called "Sepoy Mutiny". The narrative never changes - when the colonizer terrorizes the world, it's given glorious sounding names like "exploration" and "conquest", but if the oppressed so much as utters a word in resistance, it is branded as attack, mutiny and terrorism - so that, the real terrorists can keep on colonizing as the self-appointed ruler of land, life and morality, without ever being held accountable for violating the rights of what they deem second rate lifeforms, such as the arabs, indians, latinos and so on. After all this, some apes will still only be interested in one stupid question. Do I support Hamas? To which I say this. Until you've spent a lifetime under an oppressive regime, you are not qualified to ask that question. An ape can ask anything its puny brain fancies, but it's up to the human to decide whether the ape is worthy of a response. What do you think, by the way - colonizers can just keep coming as they please, to wipe their filthy feet on us like doormat, and we should do nothing - just stay quiet! For creatures who call themselves civilized, you guys have a weird sense of morality. Yet all these might not get through your thick binary skull, so let me put it to you bluntly. I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends.

The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

The expulsion of the Palestinians was Zionism’s main goal from the outset. All settler colonial projects, writes Machover, involve the dispossession of indigenous people and brutal measures to suppress resistance. But the projects differ, broadly speaking, in terms of whether the colonizers exploit the indigenous population as a labor force, or whether the indigenous population is to be excluded from the settlers’ economy, exterminated, or expelled.

manifest in the IRGC’s support for armed proxies like the Lebanon-based Shiite militia Hezbollah and the military wing of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas—made the Iranian regime Israel’s single greatest security threat and contributed to the general hardening of Israeli attitudes toward possible peace with its neighbors.

Their positions are part of a wider worldview that legitimizes any effort to abolish Palestinian national resistance nor that of Arabs against their dictatorial regimes. The lack of a radical anti-imperialist perspective, let alone an approach of anti-capitalist globalization, is in line with their support of US imperial interests in the region and Israel’s role as their enforcer. The Zionist Left wholeheartedly backs the US war against “Islamic terror,” which enables Israel to escalate its military involvement against “refusing” states and resistance movements in the Middle East. The current warmongering by the Israeli security and political establishments against Iran (and Syria and Lebanon) has gained the support of a wide strata of Israeli society. The Zionist Left shares this perspective of a continuous threat to the “security” of the state and has largely internalized it. Hence, no Left movement will be there to resist the disastrous war when it comes.

March 1945 when, under the aegis of Great Britain, six Arab states formed the Arab League. In his memoirs, Dr. Husayn describes the Palestinians’ bitter disappointment that the member states decided to remove references to Palestine from the League’s inaugural communiqué and to retain control over the choice of Palestine’s representative.12

the Palestinians had not developed effective Arab allies or the apparatus of a modern state, despite their intense patriotic feeling and the formation of a national movement strong enough to briefly pose a threat to British control of Palestine during the revolt.

Great 1936–39 Arab Revolt against British rule, during which 14 to 17 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled,17 as the British employed a hundred thousand troops and air power to master Palestinian resistance.

AS SOON AS they were able to do so in the wake of World War I, Palestinians began to organize politically in opposition both to British rule, and to the imposition of the Zionist movement as a privileged interlocutor of the British.

When incarceration in prison failed to stop the activists, Israel crushed the boycott by imposing heavy fines, and seizing and disposing of equipment, furnishings and goods from local stores, factories and homes. But you could be subjected to the same treatment for less; a common, non-violent Palestinian form of protest in those days was the use of graffiti to express resistance. This often led to the arrest and collective punishment of the entire family of the perpetrator.

Their efforts were undermined by the hierarchical, conservative, and divided nature of Palestinian society and politics, characteristic of many in the region, and further sapped by a sophisticated policy of divide and rule adopted by the mandatory authorities, aided and abetted by the Jewish Agency.

the tactics of divide and rule were fairly successful until the mid-1930s, the six-month general strike of 1936 constituted a popular and spontaneous explosion from the bottom up that took the British, the Zionists, and the elite Palestinian leadership by surprise, and that obliged the latter to put aside its divisions, at least nominally. The result was the creation of the Arab Higher Committee, which was set up to lead and represent the entire Arab majority, although the British never recognized the AHC as representative

It took the full might of the British Empire, which could only be unleashed when more troops became available after the Munich Agreement in September 1938, and nearly a year more of fierce fighting, to extinguish the Palestinian uprising.

In the view of ‘Isa al-‘Isa, inter-Palestinian disputes, which resulted in hundreds of assassinations in the late 1930s, gravely sapped the strength of the Palestinians.

Neville Chamberlain’s government issued a White Paper in an attempt to appease outraged Palestinian, Arab, and Indian Muslim opinion. This document called for a severe curtailment of Britain’s commitments to the Zionist movement. It proposed strict limits on Jewish immigration and on land sales (two major Arab demands) and promised representative institutions in five years and self-determination within ten (the most important demands).

but unfortunately their most important achievement was to broker an end to it in the fall of 1936 at the request of several Arab rulers, who were essentially acting at the behest of their patrons, the British. They promised the Palestinian leadership that the British would provide redress for their grievances.

Mandate authorities deported virtually the entire Palestinian nationalist leadership, including the mayor of Jerusalem, Dr. Husayn al-Khalidi, my uncle. With four others (he and another two were members of the AHC) he was sent to the Seychelles Islands, an isolated location in the Indian Ocean that the British Empire frequently chose for exiling nationalist opponents.

Britain meant to withhold the substance of these two crucial concessions from the Palestinians, as the Zionist movement was to have effective veto power, which it would obviously use.72

This chapter examines the late 19th- and early 20th-century context in which two emerging national communities—Zionist and Palestinian—first collided over their mutually exclusive desire for the same piece of land, not much larger than Wales (approximately 16,000 square kms). Identifying 1897 as the beginning of the history of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is significant. It underlines the fact that this hundred (or so) years’ conflict is neither rooted in ancient and religious animosities nor even are its origins so much Middle Eastern as European. Just as European Jews were responding to the nationalist spirit spawned by the conditions in 19th-century Europe, so too was the identity of the indigenous Arab population about to be reshaped by the sharpening of a specifically Palestinian consciousness that formed around the inhabitants’ resistance to the threat that Zionism posed to their own patrimony. It was in this context that Jewish immigrants from Europe struggled to find ways to successfully settle the land of Palestine, improvising and developing strategies that would have a huge impact on the future trajectory of the Zionist project.

Reference in this chapter is primarily to the First Intifada, the unarmed and mainly nonviolent uprising that lasted in full force from 1987 to 1993, in distinction from the second, which started in 2000, and which eventually became an armed uprising featuring the use of suicide bombers by the Palestinians, and the employment of tanks, helicopters, and other heavy weapons by the Israeli occupation forces.

Israel’s social media strategy is a sophisticated attempt to link the Jewish state’s operations with Western values, or at least those policies supporting a militarized response to terrorism (or resistance, depending on your perspective), hoping to engender it to global audiences. “Social media is a warzone for us here in Israel,” said Lt. Col. (Ret.) Avital Leibovich, creator of the IDF social media unit and director of the American Jewish Committee in Israel, during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. It was a seven-week battle between Israel and Hamas that killed more than 2,250 Palestinians, many of them civilians, including 500 children, and 70 Israelis, most of whom were soldiers.

23 In the half century since, with American help, Israel has driven a coach and horses through this linguistic gap, which has permitted it to colonize the occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories, some of which—East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights—it has formally annexed, and to maintain its unending military control over them.

Political Islam has served as a vehicle for resistance as well as collaboration in different eras of Palestinian history, notably in the form of the grassroots combination of Islamic revival and nationalism espoused by the charismatic Shaykh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam, whose “martyrdom” in 1935 can be said to have inspired the revolt of 1936–39. The same can be said of the more recent Islamic Jihad movement, an offshoot of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its founders were disgusted with the Brotherhood’s quietism and passivity toward—and, some even alleged, collaboration with—the Israeli occupation. Their attacks on Israeli military personnel in 1986 and 1987 helped spark the first Palestinian popular uprising, or intifada, which broke out in December 1987 and helped provoke the transformation of the major part of the Muslim Brotherhood organization into Hamas. Hamas itself has played a major part in the resistance to Israel, although some of the tactics that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have pioneered in the Palestinian arena, particularly suicide attacks on civilians inside Israel, have been both morally indefensible and disastrously counterproductive strategically.

Recognizing, and making restitution for, the harm done, primarily to the Palestinian people but also to others, as a result of that drama involves a major moral challenge to the international community, and particularly to the West, which bears a grave responsibility for helping to engender this conflict.

Having carried out the main part of his mission, my father then hesitantly conveyed the message Dr. Husayn had entrusted to him. The king’s face registered anger and surprise, and he abruptly stood up, compelling everyone else in the room to stand as well. The audience was over. Exactly at that moment, a servant entered, announcing that the BBC had just broadcast the news of the UN General Assembly’s decision in favor of the partition of Palestine. It happened that my father’s meeting with the king had coincided with the assembly’s historic vote on November 29, 1947, on Resolution 181, which provided for partition. Before stalking out of the room, the king turned to my father and said coldly, “You Palestinians have refused my offer. You deserve what happens to you.

LIKE A SLOW, seemingly endless train wreck, the Nakba unfolded over a period of many months. Its first stage, from November 30, 1947, until the final withdrawal of British forces and the establishment of Israel on May 15, 1948, witnessed successive defeats by Zionist paramilitary groups, including the Haganah and the Irgun, of the poorly armed and organized Palestinians and the Arab volunteers who had come to help them. This first stage saw a bitterly fought campaign that culminated in a country-wide Zionist offensive dubbed Plan Dalet in the spring of 1948.33 Plan Dalet involved the conquest and depopulation in April and the first half of May of the two largest Arab urban centers, Jaffa and Haifa, and of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, as well as of scores of Arab cities, towns, and villages, including Tiberias on April 18, Haifa on April 23, Safad on May 10, and Beisan on May 11. Thus, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began well before the state of Israel was proclaimed on May 15, 1948.

Six years later in October 1995, less than a month before he was assassinated, Rabin told the Knesset that any Palestinian “entity” to be created would be “less than a state.”47

To explain how we got to this seemingly intractable place, a little history is required—never a simple proposition in a part of the world where rivaling versions of the past are a dense thicket. The 1930s saw a series of Arab revolts against the influx of Jewish migrants to Palestine, which was then under British control. This wave of Jewish immigration was regarded by many Palestinians as a colonial imposition, a perception that was further cemented when British troops and local police put down the Arab uprising with tremendous force, fueling further resentment. When Palestine was partitioned in 1947, a move with overwhelming Arab opposition, and Israel declared statehood the next year, the first Arab-Israeli war was locked in. These were the years that Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe: roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, and thousands were killed, with many of the horrifying truths about these atrocities finally escaping Israel’s own Shadow Lands in recent years. Of course Palestinians would resist such ethnic cleaning with violence of their own. Yet rather than seeing Arab resistance for what it was—a nationalist, anti-colonial battle over land and self-determination (with some anti-Semitic elements, to be sure)—many influential Zionist leaders portrayed the entire Palestinian cause as nothing but more irrational Jew-hatred, a seamless continuation of the very same anti-Semitism that had resulted in the Holocaust, and that therefore needed to be crushed with the kind of militarized force that Jews had not been able to marshal in Nazi-controlled Europe. Within this imaginary, the Palestinian, as the Jew’s new eternal enemy, was treated as so illegitimate, so irrational, so other, that Israelis believed themselves to be justified in reenacting many of the forms of violence, dehumanizing propaganda, and forced displacement that had targeted and uprooted the Jewish people throughout Europe for centuries, a process that continues to this day with ongoing home demolitions, Israeli settlement expansions, targeted assassinations, settler rampages through Palestinian communities, openly discriminatory laws, and walled ghettos into which Palestinians are corralled.

There are various means of resistance available to people who are oppressed by racist or colonial regimes or foreign occupations (that is, according to the Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions), including through the use of armed force. Nowadays, the Palestine solidarity movement has committed itself to the route of nonviolent resistance. Do you think this alone will end Israeli apartheid? Solidarity movements are, of course, by their very nature nonviolent. In South Africa, even as an international solidarity movement was being organized, the ANC (African National Congress) and the SACP (South African Communist Party) came to the conclusion that they needed an armed wing of their movement: Umkhonto We Sizwe. They had every right to make that decision. Likewise, it is up to the Palestinian people to employ the methods they deem most likely to succeed in their struggle. At the same time, it is clear that if Israel is isolated politically and economically, as the BDS campaign is striving to do, Israel could not continue to implement its apartheid practices. If, for example, we in the United States could force the Obama administration to cease its $8 million-a-day support of Israel, this would go a long way toward pressuring Israel to end the occupation.

Hizballah, which grew out of the Lebanese maelstrom, became a deadly foe of the United States and Israel. In considering its rise, few have noted that many of the young men who founded the movement and carried out its lethal attacks on American and Israeli targets had fought alongside the PLO in 1982. They had remained after the PLO fighters left, only to see hundreds of their fellow Shi‘ites massacred alongside the Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila. The people killed in the US Embassy bombing, the Marines who died in their barracks, and the many other Americans kidnapped or assassinated in Beirut—among them Malcolm Kerr and several of my colleagues and friends at the AUB—largely victims of attacks by the groups that became Hizballah, paid the price for the perceived collusion between their country and the Israeli occupier.

Coming back to your answer about violence, when I heard what you said in the documentary, I thought about Palestine. The international community and the Western media are always asking, as a precondition, that Palestinians stop the violence. How would you explain the popularity of this narrative that the oppressed have to ensure the safety of the oppressors? Placing the question of violence at the forefront almost inevitably serves to obscure the issues that are at the center of struggles for justice. This occurred in South Africa during the antiapartheid struggle. Interestingly Nelson Mandela—who has been sanctified as the most important peace advocate of our time—was kept on the US terrorist list until 2008. The important issues in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination are minimized and rendered invisible by those who try to equate Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid with terrorism.

Our daughters, and later our son, were born in Beirut in the midst of the war, and by virtue of the fact of having parents who were politically involved (as were almost all of the 300,000 or so Palestinians in Lebanon), they were seen as terrorists by the Israeli government and some others, as were Mona and I.

Although a sizeable segment of Palestinians would eventually become prosperous and reliable pillars of Jordanian society, the tension between the regime and its Palestinian subjects endured for decades, eventually exploding into armed conflict in 1970.

In the words of one seasoned observer: “A central paradox of 1967 is that by defeating the Arabs, Israel resurrected the Palestinians.

In the quarter century since the Oslo agreements, the situation in Palestine and Israel has often been falsely described as a clash between two near-equals, between the state of Israel and the quasi-state of the Palestinian Authority. This depiction masks the unequal, unchanged colonial reality. The PA has no sovereignty, no jurisdiction, and no authority except that allowed it by Israel, which even controls a major part of its revenues in the form of customs duties and some taxes. Its primary function, to which much of its budget is devoted, is security, but not for its people: it is mandated by US and Israeli dictates to provide security for Israel’s settlers and occupation forces against the resistance, violent and otherwise, of other Palestinians. Since 1967, there has been one state authority in all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine: that of Israel. The creation of the PA did nothing to change that reality, rearranging the deckchairs on the Palestinian Titanic, while providing Israeli colonization and occupation with an indispensable Palestinian shield. Facing the colossus that is the Israeli state is a colonized people denied equal rights and the ability to exercise their right of national self-determination, a continuous condition since the idea of self-determination took hold globally after World War I.

Israel imposed a full-blown siege. Goods entering the strip were reduced to a bare minimum; regular exports were stopped completely; fuel supplies were cut; and leaving and entering Gaza were only rarely permitted. Gaza was in effect turned into an open-air prison, where by 2018 at least 53 percent of some two million Palestinians lived in a state of poverty,24 and unemployment stood at an astonishing 52 percent, with much higher rates for youth and women.

Over the decades, the United States has wavered, going back and forth between paying lip service to the existence of the Palestinians and trying to exclude them from the map of the Middle East. The provision for an Arab state in the 1947 partition resolution (albeit never implemented), Jimmy Carter’s mention of a Palestinian “homeland,” and nominal support for a Palestinian state from the Clinton to the Obama administrations were artifacts of that lip service. There are many more instances of American exclusion and erasure: Lyndon Johnson’s backing of UNSC 242; Kissinger’s years of sidelining the PLO in the 1960s and 1970s and covertly making proxy war on it; the 1978 Camp David accords; the Reagan administration’s green light for the 1982 war in Lebanon; the lack of will of US presidents from Johnson to Obama to stop Israeli seizure and settlement of Palestinian land. Regardless of its wavering, the United States, the great imperial power of the age, together with Great Britain before it, extended full backing to the Zionist movement and the state of Israel. But they have been trying to do the impossible: impose a colonial reality on Palestine in a postcolonial age.

there are growing fears that expulsion has become more possible in the past few years than at any time since 1948, with religious nationalists and settlers dominating successive Israeli governments, explicit plans for annexations in the West Bank, and leading Israeli parliamentarians calling for the removal of some or all of the Palestinian population. Punitive Israeli policies are currently directed at forcing as many Palestinians as possible out of the country, while also evicting some within the West Bank and the Negev inside Israel from their homes and villages via home demolition, fake property sales, rezoning, and myriad other schemes. It is only a step from these tried-and-true demographic engineering tactics to a repeat of the full-blown ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967.

Within Israel, certain important rights are reserved exclusively for Jewish citizens and denied to the 20 percent of citizens who are Palestinian. Of course, the five million Palestinians living under an Israeli military regime in the Occupied Territories have no rights at all, while the half million plus Israeli colonists there enjoy full rights.

To exist should not be to resist but to coexist. To exist should be to dialogue. To compromise. To strive toward peace. To reject these values is to threaten lives on both sides of the struggle.

Such resources, which were offered without any concrete policy demands regarding Palestinian human rights or self-determination, provided Israel the financial security and “qualitative military edge” necessary to resist compliance with international law or earnest engagement with the peace process.8 Obama’s relative progressivism offered a distinction without a difference in the lives of Palestinians.

[Hamas firing a few dozen rockets at Israel in December 2008 does] not explain the disproportionality of the Israel attack [Operation Cast Lead], especially against the history of severe sanctions and attacks in the preceding months and years. While no one disputes a nation's right to self-defense, the record demonstrates that Israel was the far greater aggressor. [...] In fact, Hamas rockets had very little if anything to do with Israel's attack. […] This was an attack against the Palestinian people and their continued resistance—be it by Hamas or by the people of Gaza—and their consistent refusal to accede to Israeli demands and conditions.

Israeli security forces’ mistreatment and imprisonment of Palestinian children, ten thousand of whom have been detained by the occupation since 2000.

One hundred years later, President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, saying, “We took Jerusalem off the table, so we don’t have to talk about it anymore.” Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu, “You won one point, and you’ll give up some points later on in the negotiation, if it ever takes place. I don’t know that it will ever take place.”2 The center of the Palestinians’ history, identity, culture, and worship was thus summarily disposed of without even the pretense of consulting their wishes.

These were major political shifts for the PLO, the culmination of an evolution toward acceptance of Israel and advocacy of a Palestinian state alongside it that had begun in the early 1970s, although these changes were unacknowledged by its Israeli adversaries. A more significant shift was yet to come. On December 14 that year, ‘Arafat accepted US conditions for entering a bilateral dialogue. In his statement, he explicitly accepted Resolutions 242 and 338, recognized the right of Israel to exist in peace and security, and renounced terrorism.21 This capitulation to American conditions finally obtained for the PLO the long-sought opening with Washington, but it neither moved the Israelis to agree to deal with the organization nor led to peace negotiations, at least not for three more years.

Hamas was an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded in Egypt in 1928 with reformist aims, but which turned to violence in the 1940s and 1950s, only to reconcile with the Egyptian regime under Sadat in the 1970s. Hamas was begun in Gaza by militants who felt that the Brotherhood had been too accommodating toward the Israeli occupier in return for lenient treatment. Indeed, in the first two decades of the occupation, when the military authorities severely repressed all other Palestinian political, social, cultural, professional, and academic groups, they had allowed the Brotherhood to operate freely. Because of its utility to the occupation in splitting the Palestinian national movement, Israeli indulgence of the Brotherhood was extended to Hamas, notwithstanding its uncompromising and anti-Semitic program and commitment to violence.8

Moreover, by 1947 al-‘Alami and Dr. Husayn, the two Palestinian leaders perhaps best suited to deal with matters of diplomatic representation, were no longer allies. Walid Khalidi describes how al-‘Alami’s high-handedness alienated colleagues,24 for which there is ample evidence in Dr. Husayn’s memoirs. More important, al-‘Alami’s closeness to the pro-British Iraqi regime provoked the suspicions of many Palestinian figures.

Meanwhile King ‘Abdullah of Transjordan had his own ambitions to dominate as much as possible of Palestine, having done his best to come to terms with both the Zionists and his British backers over his plans for the country. As Avi Shlaim reports in Collusion Across the Jordan, his account of this era, extensive clandestine contact took place between King ‘Abdullah and Jewish Agency leaders (later Israeli prime ministers) Moshe Sharett and Golda Meir.30 As the United Nations moved toward partition of Palestine, the king repeatedly met with them secretly in the hope of reaching an accord in which Jordan would incorporate the part of Palestine to be designated for its Arab majority. The king confidently gave them his assurances that the Palestinians would come around and assent to his rule.* Thus ‘Abdullah, unlike Iraq’s Nuri, had no use for any form of independent Palestinian leadership or for a body like the Arab Office that would serve as their diplomatic arm.

As the historian Avi Shlaim noted, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that” British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin “colluded directly with the Transjordanians and indirectly with the Jews to abort the birth of a Palestinian Arab state.

The siege of Beirut brought with it all the ancient terrors of sieges -- city gates broken, libraries burned down, fire dropped on defenders. A truly medieval event recalling these sieges of Jerusalem in 1099 and Acre in 1189. This siege also was a metaphor of confrontation between East and West and a fascinating symbol of the clash of self-definitions between settler-colonialism and native resistance. It was a mirage from the medieval age that bespoke, as sieges then often did, the most dreadful catastrophe that could befall people: the destruction of their city and their subsequent wanderings in search of shelter to house their passions and the outward expression of their culture. To Palestinians everywhere, the siege of Beirut became the most monumental event in their modern history -- even more monumental than the dismemberment of, and exodus from, Palestine in 1948. The Israelis tried everything during these siege. To starve the city. To bomb it to rubble. To terrorize its inhabitants with psychological warfare. To cut its water, medical, and food supplies.

May 15, 1948, a pattern of ethnic cleansing resulted in the expulsion and panicked departure of about 300,000 Palestinians overall and the devastation of many of the Arab majority’s key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural centers.

Everybody shivered. All over the camp, the emaciated dogs died. Every day had a thousand and one wrinkles and a thousand and one knots. The men looked for employment, for food. They avoided the police, who were implicating Palestinians in everything from inflation and communist plots to cold spells. And once every month they lined up, as if in a funeral procession, to receive their UNRWA rations of flour, powdered milk, and dates. The rations lasted a week. Then people ate words. The words led to orange groves in Jaffa, to olive trees in Tershiha, to cloudless summers in Haifa. And back again to Bourj el Barajneh.

No matter the cause, no civilian must die, that is my one unimpeachable law. But the hard and horrific fact of the matter is, only the occupier can put an end to the death and destruction peacefully - the resistance does not have that luxury.

While it is true that Palestinian national identity would not arise until the British invasion and occupation of Ottoman land, and only consolidated itself as a result of the desire to both throw off the yoke of British imperial rule and resist Zionist immigration and settlement, the more important point to note is that all nationalisms arise and gather strength from specific historical circumstances

Of all the services Britain provided to the Zionist movement before 1939, perhaps the most valuable was the armed suppression of Palestinian resistance in the form of the revolt. The bloody war waged against the country’s majority, which left 14 to 17 percent of the adult male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled,55 was the best illustration of the unvarnished truths uttered by Jabotinsky about the necessity of the use of force for the Zionist project to succeed. To quash the uprising, the British Empire brought in two additional divisions of troops, squadrons of bombers, and all the paraphernalia of repression that it had perfected over many decades of colonial wars.56

…the Arab section of MOIS’s foreign affairs division….One of the mandates of this office related to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Lebanese Hezbollah.

...for all its might, its nuclear weapons, and its alliance with the United States, today the Jewish state is at least as contested globally as it was at any time in the past. The Palestinians' resiliance, their persistance, and their challenge to Israel's ambitions are among the most striking phenomena of the current era.

Conference of 1991, when Israel and its Arab neighbours began face–to–face talks to resolve the Palestinian Arab problem. Following the conference, the Syrian Government, headed by Hafez al–Assad, agreed to abandon two decades of implacable resistance to Jewish emigration. All 3,886Jews in Syria were free to leave–for anywhere but Israel.

The reason behind Israel’s engagement with Lebanon was justified at the time as based on national security grounds, with other nations admiring the Jewish state’s actions and wanting to learn from them, but there was something more existential at work. In his 1998 book on the Middle East, From Beirut to Jerusalem, the New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman gave an anecdote from 1982 about the real, less acknowledged mission of Israeli forces: Two targets in particular seemed to interest [Ariel] Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no guns at the PLO Research Center, no ammunition and no fighters. But there was something more dangerous—books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs about Arab life in Palestine, historical archives about the Arab life in Palestine and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased many of them. The Research Center was like an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation. In a certain sense, this is what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. You could read it in the graffiti the Israeli boys left behind on the Research Center walls: [/block]Palestinians? What’s that?[block] And [/block]Palestinians, fuck you[block], and [/block]Arafat, I will hump your mother[block]. (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a November 1983 prisoner exchange.)56 It is not hard to see why this attitude was and remains so appealing to some governments. It is a desire to militarily destroy an opponent but also erase its history and ability to remember what has been lost. When surveillance technology is added to the mix, tested on unwilling subjects, it’s even harder to successfully resist.

His five novellas, notably Men in the Sun (1963) and Return to Haifa (1969), are widely popular, perhaps because they depict so vividly the dilemmas faced by Palestinians: the travails of exile and the pain of life in post-1967 Palestine, now entirely under Israeli control.

Palestinians had almost no voice, no central address, and no champions other than the bickering, self-interested Arab states. The Zionist movement’s deepest desire had been to transform Palestine into Israel and replace the country’s indigenous inhabitants with Jewish immigrants. After 1948, it appeared as if the Palestinians had largely disappeared, both physically and as an idea.

Hamas’s focus on the virtues of suicide bombing and armed struggle even as it engaged in discussions aimed at political participation underscored that the two were not incompatible for the movement. Leaders presented Hamas as a party that could “marry” resistance with politics.76 As if to reinforce this point, on August 31 Hamas carried out two consecutive suicide bombings in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, killing sixteen and injuring eighty-two.

Hamas’s focus on the virtues of suicide bombing and armed struggle even as it engaged in discussions aimed at political participation underscored that the two were not incompatible for the movement. Leaders presented Hamas as a party that could “marry” resistance with politics.76 As if to reinforce this point, on August 31 Hamas carried out two consecutive suicide bombings in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, killing sixteen and injuring eighty-two. These high-impact operations were allegedly planned in retaliation for Yassin’s and Rantissi’s assassinations nearly four months earlier. Underscoring Hamas’s perception of resistance as a fundamental aspect of its political vision, these attacks bolstered its claims to being a resistance movement as its engagement in the political establishment advanced.77 The Beersheba operation was the last suicide mission carried out by Hamas during the Second Intifada, as its armed struggle pivoted toward the persistent use of missiles as well as tunnel operations.

Hamas declared that the perceived demise of the peace process meant that its political participation could not be seen in the context of conferring legitimacy onto the Oslo Accords. In 1996, Hamas had boycotted the legislative elections for fear of legitimating the accords.125

The liberation of Palestine through military means, to secure the right to self-determination and the right of return, was central to the Palestinian revolution. “Our correct understanding of the reality of the Zionist occupation confirms to us that regaining the occupied homeland cannot happen except through armed violence as the sole, inevitable, unavoidable, and indispensable means in the battle of liberation.

A few months after its creation, in August 1988, Hamas issued its charter, “The Charter of Allah: The Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS).”98 This document introduced the movement and outlined its mission, values, and goals. It defined Hamas’s motto as “God is its goal; The messenger [the Prophet Mohammed] is its Leader; The Quran is its Constitution; Jihad is its methodology; and Death for the Sake of God is its most coveted desire.

While the PLO’s past entry into politics had been premised on concessions, Hamas tethered its engagement in politics to the failure of negotiations and underscored the need to reject any further concessions from the Palestinian side, including any commitment to disarm the resistance factions or to halt fire.112

As Meshal explained in a press conference from Cairo, “The world will see how Hamas can encompass resistance and politics, resistance and government. Government is not our goal, it is a tool. . . . Democracy is not a substitute for resistance. Democracy is our internal choice to reform our house, whereas resistance is our choice in facing the enemy. There is no conflict between the two.”51 Meshal emphasized that opposition to the Quartet’s conditions and perseverance in the face of the blockade constituted forms of resistance. He promised that Hamas would never contradict its ideals; it would not cease military operations, condemn resistance factions, or arrest resistance fighters.

Drawing on Israeli and international media, Hamas hypothesized about the alleged US-led planned coup. The movement’s publications discussed a series of initiatives it believed were underway: strengthening Abbas and Fatah; fomenting a clash; and forming a subservient Palestinian state that recognized Israel.

Despite this focus on internal sustenance, household income dropped sharply and dependence on food aid expanded.66 The desperate situation led to—and was ultimately mitigated by—a rapid shift toward a tunnel-based economy.67 Tunnels between the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and the Gaza Strip, passing underneath the Rafah border, had historically been used for smuggling contraband and resistance weapons, particularly during the Second Intifada.

Israel allowed the entry of one week’s worth of cooking gas, fuel, food, and medicine on January 22, 2008.90 On the same day, Hamas destroyed the seven-mile Egyptian-Gazan border at Rafah by blowing it open in seventeen places. More than seven hundred thousand Palestinians from Gaza spilled out into Egypt in search of food, fuel, and medical supplies. Hamas’s “orchestrated” initiative boosted its image and presented it as the “savior” compared to Abbas.91

Não há como descartar a probabilidade de uma conexão entre os dois fatos, ou alguma ligação oculta entre eles, por analogia às relações que os seres humanos encontram entre as plantas, por exemplo, quando alguém arranca um punhado de ervas pela raiz acreditando que dessa forma se livraria dela para sempre, apenas para a mesma erva voltar a nascer no mesmo lugar vinte e cinco anos depois.

By contrast, none of the American officials involved were ever held responsible for any of their acts, whether their collusion with Israel in launching and waging the 1982 war, or the failure of the United States to honor its pledges regarding the security of Palestinian civilians. Many of them—including Reagan, Haig, and Habib—are now dead. All have so far escaped judgment.

because of American backing for Israel and tolerance of its actions, its supplies of arms and munitions for use against civilians, its coercion of the PLO to leave Beirut and refusal to deal directly with it, and its worthless assurances of protection, the 1982 invasion must be seen as a joint Israeli-US military endeavor—their first war aimed specifically against the Palestinians. The United States thereby stepped into a position similar to that played by Britain in the 1930s, helping to repress the Palestinians by force in the service of Zionist ends. However, the British were the leading party in the 1930s, while in 1982 it was Israel that called the tune, deployed its might, and did the killing, while the United States played an indispensable but supporting role.

Between September 16 and the morning of September 18, the militiamen murdered more than thirteen hundred Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children.42

This occurred in South Africa during the antiapartheid struggle. Interestingly Nelson Mandela—who has been sanctified as the most important peace advocate of our time—was kept on the US terrorist list until 2008. The important issues in the Palestinian struggle for freedom and self-determination are minimized and rendered invisible by those who try to equate Palestinian resistance to Israeli apartheid with terrorism.

Palestinians have a legal right to armed resistance/ struggle against Israel colonialism according International Law, just as South Africans did against APARTHEID. Gaza suffers under an illegal Israeli blockade that even a former British prime minister recognized to be a “prison camp”- Journalist Ben Norton

While I believe that it’s the right of all colonized, occupied, and oppressed people to stand up to their oppressors, I’ve always been convinced that staying alive and conveying our message through unarmed resistance is more powerful and strategic than our dying. I can’t serve the Palestinian cause if I’m dead.

Even after a public outcry over the deaths of so many Lebanese and Palestinians civilians, after the televised images of the bombardment of Beirut, after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, American support continued undiminished.

From the beginning of the First Intifada to the end of 1996—nine years, including six when the intifada was ongoing—Israeli troops and armed settlers killed 1,422 Palestinians, almost one every other day.

Nevertheless, the uprising was predominantly nonviolent and unarmed, a crucially important factor that helped mobilize sectors of society in addition to the young people protesting in the streets while showing that the entirety of Palestinian society under occupation opposed the status quo and supported the intifada.

Unlike the 1936–39 revolt, the intifada was driven by a broad strategic vision and a unified leadership, and it did not exacerbate internal Palestinian divisions.

During the ten weeks of fighting from early June through mid-August, 1982, according to Lebanese official statistics, more than nineteen thousand Palestinians and Lebanese, mostly civilians, were killed, and more than thirty thousand wounded.

in the words of George Orwell, “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield,”83 which is precisely what happened on the battlefield in the Great Revolt, to the Palestinians’ lasting detriment.

They used to say PALESTINIANS fight like heroes .Now they say heroes fight like PALESTINIANS. EXISTANCE IS RESISTANCE❤️‍

This is a unique colonialism that we’ve been subjected to where they have no use for us. The best Palestinian for them is either dead or gone. It’s not that they want to exploit us, or that they need to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South Africa as a subclass.—Edward Said1

The indigenous population was further diminished by the crushing repression of the Great 1936–39 Arab Revolt against British rule, during which 14 to 17 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled,17 as the British employed a hundred thousand troops and air power to master Palestinian resistance.

Every house in the Occupied Territories has a number. The number gives you basic intel on the people inside the house. If the people inside the house are somehow involved in any resistance, if someone in the family was imprisoned, if anyone was even blacklisted, that’s a house you will not take, because then you’re risking your troops. So you enter houses of people you know in advance are innocent. Now, we never called Palestinians “innocent.” They were always “involved” or “not involved,” because no one’s “innocent.” You go into a house of that family and you basically use that house as your own as a military post. It’s elevated, it’s protected, but it’s also sort of the eye in the sky for the soldiers on the ground. There’s no privacy. There’s obviously no warrant. You don’t need to ask in advance. You don’t call in advance. You don’t send an email. You just barge in and usually handcuff and blindfold the head of the family. If there’s a teenager who looks at you the wrong way or an uncle who looks big enough that he could threaten you, you do the same…. You disconnect the phones, close the curtains, so they won’t tell anyone that you’re there with them and they sit inside scared, petrified with their heads down. This struck me as something out of a horror movie—a family held hostage not for ransom but as a show of the kind of dominance that is essential to Israeli rule.

Growing up in the Middle East, I came to find out that Arab children are taught hatred of the Jews from their mother’s milk. From a young age, Arab children are constantly bombarded with stories and information presenting Jews as barbaric, conniving, manipulative, warmongering people. Meanwhile, Jews teach their children patience, humility, service, tolerance, understanding of others, and charity to all. They call it tikkun olam, "to repair the world." The Arab-Israeli conflict has remained intractable because the Arab world refuses to accept the right of a Jewish state to exist autonomously in the middle of the Muslim Middle East. At first this refusal was based on what appeared to be pan-Arab nationalism, and then on Palestinian nationalism. There is a lot of bluster, pride, and honor among Arabs, which supports the nationalism angle. But as a Lebanese Christian looking at it from ground level and willing to blow the whistle on the hatred that Arabs harbor and teach their children against Jews, I can tell you that religious hatred, humiliation, and resentment are the driving factor behind the Israeli-Arab conflict. As a Christian who was raised in a country where people were shot at checkpoints because their ID card said “Christian,” I see it differently. I think that with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and especially after the rise of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) during the 1987 intifada, the world is seeing the true reason for the Arab world’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist: radical Islamic supremacism. It has come to the surface, overshadowing the nationalist rationale and moving on, seeking bigger game in the West.

Americans, wrote a historian of the period, were in general so ignorant of the realities on the ground that ‘when the Palestinians rose up in resistance they were able to see the Zionists’ increasingly aggressive, colonialist behaviour as a defence of democracy and other progressive Western ideals‘, while this ‘Palestinian resistance to imperialist invasion became a form of unwarranted offense against civilization’.28

Minister Naftali Bennett was a constant source of political coercion—to pursue the most drastic measures at his disposal against the Palestinians, particularly in Gaza. While

It’s largely because the Palestinian resistance has never prevented differences from existing within it—even at the cost of open confrontations—that it has been able to give the Israeli army a hard time. Here as elsewhere, political fragmentation is just as much the sign of an undeniable ethical vitality as it is the nightmare of the intelligence agencies charged with mapping, then annihilating, resistance

The fact that these organizations shift between cooperation, competition, and violent conflict increases the general complexity of their interactions and with it their collective capacity, efficiency, and resilience. The diffuse nature of Palestinian resistance and the fact that knowledge, skills, and munitions are transferred within and between these organizations—and that they sometimes stage joint attacks and at others compete to outdo each other—substantially reduces the effect that the Israeli occupation forces seek to achieve by attacking them

My fifth point is that, nevertheless, the experience, memory or imagination of enforced abnegation does play a key role. Years of real or imagined oppression — or a solidarity, even an identification, with those who have been oppressed elsewhere — lead to a rebellion. The question missing from most analyses, however, is that the oppression that is resisted is not only a political oppression of a people — for example, the Palestinians (which almost every Islamic state and militant organisation has conspicuously failed to help beyond very limited points) — but a perceived oppression or denigration of a sense of self and a sense of core belief; and it is perceived as applied personally, but also as systemically applied to the collective manifestation of this core belief. To that extent, it is belief that seems as if it is called upon to fight back, because it is belief and philosophy that have been subject to abnegation. It is not, however, just the philosophy that fights back, but, as mentioned above, the philosophy of the means chosen. Does abnegation justify a sacrificium in which huge numbers of innocent people are swept into death? Does the sacrificium necessarily sacrifice others? In so far as the memory or re-created memory of abnegation is strong and made stronger, it triumphs over the memories and values of self held by others. Terror thus becomes a requital and ruthlessness — requital for sins committed perhaps against self but certainly against self’s historical and contemporary cohorts, and ruthlessness in an exploding outwards.

At thirteen years old, I knew our whole story, but how do you take someone, especially a middle school kid, down a path of military occupation to explain why he's never heard of your country? How do you tell an eighth grader that the reason he never read about your homeland in the school's history books is because your people's land was stolen in a war in 1948, the year your father was born, the same year Israel declared independence and expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, barring them from returning?

Monte Melkonian, a third-generation Central Californian, was a trained archaeologist who spoke eight languages. He left the country of his birth at an early age, to participate in the Iranian revolution, the defense of the Armenian community in Lebanon, the guerrilla resistance in mountainous Kurdistan and the combined Lebanese-Palestinian anti-Zionist resistance.

Like the characters in the short novel Men in the Sun, by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, however, they did not always find this route easy, for it often involved alienation, isolation, and, as when Palestinians attempted to cross frontiers with their refugee papers, even tragedy

Iraq arrested five thousand Palestinians for joining the Kuwaiti resistance.

What stands out for me in this story is the seeming fact that Mark Zuckerberg and co. only pay attention to internal resistance when it reaches critical mass, which it only seems to do when the cause is American. I am aware of a number of attempts Facebook employees have made over the years to raise concerns about the handling of, for example, wrongful takedowns of Palestinian content or inattention to the growing problem of harassment … all of which were dismissed.

Palestinian identity and nationalism are all too often seen to be no more than recent expressions of an unreasoning (if not fanatical) opposition to Jewish national self-determination. But Palestinian identity, much like Zionism, emerged in response to many stimuli, and at almost exactly the same time as did modern political Zionism. The threat of Zionism was only one of these stimuli, just as anti-Semitism was only one of the factors fueling Zionism.

For all Palestinians, no matter their different circumstances, the Nakba formed an enduring touchstone of identity, one that has lasted through several generations. It marked an abrupt collective disruption, a trauma that every Palestinian shares in one way or another, personally or through their parents or grandparents. At the same time as the Nakba provided a new focus for their collective identity, it broke up families and communities, dividing and dispersing Palestinians among multiple countries and distinct sovereignties. Even those still inside Palestine, whether refugees or not, were subject to three different political regimes: Israel, Egypt (for those in the Gaza Strip), and Jordan (for those on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem). This condition of dispersal, shitat in Arabic, has afflicted the Palestinian people ever since. My own family is typical in that I have cousins in Palestine and in a half dozen Arab countries, and almost as many in Europe and the United States. Each of these separate Palestinian collectives faced a range of restrictions on movement, held a variety of identity documents or none at all, and were obliged to operate under different conditions, laws, and languages.

This lie—that Western civilization is predicated on “values” such as respect for human rights and the rule of law—is one the Palestinians, and all those in the Global South, as well as Native and Black and Brown Americans, have known for centuries.

Israel has already made painful concessions by withdrawing from Gaza and Lebanon. No. Withdrawing from land you gained and occupied illegally through force is not a "concession." "Concession" comes from the verb "concede." To "concede" means to "admit that something is true or valid after first denying or resisting it." So, for instance, one might accurately say, "Israel recently made a painful concession by stating that hummus is, in fact, part of native Palestinian cuisine and has absolutely nothing to do with Israeli culture." I can dream, can't I? Dismantling unjust and unlawful conditions that you created in the first place is not a "concession." If you think it is, you might be living in an alternate universe. You may also still be wondering why Santa Claus never responded to any of your letters.

to accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers’ rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder.

Hamas is the armed wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. When such groups and theocratic regimes reach power, this is terrorism.

The Palestinians want their land back. Then they will talk of peace. The Israelis want peace, but demand Palestinian land. And that, in three short sentences, is the intractable nature of this conflict.

former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich: “I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs.” While returning from a trip to Palestine in March 2015, the governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, said “There’s really no such thing as the Palestinians.

From the beginning of the First Intifada to the end of 1996—nine years, including six when the intifada was ongoing—Israeli troops and armed settlers killed 1,422 Palestinians, almost one every other day. Of them, 294, or over 20 percent, were minors sixteen and under.

Israel was able to exploit the deep division among Palestinians and Gaza’s isolation to launch three savage air and ground assaults on the strip that began in 2008 and continued in 2012 and 2014, leaving large swaths of its cities and refugee camps in rubble and struggling with rolling blackouts and contaminated water.26 Some neighborhoods, such as Shuja‘iyya and parts of Rafah, suffered extraordinary levels of destruction. The casualty figures tell only part of the story, although they are revealing. In these three major attacks, 3,804 Palestinians were killed, of them almost one thousand minors.

Jordanian troops were often deployed in ambushes against Palestinian militants, and were under orders to fire on anyone attempting to enter Israel.

A central paradox of 1967 is that by defeating the Arabs, Israel resurrected the Palestinians.”28

Throughout the previous night, we learned, the flares fired by the Israeli army had illuminated the camps for the LF militias—whom it had sent there to “mop up”—as they slaughtered defenseless civilians. Between September 16 and the morning of September 18, the militiamen murdered more than thirteen hundred Palestinian and Lebanese men, women, and children.42

Although there are many queer Palestinians who do not identify with the queer Palestinian movement, their disagreements on this issue are largely related to the strategies, timing, and resource allocation needed to resist Zionism.

When Palestinians finally arrive in these works, on the screen or on the page, we are represented as victims, not as protagonists or complex characters. We are not history makers; history stomps on our bodies. Our resistance is obscured, our lineages defaced. We offer our blood and bruises as evidence, reporting our calamities without commentary, to support the author’s thesis. We become their objects—curated into context-free exhibitions, editorialized to wallow unintelligibly.

The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of instrasigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many). the propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival.

In May 2024, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sent a letter to pro-Palestinian college protesters, praising them for “standing on the right side of history” by forming “a branch of the Resistance Front.” When a man accustomed to leading cries of “Death to America” finds common cause with Americans, you know that something is awry.

Well over a hundred such sentences of execution were handed down after summary trials by military tribunals, with many more Palestinians executed on the spot by British troops.58 Infuriated by rebels ambushing their convoys and blowing up their trains, the British resorted to tying Palestinian prisoners to the front of armored cars and locomotives to prevent rebel attack, a tactic they had pioneered in a futile effort to crush resistance of the Irish during their war of independence from 1919 to 1921.59 Demolitions of the homes of imprisoned or executed rebels, or of presumed rebels or their relatives, was routine, another tactic borrowed from the British playbook developed in Ireland.60 Two other imperial practices employed extensively in repressing the Palestinians were the detention of thousands without trial and the exile of troublesome leaders.

In this first phase of the Nakba before May 15, 1948, a pattern of ethnic cleansing resulted in the expulsion and panicked departure of about 300,000 Palestinians overall and the devastation of many of the Arab majority’s key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural centers. The second phase followed after May 15, when the new Israeli army defeated the Arab armies that joined the war. In belatedly deciding to intervene militarily, the Arab governments were acting under intense pressure from the Arab public, which was deeply distressed by the fall of Palestine’s cities and villages one after another and the arrival of waves of destitute refugees in neighboring capitals.37 In the wake of the defeat of the Arab armies, and after further massacres of civilians, an even larger number of Palestinians, another 400,000, were expelled and fled from their homes, escaping to neighboring Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank and Gaza (the latter two constituted the remaining 22 percent of Palestine that was not conquered by Israel). None were allowed to return, and most of their homes and villages were destroyed to prevent them from doing so.38 Still more were expelled from the new state of Israel even after the armistice agreements of 1949 were signed, while further numbers have been forced out since then. In this sense the Nakba can be understood as an ongoing process.

Palestinianism was for Said a conditon of chronic exile, exile as agnoy but also as ethical position. To remain aloof from the group while honoring one's organic ties to it; to exist between loneliness and alighnment, remaining always a bit of a stranger; to resist the resolution of the narrative, the closing of the circle; to keep looking, to not feel too at home.

For decades, Israeli intelligence and security services have targeted queer Palestinians and used homophobia as a weapon, threatening to out them to their families and communities if they do not serve as informants and collaborators. At the same time, some Zionist institutions have worked over the past decade to co-opt queer Palestinian voices in order to attempt to justify Israel’s military occupation of Palestine to global audiences. It is in this context that queer Palestinian activists built a movement to respond and resist.

It would be fair to conclude, then, that successive Israeli governments did all they could to leave the Palestinians with no option but to trust, and vote for, the one group prepared to resist an occupation described by the renowned American author Michael Chabon as 'the most grievous injustice I have seen in my life.

Israeli special forces Unit 101, under the command of Ariel Sharon, blew up forty-five homes with their inhabitants inside, killing sixty-nine Palestinian civilians.

This brief list is only the tip of the iceberg, and the bottom line is simple: BDS is a movement whose organizational structure brings together Palestinian terror organizations, promotes classically antisemitic narratives, and denies the State of Israel’s right to exist in any borders whatsoever. Palestinian terror operatives are thus able to participate in a movement that claims to promote “non-violent resistance” and a “struggle for equality, justice, and liberty” and therefore meet with important national decision-makers around the world and raise funds, while in their other capacities openly working to murder Israelis.

The premise of this plan, as the Palestinian historians Samih Farsoun and Naseer Aruri point out," is that the nearly forty-year-old impasse is not caused by an abnormal and illegal occupation but by the Palestinian resistance to that occupation. Progress was thus linked to ending the intifada and all acts of resistance rather than ending the occupation or reversing decades of colonial impoverishment of land, resources, and institutions.

The queer Palestinian solidarity movement is under scrutiny from Zionist critics across the political spectrum who, drawing on dehumanizing racialized discourses, insist on characterizing Palestinians as uniformly and viciously homophobic. Simultaneously, some leftist critics demand that queer Palestinians subordinate resistance to Palestinian homophobia to a Palestinian nationalist struggle that fails to acknowledge them.

The November 29, 1947, passage in the UN General Assembly of Resolution 181, which called for dividing Palestine into a large Jewish state and a smaller Arab one, with an international corpus separatum encompassing Jerusalem, reflected the new global balance of power. The United States and USSR, which both voted in favor of the resolution, now clearly played the decisive role in sacrificing the Palestinians for a Jewish state to take their place and control over most of their country. The resolution was another declaration of war, providing the international birth certificate for a Jewish state in most of what was still an Arab-majority land, a blatant violation of the principle of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter. The expulsion of enough Arabs to make possible a Jewish majority state necessarily and inevitably followed.

In the immediate aftermath, however, Transjordan’s King ‘Abdullah was a beneficiary of the war. Memorably described as a “falcon in a canary’s cage,” ‘Abdullah had always wanted to rule over a larger domain with more subjects than small, sparsely populated Transjordan, which had a population of barely 200,000 when he arrived there in 1921.41 Thereafter he sought to expand his territory through a variety of means. The most obvious direction was westward, into Palestine, whence the king’s lengthy secret negotiations with the Zionists to reach an accommodation that would give him control of part of the country. To further this aim, ‘Abdullah privately approved the 1937 Peel Commission’s recommendation to partition Palestine (the only Arab leader to do so), which would have annexed part of the Arab section to Transjordan. Both the king and the British opposed allowing the Palestinians to benefit from the 1947 partition or the war that followed, and neither wanted an independent Arab state in Palestine. They had come to a secret agreement to prevent this, via sending “the Arab Legion across the Jordan River as soon as the Mandate ended to occupy the part of Palestine allotted to the Arabs.”42 This goal meshed with that of the Zionist movement, which negotiated with ‘Abdullah to achieve the same end.

in the bleak new reality after the Nakba, more than a million Palestinians faced a world turned utterly upside down. Wherever they were, whether inside Palestine or not, they experienced profound social disruption. For the majority, this meant destitution—the loss of homes, jobs, and deeply rooted communities.

neither policymakers nor the oil companies perceived Israel as a threat to US oil interests, given Saudi complaisance over Palestine (at the height of the 1948 war, as Israeli troops overran most of the country and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Marshall found cause to thank King Ibn Sa‘ud for his “conciliatory manner” regarding Palestine).50 Thereafter, Saudi Arabia never rocked the boat where the close American-Israeli relationship was concerned. Indeed, it was seen by the Saudi royal family as completely compatible with the intimate American-Saudi connection that went back to the first oil exploration and exploitation deal of 1933.

- [ ] The Gaza Strip is a ghetto of children. Of its 1.8 million residents, a majority are under the age of 18. Most have never left the 360 square kilometers where they were born, raised and confined. There is no discernible future for them beyond the Israeli military occupation that has endured nearly 50 years and a siege that was officially proclaimed in 2007. The formative years of these young people have been marked by three major military assaults. These are their rites of passage. The Palestinians of Gaza have no reason or experience to believe that a fourth war will not arrive soon. The violence in Gaza has become a ritual that has confounded many outsiders, leading to the rise of simplistic explanations for the bloodshed as the product of religious extremism, endemic anti-Semitism and intractable conflict. But a brief look at the history leading up to the 51 Day War of 2014 presents a different reality. Eighty percent of Gaza's residents are refugees from the State of Israel. Their families were among the 750,000 indigenous Palestinians who fled or were forcibly expelled in the period from November 1947 to late 1948 known to them as the Nakba, or the catastrophe. Since Israel was founded, every one of its governments has identified these refugees as a demographic threat whose repatriation would threaten Israel’s Jewish majority and the Zionist project itself. Palestinians in Gaza are ultimately confined and excluded from Israel for one simple reason: They are not Jews. There is simply no place for them in an Israel that defines itself as an exclusive Jewish state, and that will not grant equal rights to these people. That is why Gaza has become a warehouse for a surplus population that the Israeli-American scholar Martin Kramer described as “superfluous young men.” And that is why Gaza resists.

Unfortunately for Palestinians in East Jerusalem, obtaining a permit from the municipal government is next to impossible, forcing them to build under circumstances the authorities consider illegal. In many cases, their homes are demolished as punishment. “I’m not allowed to build on my own land just because it’s not included in their plan,” he remarked. “If it was a Jew who did what I did it would have been maybe a 3,000 [shekel] fine.” Hussein said that the land behind his home had been expropriated by the city to build a public school, and that the city had begun uprooting the family’s orchards in order to build new access roads for settlers living on land taken from their neighbors. “Forty percent of my family’s land is going to be taken just to build settlers a short cut!” twenty-eight-year-old Muhammad exclaimed.

Like Weissglass, he advocated Gaza disengagement for reasons that had nothing to do with conflict resolution. "Unilateral separation doesn't guarantee 'peace,'" Soffer said in 2004, referring to Sharon's proposal. "It guarantees a Jewish-Zionist state with an overwhelming majority of Jews." Soffer presciently predicted that disengagement would lead to Hamas assuming power in Gaza, and that the unilateral separation could only be enforced through overwhelming violence against Gaza's civilians. "We will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire ten in response. And women and children will be killed and houses will be destroyed," he warned. Soffer went on to predict that "when 2.5 million people live in a closed off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will be even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.

When it published its findings on the 51 Day War, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem found that the Israeli military had em­braced an “open-fire policy...in which residential buildings were attacked from the air or ground, causing them to collapse on entire families.” In other words, the Israeli air force was given authorization to target multi-family homes in precision airstrikes without proving their military value or their relation to any faction involved in the fighting. The policy resulted in a chilling statistic: According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, ninety families were removed from the civil record after the Israeli military exterminated most or all mem­bers. “B’Tselem has no knowledge of who is responsible for formulating this policy under which such strikes on homes were permitted, nor who ordered it,” the organization noted. With unprecedented freedom to attack civilian targets, the Israeli army enacted the most robust fulfillment of the Dahiya Doctrine in its history, obliterating Shujaiya in the course of about forty-eight hours on July 19 and 20. The US Defense Department official who had received internal Pentagon brief­ings on Israel’s assault on Shujaiya reacted with shock at Isra­el’s use of US-made 155 mm howitzers with a kill radius of 164 feet. “The only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a period of time as possible,” the senior US military officer told Perry of Al Jazeera America. “It’s not mow­ ing the lawn. It’s removing the topsoil.

The Caner brothers weren’t the only “self-proclaimed former Islamic terrorists” making the rounds on the evangelical speaking circuit in the wake of 9/11. Together, Walid Shoebat, Zachariah Anani, and Kamal Saleem formed their own “traveling anti-Muslim sideshow.” Shoebat, a Palestinian American evangelical convert, claimed to have been a member of the PLO and to have bombed an Israeli bank. Anani, a Lebanese-born Canadian, claimed to have joined a militia at the age of thirteen, “trained to become a black belt and an expert with daggers and knives,” and to have killed hundreds of people before meeting a Southern Baptist missionary and getting saved. It was Saleem’s story, however, that was most remarkable—so remarkable that one journalist dubbed him the “Forrest Gump of the Middle East.” Born in Lebanon, Saleem claimed to have been recruited by the PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood, taught to shoot an AK-47 by none other than Palestinian nationalist resistance leader and cofounder of Fatah, Abu Jihad, and touted as a model warrior by Yasser Arafat himself.

Transportation Minister Katz warned. "I prefer one thousand Palestinian mothers crying than letting one Jewish mother cry.

In her final paper, one of the Refaat's students reworked Shylock's famous cri de coeur into an appeal to the conscience of her own oppressors: Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer as a Christian or a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

35 Thus, it is not so much of a surprise that newspapers owned and operated by the ruling classes delegitimize Palestinian rebellion in the same pages where they celebrate that of Ukrainians. To sustain the Zionist project in Palestine, to protect the empire’s capitalistic and militaristic endeavors in the region, the Palestinian freedom fighter must fall. And so the empire’s stenographers standardize the dehumanization of Palestinians and the demonization of their resistance.

The Hannibal Directive was established in 1986 following the Jibril Agreement, a prisoner exchange in which Israel traded 1,150 Palestinian prisoners for three Israeli soldiers. Amidst the political backlash, the Israeli military drafted a secret field procedure to prevent future kidnappings. The proposed operation was named after the Carthaginian general who chose to poison himself rather than be held captive by the enemy. Among those who drafted the doctrine were Asa Kasher, a Tel Aviv University philosophy professor who serves as a house “ethicist” for the Israeli military and developed the army’s so-called “purity of arms” doctrine, which governs its policies on attacking civilian targets. Kasher denied knowledge of the policy in a 2003 exchange with one of his students but now admits its existence and has even defended Ofer Winter’s decision to implement it.

The soldiers ordered the family to evacuate the house under the shelling their army had just initiated. Then they summoned Mahmoud’s father, Abdul Hadi El Said. As soon as he appeared at his doorstep, they asked him if he spoke Hebrew. When he answered in the affirmative, the soldiers shot him in the chest, leaving him to die. This was one of several cases I documented in which Gaza residents described to me the shooting of older male relatives who had revealed their ability to speak Hebrew. Were the men shot because the soldiers feared Hebrew-speaking Palestinians might be able to decipher their orders? Were orders issued to kill them? I found no answers among the survivors of the shootings, only harrowing testimony that formed a clear and chilling pattern. The Israeli military has offered no explanation either.

Spending the day of August 17 in Khuza’a was like peering through a window to Hell. But what we witnessed in the landscape of apocalyptic oblivion paled in comparison to the experience described to me by two Palestinian Red Crescent volunteers who had attempted to break through the Israeli military cordon during the siege of the town. Twenty-five-year-old Ahmed Awad and twenty-four-year-old Ala’a Alkusofi arrived at the edge of Khuz’a at a time when ICRC ambulance crews refused to travel anywhere near the town. They said they had come to collect the body of a man whom soldiers had lashed to a tree by both arms and shot in the leg. When they arrived at the site, the soldiers ordered the driver of their ambulance, Mohammed Abadla, to exit the vehicle. When he obliged, they told him to walk five meters forward and switch on a flashlight. As soon as he flicked the light on, the soldiers shot him in the chest and killed him.

After the war, Eran Efrati, a former Israeli combat soldier turned anti-occupation activist, interviewed several soldiers who participated in the assault on Shujaiya. “I can report that the official command that was handed down to the soldiers in Shujaiya was to capture Palestinian homes as outposts,” Efrati wrote on his Facebook page. “From these posts, the soldiers drew an imaginary red line, and amongst themselves decided to shoot to death anyone who crosses it. Anyone crossing the line was defined as a threat to their outposts, and was thus deemed a legitimate target. This was the official reasoning insides the units.” Months later, when we met in Brussels to present testimony on Israeli war crimes in Gaza at the Russell Tribunal, Efrati helped me decipher the map I found. He pointed me to a red line drawn on the map that bisected Shujaiya from east to west. It was labeled in Hebrew as “Hardufim,” or “Dead People.” Efrati explained that while the term “Hardufim” was often called out through Israeli army radios when a soldier was killed and required transport from the theater of battle the word was also used to mark free-fire zones in the Gaza Strip where soldiers could kill people regardless of their involvement in the battle.

A week later, a mob of assorted right-wing nationalists assaulted an anti-war rally in Haifa, bombarding the gathering of Palestinians and leftists with a hailstorm of stones while police stood by and watched. After burning a Palestinian flag while chanting "Death to Arabs," a group of right-wing activists went looking for Arabs to assault. They found Suhail Assad, the deputy mayor of the city, beating him and his son so severely that they had to be hospitalized. When police passed by, the assailants simply walked away, and the police made no arrests.

After attacking the anti-war demonstrations, Order 8 followers proceeded to supply the names of so-called traitors to their employers, pressuring companies and government agencies to fire the anti-war elements burrowing within the system. Dozens lost their jobs, most of them Palestinian citizens of Israel who had taken to Facebook to protest the army's actions in Gaza. When a postal employee posted a call for sending leftists to gas chambers, however, her government employer defended the statement on the grounds of free speech.

Over the sound of gritty break-beats and stirring string samples, The Shadow and Subliminal defended cops and lonized army service, upending the anti-authority sensibility that defines traditional rap culture. When the two self-styled Zionist rappers performed during the bloodiest days of the in-tifada, their audiences often erupted with chants of "Death to Arabs!" In June, following the abduction of the three Israeli teens, Subliminal took to Facebook to lash out at a Palestinian-Israeli member of the Knesset, Haneen Zoabi, who had objected to her interviewer's characterization of the kidnappers as terrorists. "I'm not ashamed to say that I hope she'll be run down [in an auto accident] and die, or slip in the bath and rip her head off, or eat a rotten egg and die of food poisoning, or anything.