Hamas Can Relinquish Governance but Not Arms
Portrait of Yahya Sinwar, The Legacy of Resistance — by La Vaun Yonqui (@la_vaun)
The first Palestinian intifada was not 1987. Before the Stone Intifada was the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936—three years of armed resistance against British colonial rule and the Zionist settler project it was simultaneously funding, arming, and protecting on Palestinian soil. The revolt ended with the British White Paper of 1939, which promised limits on Jewish immigration and Palestinian independence within a decade, and with the confiscation of over thirteen thousand Palestinian weapons, while the Haganah and the Jewish Settlement Police went on being armed by the same mandatory power. Nine years later, stripped of weapons and promised a state, Palestinians received instead the Nakba.
Trump’s plan calls for the demilitarization of Gaza. It also calls for the transfer of Palestinians to other countries. In Palestine, these two demands have never arrived separately, and they have always arrived in that order—disarmament comes first, and transfer follows through the vacuum it creates. The design did not originate with Trump. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, was describing transfer in 1895, proposing to ‘spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country’—departure engineered through economic pressure, executed, in his own words, ‘discreetly and circumspectly.’ By 1937, when the British Peel Commission proposed partition and recommended the forced removal of Palestinians from the territory designated for a Jewish state, David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency and the architect of what would become the Israeli state, was categorical—’We must assist in this transfer. We must insist on this point.’ The design has not changed since. What changes is the name on the plan and the language in which it arrives.
In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, then Defense Minister, had designed the operation to destroy the PLO, which had built its political and military infrastructure in West Beirut over the preceding decade. After months of siege and the systematic bombardment of civilian neighborhoods, the United States brokered an evacuation agreement: PLO fighters would leave Lebanon, and in exchange, explicit American guarantees would protect the Palestinian civilians remaining behind. Philip Habib, President Reagan’s special envoy and the American official who negotiated the evacuation’s terms, delivered those guarantees personally. Weeks later, the Phalangists—the Lebanese Christian right-wing militia that had fought alongside Israel throughout the invasion—entered Sabra and Shatila and massacred up to thirty-five hundred Palestinian refugees while Israeli forces controlled the perimeter and lit the night with flares. The guarantors did not intervene. What the guarantee had secured was the departure, not the protection.
After the Oslo Accords in 1993, the criminalization of Palestinian resistance by the PLO coincided with a dramatic acceleration of Israeli settlement. The settler population grew from a hundred and ten thousand to nearly a million. But settlement figures, staggering as they are, do not capture what Oslo was structurally. It was the moment the Palestinian leadership recognized Israel without receiving recognition of a Palestinian state in return—trading the single instrument of pressure they possessed for a process that Israel was never required to complete and never did. The Palestinian Authority that emerged from Oslo managed the population of an occupation while the occupation expanded around it, made responsible for Israel’s security while Israel remained responsible for nothing, collecting taxes for a sovereignty it did not possess and policing a people whose dispossession it had agreed not to contest—arresting, in some cases at Israel’s direction, the same men and women who had sustained the intifada. Disarmament had been offered in the name of the Peace Process, and the Peace Process delivered what it was designed to deliver: Israeli control of land, water, borders, and movement, ratified and enforced by Palestinian hands.
In each of these moments the structure is the same: an armed Palestinian presence, a negotiated or coerced disarmament offered as the condition for something better, and then the something better that never arrives—replaced by the assault the disarmament made possible. The language changes with the decade. Pacification. Security guarantees. The Peace Process. Demilitarization. The demand beneath the language does not.
Hamas has said it will relinquish governance of Gaza—that another Palestinian body may administer civilian life there. What it will not do is disarm. This distinction is drawn precisely from the lessons of 1936, of Beirut, of Oslo. It is the recognition, hard-won and paid for in blood, that a disarmed Palestinian population is a population subject to whatever its disarmers decide to do with it, and that the disarmers’ intentions have been made sufficiently plain by a century of evidence that they do not require further demonstration. Ghassan Kanafani identified the structure in 1972: the local reactionary leadership, the surrounding Arab regimes, and the imperialist-Zionist alliance. The three enemies have not changed. What changes, in each iteration, is the combination in which they operate and the particular Palestinian community they are brought to bear upon.
To demand disarmament now—as Gaza is being starved, its population displaced, its infrastructure systematically destroyed, and the pressure on Palestinians to cross into Egypt increases with each passing week—is to demand the removal of the one obstacle standing between what is happening and its completion. Gaza will not be emptied with weapons in it. Every Palestinian who lived through 1948, or was born into its aftermath, or carries in their family the memory of a village that no longer exists on any map the Israeli state will acknowledge, understands why the weapons must go first. What is being called the condition of peace is the condition of the expulsion.
Palestinians are being asked to accept not merely defeat, but the administrative terms of their own disappearance, and to present those terms to the world as reasonable. The demand to disarm is the demand to remove the final obstacle between a population and its erasure—to make the colonial project’s completion frictionless, to transform resistance into a technical problem that a negotiated process can solve. This refusal is not the refusal of peace. It is the insistence that peace, if it is ever to mean anything beyond the silence of those who are no longer there to object, cannot begin with the disarmament of the people it has not yet reached. Until the colonial project is dismantled rather than administered, the weapons are not the problem. They are the evidence that someone is still present, still counting, still refusing to be spirited across the border discreetly and circumspectly.
Clear, and unambiguous. 🙌Powerful writing 🫡🖤
Amazing article