Hamas Can Relinquish Governance but Not Arms
Portrait of Yahya Sinwar, The Legacy of Resistance — by La Vaun Yonqui (@la_vaun)
1987 was not the first Palestinian intifada. 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 funded, armed, and protected. 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 more than thirteen thousand Palestinian weapons, while the same mandatory power kept arming the Haganah and the Jewish Settlement Police. 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, described 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, wrote: “We must assist in this transfer. We must insist on this point.” The design has not changed since.
In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, then Defense Minister, 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. The guarantee had secured departure. The massacre it was meant to prevent came anyway.
After the Oslo Accords in 1993, the PLO criminalized Palestinian resistance as Israeli settlement accelerated. The settler population grew from a hundred and ten thousand to nearly a million. But the figures miss what Oslo was. It was the moment the Palestinian leadership recognized Israel and received no recognition of a Palestinian state in return—trading the single instrument of pressure they possessed for a process 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 was offered in the name of the Peace Process, and the Peace Process delivered what its authors designed it to deliver: Israeli control of land, water, borders, and movement, ratified and enforced by Palestinian hands.
The language changes with the decade. Pacification. Security guarantees. The Peace Process. Demilitarization. The demand beneath the language does not. In each iteration: 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.
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. Palestinians draw this distinction from the lessons of 1936, of Beirut, of Oslo. A disarmed population is a population subject to whatever its disarmers decide to do with it. A century of evidence has made the disarmers’ intentions sufficiently plain; no further demonstration is required. 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 Palestinian community they fall upon.
To demand disarmament now—as Israel starves Gaza, displaces its population, destroys its infrastructure, and, week by week, tightens the pressure to cross into Egypt—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 Trump calls the condition of peace is the condition of expulsion.
The weapons are 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