Occupation and Refusal

Watchtower — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)

The Great Palestinian Revolt began in April 1936 with a general strike—a direct mobilization against three decades of British facilitation of Zionist settler colonialism on Palestinian soil. For three years, farmers, workers, merchants, and fighters sustained the most prolonged armed challenge to British rule in the Arab world during the interwar period. Military suppression was accompanied by political management, and political management was eventually formalized in the White Paper of 1939, which offered a nominal path to independence within a decade and placed limits on Jewish immigration. The price was disarmament: 13,000 Palestinian weapons were confiscated while the Haganah and the Jewish Settlement Police, armed and trained by the same mandatory power, continued operating without interruption. Nine years later, stripped of weapons and promised a state, Palestinians received instead the Nakba—the expulsion of 750,000 people, the destruction of 531 villages, and the seizure of 78 percent of historic Palestine. The revolt had been managed, not defeated; the disarmament had been permanent, the promises had not.

What the Nakba scattered could not be extinguished. The expulsion concentrated Palestinians in refugee camps across Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Gaza—spaces that became, over the following decades, the organizing centers of a reconstituted political movement. The Palestine Liberation Organization, established in 1964 and reshaped after the 1967 war into the principal vehicle of Palestinian national aspirations, expressed the same structural reality in a new institutional form: a dispossessed people organizing for return. The 1967 war, which added the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights to the territories under Israeli control and displaced another 300,000 Palestinians, deepened both the occupation and the conditions that made resistance to it inevitable. Karameh in 1968—where Palestinian fighters held their ground against an Israeli military operation large enough to require tank and air support—was a single moment in a sequence already established by the logic of the situation: as control expanded, organized opposition expanded with it, drawing from the same reservoir of dispossession that no military operation could drain.

The occupation’s administrators have always understood, at some level, that resistance can be displaced but not eliminated, because displacement does not touch the condition that produces it. When Palestinian forces in Jordan became a threat the Hashemite monarchy would no longer absorb, the Jordanian army suppressed them in 1970 with a violence sufficient to force evacuation. The PLO reestablished itself in Lebanon. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982—a war planned by Ariel Sharon to destroy the Palestinian national movement once and for all—and besieged West Beirut for eighty-eight days, the PLO was evacuated under American guarantees delivered by Philip Habib, Reagan’s special envoy. Those guarantees, explicit and documented, covered the Palestinian civilians remaining in the camps after the fighters had departed. Within weeks, the Phalangists—the Lebanese Christian militia that had fought alongside Israel throughout the invasion—entered Sabra and Shatila under Israeli perimeter control, their way lit by Israeli flares, and massacred up to 3,500 people. What the guarantee had secured was the evacuation, not the protection. The PLO had been removed from Lebanon; Palestinian civilians had been left behind; and the occupation of Palestinian land had proceeded without interruption.

The First Intifada, which erupted in the refugee camps of Gaza in December 1987, arose from within occupied society—from the camps, the universities, the factories, and the streets—as the direct, sustained expression of life under occupation. No external organization had created it; no political faction had planned it. Students, workers, women, and children sustained for six years a popular uprising whose moral and organizational force proved more difficult to manage than any military operation had been. It compelled Israel to Madrid in 1991, not out of diplomatic generosity but because the domestic and international cost of suppressing Palestinian resistance had grown too high to be contained. The Oslo Accords of 1993 were the political response to that pressure—designed to absorb the energy of the intifada into a structure that would make the PLO responsible for suppressing the movement that had given it renewed relevance, while leaving the fundamental conditions of dispossession untouched.

The Palestinian Authority that emerged from Oslo made the arrangement concrete. It administered the daily life of an occupation while the occupation expanded around it: responsible for Israel’s security while Israel remained responsible for nothing, arresting in some cases at Israel’s direction the same people who had sustained the intifada, presiding over a territory whose settlers grew from 110,000 to nearly a million across the Oslo years. The Paris Protocol bound the Palestinian economy to Israel’s, ensuring a structural dependency that no administrative reform could alter. Oslo subcontracted the administration of occupation and repackaged its continuation as a peace process; what the accords managed was the language, not the reality.

In September 2000, the Second Intifada began. Ariel Sharon’s militarized visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque on September 28 was its precipitating occasion; the accumulated weight of Oslo’s failure was its cause, made visible in every settlement expanded, every checkpoint multiplied, every economic restriction codified, every negotiation that had produced the consolidation of occupation under a new name. The uprising cost thousands of Palestinian lives and brought Israeli military reoccupation of the West Bank’s cities in 2002. Hamas, which had built its presence through social services in the spaces the Authority had failed to fill, emerged from those years as the dominant political force in Gaza. In January 2006, it won the Palestinian legislative elections in a vote that international observers—including former President Jimmy Carter—declared free and fair. The United States and Israel responded by imposing a financial blockade, cutting off international funding, and dispatching an American general to arm Fatah forces against the elected government. When Hamas consolidated its control over Gaza in 2007, Israel imposed a comprehensive siege that has never been lifted—a collective punishment of two million people for the political preference they had expressed, sustained for nearly two decades in full view of the governments that had certified the election’s legitimacy and said nothing further on the matter.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism—the intellectual tradition from which the Israeli governing coalition draws its most direct lineage—wrote in 1923 with a clarity that subsequent Israeli governments have consistently declined to apply. “Every indigenous people,” he observed, “will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.” The sentence is worth dwelling on, because it locates resistance in the material condition of dispossession, not in the psychology of enmity or the theology of rejection. What it describes is structural: a predictable, repeating response that is immune to suppression so long as the condition generating it remains in place. A century of Palestinian history has confirmed that analysis in every particular. Resistance has returned after every assault, in every generation, in every form available to the people sustaining it—armed struggle, civil disobedience, popular uprising, legal challenge at international tribunals. Each form has been suppressed, criminalized, or absorbed. The occupation has continued, and resistance has reorganized itself around whatever political and social form the destruction of the previous one made available.

To acknowledge that resistance is the structural consequence of occupation is to acknowledge that the occupation must end—a conclusion that a century of Israeli and American policy has refused to reach, and refused deliberately, because reaching it would require the removal of the cause rather than the management of its effects. Every alternative—the iron wall, the peace process, the blockade, the managed autonomy, the demand for demilitarization—has been an attempt to maintain the condition while suppressing the consequences it generates. The demand being made now, as it was made in 1939, is for Palestinian disarmament as the precondition for a political process. The logic is identical: extract the weapons, offer the promises, leave the dispossession intact, and call the result a settlement. Sheikh Izzaddin Al-Qassam, who fell fighting British and Zionist forces in the hills near Haifa in 1935, and the Great Revolt that swept across Palestine in the year after his death, expressed in the only terms available to them what occupation does to the people who live under it. Remove the occupation, and you remove the problem. Everything else is a management of consequences that will return, in the next form, in the next generation, for as long as the cause remains.

Palestina Libre by Beth Cabrera (@cavernicollage)

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