Occupation and the Necessity of Resistance

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 waged the most prolonged armed challenge to British rule in the Arab world during the interwar period. Britain suppressed the revolt militarily and managed it politically, codifying that arrangement 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: British authorities confiscated 13,000 Palestinian weapons while the Haganah and the Jewish Settlement Police, armed and trained by the same mandatory power, continued operating. Nine years later, stripped of weapons and promised a state, Palestinians received the Nakba instead—the expulsion of 750,000 people, the destruction of 531 villages, the seizure of 78 percent of historic Palestine. Britain had managed the revolt into exhaustion. The disarmament proved permanent. The promised state became the Nakba.

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, 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, gave institutional form to the same impulse: a dispossessed people organizing for return. The 1967 war added the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights to territories under Israeli control and displaced another 300,000 Palestinians. It deepened the occupation and the conditions that sustain resistance. Karameh in 1968—where Palestinian fighters held their ground against an Israeli military operation requiring tank and air support—marked one moment in a sequence already set by that structure: as control expands, organized opposition expands with it, drawing from a reservoir of dispossession no military operation can drain.

Israeli governments have long understood that resistance survives displacement because displacement leaves its cause intact. When Palestinian forces in Jordan became a threat the Hashemite monarchy refused to absorb, the Jordanian army suppressed them in 1970 with decisive violence and forced evacuation. The PLO reestablished itself in Lebanon. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982—a war Ariel Sharon planned to destroy the Palestinian national movement—and besieged West Beirut for eighty-eight days, Philip Habib, Ronald Reagan’s special envoy, brokered the PLO’s evacuation under U.S. guarantees. Those guarantees covered Palestinian civilians remaining in the camps after the fighters departed. Within weeks, Phalangist militias entered Sabra and Shatila under Israeli perimeter control, their way lit by Israeli flares, and massacred up to 3,500 people. The guarantees secured the fighters’ exit. The civilians they left behind were massacred. Israel expelled the PLO from Lebanon, left the Palestinian population to the Phalangists, and continued the occupation without interruption.

The First Intifada erupted in the refugee camps of Gaza in December 1987. It arose from within occupied society—from the camps, the universities, the factories, and the streets—as the direct expression of life under occupation. No external organization created it; no political faction planned it. Students, workers, women, and children carried a six-year uprising whose moral and organizational force proved more difficult to manage than any military campaign. The domestic and international cost of suppression rose beyond what the system could absorb; Israel came to Madrid in 1991 under that pressure. The Oslo Accords of 1993 followed as a political response to that pressure—designed to absorb the energy of the intifada into a structure that made the PLO responsible for suppressing the movement that had restored its relevance while leaving the underlying conditions of dispossession intact.

The Palestinian Authority translated that arrangement into daily governance. It administered life under occupation while the occupation expanded around it: responsible for Israel’s security while Israel bore no reciprocal obligation, arresting in some cases at Israel’s direction those who had built the intifada, presiding over territory where settlers grew from 110,000 to nearly one million across the Oslo years. The Paris Protocol of 1994 bound the Palestinian economy to Israel’s, producing structural dependency no administrative reform could alter. Oslo subcontracted the administration of occupation and recast its continuation as a peace process; it managed language while dispossession deepened.

In September 2000, the Second Intifada began. Ariel Sharon’s militarized visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque on September 28 marked its immediate trigger; Oslo’s accumulated failure supplied its cause, visible in every settlement expanded, every checkpoint multiplied, every restriction codified, every negotiation that consolidated occupation under a new name. The uprising cost thousands of Palestinian lives and brought Israeli military reoccupation of West Bank cities in 2002. Hamas, which had built its presence through hospitals, schools, and social services in spaces the Authority left unfilled, emerged from these 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 U.S. and Israel imposed a financial blockade, cut international funding, and dispatched an American general to arm Fatah forces against the elected government. When Hamas consolidated control over Gaza in 2007, Israel imposed a comprehensive siege that remains in place—a collective punishment of two million people for a political choice, maintained for nearly two decades in full view of the governments that certified the election and then fell silent.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism—the tradition from which the current Israeli governing coalition draws direct lineage—wrote in 1923 with a clarity subsequent governments have avoided. “Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.” The sentence grounds resistance not in psychology, not in theology, but in the fact of foreign settlement itself. The response recurs and persists as long as that condition remains. A century of Palestinian history confirms the pattern in every phase. Resistance returns after every assault, in every generation, in every available form—armed struggle, civil disobedience, popular uprising, electoral politics, legal challenge. Each form has been suppressed, criminalized, or absorbed. The occupation continues; resistance reorganizes around the next form.

To acknowledge resistance as a structural consequence of occupation is to acknowledge that the occupation must end—a conclusion that more than a century of colonial management of Palestine has deliberately refused to draw, because drawing it would require removing the cause rather than managing its effects. Each alternative—the iron wall, the peace process, the blockade, managed autonomy, the demand for demilitarization—maintains the condition while attempting to suppress the consequences it produces. Israel and the U.S. repeat the demand made in 1939: Palestinian disarmament as the precondition for a political process. The logic holds: extract weapons, offer promises, leave dispossession intact, and call it peace. Sheikh Izzaddin Al-Qassam fell fighting British and Zionist forces near Haifa in 1935. The Great Revolt that followed expressed, in the only terms available, the effect of occupation on those who live under it. Remove the occupation, and you remove the problem. Everything else manages consequences that will return, in another form, in another generation, as long as the cause remains.

Palestina Libre by Beth Cabrera (@cavernicollage)

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