Occupation and Resistance
Watchtower — by Norman Harman (@NorrieHarman)
In his 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall,” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, wrote that “every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.” Because the Palestinians would resist while hope remained, the task he set for Zionism was the destruction of Palestinian hope. Every Israeli policy since the founding of the state has been a war on that hope—through expulsion, dispossession, siege, and slaughter. A century of that war, however, has not broken the Palestinian hope for liberation.
The first sustained test of that logic came in April 1936, when Palestinians called a general strike against decades of Zionist settler colonialism, sponsored since 1917 by British rule. Mass immigration under imperial protection had more than quadrupled the settler population, from 84,000 at the first British census in 1922 to over 350,000 by the time of the strike, nearly a third of all inhabitants, although the settlers owned barely 5 percent of the land. The colonial threat was demographic, not territorial: a settler society with its own institutions and armed militias and a declared aim of becoming the country’s majority. The strike grew into the Great Revolt, a three-year uprising and the longest armed challenge to British rule anywhere in the Arab world. A six-month general strike, among the longest in modern history, gave way to a peasant insurgency in the hills, waged by farmers, workers, and fighters against both the Mandate and the settler project it protected.
Britain answered with the full weight of empire. It deployed tens of thousands of troops, bombed villages from the air, demolished homes, and imposed collective punishment. By 1939, Britain had broken the revolt, killing thousands, jailing or exiling the leadership, and disarming the rest.
Disarmament of the Palestinians was the aim, and the White Paper of 1939 was its instrument. In it, Britain proposed an independent Palestinian state within ten years—Arab and Jewish populations together, under conditions designed to prevent either from dominating the other—and limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years, after which it would require Arab consent. The price of the agreement was Palestinian disarmament. British authorities confiscated 13,000 Palestinian weapons while the same mandatory power continued to arm and train the Haganah, the Jewish Settlement Police, and the other Zionist militias it had relied on to crush the revolt—and would later claim to restrain.
Nine years later, the White Paper revealed its purpose. Disarmed and undefended, Palestinians received, instead of the promised state, the Nakba—the expulsion of 750,000 people by the Zionist militias and the newly declared state of Israel, the destruction of 531 villages, and the seizure of 78 percent of historic Palestine.
The Nakba did not end Palestinian resistance. The catastrophe scattered Palestinians across Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza, and the camps they were driven into became the organizing centers of a reconstituted movement. The United Nations affirmed their right of return in Resolution 194. Israel refused to implement it. From the camps in Gaza and Jordan, fedayeen fighters launched raids into Israel. Israel responded with reprisals against civilian populations. At Qibya, on the night of October 14, 1953, Ariel Sharon’s Unit 101 demolished forty-five houses with civilians still inside, killing sixty-nine people. The reprisals were designed to pressure Arab governments into suppressing the fedayeen, and they largely succeeded. Egypt and Jordan policed the armistice lines, arrested fighters, and broke up the raiding networks to spare themselves the next Israeli blow.
They also radicalized a generation of Palestinian refugees who had watched Arab governments fail to restore their rights and watched Israel punish their communities for resisting. Out of that radicalization, Yasser Arafat founded Fatah in 1959. The Palestine Liberation Organization followed in 1964 under Arab League sponsorship—an attempt to contain Palestinian nationalism, to give the cause a manageable address controlled by the states. In June 1967, Israel launched a war that defeated three Arab armies in six days. It seized the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights and displaced another 300,000 Palestinians. The rout discredited the Arab states as guardians of the Palestinian cause and buried the pan-Arab promise that their power would one day restore Palestine.
What the Arab armies had lost, Palestinian fighters reclaimed in the name of their own cause. In the early morning of March 21, 1968, Israel sent tanks, paratroopers, and aircraft into Jordan to destroy the PLO base at Karameh. Palestinian fighters and the Jordanian army held their ground. By nightfall, Israel withdrew, having suffered losses it had not anticipated. The PLO—created a few years earlier as an instrument of Arab state control—became the institutional expression of Palestinian dispossession: a people organizing for return.
The PLO’s transformation at Karameh brought recruits, resources, and a new political authority—and made it a target. By 1970, the organization had built a state within a state in Jordan, controlling territory and operating independently of the Hashemite crown. A US-backed monarchy could not hold a sovereignty it did not control, and it would not bear the cost of the resistance it sheltered. In September 1970, the Jordanian army crushed the PLO’s presence, killing thousands of Palestinians in what came to be known as Black September. Another Arab regime had chosen its own survival over the Palestinian cause—as each would, for none could free Palestine without breaking the order on which its own power rested. The PLO reestablished itself in Lebanon, which became the next front against Israel.
In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy Palestinian nationalism once and for all. Ariel Sharon, by then minister of defense, was its architect. Israel besieged West Beirut for eighty-eight days until the PLO agreed to evacuate, surrendering its armed presence. American guarantees explicitly covered the unarmed Palestinian civilians who would remain in the camps after the fighters left. Philip Habib, President Ronald Reagan’s special envoy, delivered those guarantees. Within weeks, Israel’s Phalangist allies entered Sabra and Shatila under Israeli perimeter control, their way lit by Israeli flares, and massacred up to 3,500 people. As before, disarmament had come first. The massacre followed.
The PLO relocated to Tunis, operating in exile and increasingly removed from the daily reality of occupation. Across the 1980s, the distance between the Palestinians living under Israeli control and their leadership widened. In December 1987, they rose without it. The First Intifada came from within occupied society—from the camps, the universities, and the streets—as the direct expression of life under occupation. Students, workers, women, and children carried out a largely unarmed six-year uprising whose moral and organizational force proved harder to break than any armed campaign.
Crushing the Intifada cost Israel more, at home and abroad, than it could bear. Israel came to the Madrid Conference in 1991 under that pressure. The conference was the first time Palestinians from the occupied territories negotiated their own future. What followed, however, reorganized the occupation that Madrid had opened a process to end.
While the official Madrid negotiations continued, Israel and the PLO conducted secret back-channel talks in Oslo, Norway. The Palestinian delegation at Madrid was never told about them. The PLO leadership in Tunis, which had played no role in the Intifada, negotiated directly with Israel behind the backs of the Palestinians who had fought for six years to win the right to sit at the table. The Oslo Accords of 1993 recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and created the Palestinian Authority. The occupation continued. The settlements accelerated. Israel deferred the final status negotiations—statehood, borders, Jerusalem, return—to a process it never completed. The PLO got recognition and a passage home from exile. The Palestinians who had carried out the Intifada got the Authority—an apparatus built to administer the occupation they had risen against.
Under Oslo, the Authority’s primary obligation was Israel’s security. It arrested those who had built the Intifada, in some cases at Israel’s direction—Hamas’s founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, among them, and hundreds of the movement’s activists. It presided over territory where the settler population grew from 110,000 to nearly a million across the Oslo years. The Authority administered the occupation as it expanded all around it—and called the arrangement a peace process.
Seven years of Oslo had left Palestinians with self-rule over scattered enclaves but no sovereignty, an agreement but no state. The settlements expanded, the checkpoints multiplied, and statehood was deferred year after year during the so-called peace process. The conditions for revolt were already in place. On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon walked onto the Al-Aqsa compound—the third-holiest site in Islam, in occupied East Jerusalem—accompanied by hundreds of riot police, a calculated assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the place Palestinians hold most sacred. The Second Intifada began the next day. The uprising cost thousands of Palestinian lives. In 2002, Israel reoccupied the West Bank cities it had nominally transferred to the Authority under Oslo. The self-rule had been Israel’s to revoke all along.
By 2005, the resistance had made direct Israeli control of Gaza too costly to hold. Israel was defending about 9,000 settlers among roughly 1.3 million Palestinians—a tiny enclave where its soldiers kept getting killed. Citing the cost of defending isolated settlements, the demographic weight of ruling so many Palestinians, and the aim of consolidating the larger West Bank settlements, Sharon, now Israel’s prime minister, withdrew Israel’s settlers and soldiers from the strip while keeping control of its borders, airspace, and sea. The world called it the end of the occupation. The occupation continued by other means.
Hamas had become Gaza’s strongest Palestinian force. The Islamic Resistance Movement, born there at the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987, was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, with an armed wing and a far wider social base that was built across the Oslo years through clinics, schools, and charities that filled the spaces the Authority left empty. In January 2006, it won the Palestinian legislative elections. International observers, including former President Jimmy Carter, declared the vote free and fair. The United States and the European Union cut off their aid to the Authority. At the same time, Israel froze the Palestinian tax revenues it collected on its behalf. These sources made up most of the Authority’s budget. Washington dispatched an American general to arm Fatah forces against the elected government. The attempt failed.
When Hamas consolidated control over Gaza in 2007, Israel imposed a comprehensive siege that has never been lifted—a collective punishment of more than two million people for a political choice, maintained for nearly two decades.
Between 2008 and 2021, Israel launched four wars on Gaza—one under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, three under his successor Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli officials called the strategy “mowing the lawn.” Every few years, the army would bombard Gaza, degrading Hamas and the other armed factions to restore deterrence, then accepting that the resistance would grow back and have to be cut down again. Each military operation assaulted a besieged civilian population, killing hundreds to thousands of Palestinians. The siege continued throughout.
On March 30, 2018, after eleven years of siege, Palestinians in Gaza began marching to the perimeter fence that sealed them off from Israel. They demanded an end to the blockade and the right of return; most were refugees, barred from homes now inside Israel. The march came months after the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and cut its funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. From positions behind the fence, Israeli snipers fired into the crowds. Over the following year, Israeli forces killed more than 200 of the marchers, more than 40 of them children, and wounded tens of thousands. The marchers were unarmed.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other fighters broke through the fence that had sealed Gaza off for sixteen years—the latest and most explosive form that resistance had taken after the general strike, the fedayeen, the intifadas, and the marches, each answered by a deepening occupation. Israel responded as the iron wall had always demanded: with overwhelming force. It cut off food, water, fuel, and medicine to more than two million people, bombed hospitals, schools, and shelters, and reduced most of Gaza to rubble, killing more than 70,000 Palestinians, over 20,000 of them children.1
This was genocide, and the institutions named it only slowly. In 2024, the International Court of Justice found genocide plausible and ordered Israel to prevent it—binding orders Israel defied. Amnesty International concluded it was genocide that same year. Nearly two years in, a United Nations commission of inquiry reached the same conclusion, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars found that Israel’s conduct met the legal definition of genocide. By Israel’s own military intelligence, 83 percent of those it killed were civilians.
Jabotinsky’s iron wall prescribed overwhelming force as the instrument for extinguishing Palestinian hope—the point at which Palestinians, accepting that resistance was futile, would negotiate on Zionist terms. A century of that force has not extinguished it, and Palestinians remain a demographic majority between the river and the sea. No settler-colonial project has succeeded unless the native population was all but destroyed or driven out. In Palestine, it failed. From that failure, Zionism has drawn the genocidal conclusion its own logic always pointed to: if the hope cannot be destroyed, destroy the people.
It will fail, as every attempt before it has failed. Occupation produces resistance. Resistance is met with force. Force produces the next form of resistance. More than a century of colonial management of Palestine has refused to draw the only conclusion this cycle demands—that the occupation must end. End colonialism and apartheid. Return the land, the homes, the people. Remove the occupation, and you remove the need for resistance. Maintain it, and resistance will return—in another form, in another generation, for as long as the cause remains.
Figures updated for this revision (article first published 2024). Casualty totals are from the Gaza Ministry of Health through late 2025 (more than 70,000 killed, over 20,000 of them children), corroborated as a conservative floor by a capture-recapture analysis in The Lancet (January 2025) that found the Ministry under-reporting deaths by roughly 41 percent. The determination that genocide was being committed was reached by Amnesty International (December 2024), the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (September 2025), and the International Association of Genocide Scholars (resolution of 31 August 2025), following the International Court of Justice’s finding of plausibility (January 2024). The civilian proportion of the dead is drawn from Israeli Military Intelligence’s classified casualty database as of May 2025, reported by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call (August 2025).
This is an excellent article. I however take issue with the phrasing of “no settler colony has ever succeeded unless the native population was all but destroyed or driven out”, yet in ever other settler colony us Indigenous (capital) are still here. Decimated yes, but still here, and not just “driven out”. but genocided and ethnically cleansed and too often erased with language that gives up on us, often by Brown folks who become our settlers too. Perhaps talking about how they "have not succeeded unless having a genocide which results in a demographic majority.” Other Indigenous people didn’t just disappear.
You can wage war on hope for a century, but as long as hope survives, so does the struggle...🍀✨️🇵🇸