By
Resistance in Gaza, Shoufat, Naqab and Haifa. Courtesy
of the Qawim (Resist) movement. All rights reserved.
Something must be done about Israel’s number one ally, the Palestinian
Authority, otherwise what we are witnessing today will be merely another
flare-up, as opposed to a turning point for decolonization and the beginning of
an end to the occupation.
Resistance in
Gaza, Shoufat, Naqab and Haifa. Courtesy of the Qawim (Resist) movement. All
rights reserved.
“When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up
who had never stood up before.”
This famous quote belongs to
Mamie Till-Mobley, after her 14 year old son Emmett was brutally murdered in
1955 Mississippi. An all-white jury acquitted his murderers. Nearly 60 years
later, the lynching of a 16 year old Palestinian boy by Israeli settlers took
place in Jerusalem. Mohammed Abu Khdeir was kidnapped, forced to drink
gasoline, and was burned alive.
Mainstream media similarly
acquitted the state of Israel, conveniently ignoring the racist, ethnocentric,
and colonial ideology the state is premised upon. Reports circulated that Abu
Khdeir’s murder was a ‘revenge killing’ after three settlers, reported missing
for three weeks, were found dead on June 30. Palestinians took to the streets
in outrage, yet the reaction of the de
facto president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas was at
the very least insipid. His response came almost a week after the lynching,
when he announced he had sought
help to form an international committee to investigate Israeli crimes against Palestinians.
Such a dry proposition is in stark contrast to his words when it came to the three missing
settlers. Then, he stressed their humanity and openly defended the security
coordination with Israel, during the latter's biggest incursion into the West
Bank in over a decade.
With the mainstream media
labelling Abu Khdeir’s killers as ‘extremist,’ this has sought only to absolve the
Israeli public and the state from the crime of what they represent: a
colonizing, occupying, bigoted entity. As Palestinian writer Khaled Odetallah
pointed out, using the word 'extremist' to describe an unruly pack of settlers
is nothing but a mechanism for regarding the other Israeli population as
natural, and discounting the blatant racism that is inherent in all colonizing
entities.
Jerusalem and '48
Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s lynching
released an unprecedented wave of angry protests that has quickly spread from
his hometown of Shuafat to other neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, and to
Palestinian towns and villages in modern day ‘Israel.’ Since July 3, thousands
protested across the Galilee, as initial confrontations took place between
Palestinians and Israeli police in Nazareth, Arara, Umm al-Fahem, Taybeh, and
Qalanswa. Tires were burned, tear gas and rubber bullets were fired, and chants
resonated with the cry “The
people demand the demise of Israel.”
As the days stretched out to
complete one week since Abu Khdeir’s death, protests sprung up in other
villages in the Galilee, referred to as the Triangle, such as Tamra, Deir
Hanna, Kufr Manda, Baqa al-Gharbiyeh, Shifa Amro, Iblein, Sakhnin, Arraba
al-Batouf, and Jadeeda al-Makr. The cities of Haifa and Akka also held protests, as well as Bi’r Sabe’ and Rahat in the southern
Naqab desert. On Saturday, hundreds of Palestinians took to the streets in Yafa
after Israeli settlers attacked a few Palestinian homes in the old city.
Palestinians are in the throes of direct protests against the state that has allocated Israeli citizenship to the 1.6
million Palestinians, but which systematically discriminates against them and
regards them with a mixture of fear and suspicion. Hundreds have been arrested, including dozens of minors, and more than one hundred remain in detention.
Gaza assault
On Monday night, July 7, Israel
announced its incursion into Gaza, the most densely populated territory in the
world. This came after it had already killed ten people the day before. In the
first 24 hours of the bombing campaign, called Protective Edge by the Israeli
army, 24 Palestinians were killed, including eight children. Civilian homes such as the Hamad family home in Beit Hanoun and the
Kaware’ and Abadleh family homes in Khan Yunis were targeted by air strikes and
destroyed with “surgical precision”, a phrase popular with warmongers and
military officials.
The resistance in Gaza, comprised
of the military wings of the various political factions, responded with a
barrage of rockets that for the first time proved their long-range
capabilities, hitting Khadera, which is 113 kilometers away from Gaza. Gaza's
resistance tactics have surpassed the imagination of Israel, with a navy
commando unit storming the Zikim military base after swimming there from Gaza.
The Israeli government ordered the bomb shelters for its citizens to open, as
air sirens went off from Sderot to Isdoud to Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and further
north, near the city of Haifa.
Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for
the Hamas resistance al-Qassam brigades, listed in a brief press conference last Friday the conditions Israel must fulfil in order
to stop the rockets. The first is for Israel to cease its aggression in the
West Bank, Jerusalem, and the ’48 occupied territories. The second demands that
Israel release the former prisoners who were released in the 2011 prisoner swap
deal but who were re-arrested in droves during the recent massive military raid
on the West Bank last month. The Israeli government is already pushing for a
bill to approve that these prisoners should serve out the remainder of their
original sentences once they get re-arrested. Hamas will decide when to start
and when to stop, not anyone else, despite Israeli prime minister Netanyahu
declaring that he will “intensify attacks” in Gaza, and despite the support of western governments such as that
of David Cameron, who promptly reiterated the UK’s staunch support for Israel.
Israel has boasted that it has
launched air strikes on more than 400 sites in Gaza, where 1.7 million people, 75 percent of whom are women and children,
reside in an area that is 365 kilometers squared. The strip has been targeted
with 4000 tons of explosives, with an Israeli air strike occurring on average
every four
and a half minutes. The death toll has
already surpassed 120. The last large scale attack on Gaza was in November 2012, where 173 Palestinians were killed, including 38 children.
Outsourcing the West Bank
In the middle of all of this, the
West Bank remains conspicuously quiet. The protests by the shabab last month against
the Israeli army as the latter swept through towns and villages, wreaking
havoc, arresting hundreds, and killing six have subsided since the army
nominally withdrew. It is well known that the resistance rockets from Gaza are
no match for a heavily subsidized, professionalised, and technologically
developed military, which forms the standing pillar of the state of Israel.
Rockets are part of the
resistance, as are the protests in the ’48 territories. Yet without depriving
Israel of its number one ally, the Palestinian Authority, what we are
witnessing today will be merely another flare-up as opposed to a turning point
for decolonization and the beginning of an end to the occupation. Mahmoud
Abbas’ conduct and reaction has done him no favours as regards the recent
events, and his speech at the normalizing Herzliyya “peace conference” where he
begged Israelis to not miss his outstretched hand for peace is nothing
but grovelling to the enemy, in the very same moment that homes in Gaza were
being destroyed with their families still inside them. On Friday, Abbas'
interview with PA-run Palestine TV insinuated that the resistance rockets from
Gaza were pointless, and that he prefers to fight with politics and wisdom.
These events represent a period
of escalated action, yet for the status quo to be truly smashed, the West Bank
must rise up against the Palestinian Authority, effectively getting rid of the
infamous security coordination with Israel, and replacing neoliberalism with a
representative anti-occupation programme that is intolerant of oppression and
colonization.
Otherwise, Hamas and Israel will
sign another empty truce after the former incurs heavy losses on its side with
no formal guarantee that Israel will not immediately violate it as it has in
2008 and again in 2012, and the demonstrations within the ’48 occupied
territories will be hijacked or co-opted by the older generation of
“Israeli-fied” Palestinians such as Ali Sallam (member of the Nazareth municipality who described the
protesters as hooligans and thugs) and will fizzle out.
What cannot be ignored is that
the PA has created an entire sector of society that benefits from its relations
with Israel, and the fear barrier regarding its notorious intelligence and
security services has not been broken. The West Bank has been reduced to a
shadow of its self as the Palestinian cause was transformed into coffeehouse
conversations, rather than actions targeted at the oppressive force of Israel
and its collaborators. Yet as the resistance rockets are met with gleeful
support by Palestinians across the country, the PA are already caught up in
irrelevancy. The PLO as the sole and legitimate representative of Palestinians
has been exposed as toothless, since the Palestinians in “Israel” resisting
against the occupation serve as a reminder that their identity first and
foremost, despite the passport imposed on them, will be Arab Palestinians.
Widespread support among Palestinians across the country for the resistance is
mounting, leaving the PA's fallacious and empty rhetoric of peaceful
negotiations and security collaboration in a very tight space indeed, not to
mention a strong sense of the inappropriate.
The Palestinian Authority has
once again shown that it exists solely to maintain Israel’s security over and
over again. This physical domination is coupled with a disastrous neoliberal
order used to pacify and oppress Palestinians who demand to live with dignity. This
is not the place to discuss strategies and plans on how to resist the PA; it is
primarily crucial to acknowledge that precisely because of its deep
entrenchment in Palestinian society in the West Bank, any movement aimed at
dismantling it will constitute a social, economic, and political revolution in
itself.
Already recent protests in
Hebron, Jenin, Nablus and the outskirts of Ramallah have been suppressed by the
Palestinian Authority security forces, an extension of the Israeli army.
Protesters in an apparently planned attack on Friday night descended upon Qalandiya
checkpoint with molotovs and
fireworks, catching the Israeli soldiers there by surprise. Yet the PA
apparatus must also be simultaneously targeted in order to achieve and affect
real change.
As the popular quote goes, “If I
had ten bullets I’d fire one at my enemy, and nine for the traitors.”
Linah
Alsaafin is a graduate of Birzeit University and is currently pursuing her
Master's degree at SOAS, London.
This article first appeared on openDemocracy 12
July 2014.
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