In
January, as Israeli lawyers took the stand in the International Court of
Justice (ICJ) to respond to South Africa’s case that Israel is committing
genocide, a Palestinian-American TikToker ran a live counter to track every
time the delegation mentioned Hamas. He counted 137 times in total for the
three-hour session, or a little less than once a minute.
اضافة اعلان
The
counter, complete with mockery of the distinctive Israeli pronunciation of
Hamas, was both biting comedy and an indication of a serious blind spot.
When
Israeli representatives speak about Palestinians, they often use language that
is chillingly dehumanizing, as South Africa’s application to the ICJ documents.
Just as frequently, Israel simply does not see Palestinian society at all.
Israeli leaders, and Western discourse generally, have long reduced the
Palestinian national struggle to particular leaders or factions. Palestinian
people, according to this perspective, are little more than puppets manipulated
by those leaders, human shields behind which they hide, or — as indicated by
current demands to evacuate the city of Rafah in southern Gaza — objects for
Israel to clear away as part of an invasion.
This
preoccupation with what Israel regards as unscrupulous Palestinian leaders and
its refusal to see the agency, aspirations, and lived realities of millions of
Palestinian men, women, and children has a political corollary: If Israel can
eliminate leading political organizations, or perhaps co-opt them or create new
ones, its Palestinian “problem” will be resolved.
This
nonrecognition of Palestinian society has a long history. Great Britain’s 1917
Balfour Declaration pledged to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a
national home for the Jewish people, adding that it would do so without
prejudicing the civil and religious rights of Palestine’s non-Jewish
inhabitants. The pledge was not only audacious but also revealed how Europe’s
Zionist movement and state powers regarded the 90 percent of the population
that was Muslim and Christian Arab. They were not a people with political
rights but rather a complication on the path toward Jewish statehood.
The
same oversight continued during Britain’s colonial rule. Traditionally,
prominent Palestinian Arab families initially led the movement against Zionism.
As a Jewish proto-state nonetheless took root, a new generation of activists
criticized elites’ conservatism and advocated for bolder strategies. Some
invoked the example of Gandhi and urged civil disobedience. Others called for a
military confrontation. The political momentum of the Palestinian struggle
shifted from “top-down” to “bottom-up.”
In
1936, local Palestinian activists announced a general strike to pressure
Britain to block Jewish immigration and land acquisition and grant Palestine
independence. Broad sectors of society participated in demonstrations, work
stoppages, and boycotts. A grassroots groundswell led to six months of
countrywide nonviolent mobilization and also spawned armed rebellion.
Commentators
then and since have accused the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Al-Husayni, of
engineering the revolt. Yet the excessive focus on a particular leader invests
his role with far too much power and Palestinian society with far too little.
The protest was instigated not by Palestinian elites so much as by popular
exasperation with their inability to protect Palestinian national interests. In
singling out leaders, British authorities at the time — like some today —
refused to accept that the driving force behind Palestinians’ struggle was
their refusal to be made strangers in their own land.
The
1948 war created the state of Israel on 78 percent of historic Palestine and
forcibly displaced more than half of the Palestinian population. In the
following decades, young refugees formed political and guerrilla groups with
the conviction that Palestinians must lead their own fight for liberation. The
grassroots once more drove this national revival, which eventually gave rise to
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Rooted in refugee communities in
exile, the PLO’s strength came from the Palestinians of different walks of life
who joined it, identified with it, and recognized it as their sole legitimate
representative years before the UN did so.
After
Israel conquered the remaining parts of historic Palestine in the 1967 war, it
demonized the PLO and attempted to co-opt local elites in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip. The logic was one of isolating “bad” leaders and empowering “good”
ones in the hope that the population would succumb to Israeli domination.
Israel held municipal council elections in the West Bank in 1976, believing
that personalities who cooperated with the occupation would win. To its
surprise, pro-PLO candidates scored overwhelming victories in nearly every
municipality. As the nationalist mayors and civil society activists worked
together to push for Palestinian independence, Israel sought to suppress
protests by banning their coalition organization and deporting or dismissing
some mayors. The occupation authorities later unveiled what they called the
“Village Leagues,” an attempt to formalize their network of Palestinian
collaborators as an alternative leadership. That scheme met with widespread
disdain from the Palestinian public and collapsed. The idea that Israel could
eliminate a Palestinian leadership that emerged organically from society,
impose its own quislings, and thereby silence opposition to Israeli rule proved
an absurd fantasy.
“This wave of violence has been imposed upon us by the will of Arafat.”
Instead,
people across the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip increasingly joined PLO
factions, as well as the Communist Party and an array of nationally oriented
volunteer projects, women’s and student groups, professional associations, and
unions. Widespread grassroots activism built an inclusive infrastructure for
popular resistance. When a roadside killing sparked unrest in 1987, Palestinian
society had the organizational capacity to mount a broad-based unarmed
uprising: the intifada. Across villages, towns, and refugee camps, hundreds of
local committees organized people of different classes, genders, religions, and
ages into multiple forms of protest and civil disobedience.
The
intifada (or the First Intifada, as it would come to be known) was a
quintessential grassroots revolution. Israel accused PLO leaders of
orchestrating the uprising from their base in Tunisia. This was laughable to
intifada participants, one of whom remarked that the PLO heard about the
uprising “at the same time as Zimbabwe” did.
The
intifada pushed both Israel and the PLO toward negotiations, and the Oslo peace
process was announced in 1993. Most Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip welcomed the Oslo Accords with optimism, whether out of hope or
exhaustion. The next seven years of talks, however, disappointed both Israelis
and Palestinians and failed to yield the promised final settlement. In
September 2000, protests erupted again and, escalating in the face of Israeli
military repression, grew into the Second Intifada.
The
new revolt’s impetus was the Palestinians’ loss of confidence that negotiations
would produce a truly sovereign state, as well as their frustrations with the
Palestinian Authority (PA) that Oslo had created. Considerable evidence,
including my own research, suggests that PA President Yasser Arafat neither
initiated the uprising nor led or suppressed it. In fact, Palestinians lamented
the absence of any PA leadership at all. Nonetheless, Israel and its supporters
saw Arafat as a mastermind pulling the intifada’s strings. Ehud Barak, Israel’s
prime minister at the time, declared, “This wave of violence has been imposed
upon us by the will of Arafat.” American columnists called the Second Intifada
“Arafat’s war” or “Arafat’s strategy.” They were unable or unwilling to see —
or willfully ignored — that the engine of the Palestinian movement, as always,
was its people’s desire to be free.
Since
that time, Palestinian society, not particular leaders or factions, has
remained the lifeblood of that movement. In the spring of 2018, tens of
thousands of people participated in the “Great March of Return,” a campaign of
unarmed demonstrations at the barrier separating the Gaza Strip from Israel.
This time, Palestinians’ demands for dignity occurred in the context of three
devastating wars and Israel’s draconian blockade, generating crushing poverty,
an acute lack of electricity and drinkable water, a sea polluted with sewage,
and conditions that the UN characterized as “unlivable.” Participants called
for an end to the siege and for their right of return, a right especially
pertinent because some 80 percent of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees or their
descendants.
As
in 1936, 1987, and 2000, it was young people and local organizers who took the
initiative to channel the yearning for change — not the PLO, the PA, or Hamas,
which had come to control the Gaza Strip in 2007 after winning PA legislative
elections in 2006. Hamas joined the march after it got off the ground, as did
other groups in Gaza, but it neither initiated the protest nor steered it.
Characteristically, Hamas’ critics in Israel and the West blamed it anyway. As
Israel killed and maimed Palestinian protesters, journalists, and medics, an
Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) spokesperson claimed that “unfortunately, the
Hamas terror organization deliberately and methodically places civilians in
danger.” Then-US President Donald Trump likewise accused Hamas of inciting
violence and using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
[South Africa] purports to describe the reality in Gaza. But it is as if Hamas … just do not exist as a direct cause of that reality. … [I]n South Africa’s telling, they have all but disappeared. There are no explosives in mosques, and schools, and children’s bedrooms; no ambulances used to transport fighters; no tunnels and terrorist hubs under sensitive sites; no fighters dressed as civilians; no commandeering of aid trucks; no firing from civilian homes, UN facilities, and even safe zones. There is only Israel acting in Gaza.”
Since
October 7, the reality gripping Palestinian society has clearly not been mass
protest but rather mass slaughter. Still, the historical tendency of Israel and
other states not to see Palestinian society has both continued and taken on
horrific new dimensions. Israel looks at the 2.2 million people in Gaza and
sees only Hamas or objects used by Hamas. The opening remarks of Israeli
lawyers at the ICJ are instructive here:
“[South
Africa] purports to describe the reality in Gaza. But it is as if Hamas … just
do not exist as a direct cause of that reality. … [I]n South Africa’s telling,
they have all but disappeared. There are no explosives in mosques, and schools,
and children’s bedrooms; no ambulances used to transport fighters; no tunnels
and terrorist hubs under sensitive sites; no fighters dressed as civilians; no
commandeering of aid trucks; no firing from civilian homes, UN facilities, and
even safe zones. There is only Israel acting in Gaza.”
South
Africa’s testimony did, of course, discuss Hamas (if fewer than 137 times). But
that is not the point. In Israel’s view, the only actor in Gaza is Hamas. And
if Hamas is not the only actor, then the alternative actor must be Israel. In
either narrative, the Palestinian people disappear.
And
in this onslaught, which hundreds of experts judge to amount to genocide,
making the Palestinian people disappear might indeed be the goal. Israel is
starving, bombing, shooting, and degrading Palestinian children, women, and
men, depriving them of water, medical care, shelter, and a modicum of human
decency. In less than five months, Israel has forcibly displaced 85 percent of
Gaza’s population, crowding some 1.4 million people into the southernmost
governorate that it now, apocalyptically, plans to “evacuate” ahead of an
offensive into the area. Still, civilians’ humanity and strength are on display
in every moment of survival, despite the odds. Palestinian society — its
hunted-down doctors, heroic journalists, orphaned babies, grieving parents,
tortured prisoners, amputees treated without anesthetics, and so many more — is
the heart of the story of this carnage, just as it is its main target.
The
nonrecognition of Palestinians as a people has been a social fact and political
strategy for more than a century. This is the wider context in which Israel
equates Gaza with Hamas and purports that Gaza will be silent once some more
amenable leadership is brought in to govern it. This is the context in which
the US purports that an agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia can resolve
the Palestine question.
This
is the context in which Palestinian leaders themselves often neglect
Palestinian society, too. 17 years have passed since the last national PA
elections. Surveys have long indicated that Palestinians view their respective
governments — the Fatah-controlled PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza — as
authoritarian, repressive, and corrupt. Regardless, Israel has shown its
willingness to work with both Palestinian parties, as long as they preserve
Israel’s security. This strategy of seeking a modus vivendi with particular
Palestinian leaders while neglecting the Palestinian people’s needs and
aspirations has proven disastrous for all.
For
years or decades at a time, the world often forgets both that the Palestinian
people exist and that they do so under relentless circumstances of oppression
and dispossession. It seems to remember Palestinians only during periodic
escalations of violence when attention turns to condemning Palestinian
political organizations and leaders. And the cycle begins again.
This essay was published first by New Lines Magazine on February 20, 2024.
Wendy
Pearlman is professor of political science and director of the Middle East and
North Africa studies program at Northwestern University.
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