This
essay was published first by New Lines Magazine on February 20, 2024.اضافة اعلان
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.
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 chillingly dehumanizing language, 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 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 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 widespread 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 again powered this national
revival, and it solidified into what became 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 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.”
As the nationalist mayors and civil society activists
worked together to push for Palestinian independence, Israel sought to suppress
protest 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.
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. Whether
motivated by hope or exhaustion, most Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip welcomed the Oslo Accords with optimism. 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 then, 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, 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 their right to
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
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 army 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.
“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 displayed in every moment of survival despite the odds.”
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 displayed 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
broader 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. Seventeen 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.
Wendy
Pearlman is a professor of political science and director of the Middle East
and North Africa studies program at Northwestern University.
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