This article is a must read, very well sourced. Excellent summary how we got here from all the way back to 1917.
Why Palestinians Engage in Armed Struggle
https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/why-palestinians-engage-in-armed-struggle/
What is the current terrain faced by Palestinians organizing for national liberation?
As a result of key historical developments and the restriction of fronts along which to organize, Palestinians have no other option than to engage in armed resistance. This resistance is currently preventing total genocide and is a necessary component of national liberation. The other plausible tactics, nonviolent resistance and electoral organizing, are not on their own viable strategies for liberating Palestine at the current political conjuncture.
Nonviolent resistance historically relies on two sources of power: leverage at the point of production (structural power) and leverage through massive numbers of people blocking the day-to-day function of urban society (associational power). In South Africa, strikes at metal and chemical plants in Durban were combined with the Defiance Campaign of nonviolent occupations and civil disobedience to ultimately bring down apartheid.
In Palestine, these sources of power have been largely eliminated because of the total exclusion of Palestinians from Israeli society and institutions. The first process of stripping away this leverage was the construction of the Histadrut, the Zionist labor management federation that displaced Palestinian workers from points of strategic leverage.
Formation of the Histadrut
There is extensive evidence that Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together in historic Palestine. Following the Balfour Declaration in 1917, British colonialism established Mandatory Palestine as a colonial entity, opening the doors to Zionist colonization. This was followed by waves of displacement of Palestinian farmers from their land, forced proletarianization, and urbanization. At the peak of this displacement in 1937, the popular classes of Palestine engaged in a mass uprising, launching a general strike that lasted nearly six months. Palestinians were brutally repressed by the British Army, with estimates that 10% of the entire adult Arab male population were killed, wounded, or exiled. It was during this era that Israeli labor developed not simply as a tool for state building and labor force management, but also as a method for the exclusion of Palestinians from their possible levers of power.
The Histadrut was a powerful force in displacing striking Palestinian workers and the firms that employed them. In Jaffa, a parallel Zionist-operated port was established during the general strike. By 1939, 75% of the Jewish workforce was organized under the Histadrut. The Histadrut built institutions on the basis of membership, such as healthcare and banking services, including the country’s largest bank and health insurance company. Through collaboration with the state and private enterprises, the Histadrut effectively displaced Palestinian workers from points of leverage by enabling the formation of new enterprises that excluded Palestinian workers. Palestinians cannot strike against the Israeli economy effectively because they have been systematically locked out of it.
Civil Disobedience in Palestine
The First Intifada (1987-1993) was primarily led by a broad coalition of leftist and secular nationalist forces. This uprising was similar in magnitude and tactics to the Defiance Campaign in apartheid South Africa. However, the Israeli response to the First Intifada far outstripped the South African government’s response. The military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem effectively turned these areas into open-air prisons. Israel turned off electricity, starved people, and killed, imprisoned, and tortured thousands of people.
Despite intense repression, the First Intifada was capable of harnessing widespread support for resisting occupation into a campaign that was sustained until the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israeli government entered into diplomatic negotiations, culminating in the Oslo Accords in 1993. While the Oslo Accords were lauded at the time, they denied Palestinians statehood and gave Israel near-total control over borders, settlements, and security and intelligence forces.
In 2018, a new wave of mass, unarmed resistance began in besieged Gaza. Taking advantage of the capacity of social media to mobilize people quickly and without centralized leadership, the Great March of Return resembled the urban civic mobilizations that swept the Arab world in the 2010s. By 2018, eleven years under a devastating siege had resulted in 44% unemployment – one of the highest in the world – as well as a lack of access to basic medical care and clean drinking water. The Great March of Return involved weekly marches to the border fence of Gaza, which separates besieged Gaza from the land that Palestinians were expelled from during the Nakba in 1948. Over 80% of current Gazan residents are still considered refugees, as the descendants of those expelled who still have no right to return to their lands. These protests were responded to in sadistic fashion by the Israel Defense Forces: they maimed over 9000 and killed 223 people, including 46 children. IDF snipers targeted healthcare workers and children, as documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
The article continues about how apartheid is implemented and how it obstructs any peaceful way to achieve change. Then on to the Abraham Accords and further armed resistance as a result.
And this little tidbit
Hamas has also offered to disarm completely if the State of Palestine was recognized by Israel, an offer that Israel has refused. This offer, along with the demand to release Barghouti, represents a strategy of leveraging military capacity as a bargaining chip in diplomatic negotiations and in order to reunite Palestinians from various political tendencies around a common vision of liberation.
https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/why-palestinians-engage-in-armed-struggle/
