Gaza Has Changed the Discourse on Popular Resistance, But Are We Truly Listening?
by Ramzy
Baroud
Posted on February 21, 2025
Palestinians and Israelis
agree that the Gaza resistance was the main reason behind Israel’s forced
decision to accept a
ceasefire and begin its gradual withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
The oddity is that
Palestinians – dying, resisting, but remaining steadfast in Gaza – usually
stand at the polar opposite of everything the Israeli government and military
represent.
The same is true for the
Israeli government. Yet, from the very start of the Israeli genocide, both
sides entered into an undeclared agreement: the Israelis wanted to destroy the
Palestinian resistance and take full control of Gaza, while the Palestinians
wanted to thwart the Israeli objectives.
To carry out its mission,
Israel has used over
85,000 tons of explosives, enlisting the support of
the United States and other Western governments and intelligence.
To thwart the Israeli mission,
Palestinians utilized everything they could muster to wage guerrilla warfare –
a war of attrition made possible by the support of Gaza’s inhabitants, who paid
the price of their sumoud through one of the most devastating genocides
(Gazacide) ever recorded in history.
As hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians began marching from
south to north on January 27, they celebrated their return, defined as a
collective victory against the Israeli war machine and a victory for the people
themselves, who produced a new model of popular resistance.
The Israelis agree, though of
course, they would not use the same language as the Palestinians. For Israel,
the Gaza fighters are terrorists, and the Gazan population is the popular
foundation that supports such terrorism. Thus, there was collective punishment
throughout the war and constant plotting to ethnically cleanse them to Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Ireland, Morocco, Somaliland, and anywhere else.
Israel’s extremist National
Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir described the
Israeli agreement to the ceasefire as “total surrender,” which contrasts with
the “total victory” strategy repeatedly mentioned by
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu throughout the war.
This defeat, or surrender,
places Israel, in the words of retired Maj. Gen. Itzhak Brik, in an existential
threat. Writing in
Maariv, Brik does not deny that Israel’s loss of its military superiority
represents the greatest danger faced by the state in decades.
“A state that relies on
miracles and not on real military capability will not survive for long,” he
wrote.
Brik’s views are shared by
most of Israel’s political and military elites. Even Netanyahu himself has
hinted at the impossibility of the Israeli position, due almost exclusively to
the toughness of the Palestinian resistance.
Israel is engaged in an
“existential war,” he said last
March while addressing a cadet graduation ceremony, and Israel has to achieve
“total victory.”
Outside the realm of
Palestinian and Israeli discourses, however, we rarely engage in honest
conversations about the subject. Those who defend the Israeli position in the
West do so, as they often claim, in the name of democracy, civilization, and
against, in the words of
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “barbarity.”
The same contradiction can
also be seen on the side of those who purport to speak in solidarity with
Palestinians, if not speaking on behalf of Palestinians.
One constantly missing topic
in many solidarity conversations about Palestine, and in media platforms that
are wholly or partly sympathetic to Palestinians, is the subject of resistance.
Many pro-Palestine individuals
behave as if the word “resistance” is a liability. Some may covertly support
Palestinian resistance, but overtly ignore the issue altogether, as if it were
not truly the single most important factor that has defeated all of Israel’s
objectives – not just in Gaza, but in Lebanon as well.
In doing so, they also ignore
Yemen, whose ability to disrupt Israel-linked shipping in the Red Sea
represented the greatest geopolitical challenge to the US, which, in some ways,
surpassed the tension between US and Chinese navies in the South and East China
Seas.
Bryan Clark, a former Navy
submariner and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told the
Associated Press last June that “this is the most sustained combat that the US
Navy has seen since World War II.”
One could argue against or in
favor of armed struggle on moral or philosophical grounds, or even for the sake
of political expediency and pragmatism. However, doing so while denying facts
altogether – that the Israeli army, per Israel’s own definition, ‘surrendered’
in Gaza – is a form of intellectual dishonesty.
Note how Ukrainian fighters
are often celebrated in mainstream Western media, and even among many Western
progressive groups, as heroic figures for challenging the Russian army. The
ideological background of some of these groups is often ignored, and the fact
that Ukraine is almost entirely dependent on Western arms and many other forms
of support is treated as a nonissue.
Instead, they are presented as
homegrown freedom fighters, repelling foreign occupation, defending ‘democracy’
and ‘civilization,’ and so on.
The same logic applies to
Syria today, as it applies to numerous other examples, including the mujahideen
of Afghanistan when they fought against Soviet military intervention – not
US-Western military occupation.
Unfortunately, some so-called
progressives bought into that propaganda, thus judging the morality of armed
struggle based on the nature of the enemy on the other side of this struggle.
Palestinians have always been
the main exception to any definition of freedom fighting, although their cause
is arguably the most just of all causes. Not only are Palestinians fighting
against military occupation, colonialism, and a racist apartheid system, but
they are also fighting for mere survival as they endure an Israeli war of
extermination and genocide, whose weapons are provided by most Western
governments, and whose logic is constantly defended by Western media and
so-called intellectuals.
Prior to the Gaza genocide,
Palestinians were told repeatedly that armed struggle is neither strategic nor
useful. They were often chastised for failing to see what is supposedly obvious
to so many activists and writers, mobilizing and opining on Palestine thousands
of miles away from the Gaza open-air prison or the West Bank’s concentration
refugee camps.
The Israeli genocide in Gaza,
which aimed at exterminating and ethnically cleansing the survivors of the
Gazacide, left Palestinians with no options but to fight. The resistance in
Gaza materialized what was meant to be a symbolic reference by Mahmoud Darwish
in his seminal poem –
‘The Mask Has Fallen’:
The mask has fallen from the
mask, from the mask, the mask has fallen.
You have no brothers, my
brother, no friends, my friend, you have no castles.
You have no water, no
medicine, no sky, no blood, no sail, neither forward nor backward.
Besiege your siege… there is
no escape.
Your arm has fallen, so pick
it up and strike your enemy…
There is no escape, and I fell
near you, so pick me up and strike your enemy with me…
You are now free, free, and
free…
Those who killed you or
wounded you have ammunition in you, so strike with it.
It is as if Darwish was
writing a prophecy, not a poem, and unbeknownst to all of his readers, that
prophecy came true in Gaza.
While Gaza took on the
responsibility of using its wounded body as ammunition – indeed, wounded and
amputated fighters were seen fighting on the frontlines, from the lowest ranks
to the top leaders – it is the responsibility of intellectuals to document these
moments in all their detail.
This documentation, however,
is not convenient for everyone, because doing so can be a dangerous feat in
today’s environment, where the mere insinuation that Palestinians have the
right to defend themselves under international law is considered an extremist
act, and where figures like UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, along with
numerous others, would be openly accused of
belonging to Hamas.
However, the responsibility of
the intellectual, aside from speaking truth to power, as
Edward Said did, and challenging their role as orators to that of mobilizers,
as Antonio Gramsci argued, is also to stand “for truth, no matter who tells it”
according to Malcolm
X.
Telling the truth should not
be “a revolutionary act”, as George Orwell said; that if we indeed live in
free, open societies where freedom of expression is a guaranteed right under
various democratic constitutions. Sadly, this is not the case, and once again,
Palestine remains the exception.
What is truly worrisome,
however, is that if we continue to avoid the conversation that both
Palestinians and Israelis are engaging in, we render ourselves completely
irrelevant on an issue that requires deep and profound understanding. Without
such understanding, no solidarity can carry much weight, and no amount of
mobilization can make a difference.
Imagine the Israeli security
cabinet making the ceasefire decision. Netanyahu is standing in front of one of
his favorite visual media, a pie chart, which includes all the factors that
support an Israeli acceptance of a ceasefire. Considering everything that we
know about the war in Gaza, and judging by statements made by top Israeli
active and retired military generals, it is certain that the Gaza resistance –
coupled with Arab resistance elsewhere – was the main driver behind the Israeli
decision.
While many are hindered by
fears, the confines of our ideologies, and wishful thinking, some may want to
pretend that the Gaza resistance was the least relevant factor in the outcome
of the war. The truth of Gaza, however, should be obvious for anyone else to
see.
By acknowledging the
resistance, however, we are not necessarily arguing that armed struggle or any
other form of struggle is morally superior to all others. We are simply stating
a fact, and in doing so, we are asserting that Palestinians resorted to such a
choice only after being ignored by the international community for decades.
Denying Palestinians the right
to resist is more than mere intellectual dishonesty; it amounts to denying them
agency altogether and placing them squarely in the category of victims. This
gives Israel, and ourselves, all the power to kill them at will in the case of
the former, and to fight for their rights on our own terms in the case of the
latter.
If the Gaza war has taught us
anything, it is that Gaza and the Palestinian people have proven to be the most
central players in this ongoing tragedy. It is they, their resistance, and
their political discourse that will eventually defeat the Israeli occupation
and bring peace and justice back to Palestine. Any attempt at circumventing
this fact represents utter disrespect for the Palestinian people and for the
legacy of the tens of thousands of innocent civilians who were pulverized by
the Israeli-US-Western war machine.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario