As Israel takes its rightful place as a pariah state, the Palestinian people face excruciating suffering, but remain steadfast and confident. These are the reports coming out of occupied Palestine. One portrait of this is the rise in support for armed resistance.
By Soraya Misleh
To the bloodshed imposed on the Palestinian people from Gaza to the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem, the response of those who have nothing to lose is reflected in a survey conducted by the Palestinian Center for Political Research and Inquiry, between May 26 and June 1: 54% of respondents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip advocate this path to end the Zionist occupation. The survey also reflects optimism about the fall of the criminal Netanyahu, but most have no illusions about negotiations with a new Zionist government.
There is a decline in the belief that the prospect of “two states” would be the solution, and a growing repudiation of the Zionist occupation manager, the Palestinian Authority: “Just over half believe that Hamas is the most deserving to represent and lead the Palestinian people today, while only 16% believe that Fatah, under the leadership of Abbas [Mahmoud Abbas], is the most deserving.” 94% of West Bankers and 83% of Gazans demand the resignation of President Mahmoud Abbas.
One of the reasons is explained in a Middle East Eye report as the “professionalism” of the Palestinian Authority’s police and intelligence forces, as part of security cooperation with Israel, in suppressing resistance in the West Bank, even amid genocide and deepening ethnic cleansing.
The investigation took place amid more and more crimes against humanity, in a chilling collection of massacres that make up the genocide in Gaza and in the face of increasing bloodshed in the West Bank, which faces advanced ethnic cleansing. As of June 19, not counting the thousands of people missing under the rubble, more than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and more than 85,000 wounded, 70% of whom are women and children. In the West Bank and the Old City of Jerusalem, more than 520 have been killed since the beginning of October 2023, including more than 130 children. Israel is being included day after day in the dirty lists of the United Nations (UN), among the biggest child rapists in the world, among the most criminal occupation forces, etc.
In addition to the accusations, Israel’s quest for a “final solution” confronts a people whose historical perspective is liberation. “Many occupiers passed through here, none managed to stay. And no imperialism lasts forever.” This is a common phrase among Palestinians, taught from generation to generation.
The heroic and historic resistance is still alive and does not bend. “If one of us is eliminated, ten others must come in his place. This is the genuine mark of our struggle, and neither censorship nor simple cowardly complicity will be able to extinguish it,” the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said (1935-2003) had already revealed. The maxim of the Palestinian Marxist revolutionary Ghasan Kanafani is still valid: “With blood we write for Palestine.”
Isolation and crisis
The mask falls. The frightful face of the Zionist state has been exposed and its international isolation deepens. In Brazil, the demand that Lula immediately break off economic, military and diplomatic relations with the genocidal State of Israel continues to be raised.
In the midst of this process in which international solidarity gives no respite, the United States faces its own crisis. With presidential elections imminent this year, U.S. imperialism is desperately trying to cover the face of the monster it feeds. To try to save the colonial project, it may throw Netanyahu to the lions – amid internal frictions, including the dissolution of the “war cabinet” by the criminal prime minister after Zionist leader Benny Gantz abandoned that coalition. Gigantic mobilizations inside Israel are demanding Netanyahu’s head, not out of concern for Palestinian lives, but because they understand that the Zionist project is threatened. Netanyahu risks losing his office and being arrested, and has responded by threatening all-out war against Lebanon. Thus, every day he digs his own grave.
The United States is seeking a cease-fire agreement that will preserve its military enclave, and a plan for post-Gaza to place the narrow strip in the hands of the Palestinian Authority, unpopular and disliked by the Palestinians, is among the possibilities. To this end, its “revitalization” and “reform” are being considered. And, until the Palestinian Authority can take over the strip, the installation of UN peacekeepers in Gaza – as proposed by the Arab League in May, with Abbas present, at the same meeting at which it “vehemently” condemned the blockade and attacks on commercial vessels by Yemen’s Houthis in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
These international peacekeepers are rejected by the resistance, which understands that they would also put a target on their backs. The worst of all worlds in the struggle for liberation, after the urgent ceasefire, would be for the United States to put on the table a new Oslo agreement, which represented for the Palestinian people nothing more than another 30 years of peace of the cemeteries and advancement in Zionist colonization and ethnic cleansing, while creating a new capitalist class dependent on the occupation.
It is necessary to observe the movement among the historical enemies of the Palestinian cause, identified by Kanafani: in addition to imperialism/Zionism, the Arab regimes and the reactionary Arab-Palestinian elite.
The best of all worlds is the deepening political defeat of Israel, signaling a victory for the resistance. The fact is that the impossibility of eliminating it is written every day. The Palestinian people have one certainty: they will not forgive, they will not forget, they will not be wiped off the map. And they will never bend. For a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.
