How Palestinian popular resistance became a global movement
Today, 29 November, is the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
There is a long history of solidarity with Palestinians from countries and movements struggling against colonialism and oppression across the world - especially from Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
The problem is that Palestinians did not achieve liberation during the high point of anti-colonial struggles.
Instead, they got the fake one-sided peace of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which Israel used to extend its settler-colonial project from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
It is this situation – the failure to provide Palestinians with security, rights, and dignity through the US-sponsored "peace deal" – that led us directly to this day.
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For Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, sumud, or steadfastness, underpins resistance against Israel's attempts to physically remove them and destroy their demand for rights. Because, as Palestinian writer Tareq Baconi reminds us, "The alternative to Palestinian sumud is oblivion."
Yet they are not alone.
The struggle for Palestinians to remain or return to their homeland has always been global, never just local
There is also a huge diaspora - the Palestinian shatat. Israel's expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa, and through other strategies of dispossession, turned most Palestinians into refugees and exiles.
This means that the struggle for Palestinians to remain or return to their homeland has always been global, never just local.
In July 2024, the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics estimated there are 14.8 million Palestinians worldwide, over half of which constitute the shatat.
In the past, this was seen as a source of Palestinian weakness. Today, in the time of Israel's genocidal apotheosis, this is a source of strength because it created the foundations for a Global Axis of Solidarity.
This axis spans villages and civil society groups in Palestine with a vast and ever-expanding network of Palestinians in the shatat and their allies worldwide.
Links with social justice campaigns such as the Black Lives Matter movement have brought a whole new generation of activists into supporting the struggle for Palestinian rights.
Nowhere as bad as Gaza
Palestinians in Gaza are at the sharpest receiving end of Israel's violence. The number of casualties and the images of human suffering coming out of Gaza each day are truly monstrous.
Israel's repression and killing spree is accelerating in the West Bank and now in Lebanon, but the core of its genocidal actions remains in Gaza.
Palestinians outside of Gaza - inside the "Green Line", Jerusalem, the West Bank, the shatat - repeatedly tell me when I express solidarity and friendship during this genocide that nothing is as bad as Gaza.
In the West Bank, a Palestinian friend told me: "It's taking its toll on everyone. But still, we say alhamdulillah as it is no way near what our brethren in Gaza have been and still are going through."
Another Palestinian friend in Jerusalem said: "Gaza is now genocide. The West Bank is what Gaza used to be. East Jerusalem is what the West Bank used to be. And '48 Palestine (the Palestinian term for Palestinians inside "the Green Line" with Israeli citizenship) is what East Jerusalem used to be."
This insightful comment neatly captures Israel's constantly accelerating conveyor belt of repression and attempted erasure. By fragmenting Palestinians into segments, Israel has made it easier to divide and rule, exclude and expel, isolate and destroy.
Popular resistance is the rule, not the exception
In Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, Palestinian writer Mazin Qumsiyeh shows how suicide bombings, rocket attacks, plane hijackings and hostage-taking are the exception, not the rule, in the over 100 years of Palestinian resistance.
More common practices include boycotts, tax revolts, demonstrations, and everyday acts of sumud.
These are examples of what Qumsiyeh calls "popular resistance" rather than "nonviolence" because that's the term that Palestinians use, muqawama shabiya.
And yet Israel makes no such distinction: it bans all forms of Palestinian resistance and responds with huge levels of violence.
In the past few months, Israel has assassinated leaders from all the Palestinian political factions - Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Over the past year, and well before, Israel has killed Palestinian doctors, journalists, teachers and artists.
But even before 7 October 2023, Israel did not make distinctions.
In October 2021, Israel designated six Palestinian human rights groups – Addameer (the prisoner support organisation), Al-Haq (the human rights organisation), Bisan Center for Research and Development (which campaigns for the socio-economic rights of the poor and marginalised), Defense for Children International-Palestine (the children's rights organisation), the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (which represents Palestinian farmers), and the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees (the feminist organisation) - as terrorist organisations, banned them, and raided their offices in Ramallah.
It has also expelled Palestinian lawyers.
Anyone caught in possession of materials from a proscribed organisation can be arrested. Israel's extremely loose interpretation of what constitutes "terrorist material" includes Palestinian literature and the Palestinian flag.
Unarmed Palestinian men, women and children taking part in the "Great March of Return" weekly Friday demonstrations at the Israeli fence in Gaza in 2018-19 were shot by Israeli snipers using live ammunition.
In 2011, Israel banned the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and it continues to harass its leaders and prohibit entry to anyone who supports it.
Israel's violent military apartheid regime kills, jails or deports any Palestinian who stands in its way, even those who are writing poetry. Anyone who tells you otherwise is, at best, being disingenuous and, at worse, providing cover for genocide.
Israel's settler colonial project is global, too
The support that Israel has received from western states, initially Britain and then the United States, has been decisive in its creation and survival.
During its occupation and mandate over Palestine from 1917 to 1948, Britain incubated the nascent Zionist state.
During the Cold War and beyond, the US supported Israel economically, militarily and politically. Both the US and Britain are directly militarily involved in Israel's genocide in Gaza and are shielding it from censure in international forums such as the UN, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court.
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Other western states, particularly Germany and Canada, have also offered crucial support.
Western governments are essential for apartheid Israel to survive. This is why demonstrations and civil society activism in these states are so crucial.
It also helps to explain why western states - particularly those complicit in, or actively participating in, Israel's genocide - are trying to silence and jail anyone involved in the Global Axis of Solidarity.
Over 38 states in the US have passed anti-BDS legislation in recent years.
In April 2024, Germany designated BDS a "suspect terrorist group".
The UK only narrowly missed passing legislation to ban BDS because a general election prorogued parliament in the summer of 2024.
Canada, France and Spain have also discussed measures to restrict BDS. Across the West, Palestinians and their allies have suffered censure, loss of jobs, expulsion, and arrest.
Along with Israel, these western states form an "Axis of Repression" blocking the achievement of Palestinian rights. Only through civil society activism can western governments' persistent and shameful role in supporting Israel as an apartheid state be challenged and changed.
What we are currently witnessing is a fundamental clash between those who want Palestinians to have the same rights and freedoms as Jewish-Israelis, and with those who will do anything - including carrying out and enabling a genocide - to support Israel to remain an apartheid state.
'If I must die, let it bring hope'
On 6 December 2023, Israel targeted and killed the Palestinian academic, poet and activist Refaat Alareer in a bomb attack on Gaza.
His poem "If I Must Die" has been translated into over 40 languages, reaching millions around the world, and has become an anthem for the Palestinian struggle. In his beautiful eulogy to Palestinian survival and defiance, Alareer also urged: "Let it bring hope, let it be a tale."
More people are being politicised by what they see as an injustice of immense proportions being imposed on Palestinians
Hope is a tricky business, particularly at this time of genocide. But Palestinians do not have the luxury of pessimism and despair.
More people are being politicised by what they see as an injustice of immense proportions being imposed on Palestinians.
They are also seeing that this repression and injustice is only possible because of the support Israel enjoys from an alliance made up of western elites that support Israel as an apartheid settler state.
By expelling Palestinians, Israel laid the basis for its nemesis.
The Global Axis of Solidarity, which links Palestinian communities and their allies wherever they are, is getting bigger every day - from the river to the sea, from Beijing to DC. Therein lies the hope.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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