The Palestinian flare-up that has been sowing panic in Israel has created a reality never expected in the midst of a state of chaos in some Arab countries facing internal conflicts as a result of the so-called Arab Spring. Palestinian groups and organisations have also been witnessing terrible divisions unrelated to the struggle to end the Israeli occupation. But the flare-up came as a surprise to many Arabs and the world as well, according to politicians, writers and journalists in the region.
Palestinian youth, rising from the ashes of despair and lack of hope, have created a phenomenal movement of solidarity and perhaps a kind of ‘national unity’ to resist and end the brutal colonial Zionist occupation of Palestine, on their own without any known organised assistance from any side or source, domestic or foreign.
Palestinians, young men and women, have lifted the discarded Palestinian banner of liberation and forged ahead to confront the Zionist killing machine, in spite of its deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Their self-sustained struggle to end the colonial/apartheid Zionist occupation without seeking any outside help has driven thousands of the occupiers to stay put in their homes with terrifying fear to step outside. It drove many trained Zionist soldiers to flee with their weapons from scenes where a Palestinian youth may have brandished a small kitchen knife or driven a vehicle to overrun them. Such young and selfless individuals rising up to face certain death without any trace of fear has put the only remaining apartheid colonial power (that is Israel) in our world into a quandary without a clue as to how to confront this uprising that some believe could turn into an existential threat to the very survival of the Zionist colonial entity.
The Palestinian youth’s uprising has come at the right time when the whole Palestinian cause was about to disappear from the world’s political scene with many countries busy trying to defend themselves from the threats or the fighting that is falsely being waged in the name of Islam. Redrawing the maps of the Middle East by Western powers using Islam as an instrument to bring down regimes as had happened in the past in Afghanistan to end the Soviet empire, has put Western national security in extreme peril, as well. In the midst of utter confusion, Israeli news media have chosen to lead the incitement “to crush Palestinian terrorism” by all means available. But it has failed. All keen observers predict that the Palestinian youth’s uprising will continue, regardless of the loss of Palestinian lives and demolished family homes by the bulldozers of the military Zionist occupation.
Israeli military intelligence searched for conditions and motives of the young Palestinians who have taken to the streets to fight Israel’s occupation. Nadav Shragai, an Israeli military analyst, wrote that “more than 60% of Palestinian attackers in the West Bank came from the Al Khalil (Hebron) region. And 75% of the ones who carried attacks in Israel came from [occupied] East Jerusalem.” He found that most of the Palestinian attackers have, more or less, the same profile: There are single, unemployed, and loners in their actions with no criminal record or any association with any Palestinian organisation.
Modern life
“Their (Islamic) religious motivation is not high nor is a factor that drove them to attack,” it said, and “their pages on the social media on Facebook show that the vast majority of them were open to modern life with a personal attitude that was centred on secularism.”
The Israeli web portal Walla published a report by Avi Sakharov, a specialist on ‘Palestinian Affairs’ in which he gathered statistics about all the “attackers” from which he drew the following conclusions about the Palestinian youth who were killed in a public execution style by Israeli forces: “They are individuals who do not even participate in social networks on the internet because of their very modest financial means and do not own cell phones, either.” Therefore, he ruled out “the incitement” on the social networks as a cause for their actions, concluding that “in view of the findings, it is very difficult to draw a common profile of Palestinian youth engaged in the resistance, except that they are usually young bachelors and unemployed.” The Israeli Army released a study in which they concluded that “the motive behind Palestinian violence is revenge in a style that leads to martyrdom.”
The Palestinian youth engaged in this phenomenal uprising were never affected by any attempts whether by brute force or persuasion to weaken their determination or to lead them into a passive attitude in their response to the colonial occupation. Young Palestinians left with no state of their own, no decent future with national dignity to look for, have no choice whatsoever, but to choose martyrdom, not humiliation under an apartheid colonial occupation and their uprising is their way of life.
Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopaedia.
