The voice of Abu Obaida, spokesman for Hamas’s military wing, Ezz Al Qassam Brigades, seemed uncompromising and decisive. Via a video message on August 7, he told the Palestinian delegation negotiating a ceasefire agreement with Israel: “If Israel refuses to end the siege on Gaza, don’t extend the ceasefire and return home.”
Indeed, Israel didn’t agree to a ceasefire that is conditioned on ending the siege; thus the resistance, which never left its positions to begin with, resumed fighting against Israeli forces in the morning hours of the following day.
While Palestinian resistance had always won the support and respect of ordinary Palestinians throughout decades of fighting Israel, never before did it command such credibility. After more than seven years of the uninterrupted Israeli siege, Gazans have shed many illusions, including the one that Israel would end the siege without a fight. The resistance is promising to lead that fight, and, after several painful lessons, it has finally kept invading Israeli forces at bay. On August 5, all of Israel’s ground troops retreated to its positions prior to the ground invasion that began on July 17.
It is true that this came at a high price, as over 1,900 Palestinians were killed, and over 9,500 wounded. Thousands of homes have been destroyed. Hospitals, mosques, and even schools that were used as UN shelters for fleeing civilians were pulverised by US-supplied Israeli weapons, plus a whole lot more.
Increasing the price of resistance may have been an Israeli military strategy by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but there are little or no signs that it is working, in any case. Gazans know well that their resistance is an outcome of Israeli occupations, siege and successive wars. To abandon resistance at a time when it is needed most would appear irrational, no matter the price.
The Israeli assault on Gaza began on July 8, in what the Israeli military dubbed ‘Operation Protective Edge.’ In relative terms, Gaza is a tiny stretch of land (an area of about 139 square miles) and is home to 1.8 million, 80 per cent of whom are refugees. A draconian siege of seven years had left the already poverty-stricken strip in a miserable state, to the extent that the UN deemed it would be uninhabitable by 2020.
Gaza’s punishment was meted out through the years through various means, including psychological war, a hermetic siege involving Egypt, and routine massive wars. In 2008-9, Israel’s so-called Operation Cast Lead killed over 1,400 Palestinians and well over 5,000 were wounded. Back then, many thought that Israeli war crimes would cause the needed shift in world opinion that would ultimately cause enough pressure to force Israel to break its siege on Gaza.
But it didn’t. The siege grew tighter and the hardships worse, especially as the Egypt turmoil was used as another pretence to punish Gazans. Thus Gazans fighting for political rights, freedom of movement, and ending the siege became a fight for their very own survival.
As the so-called Arab Spring descended into violence and chaos, the urgent case of Gaza, as in the cause of Palestine altogether, was largely neglected.
It is within this bleak context that Netanyahu thought his war on Gaza would be a decisive one. He assumed that siege-fatigued and politically hopeless Gazans would simply surrender, perhaps with the hope that the next stage of their oppression would be slightly less cruel. They didn’t. Gaza’s resistance fought with unprecedented ferocity. By the August 5 ceasefire, the Israeli army admitted to the killing of 64 soldiers and wounding of hundreds more. The Palestinian resistance says Israel hides its casualties so as not to grant the resistance a reason to celebrate its victory. The Israeli figures, however, are still more than five times those killed and wounded during the ‘Cast Lead’ operation.
And while only three Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinian resistance, the vast majority of Palestinian dead and wounded were civilians. Hundreds of children and entire families were wiped out. Hundreds of those killed and wounded were even taking shelter in UN schools and other facilities that were deemed ‘safe.’
While Israel’s ‘most moral army in the world’ – by their own designations – seemed to be fighting a war against civilians, Gaza’s resistance aimed for invading soldiers as the primary target.
Still, the US and other western governments condemned Gaza’s resistance with so much passion, parroting the Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ line even as international media beamed thousands of images and footage of mutilated civilian bodies, or entire families.
Even before Palestinians managed to dig the remains of their dead from underneath the rubble, Israel, backed by the EU and the US, were insisting on a main condition: Gaza’s resistance must disarm.
Gazans know well what would befall on them if the resistance, their last line of defence, would disarm. Naturally, the resistance refused. But the notion that Palestinians must not fight the Israeli occupation is an old and recurring one.
A crude presentation of this language was made by the then-newly elected US President Barack Obama, who stood at a Cairo university podium on June 4, 2009, to convey to Palestinians a most denigrating, insensitive and highly inaccurate message:
“Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights.”
Obama’s message painted the Palestinian struggle as an abnormality among perfectly peaceful national liberation struggles happening around the world. The message is of course untrue. But more importantly, Israel’s military occupation has never, in any historical juncture, been linked to the type of resistance applied by Palestinians. Although no ‘rockets are raining on Israel’ from the West Bank, the military occupation there is extreme, cruel and entrenched with illegal Jewish colonies and numerous checkpoints.
For Palestinians, resistance is an organic concept. It sees no separating between armed or non-violent resistance, and all forms of resistance stem from a popular and collective movement that can be traced back in Palestinian history to nearly a century ago. In the case of Gaza, however, armed resistance has become the main language that can possibly be understood by Israel, as some of its officials and media are openly advocating genocide.
After his return home to Norway, following 15 days of caring for Gaza’s wounded, emergency surgeon Dr Mads Gilbert had a message for his people, who experienced untold horror at the hands of the Nazis.
“So I returned home to my free country – and this country is free because we had a resistance movement, because we said that occupied nations have the right to resist, even with weapons. It’s stated in international law.
“You are permitted to fight the occupier even with weapons. Nobody wants to be occupied!”
Ramzy Baroud is a PhD scholar in People’s History at the University of Exeter. He is the Managing Editor of Middle East Eye. Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).
