Palestinian Resistance and the Politics of Disarmament: A Historical Perspective
Gaza’s resistance factions recently agreed to a US-backed disarmament roadmap. Despite having consistently demanded this step be taken over the course of nearly three years, as a prerequisite to ending its invasion, Israel flatly rejected the proposal. In order to properly understand this renewed disarmament campaign, it is essential to consider the historic context that makes true disarmament impossible.
“If Hamas just gave up its weapons…” and “Hamas cannot control Gaza after their attacks on Israel…” have been popular arguments featured in the English-language media, not only since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, but for decades now. On July 6, Hamas declared that it had agreed to hand over control of Gaza’s civil administration to a technocratic governing committee and by July 30 the movement had pledged to implement a disarmament plan. Both of these agreements, reached through the US’s Board of Peace (BoP), provoked nothing more than pledges of further violence from the Israeli authorities.
The reason for this is that Israel will accept only a disarmament process that leaves the Palestinian people completely defenseless and at the full mercy of their occupying army. Therefore, the Hamas movement and its armed allies, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), have stressed that a disarmament plan must be sequential, not a surrender agreement as the Israelis are demanding.
While the Fatah Party is the only major Palestinian political Party that is not currently a proscribed terrorist organization in the US, UK and most EU nations, it was once considered to be one of the leading global terrorist organizations by the Israelis and their allies. In order to destroy the Fatah-led Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Besieging Beirut, where the PLO had established itself in exile, the Israelis killed around 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese before eventually offering the Palestinians an ultimatum: continue fighting until the last drop of blood, or the organization give up their resistance and flee. PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat chose to flee to Tunisia and accepted defeat.
Yet, Israel did not live up to its word. Following this agreement, horrifying massacres would be inflicted against the Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon. On September 16, 1982, with no resistance to even attempt to aid them, the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre occurred. Israeli forces watched on as their fascist Lebanese allied militia force, Kataeb, mass murdered up to 3,500 civilians over a 43-hour period. Almost all of the victims were women and children, because many of the men previously living there were involved in the resistance and had fled as part of the agreement.
Israel also refused to leave southern Lebanon, establishing an illegal occupation of the south of the country despite signing a withdrawal agreement, formally securing its role as an occupier in 1985. This ended up triggering the founding of the Party Israel today blames for its current war against Lebanon, Hezbollah.
The lessons of 1982 have never been forgotten. In fact, the aftershocks of the PLO’s retreat are still being felt today, as the trauma of the setback triggered a chain of events that resulted in a major ideological sea change.
Although it has often been argued that the developments that emerged off the back of the Post World War II global order – oriented around the United Nations system, concepts of Human Rights and International Law – had ushered in changes that rendered old models of armed struggle null and void, the predicament of Palestine today has largely discredited this argument.
Under the model of a “rules-based order” and “Western liberal democracy”, nations are supposed to behave rationally. Under this understanding, Israel, which is assumed to live up to the definition of a modern State, is therefore argued to behave rationally.
Prior to October 7, 2023, the Palestinian resistance factions argued that their armed struggle was necessary and that they were not fighting a rational enemy. Nearly three years later, they have been vindicated. The former leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, challenged this concept of Israel’s assumed rational nature, arguing that through armed struggle the reaction of his people’s occupiers would lead them to two options: An all-out regional war or a negotiated Two-state settlement.
The Algerian revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote that “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”
Although written with Algeria’s struggle against the French as its key reference point, this exact reasoning can be seen to have heavily inspired the Fatah Party’s foundational doctrine, which argued the necessity of armed struggle as a means of national liberation. The expulsion of between 800,000 to 900,000 Pieds-noirs settlers, along with France’s occupying forces, from Algeria in 1962, long served as a major inspiration for the Palestinian resistance, in particular the Fatah Party.
In the immediate aftermath of Operation al-Aqsa Flood, the abovementioned quote from Fanon’s seminal work ‘The Wretched of the Earth ’ was once again popularised as a defense of the October 7, 2023, attack, masterminded by the Qassam Brigades of Hamas. A popular critique of this line of thinking was that the violence witnessed that day could not overcome Israel’s violence and that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is too different to that of the French occupation of Algeria for the analogy to work.
As is the case with analogies, they are not perfect, nor are they meant to be. What Yahya Sinwar, the head of the Qassam Brigades, Mohammed al-Deif, and others who engineered the October 7 offensive were doing was challenging the occupier in an unprecedented manner. Whether they understood the full extent to which Israel was willing to go in response is somewhat irrelevant to the conversation at hand; instead, what is important is the way things have played out.
With modern weapons and technology, Israel has put on display the colonial mindset. There is no argument to present that the genocide in Gaza is rational; it is indiscriminate, it has been an extermination, and as we have seen, there has been no carefully calibrated plan. Instead, the Zionists have lashed out on every conceivable front, and as a result, the global public has rallied against them. As Sinwar predicted, Tel Aviv’s totally irrational behavior has led to regional confrontation, and before it is his ultimatum.
‘Greater Violence’ and Abandoning Resistance
For those who have familiarised themselves with Frantz Fanon’s work, another concept he introduces is the concept of the native wrestling back his humanity through the use of armed struggle. In the Palestinian experience, this certainly applies.
The origin of the modern Palestinian liberation movement is often traced back to around 1918. The Urban Palestinian population evidently contributed in the early stages of the national movement to its concepts and demands, with the likes of the Muslim-Christian Associations that were established as political clubs contributing towards this. As influential Palestinian journalist, writer, and PFLP official Ghassan Kanafani discussed, the semi-feudal and religious nature of Palestine’s leadership had its various fallbacks, but would eventually contribute to encouraging a series of revolts.
Palestine’s masses, during the formative days of its national movement under the British Mandate, were not the urban communities; instead, they were the Fellaheen (farmers and agricultural workers). These workers would form the backbone of each revolt against the British and Zionists between 1921 and 1933.
During the early 1930s, one of the central figures in the history of Palestinian resistance, Sheikh Izz ad-Deen al-Qassam, would begin training workers he recruited in Haifa and carrying out armed attacks against British-Zionist targets. “It is a Jihad of victory of martyrdom” was the slogan that the Sheikh developed, one that the spokesperson for Hamas’ armed wing, Abu Obeida, would repeat in every televised speech following October 7, 2023.
The most iconic artwork, literature and songs representing Palestinian national identity have long been centered around the Fellaheen, the people of the countryside, taking specific pride in those who resisted with whatever means were available. A gun, hand grenade, or stone- whatever tools were available- it didn’t matter; the theme was struggle.
In the Palestinian experience, an entire culture of resistance was forged through generations of armed revolt and accompanying forms of struggle, shaping an identity, centering the concept of standing up for oneself against all odds. Palestine’s movement for national liberation has been predominantly led, post-1948, by the refugee population, whether they be the internally displaced in Gaza, the people of the camps in the occupied West Bank, or the diaspora who live in exile in neighboring nations.
Whether we look to the Arab Revolt between 1936-39, the resistance to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine 1947-49, the historic battle of Karameh in 1968 or even the 1982 war, none of these represented victories and yet each ended up representing a means to an end. Palestinian resistance fighters have employed a large range of tactics throughout different eras of their struggle, some in order to raise awareness for their cause, some to achieve tactical victories and oftentimes as a means of reacting to the violence inflicted against themselves.
Israel’s obsession with disarmament, which currently fits into a larger regional push from Washington and Tel Aviv, is not about conflict resolution; it is about domination and submission. The idea is to remove the means of the Palestinians to fight back, so that they are totally at the mercy of the occupying regime.
Hamas, along with almost a dozen other resistance factions in Gaza, seeks to achieve a resolution through a phased disarmament scheme, where their weapons will be stored and only obtained by a future Palestinian State. They will not accept Israel’s demands that they surrender.
There is no nation on earth that is disarmed and is forbidden from having its own military. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly stated that his government’s intent is to prevent a Palestinian State at all costs, while his opposition also opposes any deal that will lead to a State of Palestine. Disarmament is a means to destroy the national struggle of the land’s indigenous inhabitants, which the people understand well.
“Your steadfastness, despite abandonment. Your patience, your sacrifice, and your defiance of oppression and deprivation are what enrages your enemy the most. The night will inevitably come to an end. Victory comes with patience, and relief with hardship. And with every hardship there is ease.” – Huthaifa Samir al-Kahlout (Abu Obeida), the former spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, addressing the people of Gaza in a final speech prior to his assassination.
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
September 2, 2026 -
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Zionism
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