The zionist entity, a.k.a. the racial colony of israel, responded to the October 7 guerrilla act of resistance by the Gaza-based Islamic Resistance Movement – Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, Hamas – and its partners in the Popular Resistance Committees by launching a massive air bombardment of the besieged Gaza enclave, followed by a ground offensive that caused near total destruction, huge loss of lives, famine and disease throughout the colonized and besieged Gaza Strip. A year since the onset of the genocide, the official number of Gazans murdered by the zionist entity stands at 42,000, some 40 per cent of whom are women and children (not including people buried under the rubble, nor people who died of hunger and disease); 97,000 injured people and 1.9 million people displaced – some 90 per cent of the population. Unofficial figures estimate the casualties at anything between 186,000 [i] and 512,000. [ii]
While perpetrating the Gaza genocide, the israeli military also killed over 530 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in the year between October 2023 and October 2024, [iii] and Jewish settlers have continued to harass Palestinian civilians, demolish their homes and expel them under the watch of entity’s security forces, while the construction of illegal Jewish settlements has substantively expanded, [iv] and the situation of Palestinian civilians in occupied Al Quds has been the worst it has been in the past forty years. In recent weeks, the Zionist entity has escalated the war to attack Lebanon, displacing 1.2m people, allegedly fighting the resistance organisation Hizballah, and threatening to retaliate against Iran which has successfully launched ballistic missiles against the entity.
The israeli assault of the Gaza Strip was termed “a textbook case of genocide” [v] by Palestinians and millions of their supporters, and by international bodies, including the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967. [vi] The Gaza genocide, vehemently denied by israel and its Zionist supporters, continues the ongoing zionist settler colonial resolve to eliminate the Palestinian natives, in line with their racialization by the Zionist movement that, since its inception in the late nineteenth century, has construced white European Jews as a superior race and Palestinians as well as non-European and Arab Jews as an inferior race, [vii]and conducted a perpetual war against the Palestinian people.
Israeli historian Dotan Halevi [viii] reminds us that Gaza was once a thriving trade port which lost its importance with the construction of the Suez Canal. The Gaza Strip remained in Egyptian hands after the 1948 Nakba, but it is an archetypical product of the Nakba – 200,000Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes settled in the Gaza Strip and today 86 per cent of Gazans are Nakba refugees and their descendants. The Strip was captured by the zionist entity in the 1956 Suez war and again in the 1967 war, and israel attacked it brutally several times, keeping it under a land, sea and air blockade since 2007. In 2008-9 israel invaded Gaza resulting in more than 1,000 deaths and widespread destruction of homes, schools and hospitals. In 2012 another invasion led to more than 100 people being killed, and in 2014, israel conducted a major invasion, its soldiers murdering 2,251 Palestinian people,including 551 children. The 2014 invasion resulted in extensive destruction, damaging 25 per cent of homes in Gaza city and 70 per cent of homes in Beit Hanoun. Another attack, in 2021, saw 256 Palestinians being killed by the israeli military. [ix]According to Halevi, though for most Israeli Jews the Gaza Strip had simply “always been there,” the Gazans, like all colonised Palestinians, have always resisted the Zionist violence and blockade.
The history of Palestinian resistance to colonisation and racialisation dates much earlier than the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist colonists expelled and murdered some 800,000 Palestinians, depopulated more than 500 villages and urban neighbourhoods, and replacing them with Jewish settlements and towns. [x]
Between 1936 and 1939, opposing the arrival of Jewish settlers, Palestinians staged the Great Palestinian Revolt, which, according to Ghassan Kanafani, [xi]had three main demands: an immediate stop to Jewish immigration to Palestine, the prohibition of the transfer of the ownership of Palestinian Arab lands to Jewish settlers, and the establishment of a democratic government in which Palestinian Arabs would have the largest share in conformity with their numerical superiority. Considering these demands quote ‘bombastic’, Kanafani writes that the revolt has its real roots in “the fact that the acute conflicts involved in the transformation of Palestinian society from an Arab agricultural-feudal-clerical one into a Zionist (Western) industrial bourgeois one, had reached their climax.” The revolt consisted of an armed insurgency and of attacks on British and zionist targets, a general strike, and, in the second phase “large swaths of the hilly Palestinian interior, including for a time the Old City of Jerusalem, fell fully under rebel control. Rebels established institutions, most significantly courts and a postal service, to replace the British Mandate structures they sought to dismantle.” The revolt was however suppressed by the British forces and by zionist militias armed and trained by the British authorities and was brought to an end by the combined impact of the British diplomatic and military efforts in the summer of 1939. In all, some 5,000 Palestinians were killed and nearly 15,000 wounded. The Palestinian leadership was exiled, assassinated, imprisoned, and made to turn against one another and the combined British-Zionist assault on Palestinian political and social life during the revolt had a long-lasting impact. [xii] The repression of the Great Revolt did not prevent many Palestinians taking active part in defending their villages and towns against zionist attacks during the 1948 Nakba, and in fact, as many Palestinians say, for them resistance is existence.
Two noteworthy acts of resistance were of course the Palestinian intifadas. The first, largely unarmed uprising, from 1987 to 1993, was characterised by protests, barricading, civil disobedience and boycotts, and the throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Israel responded brutally, killing 1,087 Palestinians, including 240 children. The second Intifada (2000-2005) was an armed uprising, including suicide bombings, leading to the killing of over 1,000 israelis and nearly 5,000 Palestinians. Both Intifadas, brutally repressed by the zionist entity, are hailed by Palestinian protestors; as we all chant ‘there is only one solution, intifada, revolution’…
In Gaza, the 2018-19 Great March of Return was a series of demonstrations held each Friday near the Gaza-Israel border, in which protestors demanded the return of Palestinian refugees to lands they were displaced from, and in which israeli forces killed 223 Palestinians and shot and maimed thousands of unarmed protestors. [xiii]
Having established the history of the Palestinian resistance to the colonisation of Palestine, I want to say something about the history of Jewish resistance prior to the establishment of the racial colony of israel. Quite apart from Jewish settlers resisting Ottoman and British colonialism in Palestine, Jewish people also resisted their oppression and incarceration during the Nazi genocide. In fact, October 7 marks another anniversary, that of the 1944 revolt by Jewish prisoners in the largest Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, when 200 Sonderkommando members rose against their Nazi guards. The well planned and executed revolt, through it led to the escape of the prisoners, ended with the Nazis killing 250 Jews, including the Sonderkommando leadership. [xiv] Another well-known uprising by Jewish people against the Nazis was the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising. And yet another October Jewish act of resistance was the October 14, 1943 uprising by Jewish prisoners in the Sobibor concentration camp, who killed 11 members of the SS staff, including the camp’s deputy commander. While 300 prisoners escaped breaking through the barbed wire and risking their lives in the minefield surrounding the camp, only about 50 of them survived the war. [xv] I commemorate these heroic acts of resistance with awe and respect.
In the midst of the death, destruction and chaos caused by the Gaza genocide, It is truly remarkable that the Palestinian insurgents, despite their relatively small numbers and lack of advanced military hardware, and the impossibly difficult conditions from which they launched their attack on southern israel, have nonetheless succeeded to hold on and prevent the numerically superior, better equipped and western-funded israeli military from achieving victory. Among many Palestinian analyses, Toufic Haddad’s thorough analysis of the 7 October act of resistance reminds us that “Hamas did its homework and Israel was assumptive and arrogant, believing it had gotten to the stage of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience at the same time.” [xvi] Calling the act of guerrilla resistance Gaza’s “Warsaw uprising moment,” Gaza academic Haidar Eid wrote already on October 10, 2023: “Instead of waiting for Israel’s ‘generosity’ when it decides, through mediators, to open one of the seven gates of the largest open-air prisons on earth, the inmates – having learned from the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 – decided to bring it down themselves… The resistance movements in Gaza, right and left, have decided to turn the table upside down. They have given the Palestinian struggle a new impetus, a clear direction towards liberation and decolonisation”. [xvii]
Beside the refusal to admit that israel’s decimation of Gaza constitutes genocide and to contextualize the Palestinian act of resistance in the history of the colonization of Palestine, the Nakba, and the 1967 occupation, israel and its imperial western backers, as well as many liberals, not merely liberal Zionists, rushed to condemn Hamas of committing a “crime against humanity” and to accuse supporters of Palestine of promoting terrorism and of antisemitism. Responding to the criticism of Hamas and its resistance partners by various Western bodies, including left wing commentators, Palestinian academic Abdaljawad Omar writes that “the space for Palestinians to articulate their struggle is confined within legal constructs and liberal narratives of victimhood, which offer only a superficial treatment of agency, civil resistance and nonviolene, ignoring the harsh realities Palestinians face and the conditions that breed Palestinian liberation organizations.” This reminds us to rescue our antiracist analysis from liberal cooptation, and to keep anticolonial resistance to the fore.
Omar’s and Haddad’s analyses reiterate the nature of the Palestinian military strategy as guerrilla tactic “aimed not just to thwart Israeli efforts to retake land but also to hold areas for negotiation, complicating and impeding an easy Israeli counterattack.” [xviii] This tactic resulted in the Gaza genocide, but that also managed to continue to engage the Israeli military, ranked 18th in the list of the world’s mightiest armed forces and incur the resistance by Hizballah and other forces in Yemen and Iran.
When speaking about Gaza we must acknowledge that “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” (Toufan Al Aqsa) was a major military offensive against the holistic regime and apparatus of control that contained, starved, and repressed Gaza militarily, politically, and in terms of civilian life. The operation was a strategic gambit in an effort to change the rules of the game, both in the long term as well as the short,” as Haddad writes.
We must also bear in mind that all the relentless ongoing solidarity work by countless supporters, including many Jewish anti-zionist activists throughout the world – including me, a Palestine-born Jewish former settler (settler being a material and social relation) turned pro-Palestine activist immediately after the 1967 Naksa – pales into insignificance by comparison with the powerful Palestinian resistance, courage and Sumoud in the face of the appalling genocide inflicted upon Gaza and its people by the racial colony of israel and its imperial capitalist sponsors.
[i] Khatib, R., M. Mckee, S. Yusuf (2024), “Counting the dead in Gaza: Difficult but essential,” The Lancet, 5 July, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)01169-3
[ii] Abulhawa, S. (2024), “Math proves that Israel’s stated goals are an epic lie,” Electronic Intifada, 27 June, https://electronicintifada.net/content/math-proves-israels-stated-goals-are-epic-lie/
[iii] Al Jazeera, “Israel kills more than 500 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7,” 16 May, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/16/israel-kills-more-than-500-palestinians-in-the-west-bank-since-october-7.
[iv] United Nations Human Rights, “UN human rights chief deplores new moves to expand Israeli settlements in occupied West Bank,” 8 March 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/03/un-human-rights-chief-deplores-new-moves-expand-israeli-settlements-occupied
[v] Raz Segal, “A textbook case of genocide,” Jewish Currents, 13 October 2023, https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
[vi] OCHA, Anatomy of a Genocide – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese (A/HRC/55/73), https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/anatomy-genocide-report-special-rapporteur-situation-human-rights-palestinian-territories-occupied-1967-francesca-albanese-ahrc5573-advance-unedited-version
[vii] Ronit Lentin, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
[viii] Dotan Halevi, “Getting Gaza out of the Strip,” Hazman Hazeh, August 2024, https://hazmanhazeh.org.il/gazza-strip/
[ix] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza–Israel_conflict
[x] See, inter alia, Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford: Oneworld Publications 2006.
[xi] Ghassan Kanafani, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, New York: Committee for Democratic Palestine, 1972.
[xii] Great Arab Revolt 1939-39: A Popular Uprising Facing Ruthless Repression, https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/158/great-arab-revolt-1936-1939
[xiii] Hathifa Fayyad, “Gaza’s Great March of Return Protests Explained,” Al Jazeera, 30 March 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/3/30/gazas-great-march-of-return-protests-explained
[xiv] Dan Cohen, “Palestine and the forgotten Jewish October 7 Revolt,” Uncaptured Media, 8 October 2024, https://www.uncaptured.media/p/palestine-and-the-forgotten-jewish
[xv] Adi Callai, ‘The Gaza ghetto uprising,” YouTube, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt_1k7nSv1M&t=34s
[xvi] Toufic Hadda, “Palestinian resistance and the war in Gaza,” New Politics, XIX(4), Winter 2024, https://newpol.org/issue_post/palestinian-resistance-and-the-war-in-gaza/
[xvii] Haidar Eid, “Gaza 2023: Our Warsaw uprising moment,” Al Jazeera, 10 October 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/10/gaza-2023-our-warsaw-uprising-moment
[xviii] Abdaljawad Omar, “An interview with Abdaljawad Omar on October 7th and the Palestinian resistance,” Louis Allday, Ebb, Issue 1, January 2024: 9.