[News] Young Palestinians are teaching us how to resist

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Young Palestinians are teaching us how to resist

Nadia Naser-Najjab 
<https://electronicintifada.net/people/nadia-naser-najjab> 14 October 2015
*https://electronicintifada.net/content/young-palestinians-are-teaching-us-how-resist/14918*

The Palestinian generation that came of age in the first intifada 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/first-intifada> during the late 
1980s has frequently decried its successors.

Many times we have accused younger generations of being apolitical and 
politically uneducated. I have lost count of the number of times that I 
have heard the accusation that younger Palestinians are self-absorbed; 
that they do not understand the meaning of collective resistance and 
sacrifice.

Upon listening to these complaints, you would be forgiven for believing 
that the very idea of popular resistance did not exist until my 
generation came along. But recent events in Palestine have shown us just 
how wrong and unfair these criticisms were — there was nothing unique 
about the generation that came of age in the first intifada.

As philosopher Frantz Fanon 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/frantz-fanon> taught, popular 
struggle originates <http://www.openanthropology.org/fanonviolence.htm> 
within the conditions of colonialism itself, within the various ways in 
which it impinges upon, and steadily degrades, the conditions of 
everyday existence.

Admittedly, some things never change. The response of the Israeli 
government to recent events clearly derives from an unwavering and 
unyielding colonial mindset. Thus, by virtue of the fact that the 
natives cannot have political demands, the Israeli colonial 
administrators have deemed the current “disturbances” to be a “law and 
order” issue.

Order and tranquillity will be restored once the native population are 
engaged with blunt force — this, after all, is the only language “they” 
can be expected to understand. For Palestinians, these words have a 
wearying familiarity — the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/benjamin-netanyahu> and Moshe 
Yaalon <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/moshe-yaalon-0> are part of 
a colonial lineage which can be traced back to Yitzhak Rabin 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/yitzhak-rabin> and beyond.

During the first intifada, Rabin, then defense minister, called 
<http://articles.latimes.com/1990-06-22/news/mn-431_1_rabin-ordered> 
upon the Israeli army to “break the bones” of Palestinian protesters; 
now the current administrators of colonial power effectively call for 
the same.


    Challenges

But some things do undeniably change. Aside from anything else, the 
challenges which confront young Palestinians are considerably more 
imposing than the ones faced by my generation. During the first 
intifada, our main opponent was the Israeli army.

The colonial settlement 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/israeli-settlements> of the West 
Bank was still limited and the settlers’ 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/israeli-settlers> involvement in 
the first intifada was equally as limited. Today, many new settlements 
are constructed in close proximity to Palestinian population centers.

Additionally, in the first intifada, Palestinian activists enjoyed 
relative freedom of movement and were able to travel through cities, 
villages and refugee camps to organize sit-ins, vigils, strikes and 
seminars.

Arab and international opinion was also more supportive. Israeli 
solidarity groups lent their assistance to our struggle and worked to 
change public opinion in their society.

Changes in all of these respects have introduced new dimensions to the 
question of Palestinian struggle.

The younger generation has found innovative ways of responding to this 
changed reality. It has identified new ways of creating political and 
social consciousness — “Resist to exist” was one particularly striking 
slogan which I saw posted on Facebook the other day.

Images of incarceration, brutalization and dehumanization now circulate 
through social models, creating new solidarities and vernaculars of 
struggle. The two elements imply each other: as the political realities 
adjust, so too do the forms of resistance.

However, the challenges which confront young Palestinians are more than 
just geographical; they are also political. Limited Palestinian 
political autonomy, along with the creation of a self-governing 
political entity — the Palestinian Authority 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/palestinian-authority> — has become 
one of the ways in which the occupation has strengthened and 
consolidated its hold over territory and population.

Upon reading and watching interviews with younger Palestinians, I am 
frequently struck by how far their political mindset diverges from that 
of my own generation.

We looked to phrase our struggle within an internationally accepted 
political vernacular, and to align ourselves with broader political 
dynamics; we looked to the Unified National Leadership to coordinate the 
day-to-day tactics and strategies of resistance during the first 
intifada, and to the Palestine Liberation Organization 
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/plo> as the symbolic embodiment of 
the Palestinian national struggle.

In vivid and direct contrast, one member of the younger vanguard 
recently informed <http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=768091> the 
Ma’an News Agency that “we don’t care about leaders. We will be the 
leaders,” while another interviewee abruptly referred to the Palestinian 
Authority as “traitors.”

The ongoing developments within the West Bank correspond to a pronounced 
crisis of Palestinian political leadership. The current antagonism 
appears to be directed as much towards one of the central mechanisms of 
colonial power — a discredited Palestinian political leadership that has 
effectively perpetuated a subcontracting 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/mahmoud-abbas-collaboration-israeli-army-secret-police-sacred> 
of the occupation — as to its originating point.


    Strategic management

In a number of key respects, any distinction between the two is, of 
course, redundant. In addition to its formidable array of instruments of 
coercion and force, the occupation is therefore secured by more subtle 
forms of political influence which co-opt and strategically manage the 
agency of local partners — the PA being a case in point.

 From this perspective, the formal peace process can be retrospectively 
analyzed as a reconfiguration of relations of domination and control: 
“compromise” has entrenched occupation; “self-governance” has sanctified 
inefficiency and corruption; “peace” has become equated with moral and 
political degradation.

All of this perhaps goes some way towards explaining why I have not 
heard the younger generation issue one single appeal to the Palestinian 
political leadership.

It is time for those of us who engaged in the first intifada to admit 
our essential irrelevance. Not only because circumstances have changed, 
but also because the strategies and approaches which we advocated have 
since been so thoroughly discredited.

For all our efforts, sacrifices and limited advances, we ultimately 
contributed to a political settlement which reinforced and consolidated 
the conditions and relations of occupation. We lost sight of the 
essential fact that, as Fanon once observed 
<https://books.google.com/books?id=-XGKFJq4eccC&pg=PA92&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false>, 
“colonialism never gives anything away for nothing.”

Far from teaching the new generation of Palestinians “lessons” about our 
struggle, it is my generation who should be seeking to learn.

/Dr. Nadia Naser-Najjab is an associate research fellow at the European 
Center of Palestine Studies-Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the 
University of Exeter./

-- 
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