[News] Palestinians are showing that they will not be erased

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Palestinians are showing that they will not be erased

*Palestinians have reminded the world of their existence, and determination
to resist colonial oppression, in the only way that works.*

   - [image: M Muhannad Ayyash]
   <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/mark_muhannad_ayyash_200706132625995>
   M Muhannad Ayyash
   <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/mark_muhannad_ayyash_200706132625995>
   Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada.
   -
   https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/10/palestinians-are-showing-that-they-will-not-be-erased

Published On 10 Oct 2023
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[image: An Israeli missile launched from the Iron Dome defence missile
system attempts to intercept a rocket, fired from the Gaza Strip, over the
city of Netivot in southern Israel on October 8, 2023.]
An Israeli missile launched from the Iron Dome defence missile system
attempts to intercept a rocket, fired from the Gaza Strip, over the city of
Netivot in southern Israel on October 8, 2023 [Mahmud Hams/AFP]

For decades, Israel, aided and abetted by the American empire, has sought
to politically erase Palestine from the map. Over the past few days,
Palestinians have proved, once again, that they won’t easily give up their
indigenous claim to and sovereignty over the land stolen from them.

I do not use “sovereignty” here to mean “the authority to govern a land” in
the narrow Euro-American sense. Rather, I’m speaking of an authority to
govern that stems from the deep, non-utilitarian connection between a
people and their ancestral land – a connection that renders meaningless all
other political impositions.

That deep connection between Palestinians and Palestine is exactly what the
Israeli state has long been seeking to erase.

Recently, efforts to normalise relations between Israel and Arab states,
and especially between Israel and Saudi Arabia, have intensified this
erasure. With every step towards normalisation, more and more people around
the world, including top diplomats and politicians, bought into the idea
that the Middle East has become a region where Palestinians do not matter,
where Palestinian aspirations for freedom, liberation, and sovereignty do
not figure into the future of the region.

Palestinians have, for decades, tried to put under a global spotlight the
violence Israel has been inflicting on them on a daily basis. They recorded
all the killings, the torture and the abuse. They catalogued the stolen
homes, lands and other vital resources. They documented in painstaking
detail how Israeli state violence deprives them of their freedom and
dignity, and harasses and abuses them on a regular basis, in blatant
violation of international law.

How did the leading members of the international community respond to all
this evidence of Israel’s relentless brutality?

They responded with something much worse than silence.

They voiced their support, repeatedly and loudly, for Israel. They aided
and abetted Israel’s colonial oppression and basically encouraged it to
intensify its efforts to expel Palestinians from their remaining lands and
erase Palestine from history and global politics.

Palestinians tried diplomacy, political advocacy, and all types of armed
and unarmed resistance and protest to get the world’s attention. They
pleaded their case over and over to anyone who listened, but all that
effort has not brought their situation to a stasis – in fact, their
situation has gotten worse.

As Israel intensified its efforts to erase Palestine and Palestinian people
from Arab and global consciousness, Palestinians found themselves at a
crossroads.

They could continue to try and plead their case, from within the confines
of their prison, obeying the rules of those who imprison them, and hope
that someone with some humanity would eventually intervene to stop their
constant brutalisation. Or they could start acting in a manner that
responds to the brutal, inhumane system in which their tragedy is playing
out in accordance with that system’s internal logic.

Looking at the states holding leadership positions in the global arena –
states that have a say over the fate of Palestinians, there is one clear
thing: these states, including Israel, and its main protector the US,
achieved their positions of influence, power and security through organised
state violence. No state or actor in this current system can gain enough
authority and power to ensure its safety and dictate its will on the global
community by merely speaking of higher ideals. In fact, higher ideals are
proclaimed in this wretched world order only to conceal the brutal violence
required to gain and maintain any authority whatsoever.

As such, mirroring the behaviour of the states oppressing Palestinians
through acts of organised violence emerged as a rational way forward for
the Palestinian struggle.

Many label such actions by the colonised as “terror”, as if that violence
is somehow worse than the much more systematic and thus far-reaching and
long-term state violence perpetrated by the coloniser. Others say this
course of action is “irrational” because the colonised are too weak to wage
a battle of organised violence against mighty states whose capacities for
violence cannot be matched by stateless, weakened, suffocated peoples like
the Palestinians.

This latter point is, of course, true, but this is an observation that is
not lost on the colonised.

The recent attacks on Israel from Gaza are not aimed at immediately
liberating Palestine, even if that discourse is sometimes used by the
resistance. Rather, these operations are meant to change the outlook and
dynamic of the struggle. They are meant to shake up the current
international consensus, which holds that Palestine is a lost cause and
should be completely ignored and eventually forgotten. These operations are
reminders – and from the viewpoint of those who call for organised armed
resistance, the only ones that will work in this system – that Palestinians
exist and will never give up their right to live as a free and sovereign
people on their lands.

These operations will not change the current conditions on the ground for
Palestinians. And it is probable that their conditions will be made worse.
But they are not going to be made worse because of these operations: they
are going to be made worse by the ongoing actions of the Israeli state,
which is determined, regardless of how Palestinians resist, to erase
Palestine and officially create what they already achieved in practice:
exclusive Israeli-Jewish sovereignty over the entire land of Palestine. So
yes, the colonised are outmatched in the relations of force, but in this
colonial world order, the colonised have observed clearly and unambiguously
that they only receive attention and recognition of their existence when
they engage in organised violence. Otherwise, they are killed and erased
anyway, and without states that can make a difference paying any attention.

This is the state of affairs that journalists, academics, and politicians
in powerful states want to return to when they ask for de-escalation and
calm: a slow, gradual, brutal erasure of Palestine. In this reality, there
is no calm, there is no de-escalation; there is no break for Palestinians
from the brutal yoke of Israeli settler colonial power.

I think that I can safely predict that the Israeli government, as well as
politicians and foreign policy experts in the US and elsewhere, are now
considering all of these developments purely in security terms. They will
focus on the intelligence failure and other technical security failures
that allowed the Palestinian fighters to undertake Saturday’s operation.
They will focus on their continuing brutal bombing of the Gaza Strip. They
will focus on their continued expulsion of Palestinians, their official
annexation of even more Palestinian land, and the erasure of Palestine. In
short, they will try and carry on business as usual.

But here’s the most important point: Palestinians will not be erased, and
the majority of people in the region and many people in other regions of
the world understand and support the just Palestinian struggle. The people
of Palestine will continue to refuse this fate of erasure that all these
great powers have determined should be theirs. People from across the world
will continue to see their struggles reflected in the Palestinian struggle,
ensuring that Palestine as a political story, a political vision, and as a
revelation of the current political conditions and systems of power, will
never be erased from the hearts and minds of people the world over.

This, and not the current configuration of the relations of force that
favour Israel, will be what stands the test of time. The Palestinian
revolutionary spirit that shows the foundational violence and injustice of
this colonial world order and insists on liberation and the creation of an
alternative system will outlast all of the powerful states who are
currently ruling the world and plotting to erase Palestine from the map.

*The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.   *
------------------------------

   - [image: M Muhannad Ayyash]
   <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/mark_muhannad_ayyash_200706132625995>
   M Muhannad Ayyash
   <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/mark_muhannad_ayyash_200706132625995>
   Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada.
   Ayyash is the author of A Hermeneutics of Violence (UTP, 2019), and a
   policy analyst at Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. He was born
   and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds, before immigrating to Canada where he is now
   a Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University. He is currently writing
   a book on settler colonial sovereignty.
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