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<h1 class="reader-title">Palestinian Popular Resistance Must Be
Free of PA Impositions</h1>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time">August 23,2018<br>
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<p><strong>By Ramona Wadi</strong></p>
<p>With the Bedouin village of Khan Al-Ahmar still
targeted by Israel for demolition, Palestinian
Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has availed
himself of the opportunity to call for
mobilization in the form of popular resistance.
This, he maintains, is “the only means of
struggle towards independence and statehood”, to
the exclusion of all other forms of
anti-colonial struggle. Khan al-Ahmar’s context,
however, was necessary for Abbas to make his
argument.</p>
<p>In other remarks during the 29thmeeting of the
Palestinian Central Council, he reiterated his
authoritarian plans for Gaza and for
reconciliation to happen on terms that have been
imposed by the international community upon the
Palestinians. If popular resistance is
implemented according to Abbas’s directives, it
will undoubtedly be a limited endeavor, fraught
with restrictions and transformed into another
tool for the PA to allow Israel to complete its
colonization of the whole of Palestine.</p>
<p>Just as Abbas wishes to eliminate all other
possibilities of the Palestinian leadership,
“popular resistance” in PA rhetoric means
abandoning all other legitimate forms of
resistance for one that is easier to control in
terms of conforming to the authority’s demands.
Furthermore, endorsement of popular resistance
by the PA is being used to project purported
differences between Gaza and the occupied West
Bank, despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza
are the embodiment of popular resistance as part
of the collective struggle for freedom from
Israel’s occupation.</p>
<p>The PA has often called for popular resistance,
only to distance itself from the outcome on many
occasions while letting Palestinians become
fodder for Israeli jails. It is clear,
therefore, that the Ramallah authority utilizes
popular resistance to embellish its rhetoric.
When Palestinians in the occupied West Bank
protest against Abbas’s punitive measures
imposed on the people in Gaza, for example, the
PA’s security services never hesitate to target
peaceful demonstrators with excessive violence.
A recent protest at the PLO Headquarters in
Ramallah saw PA security officers tearing down
the placards of activists asking Abbas to lift
his sanctions on Gaza.</p>
<p>The PA is trying hard to monopolize Palestinian
popular resistance through differentiation. If
popular resistance is restricted to occasional
demonstrations against Israeli violations, or if
it is necessary to promote any PA diplomatic
stunts abroad, Abbas and his aides do not
hesitate to endorse it. If, however,
Palestinians utilize popular resistance to
protest against PA violations, there are no
qualms about using violence to disperse
protestors. Hence, it is clear that in the PA’s
vision of popular resistance, it is the same
individuals who determine what popular protest
is and how it should be utilized. The result is
that such protest becomes yet another form of PA
control over Palestinian resilience and
resistance to Israel’s military occupation.</p>
<p>Popular resistance requires no endorsements or
exhortations from Abbas. The Palestinian concept
of liberation is not derived from PA “sacred
security cooperation” with Israel and the
international community. If the PA thinks it can
manipulate the concept of popular resistance to
be attributed to their leaders, their political
delusion is even greater than it seems. This is
especially so given that there is no denying
that the Palestinians have decided to implement
popular resistance as part of the struggle
against all forms of oppression, including the
PA’s own collaboration with Israel.</p>
<p><i><span>– Ramona Wadi is a staff writer for
Middle East Monitor, where this article was
originally <a
href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180822-palestinian-popular-resistance-must-be-free-of-pa-impositions/">published</a>.
She contributed this article to
PalestineChronicle.com.</span></i></p>
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