Axes of Resistance
Attrition amid Israel’s Occupation
Séamus Malekafzali
Francis Frith, Gaza (The Old Town), 1857
When [Anwar] Sadat visited Israel ... I can’t describe my feelings. There was some astonishment, although I can’t say the visit surprised me. The sun was bright that day, even though I was shut up in this very room, behind the desk. I’d closed all the inner and outer windows. I felt the sun was entering through the cracks in the windows and entering the sitting room. Like a foreign aggression against my inner peace. I sat and wrote “The Coffin and the Mourners, Together.” It was the last thing I wrote before a long period of silence. After I finished writing it, I said “I’m tired, and I should go rest for a few weeks.” Some place, Aleppo, Latakia. But I was very nervous and I knew I couldn’t control myself. It was around sunset. I took a sleeping pill, trying to escape through sleep. Two hours later, I woke up, even more nervous and troubled. The darkness was total. That night, I made a serious attempt to commit suicide. —Saadallah Wannous
When discussing the grave hour that we are living through, one would be remiss not to discuss the difficulties faced by the other side of the Manichaean world. Words have escaped all of us in trying to describe the level of suffering that has been wrought upon the Palestinians, something far worse and far deadlier than the Nakba and every wave of expulsion that came after it. The United States and Israel are attempting now to establish a plane of sadistic superiority over the subaltern, where democracy is no longer sought after, the idea of peace is spat upon, and racial extermination is openly celebrated. There will be no returning to the way things were. Whether the end is good or bad, the before is dead and buried. But even in that before, there were signs on the road to Jerusalem.
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In 1980, only a year after peace was brokered between two long-standing foes, an embassy for the State of Israel was opened in Cairo, the first of its kind in the Arab world. Video of the opening looks neither like a diplomatic breakthrough, nor a historic thaw. It evokes a devastating capitulation. As the Israeli flag is raised above the streets of Egypt’s capital, the attendees inside the embassy’s gates applaud—softly, almost paranoid, aware they are not in this land as friends. In the background, Egyptians can be heard screaming from far outside the gates. Looking out from their windows, their faces are in disbelief—forced to look at Israel’s state banner, perhaps for the rest of their lives.
Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was once considered a hero for leading his military against Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, reversing some of the defeats of the Six-Day War from six years earlier. The 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, however, made Sadat a pariah. Only a year after the embassy opened, he was assassinated. While attending a military parade celebrating the crossing of the Suez—when Egyptian soldiers moved to retake the Sinai Peninsula from the Israeli occupation—he was killed by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad armed with assault rifles and grenades. Today, Sadat’s name is emblazoned on street signs in Egypt, Lebanon, and even inside Israel itself, but his name rarely echoes beyond them. Sadat’s legacy is unable to move hearts. His portrait no longer graces the walls in Beirut. This is, instead, the honor of his predecessor: Gamal Abdel Nasser.
From the perspective of the normalizer, Nasser represented historic defeat. As more and more Arab territory was lost to the State of Israel and its army, his actions led to humiliation after humiliation. The project of pan-Arabism had come to some fruition only to be destroyed under his administration, never to rear its head with such ferocity again—whereas Sadat later reformed the Egyptian military, achieved military successes against the IDF, and achieved peace when no other Arab state would dare tread such a path. So why, then, is Sadat forgotten and Nasser still praised, even by those who neither heard him speak nor lived under his rule?
In the eyes of many, Nasser represents an unbowed Arab leader, unconquered still. Despite the loss of the Sinai to Israeli occupation—to say nothing of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan—he refused to accept the status quo from before he came to power. He refused to change course from his unshakeable tenets of faith: Palestine could not be forgotten, and the Arabs had a collective duty not to forget it either. When Nasser attempted to resign after the 1967 Naksa—or “setback”—thousands upon thousands of Egyptians poured into the streets. They did not ask for further repentance, nor did they celebrate his attempt to leave. Rather, they demanded he stay in office. The alternative—a leader who would take a different course—was unthinkable. After his resignation, seeing how much had been lost in trying to fight for it, Nasser could have recanted, abandoning the Palestinian cause. Instead, he retracted his resignation quickly after, and only three months after the war, Nasser and the Arab League established the Three Nos at a summit in Khartoum: No peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, and no recognition of Israel.
The seeds of the “Axis of Resistance” were planted here in these failures and nourished in the refusal to accept that such a regional situation could remain. There was immense suffering and untold shame, but the solution could not be “normalization,” as other Arab states would soon pursue. Rather, the aim was to refocus all eyes and efforts against Israel by training fighters against a sole enemy and by never relenting.
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Nevertheless, what is broadly known as the Axis of Resistance is a media invention. This term came into being in an Arab newspaper in the early 2000s and then slowly found purchase among politicians in Iran and elsewhere through the 2010s. The reference arguably reached its peak when the war against Gaza escalated and the “unity of the fields” of Palestinian solidarity grew, fields not just physical, but rhetorical, places where support abroad intensifies even as supplies dwindle inside states of siege.
After the Iranian Revolution, there were attempts to build a kind of “Islamic International,” an international coalition that could oppose the West and its attempts to sustain Israel, and in the decades hence, many groups were directly inspired by the founding of the Islamic Republic. (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah have similar iconography for a reason.) But the Axis is rather amorphous, and never commanded full, constant, and outward ideological conformity.
For instance, Hamas, despite its centrality now, was outside the Axis’s fold for years, and this was, in part, due to its tenuous relationship with Syria under Bashar al-Assad. At times, such as in the 2006 Lebanon War, Iranian strategists worked with Hezbollah leaders against Israel. But now, sparked by the actions of only one faction and without prior knowledge among the rest of the makeshift coalition, all these factions, Sunni and Shia, state and non-state, have come together in one way or another to fight Israel. Accordingly, it is now feasible that both Iranian and Yemeni missiles could accompany Iraqi drones, Lebanese fighters, and Palestinian rockets in battles against the IDF.
In other words, when the Axis of Resistance is mentioned in the media—by both its supporters and its opponents—it is important to note that this alliance is not like the Warsaw Pact or even NATO. The Axis is not a defense pact forged by diplomats and signed in stone by their nations leaders as so many unshakeable obligations are. While the level of cooperation between these disparate militias and states has never been higher than in this period, it is not the formal military pact that many would like it to be. There is no central operations room, no codified agreement to defend, no red phone between Naim Qassem and Ali Khamenei.
All these factions agree that Gaza is their red line, but they disagree on several specifications: which red lines, how best to respond to violations, and what the ceiling of their action should be. Strategists from different nations have different political atmospheres back home with more or less room to act. In short, just as the Axis has never been closer to a semblance of cohesion, it has arguably never been more disconnected than it is right now—especially after the fall of Syria to Hay’at Tahrir ash-Sham, whose leader Ahmad al-Shara’a (Abu Muhammad al-Jolani) has said they moved to stop the country from further participating in a regional war that would involve fighting Israel.
After the ending of the first round of fighting, after 15 months of devastation wrought against multiple countries, the factions of the Axis found their fortunes shifted. Hezbollah, once the strongest non-state faction by far, still reels from the destruction of its central leadership and its critical Syrian supply lines, and now, despite retaining its combat abilities, has not responded with its arms to daily bombings of south Lebanon and the presence of Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese side of the border. Iranian promises of retaliation for the soldiers killed in an Israeli attack on Iran’s soil in October have not materialized, the country unable to afford another round of ballistic missile strikes that may have no end in sight. Hamas has replenished its ranks in spades over the course of the war but has not been able to match such a replenishment with a renewed missile capacity, now diminished from the conflict’s start and thus far unable to be resupplied as long as the siege continues. The Houthis, who have emerged undeniably stronger and more capable in every sense since the war’s start, are still left unable to counter Israel on their own. Talk of coordination with the larger Axis has returned to the back burner, almost unremarked upon. With the ceasefire in Gaza destroyed by Israeli bombing and the war having returned to the fore, Yemen has emerged as the only actor abroad to militarily intervene once more, with Hezbollah only releasing a statement asking Arabs and Muslims to “expose” the U.S.–Israeli relationship.
“This narrative, besides being a geopolitical tool, is also a case study of unique malignancy, where the psychosis of replacing the extant reality with the one created by Zionist ideology must be imposed by force, destroying the inconvenient past not just by an internal psychological repression, but by the might of tanks and guns.”
Still, it is of no matter to Israel whether the Axis of Resistance is a true political entity, a bona fide military coalition, or none of the above. All those who fight against Israel will be treated as a threat greater than the sum of their actual parts. This super-coalition supposedly threatens another Holocaust—or another October 7th, which takes up the same space in the consciousness of Israeli officials and many Zionist publics also coalescing around Israeli security interests. The narrative of impending, total destruction is the supporting cornerstone of the overarching Israeli objective: to exterminate Palestinians and to place the entire Middle East under a U.S.–Israel sphere of influence.
This narrative, besides being a geopolitical tool, is also a case study of unique malignancy, where the psychosis of replacing the extant reality with the one created by Zionist ideology must be imposed by force, destroying the inconvenient past not just by an internal psychological repression, but by the might of tanks and guns. Jews must never be allowed to remember the past, the real past, where they were once in ghettos. Jews must never be allowed to remember the ghetto uprisings, the true depths of Jewish culture in Europe, and the ideological roots of Zionism. To do so would reveal how deep the splitting of the ego has become, as Freud posited: where the constant remembrance of repression meets the constant need to impose that same repression on everyone who stands in their way.
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Were one to read only contemporary Zionist texts, one could be forgiven for assuming that Israel was created from nothing. Framed ever so perfectly, photographs of the founding of Tel Aviv often portray a major metropolis that erupted out of the desert through pure tenacity. Seek out the explanations of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, as Ilan Pappé did, and you’ll find the original Palestinian inhabitants hardly mentioned, a narrative in which the Jewish population gained a majority over some sort of race in the late 1800s, and absentee landlords from some unknown place held most of the land before the Jews did. The “Israeli Arabs,” as they would be renamed, are an other: not indigenous inhabitants, these people were travelers from other lands, the real usurpers, the real colonists. By contrast, the Jewish people were returning to their native land and claimed themselves as the real indigenous population. These new myths have been carved in solid granite. They buried the older myths from when colonialism was not a dirty word, when the genocide of the “Red Indian” in America was not spoken about in hushed tones but celebrated as evidence of the valiance of their killers. The essays of Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky openly spoke of invading the land where Arabs lived. Those who love the Israel of the present, Israeli or otherwise, are largely ignorant of the Israel from before, or perhaps more precisely, ignorant when they wish to be.
At the beginning of Israel’s creation, there was a semblance of rugged living. Many Jewish settlers had stolen the homes of Palestinians—everything from lavish villas to regular apartments—but there were also many new kibbutzim built on the frontiers of their new country. These were built on the seized land of former Palestinian villages, whose memories were to be forgotten by the new Jewish village’s future inhabitants. Israel used to be a much poorer country. Israel had an ostensibly left-wing political class—one that still engaged in genocide and imperialist wars of conquest—and the nation styled itself as one that ran on communal living among its settlers. Then, even if it had been manufactured to constitute an ideological project in and of itself, there was a sense of difficulty and evident ruggedness. That Israel no longer exists. Today, Israel’s image tilts squarely toward its Western benefactors, firmly planted in the idea of a modern, prosperous liberal democracy: a “start-up nation” with new ideas, standards of living, and a political culture on par with the nations of Western Europe and North America. Israel has met its goal, as Herzl once envisioned, of becoming the bulwark of Western civilization in Asia.
There are still those who hold onto the vestiges of rugged colonial living in Israel: settlers who work to expand the bounds of settlements, which are illegal under international law. Israel’s government actively supports these projects both rhetorically and with funds from taxpayer coffers, but when settlers set up makeshift houses with bare-bones amnesty—erecting walls, in the dead of night, on Palestinian land in the West Bank—they often come into conflict with both Israeli police and Palestinian residents. Despite the fact that these settlers are a voter base heavily represented in the Israeli government—and amply supported by current Western leadership—Israel is less keen to show off this side of its society. No, the glistening skyscrapers and pristine beaches in Tel Aviv should catch the eye of the woman in Miami; the new economic opportunities should spark the interest of the man in Crown Heights; the man performing Orthodox rituals in full military uniform should move the heart of any synagogue-goer, anywhere.
Israeli leaders would be remiss if they went a single day without referencing the crimes done to Jews in the past. Memory of these historical crimes—and the immense suffering they caused the Jewish people—is meant to reinforce the notion that if Israel did not exist, such things would happen again. But this contradictory acknowledgement of historic suffering alongside the fact that Israel causes such immense and immediate suffering today cannot coexist without being put toward Israel’s raison d’être. Any understanding of rugged living, poverty, suffering, or pain must ultimately communicate the state’s success, security, and unquestioned prosperity for the “Silicon Valley Sparta.” Holocaust survivors are, accordingly, instrumentalized and made into objects in the Israeli media. Often living in abject poverty, many survivors in Israel attest to being abandoned by their government. For the Israeli state, the Holocaust survivor is to be used as a cudgel to beat others with, not to be acknowledged as anything beyond that.
“Here we find the central contradiction of Israel’s self-perpetuating, circular, and paranoid military mindset, one that enacts violence that begets conditions for more violence: the abject hatred at the idea of suffering any pain and humiliation sits uneasily alongside the memory of having once been among the underclass and oppressed.”
Those who came from the concentration camps in the Third Reich were initially called sabonim, a slang term with a wretched phonetic similarity to sabon or soap, derived from the widely circulated but unfounded rumors that such a thing had been made from the bodies of those killed in Polish camps. Often for Israeli statesmen, as it was for far-right Israeli nationalist Meir Kahane, “never again” entails an implicit judgment—sometimes hidden, sometimes not—that Europeans Jews went willingly to the slaughter. In a blunt illustration, one West Bank settler leader has shared an image of Hasidic men with machine guns strapped to their back with the caption, “This ain’t Poland 1942.” The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the valiant effort of Jews to refuse to bow down to the Nazis, to not let fascists decide the hour of their deaths, is repressed in their version of events. The Jew cannot return to the repressed time of what was: pain is aberrant; suffering is for the villain; we are oppressed by the entire world, but we cannot feel it, lest we become what we hate—the poor and the downtrodden.
Here we find the central contradiction of Israel’s self-perpetuating, circular, and paranoid military mindset, one that enacts violence that begets conditions for more violence: the abject hatred at the idea of suffering any pain and humiliation sits uneasily alongside the memory of having once been among the underclass and oppressed. The only way to sustain a fascist state animated by this contradiction is through constant military expansion. This is ultimately a trap laid for oneself, expressed by sabotaging apparently sought-after negotiations and attacking unprovoked so that more attacks might be justified. This approach forces the continuation of wars past and present. Through this project, the world will see that Israel is always under attack, that it needs the West’s uncompromising support, and that there is no way to have peace with the Arab hordes at the gates of not just Jerusalem, but New York, Paris, and Rome. What is uncanny here is the degree to which this mindset is cynical and knowing, yet simultaneously deeply felt and sincere among Israeli nationals. How can we be subjected to this? How can we, a free, Western civilization, be under constant attack? What did we do to deserve this except merely exist?
The mentality of this supposedly native Western society is less an iron dome than a delicate ideological bubble. If it is popped by a drone from Yemen, an echo and reminder of the mass murder perpetrated by Israel’s military in Gaza, mass panic erupts. The missile sirens that wake people up at four in the morning become justification for destroying countries entirely. The potential threat must be stamped out, even as settlers on occupied Syrian land need yet more protection from another potential October 7th from the new Syrian rulers. Never mind that the new Syrian regime has nearly fallen over themselves to say they would never seek to disturb Israel. All the while, the IDF destroys every military asset in the country they can find. Anything that disturbs this bubble, this mirage—in any way, shape, or form—must be punished with full force, even as they send the missiles that eventually find their way back through the threshold.
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When the war began, Mohammed Deif, then the commander-in-chief of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, spoke in terms that indicated his belief that this phase would be the one that would set in motion the liberation of Palestine and an end to humiliation. Since that speech, the Brigades have withstood the most intense siege of the 21st century, but at a cost greater than words could ever describe.
Fanon wrote extensively about the conditions for decolonization and just as well about the dilemma of knowing when such conditions would arrive:
From the point of view of political tactics and History, the liberation of the colonies poses a theoretical problem of crucial importance at the current time: When can it be said that the situation is ripe for a national liberation movement? What should be the first line of action? Because decolonization comes in many shapes, reason wavers and abstains from declaring what is true decolonization and what is not. We shall see that for the politically committed, urgent decisions are needed on means and tactics, i.e., direction and organization. Anything else is but blind voluntarism with the terribly reactionary risks this implies.
New tracks in the way the world runs have been laid, and now we must take stock of where this train has led with clear eyes.
If there is one grave miscalculation made by some of those who support the Palestinian cause, it is assuming that one day the United States will abandon its rabid support of Israel, considering it too much work for what it is worth. The exact opposite has happened. As Israel continues to expand its fronts—demanding southern Syria’s demilitarization and some government ministers even claiming the war should not officially come to a halt until Iran’s government is toppled and its nuclear program destroyed—both parties have ensured that Israel will never face the only thing that has ever affected its decision-making: consequences.
Tens of thousands lie dead. An entire society has been devastated from above in ways once thought unspeakable in the modern day. Israel has ridden this unchecked impunity across all red lines. By force, Israel has dispersed the fronts that once were united in Gaza and imposed a cost on supporting Palestine that could exceed that of all previous wars to liberate it. The land is no longer just occupied with settlements built atop it. Israel is now willing to destroy an entire society with everyone inside it. All this is possible because America would never substantively protest.
This is the difficulty of the current moment for anyone across the world committed to Palestinian resistance: Israel’s inferno continues to burn, but the rapid collapse of the fragile Axis has created a chasm of uncertainty. In the past, before Israel invaded Lebanon, one could argue that Israel would soon reach a point where the consequences of its actions would bite back so severely it would have to retreat. Based on its resilience and resistance, the Axis would be better equipped for the war that was inevitably going to expand into something too unwieldy for the Israeli state. That argument failed to account for how these militias are in a new world, where their respective whims are largely determined by the governments that host them. To illustrate, during the marches in Yemen, speakers like the poet Saqr al-Lahji demanded that Israel retaliate so that they can become more involved, explicitly so that they may expand the war. By contrast, this was not happening in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square.
More generally, there are worries about the economic cost of reconstruction and international isolation. There are questions about why Lebanon—or, indeed, any nation—should bear the brunt of the cost of supporting Palestine for so long. Outside of a more sentimental or romantic feeling of bonded resistance, difficult questions spring up from the deep. How long can this go on? How much can we ask others to bear from within our own comfort? Why should others who have things to lose be forced to lose them for a war that may never be won? Can this be won? Arguments rattle around in the brain about defeatism, about seeing things as they are, about how to understand things clearly or if one is abandoning the cause by thinking about them. After these thoughts clear, there comes a more difficult understanding—one that renders many of these concerns moot.
There is no way out from this equation. If you are strong and oppose Israel, you are Israel’s enemy. If you are weak, doubly so. If you are an Arab, you are a reminder to Israel of its occupation and must either be placed under its heel or destroyed entirely. If you are on land that was promised to Israel in myth-craft, you are to be expelled. If you make peace with them, they dream of one day building settlements on that forbidden land. If you allow your military to be destroyed, hand over your weapons, and insist you will never be a threat, they will continue to push and intensify the occupation to make good on those insistences. There is no escape. If your cities and towns lie between the Nile and the Euphrates, they will come for you eventually.
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In Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas’ The Night, we are told the story of a man’s father who came to Quneitra in 1936. He had been one of the Arab volunteers that went to Palestine to fight against Zionist militias building their power and erecting settlements in the then-British Mandate. After he gives up on that adventure, he stays in Quneitra, a small town in southern Syria, alongside others who decide not to return to the fight. He and his men had been valiant, parading with triumph through the Syrian streets, but they could not match the armed sophistication and organization of their enemies—not then. The father attempts to return to Palestine, to right the wrongs of his past, but is unable. He has missed his moment. When one of his old comrades realizes that he can now see the Israeli flag from his home, he sets himself on fire in front of his family.
Yemeni Brigadier General Abdullah bin Amer commented last year that everyone will pay the price for inaction. The next year, he says, will be worse than the last. Indeed, we are seeing the cost of it now. When Israel faces consequences, it is forced to change its behavior. When it does not, the road to conquest opens wider. Where the occupation is the most direct and severe, many still see a world without occupation, while those outside Palestine—and in the imperial core—see an increasingly blurry and dark future. Before his demise, Yahya Sinwar knew what would be required, speaking in communiques of a war of attrition for which Hamas is prepared: “The longer the war of attrition lasts and the more it expands, the closer we get to Jerusalem—and it may last longer than some expect.”
Nasser and his generation were adults during the Nakba. Cursed by the memory of Palestine from before 1948, they witnessed the initial ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land. The generation following Nasser built the Axis, but they had no direct memory of Palestine prior to the Nakba. Instead, they were tortured by the sight of its ruins—the echoes of what it used to be, reverberating within the walls of refugee camps in Jenin and Jabalia. Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh was born in the camp of al-Shati in North Gaza, around sixteen kilometers from al-Jura, the village his parents were expelled from, which after being depopulated was turned into a national park. Sinwar, the head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, was born in Khan Younis in South Gaza, but his family came from the village of al-Majdal, only five kilometers away from Haniyeh’s. Neither man grew up more than 45 kilometers from his family’s native home, from which they had been forcibly removed. On a map of the United States, it is the distance from the southernmost tip of Staten Island to Washington Heights in Manhattan.
In his semi-autobiographical novel The Thorn and the Carnation, Sinwar describes the conditions in al-Shati as if they were a war in and of itself.
Streams ran through the camp’s alleys, invading the homes and crowding the residents in their small rooms with floors lower than the nearby street level. Time and again, the winter floodwaters surged into our small home’s courtyard and then inside the house where our family had been living [...] Each time, fear gripped me and my three brothers and sister, who were all older than me. My father and mother would rush to lift us off the ground, and my mother would hurriedly raise the bedding before the invading waters soaked it. Being the youngest, I would cling to my mother’s neck alongside my infant sister, who was usually in her arms in such situations. Often, I woke up at night to my mother’s hands shifting me aside to place an aluminum pot or a large clay dish on her bed to catch the water droplets seeping through the crack in the tiled roof covering that small room. [...] I was five years old, and on a morning during winter, when the spring sun was trying to reclaim its natural place and erase the traces of the winter’s dark nightly assault on the camp, my seven-year-old brother, Mohammed, took my hand, and we walked through the camp’s streets to its outskirts where an Egyptian army camp was stationed.
The camps’ terrible conditions were set alight by the war of 1967 by which Israel absorbed all of historic Palestine. Emerging from that loss, Sinwar describes an almost apocalyptic atmosphere: new, unfamiliar faces decide who lives or dies inside the camp; death, mourning, and grief are constant and unceasing; and the resistance fighter—resisting the occupiers with all his might—inspires like no other figure before him. These sacrifices and resistance made an intense impression on Sinwar in his youth. Even when he rose to lead the Gaza Strip, he never weakened in his belief in the ultimate honor: to sacrifice everything—even one’s life and including his own—for the sake of freeing the Palestinian people.
The greatest gift the enemy and the occupation can give me is to assassinate me, so I can go to God as a martyr by their hand. Today, I am 59 years old, and truthfully, I prefer to be killed by an F-16 or missiles, than die from coronavirus, or from a stroke, heart attack, car accident, or any other thing people die from. As you know, at 60 we are closer to death, to dying from natural causes. I prefer to die a martyr than die a meaningless death.
Sinwar’s beliefs were forged and hardened in the fires of the occupation—the destruction wrought against an already battered people. Others who bore witness to these acts by Israel came to the same or similar conclusions: through the invasion of their own lands, like in Lebanon, or as in Iran, through knowing their own leaders benefited from the impunity of Israeli political actors.
Black-and-white photographs depict Historic Palestine as a regular society—not divine, and not perfect beyond comprehension. This was a civilization in which people lived, worked, and loved. They could travel freely, speak their own language, and live on their own property. Those roots of Palestine were torn from the Earth, and its memories were forced to be mediated as if through retelling dreams—what streets they were born on, how the salt of the sea smelled from their homes. This memory drove the fury of those who came afterward. Here is resilience against crimes done to innocents. Here is resistance to losing a historic home forever. This is testament: as long as there is one hand still above the earth, it will claw its way back to Jerusalem.
A crucial question to which I return now is this: if the Palestinians in Beit Hanoun and Jabalia never surrendered, why should any of us?