Armed vs. peaceful resistance What you need to know about Muqawama in Gaza

The word Muqawama in Palestinian lexicon does not need elaboration beyond the immediate meaning Armed vs. peaceful generates among ordinary Palestinians. Only recently, and specifically after the Oslo peace accords and the sudden infusion of western-funded NGOs, did such terms as ‘peaceful resistance’ and ‘non-violent resistance’ begin to emerge within some circles of Palestinian intellectuals. These phrases, however, never truly registered as central to the collective discourse of Palestinians. For them, Muqawama remained: one – indivisible, all encompassing. smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc smc

This assertion should hardly suggest that Palestinians did not resist, in the various stages of their struggle, using non-armed methods. In fact, they have done so for generations. The six-month general strike of April 1936 a culmination of civil disobedience tactics that had been used for years prior to that date. It continued to be used, since then, throughout Palestine, for a century.

The difference between the Palestinian perception of resistance and the western-promoted notion is that Palestinians do not see Muqawama as a liability, nor do they seek to explain, contextualise or justify forms of collective resistance they use. Historically, only circumstances determine the type, time and place for armed or unarmed resistance.

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The western notion, however, predicated on the concept of preferentiality, as in one strategy is better than the other, and that one is ethical, while the other is not. In doing so, this judgmental attitude creates a clear distinction between the ‘peaceful’ Palestinians, dubbed moderate, and the violent ones, dubbed radical.

Moreover, western definitions of resistance are selective. The Ukrainians, for example, are permitted to use arms to repel the Russian army. Palestinians are condemned for doing so when Israel invades and carries out an unparalleled genocide in Gaza.

Though some promoters of certain types of resistance are, perhaps, well intentioned, they seem to fully ignore the historical roots of such language. Yet, by engaging in such condemnatory discourse, they, wittingly or otherwise, reproduce old colonial perceptions of the colonised. Similar language defined colonial Europe’s relationship with virtually all colonised spaces: those who resisted were perceived as savages or terrorists; those who did not, granted no civil or political rights, only the occasional privilege of not being tortured or killed with impunity.

Gaza: heart of resistance

To fully fathom the concept of Muqawama in its Palestinian context, one only needs to look at Gaza. Though the Strip has historically served as the centre of Palestinian Resistance in both discourse and action, al-Muqawama here is not entirely an outcome of geography, but rather the collective experience and identity of those occupying this tiny space of 365 square kilometres.

70 per cent of Gaza’s population are refugees. They ethnically cleansed, along with nearly 800,000 Palestinians, from historic Palestine during the Nakba, the catastrophic destruction and ethnic cleansing of Palestine and her people in 1948. They are survivors of massacres, which were part of a major military campaign that saw the ruin or emptying of whole villages, towns and communities.

Due to Gaza’s small size and the nature of its topography

Flat land with little resources – the suffering of the refugees of Gaza was particularly extreme. Trapped between a persisting past of loss, suffering and unrestored rights and a present of siege and grinding poverty, it was only rational for Gaza to be the spearhead of Palestinian Resistance throughout the years. Often, the degree of Israeli brutality determined the degree of Palestinian response, since violence begets violence and deadly sieges and genocidal wars beget Al-Aqsa Flood type of resistance operations.

Though general strikes and other forms of civil disobedience abundantly used by Gaza’s resisting population throughout the years – especially in the period between the Israeli occupation of 1967 and the so-called Israeli military ‘redeployment’ of 2005 – armed resistance has always been a critical component of Palestinian Muqawama.

Despite its geographic isolation, which has long preceded the latest layer of Israeli siege imposed on the Strip in 2007, the Gaza population, as judged by the constant state of rebellion and political discourse, has always viewed itself as part of a larger and more coherent Palestinian whole. One of the reasons behind this is that collective Palestinian memory served as a generational bonding agent that kept Palestinian communities attached to Palestine as a tangible reality, and also as an idea.

The other reason pertains to the relationship that Gaza had with Egypt, the Strip’s former military administrator and once potential liberator.

Though Egypt administered Gaza between 1949 and 1967 – with a brief few months’ exception during the war of 1956 – Cairo did not exactly see Gaza as a territorial or even as a political extension that permanently linked to the country’s body politic. True, Egyptian President, Jamal Abdul Nasser, was the caretaker of Gaza and attempted to shape its political institutions, in fact, the very armed resistance – for example, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (1964) and the Palestine Liberation Army (1964) – Gaza’s local leaderships and political elites largely embraced Egypt as strategic depth, not an alternative leadership, let alone homeland. If any confusion existed, the matter resolved, anyway, following the humiliating defeat of Arab armies at the hands of the US-backed Israeli military in the June 1967 war, known as the Naksa or the ‘setback’.

Though the post-war version of the PLO remained largely reliant on Arab support and political validation, with time, it became more Palestinian in terms of decision-making. The PLA, on the other hand, which only operated under the auspices of other Arab militaries, became marginalised, if at all relevant. But even with the sidelining of the Arabs and marginalisation of the PLA, Palestinians continued to resist. Their new resistance, however, modelled around Palestinian historical experiences. This history of resistance is rife with examples, which started long before the establishment of Israel on the ruins of Palestine, and continued after the Nakba with the rise of the Fidayeen Movement, whose roots trace back to Gaza.

When Gaza fell under Israeli military occupation in 1967

So did the West Bank. Though all historic Palestine was now captive to Israel and its totalistic Zionist discourse, the Occupation, coupled with the defeat of Arab armies, only accentuated a Palestinian identity that had little overlaps with regional Arab priorities – be it Jordanian, as was the case in the West Bank, or Egyptian, as in the case of Gaza.

This new reality did not automatically cancel the historic rapport between Palestine and the Arab world. However, it did underscore a growing sense of Arab political provincialism and a growing sense of Palestinian nationalism that began evolving into a new set of political significances and boundaries.

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Ironically, armed Palestinian resistance, which developed outside the realm of Arab governments and armies, only grew stronger following the Naksa. This was true in the case of Jordan and Lebanon-based Palestinian Resistance. However, this seeming contradiction has manifested in Gaza since 7 October, more than any other time or place in the past.

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