In April 1920, Palestinian crowds that had gathered for the Nabi Musa festival in Jerusalem rioted against the British Mandate and Zionist immigration. The unrest ended in the death of five Jews and four Arabs and the injury of several hundred others, in what counts as the first major clash of what would become the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On October 7, 2023, the most recent chapter of that same story opened; its victims are still falling. In the century between them, Palestinian armed resistance has been tried in nearly every form, legal and illegal, by every generation, from every available base. The result has been a series of disasters. Armed resistance did not stop or dismantle Zionism. If anything, it fed the most aggressive and expansionist elements of the Zionist movement. And every round has left Palestinians with less autonomy and less territory.
How can well-meaning and ostensibly reasonable people still embrace a strategy that failed repeatedly over a century? How can they not see it? How can secularists and liberals embrace an Islamist movement that would destroy them if it had the power?
Yet when Palestinian and Arab voices (including my own) argue against armed resistance, both on the grounds of its failure and its savage toll on Palestinian and Arab moral order, the response is often vicious. Accusations of betrayal, servility and victim-blaming come into play, usually without regard for logic or facts.
That reaction is a puzzle worth understanding. How can well-meaning and ostensibly reasonable people still embrace a strategy that failed repeatedly over a century? How can they not see it? How can secularists and liberals embrace an Islamist movement that would destroy them if it had the power? Assuming irrationality in those we disagree with is the mirror image of their assuming betrayal on our part. Neither advances our understanding of each other or of this conflict.
The Proxy Arguments
The obvious explanations seem like a proxy for something else. The most common one is that Palestinians do not weigh armed resistance against peaceful co-existence because there is none on offer; rather, they weigh it against continued subjugation or outright erasure. Another is that non-violence also failed: neither negotiations nor peaceful resistance have worked either. In contrast, Hezbollah’s armed resistance, its supporters contend, prompted Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon (2000), while Hamas’s prompted Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza (2005). And if these two examples aren’t enough, there are always the Algerian liberation war and South African armed resistance as longer-term examples.
These arguments sound closer to rationalization than explanation. Continued occupation doesn’t turn a failed strategy into a successful one. If occupation continues despite (some say because) of armed resistance, that cannot possibly mean that the answer to occupation is more of the same strategy that didn’t work. No matter how terrible occupation becomes, a failed strategy remains a failed path to end it. Also, it’s quite possible that both negotiations and armed resistance aren’t working; but one failed strategy doesn’t make the other failed strategy a success. Maybe Palestinians need something different altogether.
In addition, the persistence of violence – aka armed resistance – contributed significantly to the failure of a negotiated settlement. Moreover, those alleged “successes” of Hezbollah and Hamas seem far less impressive today. As for French Algeria and South Africa, those are such fundamentally different cases – in the first, a European colonial power withdrew from another; in the second, a minority retreated from dominance to protected privilege – that one struggles to see their relevance.
These arguments seem more like justifications, a proxy for something deeper. The visceral anger accompanying the discussion is also telling; people do not respond with that intensity to a disagreement about utility. They respond that way when they feel under attack. And that is the key to the puzzle: To understand why armed resistance persists, we have to understand what it touches beneath these proxy arguments.
Where the Ideal Comes From
Yezid Sayigh’s Armed Struggle and the Search for State (1997) captures an important part of the answer. He shows how armed struggle provided the shell for Palestinian identity formation, especially in the 1960s and the 1970s, regardless of its operational failures. For example, an Israeli raid on Karameh camp in Jordan in 1968 ended in the killing of up to 200 Palestinian fighters and Jordanian soldiers, as well as the capture of more than 100 Palestinians and the destruction of the camp. But the invading force lost 30 soldiers and numerous vehicles. Yasser Arafat celebrated it as a victory, a testimony that the Palestinians were no longer refugees, but a people, who act as such.
In that sense, armed resistance was a vehicle not just for identity-formation, but also for affirmation of agency. And it started playing that role much earlier, in the early 1920s when the Palestinians found themselves coerced into a British rule that dashed their hopes for independence. These were the violent years of the First World War and nationalist armed rebellions that tore through the Ottoman world. Meanwhile, the Zionist movement was purchasing large swaths of land and evicting thousands of peasants from it.
Eventually, the peasantry took up arms and presented their “resistance” as affirmation of agency, the opposite of the passivity of the Palestinian notables and their sterile politics. In her debut novel, The Parisian (2019), Isabella Hammad captured, with remarkable subtlety, how armed struggle became the new bond, one that transcended individual, family and other allegiances and restructured ordinary people’s priorities, life choices and self-perceptions.
The 1920 Nabi Musa riots were just the beginning of this shift. By the end of the decade, the idea of armed resistance had taken hold, and it turned deadly in the 1929 Al-Buraq riots and the Hebron massacre. The more violence took root, the more the leadership shifted to the hands of those who advocated it, such as Sheikh Izz Ed-din Al-Qassam (1881-1935). This is how the general strike that started in 1936 quickly turned into an armed insurrection led mainly by the peasant fighters. As sacrifices accumulated under brutal British repression, the shift of power from the old elite to the rural fighters continued. Then came the 1948 war and the Nakba, which destroyed what was left of those older classes and left Palestinians without a body representing them collectively, as a people. Armed factions quickly filled this vacuum.
Of course there were moments where armed resistance seemed to lose steam, as during the early years of the Oslo process where a majority of Palestinians supported a negotiated settlement. But it remained there, under the surface, as the main tool for affirming identity and agency. This is how it was possible for Hamas and Islamic Jihad to find followers preferring their path to that of Oslo. This is why, when Oslo finally faltered in Camp David summit of 2000, armed resistance became the default alternative.
Armed resistance is unlikely to dissipate as an ideal due to arguments about its failure to achieve national goals or its corrosive impact on Palestinian morality and humanity.
Armed resistance represents, therefore, not only the identity of Palestinians, but also their ability to stand on their own feet and push back, whether they win or lose. In fact, the more they lose, the more important it becomes to show, to themselves and the world, that they are still standing, a people capable of acting as one. Defeat is therefore not an argument against resistance; it actually makes resistance more needed. This is why Israel’s response to October 7, and to every act of armed resistance, does not weaken the impulse. It raises the cost, but Palestinians treat that cost as unavoidable.
And this is why those of us who criticize armed resistance become the objects of visceral anger. Our criticisms sound as if we are denying Palestinians the right to act at all. Arguments about the failure to achieve self-determination sound hollow, because armed resistance itself represents self-determination to its followers. Arguments about the difference between resistance and terrorism, fighting and murder, glorification of death, and so on sound even more hollow amid the general moral collapse that this conflict has brought to its parties and victims. Arguments about narrow factional interests, Islamist excesses, or arguments about regional patrons and their agendas, also sound secondary.
In short, armed resistance is unlikely to dissipate as an ideal due to arguments about its failure to achieve national goals or its corrosive impact on Palestinian morality and humanity. It will lose its appeal only if Palestinian identity and agency are separated from it and relocated around something else, something that enables Palestinians to act, and be seen acting, as a people without a rifle in their hands. This shift will not happen easily, and it is harder still to engineer. But until it does, the ideal will keep outliving its results, and so will the price.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
