The Resistance Fights On, as the Cowardly Crusaders Flounder
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
With a fictional ceasefire in place, Israel continues its genocide in Gaza, just in a lower gear. The people of Gaza are still living each day amid the chaos and terror brought by Israel. And Israeli leaders are still making crystal clear their intentions to destroy Palestinian society and erase from collective memory the fact that Palestinians ever existed.
Meanwhile, the armed resistance groups in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon carry on toward their common goal: to drive Israeli occupation forces out of their respective homelands and end the slaughter, displacement, and dispossession of their people. They’d rather be living a normal life. They wouldn’t be firing a single rocket, shell, or bullet if Israelis were not constantly committing atrocities in an effort to seize all of Palestine, southern Lebanon, and lands beyond.
Palestinian and Lebanese armed resistance to Israeli occupation is justified under a large body of international law. Israel’s declarations of genocidal intent and its genocidal actions of the past 31 months have strengthened the case for armed resistance even more. And the abject refusal of the US, EU, and UN to sanction and disarm Israel has sharpened the existential necessity that Palestinians engage in armed self-defense.
It’s All the One Long Struggle
In March, with the US and Israel having launched their unprovoked war on Iran, Wissam Charafeddine of Dearborn Blog wrote against the kind of “realism” that pundits always use to justify the initiation of such illegal military conflict—lame arguments that, he wrote, go something like this: “Yes, there is aggression, but what about Iran? Yes, there is an illegal war, but what about the regime?” Of course, he noted, this illogic is routinely applied to Israel’s long history of aggression against the Palestinians:
The obsession with false balance has done enormous damage in our part of the world. Every time an existential threat becomes visible, some commentators rush to flatten the hierarchy of dangers. The occupier and the occupied. The invader and the invaded. The empire and the state under bombardment. Everyone gets blended into one gray puddle. Then we are told this is maturity.
Ramzy Baroud, editor of The Palestine Chronicle, made a similar point regarding Palestine in an April essay, arguing that too many Americans who claim to be anti-war or even pro-Palestinian
. . . acknowledge Israeli crimes but feel compelled to condemn Palestinian “terrorism.” They oppose Israeli policies yet insist on distancing themselves from Hamas and the others, as if Palestinian resistance exists outside the historical and political reality that produced it. They speak of “extremists on both sides,” as though figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and a Palestinian fighter in Gaza can be meaningfully compared.
A year and a half into the Gaza genocide, Mohammad Mishal, a scholar of international human rights law, wrote that, because Israel has forcibly occupied the West Bank and Gaza continuously since 1967, the Palestinians’ right to self-defense and self-determination in their homeland has remained in effect throughout the past six decades. (Israeli troops were not inside Gaza from 2007 to 2023, but they controlled it as an open-air prison throughout those years, and did a lot of bombing.) Therefore, wrote Mishal, any “military operation aimed at ending their occupation would not be the beginning of a new conflict.” For example, the Palestinian resistance’s October 7, 2023 operation was not the initiation of a war but the continuation of a people’s longstanding struggle against illegal occupation.
In Zionist propaganda, that continuous, decades-long struggle has instead been depicted as a series of singular eruptions that pop up every few years, each supposedly initiated by the Palestinians just because that’s how they are. But in the world we actually inhabit, the baseline of this conflict has been one long campaign of aggression and occupation initiated and carried out by Israel, always with US support. The resistance’s actions, meanwhile, have always been aimed at ending Israel’s control over Palestinian land and lives.
An Army Versus a People
In his post, Charafeddine urged that we “refuse to let every conversation begin by interrogating the target of attack before we name the attacker.” In that spirit, let’s not entertain any debate over Occupied Palestine that begins with the accusatory question, “Do you condemn Hamas?!” We begin instead by identifying the State of Israel as the aggressor and Palestine as the target.
Over many years, the chief functions of the Israeli military were to enforce apartheid in the West Bank and lay siege to the Gaza Strip—in other words, to impose confinement and deprivation on the entire population of the Occupied Territories. Palestinians’ attempts to achieve liberation from the horror through nonviolent action have been met with increasingly horrific violence.
That came to a head in 2018–19 when unarmed civilians in Gaza mounted a long series of weekly nonviolent protests known as the Great March of Return. Occupation forces outside the border fence responded with sniper fire. In total, Israeli troops killed 226 marchers, including dozens of children, and intentionally injured more than 30,000. Finally in 2023, with conditions in the territory becoming unbearable, the resistance planned and executed the October 7 prison break and military operation that overwhelmed the Israeli army bases surrounding Gaza.
The armed conflict has always followed a predictable pattern: Israeli troops wage war on civilians and their means of subsistence, while resistance forces fight a defensive war against Israeli military targets. (To any reader now shouting, “What about what Hamas did on October 7!!?”, I recommend The Electronic Intifada’s extensive body of work debunking Israeli/US propaganda about that day.)
For more than two years, the Israeli military’s war on Gaza has only incidentally involved engaging the Palestinian resistance fighters in battle. Occupation troops have stayed safely out of harm’s way, seated in US-supplied aircraft over Gaza, dropping bombs and firing missiles on civilian areas. Others are miles away on the ground, firing artillery shells or sitting at desks as they steer deadly armed drones over and through Gaza’s cities, camps, and fields, shooting children, women, and men.
Israeli leaders’ goal in Gaza, and increasingly in the West Bank, is not to defeat the resistance militarily but to render life so unbearable for the civilian population that they will allow themselves to be forced out. The monsters in Tel Aviv have openly and endlessly declared this genocidal intention. Month after month, we’ve seen the horrific results: near-total destruction of the territory’s housing, health care, public-safety agencies, transportation, water, energy, and food systems; a total of more than 72,000 human beings killed, a majority of them children or women.
Starting decades before the full-blown genocide and on an even greater scale since, Israel has also abducted and imprisoned tens of thousands of Palestinians. Their prisons, though, are better characterized as torture camps. A recent report from Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, on sexual torture in these places, goes way, way beyond gut-wrenching. On the few occasions when the resistance has launched offensive military operations—most recently and prominently in the October 7 jailbreak—the goal has been to capture occupation troops that they can swap for Palestinians held captive by Israel.
The Palestinian resistance attacks soldiers, not civilians. And they fight in person, not from cushioned seats. On those occasions when ground troops have ventured into Gaza’s cities or camps seeking to seize and hold ground, they’ve found Palestinian fighters waiting for them, ready to kill or drive them out, firing weaponry that they design and manufacture themselves. The occupation troops don’t like to venture out of their tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs), because resistance sharpshooters in upper floors of bombed-out buildings are ready to pick them off if they do. In so-called “return to sender” missions, the resistance has destroyed or disabled countless Israeli tanks, APCs, bulldozers, and other equipment with bombs they manufactured using undetonated explosives recovered from Israel’s US-supplied bombs and other munitions.
The resistance targets only those soldiers who pose a threat. They never attack medevac helicopters that come to carry away Israel’s wounded and dead. And they abide by ceasefires, including the one now supposedly in effect—one that Israel has violated more than 2,000 times, killing 750 Palestinians in the process.
To Team Israel/USA: Three Strikes and You’re Out!
Israel is the aggressor in Lebanon as well, and is fully supported, as always, by the US. For many years, it has made a habit of bombing and invading its neighbor to the north. Current attempts to seize and occupy southern Lebanon—in violation of a ceasefire, of course—are looking very much like the genocide in Gaza. Its troops are forcibly displacing entire communities and bombing homes, businesses, and other civilian targets. From March 2 through May 2, they killed more than 2,500 civilians, wounded more than 8,000, and forced more than one million people into homelessness.
These attacks have ruined life in southern Lebanon. But as attempts to occupy and control the region, they have failed miserably. Thanks to formidable resistance mounted by local Hezbollah fighters, Israeli troops have captured and held very little ground. Building and deploying ultra-cheap, innovative drones guided by fiber-optic wires, Hezbollah has been wreaking havoc on Israeli positions, equipment, vehicles, and troops. The invaders, powerless to advance more than a few miles into Lebanon, have focused on demolishing buildings and infrastructure wherever they find themselves bogged down.
Also, in their war on Iran, Israel and the US very plainly are the aggressors—and treacherous ones at that. Off and on throughout February, the US and Iran engaged in talks, mediated by Oman, the aim of which was to avoid conflict. Toward the end of the month, the Iranians agreed to all remaining terms, including a very significant dilution of their radioactive material. But just as the negotiations reached that especially productive stage, the US and Israel launched their massive surprise attack. In that initial blitzkrieg and through the weeks that followed, they hit civilian targets, including grade schools, universities, residential buildings, hospitals, water desalinization and power plants, and bridges. The civilian death toll exceeded 2,000, including more than 500 women, more than 400 children, and more than 90 health care workers. Iran responded by attacking energy facilities and US military bases located in six Persian Gulf countries.
In Palestine . . . in Lebanon . . . in Iran, Team Israel/USA is the aggressor, and it’s floundering in all three conflicts. With treachery in negotiations and extravagant use of bombardment having failed to help them achieve their goals, Tel Aviv and Washington have resorted to just stamping their feet and demanding that Iran, Lebanon, and the Palestinians all surrender unconditionally. None of the three will surrender, of course. At one point in this terrible saga, Abu Obeida, spokesperson for the Al-Qassam Brigades, offered this pithy response to such demands: “What the enemy failed to take from us through tanks and war, it will not be able to take through politics or at the negotiating table.”
Team Israel/USA, now a military failure three times over, is still capable of doing grievous damage in West Asia and beyond for a while longer. But the era of US global dominance is fading fast, thanks in good part to the valiant, steadfast people of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran.
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