This article is part one of a series, you can read the second article here. Signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the organization.
Socialists must develop an analysis of the terrain of organizing in colonized nations in order to best assist them with their own organizing – to make internationalism a practical reality. Our organizing is not done in a vacuum so our aim should not be to simply inspire consciousness at home through statements and mobilizations. Our task is to understand the goals and tactics of organizers in the colonized nation, and then to identify domestic strategies to support those goals and tactics currently being used.
What is the Current Terrain Faced by Palestinians Organizing for National Liberation?
As a result of key historical developments and the restriction of fronts along which to organize, Palestinians have no other option than to engage in armed resistance. This resistance is currently preventing total genocide and is a necessary component of national liberation. The other plausible tactics, nonviolent resistance and electoral organizing, are not on their own viable strategies for liberating Palestine at the current political conjuncture.
Nonviolent resistance historically relies on two sources of power: leverage at the point of production (structural power) and leverage through massive numbers of people blocking the day-to-day function of urban society (associational power). In South Africa, strikes at metal and chemical plants in Durban were combined with the Defiance Campaign of nonviolent occupations and civil disobedience to ultimately bring down apartheid.
In Palestine, these sources of power have been largely eliminated because of the total exclusion of Palestinians from Israeli society and institutions. The first process of stripping away this leverage was the construction of the Histadrut, the Zionist labor management federation that displaced Palestinian workers from points of strategic leverage.
Formation of the Histadrut
There is extensive evidence that Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together in historic Palestine. Following the Balfour Declaration in 1917, British colonialism established Mandatory Palestine as a colonial entity, opening the doors to Zionist colonization. This was followed by waves of displacement of Palestinian farmers from their land, forced proletarianization, and urbanization. At the peak of this displacement in 1937, the popular classes of Palestine engaged in a mass uprising, launching a general strike that lasted nearly six months. Palestinians were brutally repressed by the British Army, with estimates that 10% of the entire adult Arab male population were killed, wounded, or exiled. It was during this era that Israeli labor developed not simply as a tool for state building and labor force management, but also as a method for the exclusion of Palestinians from their possible levers of power.
The Histadrut was a powerful force in displacing striking Palestinian workers and the firms that employed them. In Jaffa, a parallel Zionist-operated port was established during the general strike. By 1939, 75% of the Jewish workforce was organized under the Histadrut. The Histadrut built institutions on the basis of membership, such as healthcare and banking services, including the country’s largest bank and health insurance company. Through collaboration with the state and private enterprises, the Histadrut effectively displaced Palestinian workers from points of leverage by enabling the formation of new enterprises that excluded Palestinian workers. Palestinians cannot strike against the Israeli economy effectively because they have been systematically locked out of it.
Civil Disobedience in Palestine
The First Intifada (1987-1993) was primarily led by a broad coalition of leftist and secular nationalist forces. This uprising was similar in magnitude and tactics to the Defiance Campaign in apartheid South Africa. However, the Israeli response to the First Intifada far outstripped the South African government’s response. The military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem effectively turned these areas into open-air prisons. Israel turned off electricity, starved people, and killed, imprisoned, and tortured thousands of people.
Despite intense repression, the First Intifada was capable of harnessing widespread support for resisting occupation into a campaign that was sustained until the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israeli government entered into diplomatic negotiations, culminating in the Oslo Accords in 1993. While the Oslo Accords were lauded at the time, they denied Palestinians statehood and gave Israel near-total control over borders, settlements, and security and intelligence forces.
In 2018, a new wave of mass, unarmed resistance began in besieged Gaza. Taking advantage of the capacity of social media to mobilize people quickly and without centralized leadership, the Great March of Return resembled the urban civic mobilizations that swept the Arab world in the 2010s. By 2018, eleven years under a devastating siege had resulted in 44% unemployment – one of the highest in the world – as well as a lack of access to basic medical care and clean drinking water. The Great March of Return involved weekly marches to the border fence of Gaza, which separates besieged Gaza from the land that Palestinians were expelled from during the Nakba in 1948. Over 80% of current Gazan residents are still considered refugees, as the descendants of those expelled who still have no right to return to their lands. These protests were responded to in sadistic fashion by the Israel Defense Forces: they maimed over 9000 and killed 223 people, including 46 children. IDF snipers targeted healthcare workers and children, as documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Since Palestinians are ghettoized in Gaza, mobilizations lacked the ability to shut down Israeli society. These mobilizations also lacked the ability to create a crisis in Israeli society, which had moved further and further to the openly genocidal nationalism that characterizes the current regime. Within Israel, only 8% of Palestinians live side-by-side with Jews, the other 92% effectively segregated. This segregation reduces the ability to leverage associational power through mass mobilizations.
The Great March of Return prompted international outcry, but was incapable of moving the intransigent American government, which was and is staunchly committed to supporting Israel. Ultimately, the international outcry was limited by the scale and speed with which Israel crushed the mobilizations. The horrific reality faced by the Palestinians dehumanized by the world was that a handful of them dying or being shot every week was barely enough to make the news, let alone prompt political action.
As the Great March of Return continued, the expansion of new settlements in the West Bank accelerated. These settlements, despite being illegal under international and Israeli law, were authorized by the Israeli government, and they continue to spread with full protection from the IDF. Protests against these settlements have occurred across the West Bank, but so far have been incapable of provoking political action from Israel or its allies to end the barbaric and illegal settlements.
Electoral Action in Palestine and Israel
Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank cannot vote in elections in Israel, and so are denied a straightforward democratic path to building political power. In East Jerusalem, Palestinians can vote in local elections, but are denied a vote in national elections, which is where the real power to shift occupation policies is held. Additionally, since 2002, after the passage of Section 7a, political parties within Israel that are opposed to the existence of an Israeli ethnostate are barred from running for seats in the Knesset, the Israeli legislature. Political parties that adopt the principles of one democratic, secular state – like those put forward by the One Democratic State Initiative (ODSI) – are barred as a result of this law.
Close to 20% of Israel’s population is made up of Arabs. In 2015, the charismatic Arab leader of Hadash, a majority Arab Left party that combined the Israeli Communist Party with other left groups in Israel, built a coalition between the Arab parties called the Joint List. They formed the third-largest faction in the Knesset, claiming 82% of the Arab vote. However, the alliance’s minority status, alongside the growing far-right bloc, prevented the Joint List from being able to have a meaningful impact on Israeli politics. While the Joint List voted against the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the Gulf nations and greenlit the occupation of the West Bank and the siege on Gaza, they were massively outnumbered and incapable of preventing this catastrophic agreement. A year later, the Joint List split internally, and the remaining factions failed to capture a significant portion of the Arab vote. In 2024, the Knesset voted overwhelmingly to not recognize a Palestinian state, effectively shutting the door to a diplomatically negotiated solution through electoral action within Israel.
Palestinians have been systematically deprived of nearly every potential source of leverage in their liberation struggle. What remains is armed resistance.
Armed Resistance in Palestine
The military capacity of Gaza’s guerilla factions has demonstrated itself to be a singularly powerful force at reuniting Palestinians around the possibilities of a military path to liberation. Despite the ongoing genocide, support for armed resistance as a tactic has remained high since October 7th and has climbed by 8 points in polls of Palestinians as of June. Importantly, this support has extended across Palestine, with support for armed resistance also high in the West Bank. For the first time in 17 years, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs the West Bank, and Hamas, which governs Gaza, have engaged in unity talks in Beijing, alongside a dozen other Palestinian political factions. These unity talks have been spurred by an increase in support for militant tactics and extremely low support for Mahmoud Abbas, the current president of the PA who is deeply unpopular because he is seen as a corrupt collaborator.
Importantly, while support for Hamas has increased across Palestine, Marwan Barghouti of Fatah – a secular nationalist party and the largest political faction within the PA – remains the most popular candidate. He has been imprisoned by Israel since 2002 for his role in supporting armed struggle during the First and Second Intifadas, preventing him from taking more active leadership, but would win in a landslide in both the West Bank and Gaza if elections were called tomorrow. Palestinians remain solidly in support of a pro-democracy, pro-armed-struggle candidate capable of uniting factions behind a common vision of liberation. This persistent support for Barghouti suggests that the recent surge in support for Hamas is not necessarily a measure of Palestinian alignment with Hamas’s political program but can be better understood as a proxy for support for armed struggle. Barghouti’s popularity has led Hamas to demand his release as part of the first phase of a hostage deal.
Hamas has also offered to disarm completely if the State of Palestine was recognized by Israel, an offer that Israel has refused. This offer, along with the demand to release Barghouti, represents a strategy of leveraging military capacity as a bargaining chip in diplomatic negotiations and in order to reunite Palestinians from various political tendencies around a common vision of liberation.
The military capacity of these guerilla factions has also proven itself to be the last bulwark against swift and total destruction of the Gaza Strip. Reports now show that upwards of 2800 tanks have been damaged as a result of highly coordinated attacks with indigenously manufactured weaponry. In Khan Younis, the IDF was forced to withdraw as a result of these attacks. A 1000 km tunnel network across Gaza has facilitated rapid guerilla attacks with minimal predictability. The casualties caused by the resistance have been the most powerful force provoking mass mobilizations in Israel, as the families of soldiers and reservists in Gaza call on the government to bring troops home and reach a ceasefire agreement.
Palestine has resisted colonization through a variety of tactics for a century now. At this point, armed struggle is one of the only available methods of struggle that remains for the Palestinian people.