By Ramzy Baroud 
Gaza-born intellectual and refugee, Ramzy Baroud, argues that Gaza’s resistance has reshaped the conversation on popular resistance, compelling us to confront uncomfortable truths.
Palestinians and Israelis agree that the Gaza resistance was the main reason behind Israel’s forced decision to accept a ceasefire and begin its gradual withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
The oddity is that Palestinians—dying, resisting, but remaining steadfast in Gaza—usually stand at the polar opposite of everything the Israeli government and military represent.
The same is true for the Israeli government. Yet, from the very start of the Israeli genocide, both sides entered into an undeclared agreement: the Israelis wanted to destroy the Palestinian resistance and take full control of Gaza, while the Palestinians wanted to thwart the Israeli objectives.
To carry out its mission, Israel has used over 85,000 tons of explosives, enlisting the support of the United States and other Western governments and intelligence.
To thwart the Israeli mission, Palestinians utilized everything they could muster to wage guerrilla warfare—a war of attrition made possible by the support of Gaza’s inhabitants, who paid the price of their sumoud through one of the most devastating genocides (Gazacide) ever recorded in history.
As hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began marching from south to north on January 27, they celebrated their return, defined as a collective victory against the Israeli war machine and a victory for the people themselves, who produced a new model of popular resistance.
The Israelis agree, though of course, they would not use the same language as the Palestinians. For Israel, the Gaza fighters are terrorists, and the Gazan population is the popular foundation that supports such terrorism. Thus, there was collective punishment throughout the war and constant plotting to ethnically cleanse them to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, Morocco, Somaliland, and anywhere else.
Israel’s extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir described the Israeli agreement to the ceasefire as “total surrender,” which contrasts with the “total victory” strategy repeatedly mentioned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu throughout the war.
This defeat, or surrender, places Israel, in the words of retired Maj. Gen. Itzhak Brik, in an existential threat. Writing in Maariv, Brik does not deny that Israel’s loss of its military superiority represents the greatest danger faced by the state in decades.
“A state that relies on miracles and not on real military capability will not survive for long,” he wrote.
Brik’s views are shared by most of Israel’s political and military elites. Even Netanyahu himself has hinted at the impossibility of the Israeli position, due almost exclusively to the toughness of the Palestinian resistance.
Israel is engaged in an “existential war,” he said last March while addressing a cadet graduation ceremony, and Israel has to achieve “total victory.”
Outside the realm of Palestinian and Israeli discourses, however, we rarely engage in honest conversations about the subject. Those who defend the Israeli position in the West do so, as they often claim, in the name of democracy, civilization, and against, in the words of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “barbarity.”
The same contradiction can also be seen on the side of those who purport to speak in solidarity with Palestinians, if not speaking on behalf of Palestinians.
One constantly missing topic in many solidarity conversations about Palestine, and in media platforms that are wholly or partly sympathetic to Palestinians, is the subject of resistance.
Many pro-Palestine individuals behave as if the word “resistance” is a liability. Some may covertly support Palestinian resistance, but overtly ignore the issue altogether, as if it were not truly the single most important factor that has defeated all of Israel’s objectives—not just in Gaza, but in Lebanon as well.
In doing so, they also ignore Yemen, whose ability to disrupt Israel-linked shipping in the Red Sea represented the greatest geopolitical challenge to the US, which, in some ways, surpassed the tension between US and Chinese navies in the South and East China Seas.
Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told the Associated Press last June that “this is the most sustained combat that the US Navy has seen since World War II.”
One could argue against or in favor of armed struggle on moral or philosophical grounds, or even for the sake of political expediency and pragmatism. However, doing so while denying facts altogether—that the Israeli army, per Israel’s own definition, ‘surrendered’ in Gaza—is a form of intellectual dishonesty.
Note how Ukrainian fighters are often celebrated in mainstream Western media, and even among many Western progressive groups, as heroic figures for challenging the Russian army. The ideological background of some of these groups is often ignored, and the fact that Ukraine is almost entirely dependent on Western arms and many other forms of support is treated as a nonissue.
Instead, they are presented as homegrown freedom fighters, repelling foreign occupation, defending ‘democracy’ and ‘civilization,’ and so on.
The same logic applies to Syria today, as it applies to numerous other examples, including the mujahideen of Afghanistan when they fought against Soviet military intervention—not US-Western military occupation.
Unfortunately, some so-called progressives bought into that propaganda, thus judging the morality of armed struggle based on the nature of the enemy on the other side of this struggle.
Palestinians have always been the main exception to any definition of freedom fighting, although their cause is arguably the most just of all causes. Not only are Palestinians fighting against military occupation, colonialism, and a racist apartheid system, but they are also fighting for mere survival as they endure an Israeli war of extermination and genocide, whose weapons are provided by most Western governments, and whose logic is constantly defended by Western media and so-called intellectuals.
Prior to the Gaza genocide, Palestinians were told repeatedly that armed struggle is neither strategic nor useful. They were often chastised for failing to see what is supposedly obvious to so many activists and writers, mobilizing and opining on Palestine thousands of miles away from the Gaza open-air prison or the West Bank’s concentration refugee camps.
The Israeli genocide in Gaza, which aimed at exterminating and ethnically cleansing the survivors of the Gazacide, left Palestinians with no options but to fight. The resistance in Gaza materialized what was meant to be a symbolic reference by Mahmoud Darwish in his seminal poem – ‘The Mask Has Fallen’:
The mask has fallen from the mask, from the mask, the mask has fallen.
You have no brothers, my brother, no friends, my friend, you have no castles.
You have no water, no medicine, no sky, no blood, no sail, neither forward nor backward.
Besiege your siege… there is no escape.
Your arm has fallen, so pick it up and strike your enemy…
There is no escape, and I fell near you, so pick me up and strike your enemy with me…
You are now free, free, and free…
Those who killed you or wounded you have ammunition in you, so strike with it.
It is as if Darwish was writing a prophecy, not a poem, and unbeknownst to all of his readers, that prophecy came true in Gaza.
While Gaza took on the responsibility of using its wounded body as ammunition—indeed, wounded and amputated fighters were seen fighting on the frontlines, from the lowest ranks to the top leaders—it is the responsibility of intellectuals to document these moments in all their detail.
This documentation, however, is not convenient for everyone, because doing so can be a dangerous feat in today’s environment, where the mere insinuation that Palestinians have the right to defend themselves under international law is considered an extremist act, and where figures like UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, along with numerous others, would be openly accused of belonging to Hamas.
However, the responsibility of the intellectual, aside from speaking truth to power, as Edward Said did, and challenging their role as orators to that of mobilizers, as Antonio Gramsci argued, is also to stand “for truth, no matter who tells it” according to Malcolm X.
Telling the truth should not be “a revolutionary act”, as George Orwell said; that if we indeed live in free, open societies where freedom of expression is a guaranteed right under various democratic constitutions. Sadly, this is not the case, and once again, Palestine remains the exception.
What is truly worrisome, however, is that if we continue to avoid the conversation that both Palestinians and Israelis are engaging in, we render ourselves completely irrelevant on an issue that requires deep and profound understanding. Without such understanding, no solidarity can carry much weight, and no amount of mobilization can make a difference.
Imagine the Israeli security cabinet making the ceasefire decision. Netanyahu is standing in front of one of his favorite visual media, a pie chart, which includes all the factors that support an Israeli acceptance of a ceasefire. Considering everything that we know about the war in Gaza, and judging by statements made by top Israeli active and retired military generals, it is certain that the Gaza resistance—coupled with Arab resistance elsewhere—was the main driver behind the Israeli decision.
While many are hindered by fears, the confines of our ideologies, and wishful thinking, some may want to pretend that the Gaza resistance was the least relevant factor in the outcome of the war. The truth of Gaza, however, should be obvious for anyone else to see.
By acknowledging the resistance, however, we are not necessarily arguing that armed struggle or any other form of struggle is morally superior to all others. We are simply stating a fact, and in doing so, we are asserting that Palestinians resorted to such a choice only after being ignored by the international community for decades.
Denying Palestinians the right to resist is more than mere intellectual dishonesty; it amounts to denying them agency altogether and placing them squarely in the category of victims. This gives Israel, and ourselves, all the power to kill them at will in the case of the former, and to fight for their rights on our own terms in the case of the latter.
If the Gaza war has taught us anything, it is that Gaza and the Palestinian people have proven to be the most central players in this ongoing tragedy. It is they, their resistance, and their political discourse that will eventually defeat the Israeli occupation and bring peace and justice back to Palestine. Any attempt at circumventing this fact represents utter disrespect for the Palestinian people and for the legacy of the tens of thousands of innocent civilians who were pulverized by the Israeli-US-Western war machine.
– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
