The Palestinian national struggle has been identified with images of hijacked airplanes, homemade rockets, charred wreckage of exploded buses, and, more recently, teenagers wielding scissors and knives, but in over a century of Zionist-Arab conflict it has been the unarmed—or, as Palestinians call it, “popular”—form of resistance that has been more prevalent and deeply rooted. During the first decades of Zionist immigration to Palestine, Jews barely encountered violent opposition.1 Palestinians instead protested by witholding cooperation, appealing to the Ottoman and British authorities to slow Zionist immigration, and refusing to sell their property. Through such means, more than 93 percent of Palestine’s territory remained outside Jewish hands at the outset of the 1948 war, and even the less than 7 percent owned by Jews had been sold mostly by absentee landlords residing abroad, many of whom weren’t Palestinian.2
In the four major wars Israel fought, Palestinian participation was extraordinarily low. In 1948, of a population of 1.3 million, only a few thousand Palestinians joined irregular forces or the Arab Salvation Army; in the 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars, Palestinian contributions were also slight.3 The violence that Palestinians did lead over the decades was many times less deadly than struggles against foreign occupiers elsewhere in the world. From the first Palestinian riots in 1920 until the end of June 2016, according to Israeli government sources, fewer than four thousand Jews (forty per year) were killed as a result of Palestinian violence, including the intifadas and wars in Gaza.4
The four most notable acts of Palestinian rebellion all began in nonviolent protest. These periods are the most highly revered in Palestinian national memory, precisely because nonviolence permitted and encouraged the sort of collectivism, solidarity, and broad-based participation that violence did not. The 1936–1939 Arab Revolt started with a general strike, demonstrations, boycotts, and nonpayment of taxes. The British repressed it brutally, making use of torture, home demolitions, deportations, raids, collective punishment, and aerial bombardment. The strike was called off within six months, after approximately one thousand Palestinians had been killed, and the revolt then turned violent, resulting in the deaths of another Palestinians and several hundred Jews and Britons.5
The second large Palestinian rebellion took place on March 30, 1976, when tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel went on marches and joined a general strike to protest against increased land confiscations by the Israeli government in the Galilee; the event, known as Land Day, has been commemorated with demonstrations each year since. During the third rebellion, known as the First Intifada (for many of the Palestinians old enough to have participated in it, the “real” intifada), people took part in mass protests, strikes, and boycotts; refused to pay taxes; flew banned Palestinian flags; threw stones; and engaged in other largely unarmed acts, particularly during the intifada’s initial phase. In the first year of the uprising, 4 Israeli soldiers were killed, while Israeli security forces and settlers killed at least 326 Palestinians. This revolt is sometimes known as the Intifada of the Stones and is seen by Palestinians as providing the model for popular resistance, of which they consider stone throwing to be a legitimate part. The IDF views stone throwing as a violent act but admits that not a single soldier has died as a result of it. Court testimony by members of the Israeli security forces and videos made by journalists record numerous occasions, some as recent as 2015, when undercover Israeli agents infiltrated protests, incited Palestinians to violence, and threw stones at soldiers themselves in an attempt to entrap protesters.6
The far bloodier Second Intifada also began with unarmed protests and stone throwing over Ariel Sharon’s visit to Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque compound, or Temple Mount. Israeli forces killed 7 Palestinian demonstrators the day after the visit, 13 the following day, and, several days later, 12 Palestinian citizens of Israel, who had called a general strike and launched unarmed protests in solidarity.7 Large demonstrations and other peaceful forms of resistance dwindled as violence took over, but they were not entirely extinguished. Alongside the militarization of the intifada there grew a new incarnation of popular resistance, which began spreading across West Bank villages in 2002.
* * *
Initially, these popular protests, which were seen as a return to the methods of the First Intifada, were aimed at stopping the construction of the separation barrier, which de facto annexed parts of the West Bank to Israel, dividing and surrounding many Palestinian communities and cutting them off from their lands.
The resistance began in the agricultural village of Jayyous, the largest olive-producing region of the West Bank governorate of Qalqilya. In September 2002, residents found signs affixed to the trees informing them that the separation barrier would be routed several miles east of the pre-1967 line, coming within ninety feet of some of Jayyous’s homes and separating the village from twelve thousand of its olive trees, each of its groundwater wells, and all of its irrigated land.8 Residents held demonstrations, welcomed Israeli and international solidarity activists, stood in front of bulldozers, and temporarily slowed the army’s advance. But in the end, the barrier was erected and the protests stopped. A similar pattern emerged in Mes’ha, Beit Liqya, Beit Ijza, Biddu, and Niʿlin. Men, women, and children stood before bulldozers, hugged olive trees to prevent their uprooting, marched, were arrested, tear-gassed, shot, and sometimes killed, but failed to stop the barrier from going up.
There were a few isolated successes, however. In 2004, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that “the construction of the wall being built by Israel … [is] contrary to international law” and that Israel was obligated to dismantle it forthwith. Israel ignored the ICJ, but the village protests did not stop. After dozens of demonstrations in Budrus, west of Ramallah, the IDF recommended changing the planned route of the separation barrier so that it would no longer encircle Budrus and eight other villages, closing them off from both Israel and the rest of the West Bank. In 2005, the government approved a new route that intruded on less of Budrus’s land, kept closer to the pre-1967 line in that small section of the barrier, and no longer confined the nine villages.9
The following year, Israeli courts ruled that the inhabitants of a single home near Jerusalem—entirely encircled by the barrier, encroached on by a settlement, and locked in by a gate that could be opened only by the army—were no longer to be trapped inside, their relatives prevented from visiting unless they obtained permits. In 2007, after two and a half years of protests in nearby Bilʿin, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the barrier should be rerouted: “We were not convinced,” the chief justice wrote in her decision, “that it is necessary for security-military reasons to retain the current route that passes on Bilʿin’s lands.”10
The protests spread and were no longer concerned only with the location of the barrier. In Kafr Qaddum, villagers held weekly demonstrations against the closure of their main road and exit, shut down after the neighboring settlement of Kedumim added a new neighborhood. All the settlements outside Jerusalem are located in the 60 percent of the West Bank designated Area C by the Israeli military, and Palestinians there have had much to protest. The majority of Area C is off-limits to its Palestinian inhabitants. The army can expel residents by declaring that their land is to be used as a “firing zone” for military training, and it has failed to prevent attacks on people and property by Israeli settlers. Building permits are hard to come by: of the thousands of applications submitted by Palestinians between 2000 and 2012, only 5.6 percent were approved, and in practice building by Palestinians is permitted in less than 1 percent of Area C. Homes and other structures built without permits are routinely demolished: in the same years, nearly three thousand were destroyed, displacing thousands of people.11
In 2008, a group in Hebron called Youth Against Settlements organized nonviolent protests against the army’s extinction of Palestinian life in the center of the city: the IDF had erected more than a hundred obstructions to restrict movement; forced hundreds of businesses to shut down; enforced what it calls “sterile” streets, where Jewish settlers can walk but Palestinians cannot (the front doors of Palestinian houses on these streets were welded shut, obliging their residents to use roofs and ladders to get out); and shut down what was once Hebron’s main market and liveliest thoroughfare, Shuhada Street. Curfews for Palestinians and restrictions on access to Shuhada Street were first imposed in 1994, in response not to Palestinian but to Israeli violence: an American-born settler, Baruch Goldstein, forced his way into the back of the Ibrahimi mosque and fired 111 rounds at the rows of worshippers kneeling in Friday morning prayer, killing twenty-nine.12 The Palestinians of Hebron have been punished for this massacre ever since.
Elsewhere, in Nabi Saleh, a village of some six hundred people, residents challenged the confiscation of their land and their main spring by the settlement of Halamish. Israeli government statistics obtained by the NGO Peace Now show that one-third of the area registered to Halamish was stolen from private Palestinian owners. The figure is almost identical to the amount—over 32 percent—of West Bank settlement land that is privately owned by Palestinians. During the Second Intifada, in a common practice, the IDF declared territory adjacent to Halamish a closed military zone. The army prevented the villagers from farming their lands there, while allowing the settlers in; that is, it was essentially a closed military zone for Jewish-only farming. In protest against these and other usurpations, every Friday dozens and sometimes hundreds of people would march from Nabi Saleh toward the spring, where settlers had built an arbor, a swing, and pools. After two and a half years of demonstrations, the villagers finally managed to reach the spring. They spent an hour there before settlers demanded the army expel them, and they have remained banned from it ever since.13
In 2011, protests moved beyond the West Bank. As upheaval spread throughout the Middle East, thousands of unarmed demonstrators marched on Israel’s borders on May 15, the day commemorating the Nakba, the loss of Palestinian land and homes in the 1948 war. In other places abroad, particularly on university campuses, another form of peaceful resistance—the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel—markedly grew.14
In the West Bank, meanwhile, new tactics emerged. A group of young Palestinian activists calling themselves Freedom Riders invited foreign journalists to accompany them when they boarded a public bus in the West Bank used by settlers to travel to and from Israel. When the bus arrived at the outskirts of occupied East Jerusalem, to which Palestinian but not Jewish residents of the West Bank require entry permits, the police ordered the activists to get off the bus; they refused, comparing themselves to Rosa Parks as they were arrested. The next year a group of protesters blocked a road near Ramallah that is for Israeli cars only.15
At the same time, the PLO leadership pursued—haltingly, and primarily as a means of leveraging new talks with the Israeli government—what it considered a peaceful resistance strategy in the international sphere: it advanced a UN Security Council resolution on the illegality of settlements, which the United States vetoed; joined UNESCO as a member state; won Palestine’s admission to the UN as a nonmember observer state; and, following the collapse of US-led negotiations in April 2014, signed instruments of accession to numerous international treaty bodies, as well as, in December, the International Criminal Court.16 Although these diplomatic moves did not put a dent in the machinery of occupation and had no impact on Palestinians’ daily lives, they nevertheless helped give rise to a sense that momentum for nonviolent resistance was building.
Palestinian activists also turned to a new approach, adopting the settler tactic of “creating facts on the ground”: on a contentious site known as E1, a plot of land east of Jerusalem that had been picked out for settlement expansion, they put up two dozen tents to form a protest “village” called Bab al-Shams. In stark contrast to the Israeli government’s years of inaction toward Jewish-inhabited, illegally constructed settlement outposts, which are not only left alone but guarded by the military, connected to water and electricity, and often retroactively legalized, Israeli forces acted swiftly at Bab al-Shams, evicting the protesters within forty-eight hours. The idea nevertheless caught on, and over the next several weeks four more protest villages were set up.17
For a period, there was hope that this wave of popular resistance could start the next great Palestinian rebellion—a peaceful, grassroots, nonfactional uprising led by a new generation. But this hope faded quickly. Participation, never high to begin with, shrank. Political leaders showed little interest. Media attention turned elsewhere.
Some battles by individual towns and villages continued, but they remained disparate, localized struggles against specific aspects of the occupation of the West Bank, never coalescing into a larger revolt against occupation itself. Why they failed to do so is one of the central questions of the novelist and journalist Ben Ehrenreich’s The Way to the Spring, a compassionate and eloquent account of popular resistance and Israeli military repression in the West Bank.
* * *
For those active in the popular resistance movement, there is little mystery about why Israel has not faced a sustained, widely supported campaign of Palestinian civil disobedience and unarmed struggle since the First Intifada. It can be summarized in a single word: Oslo.
The Oslo agreements brought the First Intifada to an end, established limited Palestinian self-governance in parts of Gaza and the West Bank, outsourced to the new Palestinian government many of Israel’s responsibilities as an occupying power, and to a significant degree immunized Israel against the forms of protest to which it had previously been vulnerable: boycotts, strikes, nonpayment of taxes, and mass demonstrations. Israel protected itself from the damage of possible labor strikes by replacing Palestinian workers with foreigners: prior to Oslo, over one-third of the Palestinian labor force worked in Israel or its settlements, but by 1997, three years after the inception of the PA, the figure had dropped to 16 percent. Unemployment soared.18 Palestinian leaders who just several years earlier had been directing intifada labor strikes against Israel were now in official government positions begging the Israeli authorities to issue more work permits.
Nonpayment of taxes, which had been an Israeli liability, now became a Palestinian one, as the PA began collecting income taxes. At the same time, the Palestinian economy became more vulnerable, since basic services once provided by the occupying power were no longer guaranteed: the PA depended on Israel to hand over the far larger taxes on imports, which it collected for a 3 percent fee, and sometimes withheld when the Palestinians didn’t behave themselves.19
Large-scale protests ceased to pose the sort of threat to Israel that they once did, as Gaza was fenced off and over 90 percent of the population of the West Bank was divided into 165 islands of ostensible PA control (Area A islands, the 18 percent of the West Bank in which the PA has security and civil jurisdiction, and Area B islands, the 22 percent where the PA has only civil authority). These islands are surrounded by Area C, the spatially contiguous 60 percent of the West Bank that the Palestinian Authority may not enter.20 This territorial arrangement ensures that the largest population centers, in Area A, are removed from direct contact with Israelis; indirectly managed by the IDF, through its close cooperation with Palestinian security forces; and encircled by zones of Israeli control, which make any large demonstration containable, less likely to spread, and easily sealed off from incomers.
That leaves Area C as the main realm of protest in the West Bank. But most Area C communities are small, isolated villages and hamlets in valleys, deserts, or on hills. Their sparseness and topography make mass demonstrations nearly impossible, which in turn means less attention from the media and less ability to influence a fairly oblivious Israeli public, most of whom in their daily lives are hardly conscious of the occupation.
Those who continue to demonstrate also face a daunting set of legal obstacles. Protests in the West Bank are effectively criminalized. Israel’s Military Order 101, in place since 1967, makes illegal any “procession, gathering, or rally … held without a permit issued by a military commander,” with a procession or rally defined as “any group of ten or more persons” assembled “for a political purpose or for a matter that could be interpreted as political.” Incitement, defined as “orally or in any other way attempt[ing] to influence public opinion in the region in a way that is liable to disturb public peace or order,” is outlawed too. Another regulation allows local IDF commanders to declare any area—for example, the Palestinian-owned land on which a protest is taking place—a “closed military zone,” thereby enabling them to shut down demonstrations and arrest the participants.21
Thanks to laws and regulations such as these, some 40 percent of all Palestinian men in the West Bank and Gaza have been confined in Israeli jails. Once arrested, Palestinian protesters, unlike Israeli ones, are subject to the military justice system, in which they may be placed in “administrative detention” indefinitely, without charge or trial. By his forty-fourth birthday, Bassem Tamimi, one of the leaders of the protests in Nabi Saleh, had been arrested ten times and “spent three years of his life in Israeli prisons without ever being convicted of a crime.” When he was finally tried, in 2011, he was charged with “incitement,” “solicitation to stone throwing,” “disruption of legal proceedings,” and “organizing and participating in unauthorized processions.” The trial dragged on; more than a year after his arrest he was convicted of two of the charges, and sentenced to thirteen months in prison. Tamimi’s conviction was hardly in doubt: in 2010, the last year for which records are available, 99.74 percent of Palestinians tried in Israel’s military courts were found guilty.22
The odds were not much better for Palestinians attempting to use this same justice system to address Israeli wrongdoing. Of all complaints filed against soldiers between 2010 and 2013, only 1.4 percent resulted in an indictment, and this doesn’t take into account the large number of cases Palestinians never bothered to file. There were roughly three hundred charges of torture at the hands of the Shin Bet that resulted in official inquiries between 2013 and 2016, but not one precipitated a criminal investigation.23
There were also internal obstacles to a new popular uprising. Fatah feared that Hamas might use popular protest to undermine its authority in the West Bank, and Hamas feared Fatah would do the same in Gaza. Many Palestinians were still exhausted from the Second Intifada. In Area C villages like Nabi Saleh, Ehrenreich writes, residents were divided over the utility of the protests, which had exacted a heavy price: after fourteen months of weekly demonstrations, 155 residents had been injured, 70 had been arrested, 15 were in prison, 6 were in hiding, and nearly every home had been either damaged in Israeli raids, burned by gas grenades, or sprayed with a feculent liquid the army calls skunk. During the following twenty months, 2 protesters were killed by the army.24
Palestinian politicians were of little help. They were profoundly distrusted and seen as having squandered the sacrifices of the First Intifada on a set of agreements that had in fact given Israel’s occupation new life. Palestinians saw enormous gaps between the rhetoric of their leaders and the reality of their positions. Rhetoric was the PLO Central Council voting to end security cooperation with Israel and Mahmoud Abbas threatening to dismantle the PA. Reality was Abbas calling security cooperation “sacred” and vowing that “the PA is our achievement and we will not give it up.” Rhetoric was official support for boycotts of Israeli products. Reality was Israeli settlements constructed largely by Palestinian workers. Rhetoric was the Palestinian president promising, “Our people will continue their popular peaceful resistance to the Israeli occupation.” Reality was a movement that was never supported by Palestinian leaders and that was sometimes suppressed by PA security forces, helping ensure that demonstrations failed to sustain the attention of a fickle press, hardly made an impression on Israelis, and were little more than a ritualized nuisance for the occupying power.25
Political figures might have wanted to claim that popular protest and civil disobedience were of a piece with the PLO’s nonviolent strategy of joining international institutions and asserting the PA’s statelike quality. But there was a fundamental contradiction between the two paths. The message the PA’s constituents heard was that they should keep quiet, put faith in their leaders, do their jobs, pay their mortgages, and allow the guys in nice suits who use such phrases as “capacity building” and “institutional development” to deliver an independent state. It was a model of liberation without struggle—elite-driven and antiparticipatory. Popular resistance was closer to the opposite. It was of and by the people: devolving power to local committees, villages, and municipal councils; disrupting the status quo; collectively enduring closures, curfews, and revocations of work and exit permits; risking damage to PA institutions and their technocrats with seven- and eight-word job titles; and losing sons and daughters to Israeli bullets and jails.
Near the end of his book, Ehrenreich recounts a vivid instance of the security coordination that Palestinian leaders frequently claim to oppose. A little after one a.m. on June 22, 2014, Israeli forces entered Ramallah and took up positions in a downtown building housing the police station. The Palestinian police put up no resistance and, in the view of many bystanders, appeared complicit in the operation. Young people then marched through the streets, yelling, “Traitors!” and “The PA is a whore!” To put down the demonstration, Ehrenreich writes, Israeli soldiers “began firing tear gas and both live and rubber-coated bullets from a few blocks away as the Palestinian police battled the crowd around the station. The streets were thick with smoke and gas, but for a few minutes before the jeeps sped off again, everything was perfectly clear. The Israelis were shooting from one direction and the PA from another, the two security forces acting in concert against the same opponent—the young men who had come out in defense of their city.”26
That Israel and the Palestinian Authority largely succeeded in containing any real challenge to their symbiotic control of the West Bank created a sense of despair among many activists. Some members of a once hopeful movement began wondering whether the popular resistance that grew after the Second Intifada was less the spark of a new revolution than the last embers of an old one.
First Intifada leaders who had ruthlessly crushed collaboration became, post-Oslo, officially sanctioned overseers of it. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank saw the PLO transformed from a protector against an occupying army into an agglomeration of self-interested businessmen securing exclusive contracts from it. Nationalism gave way to individualism, and compromise with Israel, as a necessary means of survival, was legitimized from the top down. Resistance came to seem futile, if not foolish.
Worse still, no Palestinian could fully escape feeling implicated in the collaboration that was inherent in the daily functions of the Palestinian Authority and the lives of the people who depend on it. In the years since Oslo, the line between resistance and collaboration has been blurred. Too many rely on the Palestinian Authority’s existence, and too few can determine its true function: is it an instrument of indirect Israeli control, or a means of achieving independence against the wishes of the occupier?
Life in the West Bank has become discordant, absurd. Businessmen and ministers in expensive Mercedes and Audi sedans drive past refugee camps where children burn tires or throw stones. For many, the popular resistance movement that sprouted in isolated West Bank villages was a reminder of purer and prouder days of struggle. It was an echo and an inspiration, but never quite popular enough.
—September 2016