[Prefatory Note: I wanted to share a foreword that I wrote to an exceptional ethnographic study of everyday resistance by residents of the Palestinian village of Bil’in, quite near Ramallah, based on the Suzanne Hammad three years of residence and informed observation. It enriches our understanding of core forms of resistance embedded in home and land. It offers a parallel to the commin perception of resistance as distinct protest activity, both violent and non-violent, for which Bil’in was previously international known as a result of its weekly protests that were provoked by the intrusive construction of the Israeli separation wall. This book written well before October 2023 when the genocidal onslaught by Israel on Gaza was published in 2023 by Rowman & Littlefield, and available in a Kindle edition, unfortunately with a high price-tag.]
Suzanne Hammad, Toward a Theory of Emplaced Resistances: Everything
Starts and Ends with the Land, Foreword by Richard Falk, 2023.
This fascinating book gives us not only creative ways of grasping the underlying continuities of the Palestinian ordeal but also a truly original conception of why the long arc of resistance and resilience, stretching across time and taking certain distinctive forms, has been sustained for more than a century in the face of assorted trials and tribulations. None of these tests of Palestinian resistance was greater than the double assault on the fundamentals of Palestinian normalcy in the West Bank than that posed by the ever-expanding settlement movement and the connected construction of an encroaching Separation Wall on mostly occupied Palestinian land commencing in 2001.
Suzanne Hammad views the evolving Palestinian reality through an ethnographic lens that complements what the media reports, leaders and intellectuals have to say, and militants achieve by direct confrontation with the daily experience of Palestinians living under the heavy boot of Israel’s apartheid regime which pursues with accelerating vigor its own agenda of ethnic cleansing and dispossession of people from their land. To carry out such an exploration led Hammad to conduct her field research for three years in a single West Bank community, the village of Bil’in. The implications of her findings have a broad resonance for Palestinian studies as they illuminate the realities of many similar villages subject to occupation, and indeed inform the situation and consciousness of all Palestinians regardless of whether living under occupation, in Arab refugee camps, or in pre-1967 Israel. In this sense, Bil’in with its population of less than 2000 offers us a rich metaphor by which to decipher the entire Palestinian predicament, and better appreciate the various modes of response that underpin resistance not only to the existential abuses being experienced under occupation but to the foreshadowing of an inevitable liberation that Israel’s state violence is capable of punishing harshly, yet unable so far to destroy. It might even be unable to comprehend such resistance. It is bringing to light these under-appreciated facets of Palestinian sumud or steadfastness that makes this book illuminating reading for all who wish to gain a deeper comprehension of this tragic struggle that remains horizonless as to beginning and end.
Although Bil’in is but one of many West Bank villages, its selection by the author as her main case study is hardly accidental or arbitrary. This village distinguished itself from many other superficially similar villages in at least two important ways. First, residents experienced the severe intrusion of the Wall upon its living space, vividly exemplified by the barbed wire, electrified fence passing through Bil’in in ways that cut its residents off from 60% of their agricultural growing and grazing land, as well as the surrounding ‘empty’ areas used for recreation, reflection, and spiritual growth, including gatherings of the whole community during holidays, and even more during the harvesting times, especially of olives. Bil’in’s inhabitants were cut off by a permit system that was required to pass the single gate in the wall that granted them permission to go beyond the mostly residential part of the village, and in some cases, gain access to their own farmland. Secondly, residents reacted through collective anti-Wall protests every Friday for at least 15 years starting in 2005. The continuity and persistence of these protest dramatized Palestinian opposition to the Wall and the resolve of villagers to resist non-violently, yet with courage and resolve. This activism in Bil’in contrasted reliance on peaceful methods with the violent brutality of Israel’s apartheid regime, which imposes Jewish supremacy even in occupied Palestine and in defiance of international humanitarian law. In relation to the Wall, Israeli defiance became overt as Israel rejected the near unanimous (14-1) findings of the World Court’s Advisory Opinion of 2004. Such an authoritative legal endorsement of Bil’in fundamental grievance added legitimacy to the Friday protests by confirming that it was unlawful for Israel to construct a supposed security Wall on Occupied Palestinian Territory, and hence the Wall should be dismantled, and the Palestinians given reparations for the harm sustained. Implicit in the Advisory Opinion was the related idea that Israel’s situating the Wall on Palestinian territory was more a land grab than a genuine security measure.
We ignore the special contribution of Hammad’s inquiry if we are content with this most visible level of interaction, which is to depict both the depth of Palestinian suffering and its transcendence in the lived daily life of the residents of Bil’in. On the one side a deprivation so severe that it prompts inhabitants to pronounce their condition by such sayings as ‘we’re alive only because we are not dead yet” or “if we had the chance we would choose death over living under occupation.” And yet, this is not at all the bleak understanding that Hammad seeks to impart, which is rather a seemingly contradictory sense in Bil’in that our life is not worth living and yet if we will go on living our values, resisting Israel’s encroachments, and transcending their harmful intentions, by nurturing the pride and pleasure associated with sustaining our way of life in the face of hardships, humiliations, and humbling adjustments we will be living the best possible life given the circumstances. To get at this interface between despair and transcendence, Hammad enables us to listen closely to the voices of Bil’in’s people, which dominate the text. This witnessing by Bil’inians decries the pain of profound loss yet seamlessly affirms their pride and meaning of life by maintaining organic connections as best they can with the land and their ancestral homes by doing as much of what they did before the Wall by walking alone or with a friend in the arid wilderness beyond the fertile land or convening the village children and elders to take part in the annual olive harvests that are more than agricultural and livelihood happenings, but are truly sacred rituals that combine work, play, festivals of remembrance, and defiant reaffirmations of a sense of belonging that guns, settlements, and provocations are incapable of damaging, let alone destroying.
Along the way we become privy to many telling details that add credibility to this seeming impossible atmosphere of existential contradiction. For instance, the residents of Bil’in do not waste a moment of regret lamenting their decision to stay in their homes as near as possible to their land on the wrong side of the Wall, come what may in terms of settler violence, encroachment, and Israeli tactics of repression. On the contrary, those Palestinians who departed from their homes and land increased their experience of injustice and suffering associated with Israeli 1948 tactics of dispossession and subsequent reenactments of the nakba; in retrospect, those so coerced, should for their own sake have stayed, resisted, and even accepting death as preferable to displacement, however cruelly induced to attain the Zionist settler colonial goals.
In another telling example, Hammad show us how those Bil’in residents rendered unable to grow their own subsistence food on their diminished farmland, losing the dignity associated with living off the produce yielded from one’s own land as generations before them had done. A further creative initiative undertaken not only for practical reasons, but in the spirit of nonviolent resistance is a food sovereignty movement in Bil’in which seeks to act collectively as a community to maintain local subsistence living standards without outside dependence.
These ways of balancing the ordeal of the occupation against a resolve to live as authentically as possible in traditional ways is what most truly captures the complex truths of life in Bil’in. In other words, the weekly protests that gave Bil’in worldwide prominence are the visible display of stubborn resistance. These marches to the wall opposed by Israel’s active military presence are the front story, but it is the back story of the daily lived life of residents that is the core of a resistance-unto-death that is quietly enacted on an hourly basis by the people of Bil’in. This extended exposure to the voiced experiences of Bil’in’s residents also abandons the conventional reliance of scholarly inquiry on the binary optics of oppressor/victim or victim/resister. This enriches the appreciation that Palestinian life under occupation is not properly interpreted as an either/or reality, but is more truly constituted by a richer interwoven texture of creative adaptation, stubborn revolt, depressing captivity, and liberating defiance.
Suzanne Hammad’s relationship to this account of her experience in Bil’in is at once deeply personal while at the same time managing to uphold the best traditions of academic rigor. She does not obscure her own background whose father left Nablus in the 1967 War for the sake of economic opportunity to start a family outside, taking refuge in an Arab country. She makes no effort to offer a balancing rationale for the Zionist Project or set forth the Israeli security narrative, yet this book came across to me as not only revelatory but entirely trustworthy. Hammad attains her goals by allowing the people of Bil’in to speak about their lives in ways that enlighten readers no matter how familiar they are with the large literature on the Palestine struggle. This study is also a rebuke to those who insist that objectivity requires a total detachment from partisan perspectives by achieving an understanding of Palestinian resistance that has eluded conventional scholarship for more than seven decades.
There are some lingering questions that make me urge Hammad to consider undertaking a sequel.
–Is this attachment to home and place especially strong in Bil’in because the fence/Wall bisects the lived life of the village, or has this sense of loss transcended the physicality of Bil’in to become part of a broader Palestinian imaginary by way of empathy and projection?
–If after a few years, will a renewed immersion in Bil’in after a year or so confirm the persistence of Hammad’s findings, given the heightened Israeli provocations of the extremist leadership that took over the Israel government at the start of 2023, and put the West Bank at the top of its expansionist policy agenda?
–How do the daily lives of city dwellers in Jenin or Nablus exhibit resistance in ways that either resemble or differ from Bil’in and from one other?
–And even more wider afield, is everyday Palestinian resistance, with its pride of place and home attached to sumud unique to the Palestinian reality, or is it paralleled in other national situations of sustained repression of an ethnically distinct people in similar or differing ways? For example, Kashmir, Western Sahara, Catalonia, Tibet, Rohingya (Rakhine State, Myanmar)?
Hammad’s inspiring study has many additional ramifications that invite further study, but as a way of conceiving the Palestinian ordeal this book presents the most convincing, compassionate, and imaginative understanding of just how deep and abiding are the roots of Palestinian resistance. It is a great achievement as well as a loving tribute to the forms of resistance enacted by the village people of Bil’in against the apartheid regime of mighty Israel.
Richard Falk
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Renaming the 1948 War: Partition, Dispossession, and Fragmentation
24 MarRenaming the 1948 War: Partition, Dispossession, and Fragmentation- On the Politics of Language
Controlling the Discourse
Israel has been brilliant over the years in shaping and misdirecting the public discourse on the future of Palestine. Among its earliest achievement along these lines was the crucial propaganda victory by having the 1948 War known internationally as the ‘War of Independence.’ Such a designation erases the Palestinians from political consciousness, and distorts the deeper human and political consequences of the war. Language matters, especially in vital circumstances where there are winners and losers, a reality that applies above all to a war of displacement.
It took decades for the Palestinians to elevate their experience of the 1948 war to even the consciousness of those on an international level who supported the Palestinian national struggle for self-determination. Even now more than 50 years after the war, the ‘Nakba’ by which the 1948 war is known to Palestinians remains internationally obscure. The word signifies ‘catastrophe,’ which is associated principally with the dispossession of at least 700,000 non-Jewish residents of Palestine, what became the state of Israel after 1948, and subsequently, with the denial by Israel of any right of return for those Palestinians who abandoned their homes and villages out of fear or as a result of Israeli coercion. This double process of dispossession and erasure was reinforced powerfully by the bulldozing and utter destruction of 400-600 Palestinian villages in the new state of Israel.
Even those who have this revisionist awareness rarely convey a sense of the Nakba as a process, not just a calamitous event. For those Palestinians dispossessed of home, property, community, employment, and dignity, their life, that of their families, and that of subsequent generations has been generally ‘a living hell’ as a consequence of either enduring the misery and humiliation of long-term residence in refugee camps or experiencing the various vulnerabilities and rootlessness of involuntary and permanent exile. In other words, the tragedy of the Nakba began and did not end with the traumas of dispossession, but rather continued in the ordeals that followed, which must be considered as inseparable from the originating catastrophe.
The UN Partition Resolution
For many reflective Palestinians, the decades since 1948 have intensified the ordeal that followed from the struggle for control of territory and elemental rights that followed from GA Resolution 181 adopted by a vote of 33-13 (with ten abstentions, one absent), in November 29, 1947. The Israeli mastery of the public international discourse was expressed by dramatizing the Zionist acceptance (as represented by the Jewish Agency for Palestine) of the proposed partition of historic Palestine while the Palestinians, their Arab neighbors, as well as India and Pakistan, rejected it declaring above all that partition without the consent of the inhabitants of Palestine was a flagrant violation of the UN Charter promise of the right of self-determination, entailing peoples choosing their own political destiny.
This clash of attitudes was then interpreted in the West as demonstrating the reasonableness of the Zionist approach to the complexities associated with two contradictory claims of right regarding self-determination and territorial sovereignty. The Zionist/Israeli spin claimed a readiness to resolve the conflict by way of political compromise while contrasting and denigrating the Palestinian approach to the future of the country as exclusivist and rejectionist, even as genocidal, implying an alleged Arab resolve to throw Jews into the sea, a contention that naturally agitated an extremely sensitive post-Holocaust Western liberal political consciousness. A more objective rendering of the opposed viewpoints of the two sides supports a set of conclusions almost totally the opposite of what has been sold to the world by an Israeli narrative of the UN partition initiative and its aftermath that despite these contrary considerations remains dominant.
After an understandable initial Palestinian reflex to repel Jewish intruders intent on occupying and dividing their homeland of centuries, it has been the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who have been proposing a comprensive compromise and it is the Israelis who, by and large, subscribe to the view that the Jewish ‘promised land’ incorporates the West Bank and the unified city of Jerusalem, and any dilution of these goals would be a fundamental betrayal of the Zionist project to restore fully a mythic ‘biblical Israel’ in the form of a sovereign state. The more ideological Israelis, including Menachem Begin, (commander of the Zvai Leumi Irgun, 6th prime minister of Israel, 1977-83) were outspoken critics of partition in 1947, anticipating correctly that it would produce violence, and believing that Israel would only achieve its security and complete the Zionist Project by engaging in military operations with the object of territorial expansion. David Ben-Gurion, the master Zionist tactician and the first and foremost Israeli leader, shared Begin’s skepticism about partition, but favored it for pragmatic reasons as a step toward the fulfillment of the Zionist Project, but not the end of it. Partition was provisional, to be followed by seeking to complete the Zionist agenda, which is precisely what unfolded ever since 1947.
Partition was a familiar British colonial tactic that complemented their ‘divide and rule’ strategy of occupation was proposed for Palestine as early as 1937 in the report of the Peel Commission, but in view of the desire for Arab cooperation in World War II, the UK uncharacteristically backed away from their advocacy of partition for Palestine. In a later white paper the British declared partition to be ‘impractical’ as applied to Palestine, and somewhat surprisingly abstained from the vote on GA Res. 181.
Prolonging the Palestinian Ordeal
At least since the PLO decision in 1988 to accept Israel as a legitimate state and offer normalization of relations if Israel followed the prescriptive provisions of UN Security Council Resolution 242, that is, withdrawing to the 1967 green line borders and agreeing on arrangements for an effective resolution of the refugee issue. The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 added regional inducements to the PLO offer of political compromise, and this too was met by Israeli silence and a lackluster response in the West. The Oslo diplomacy was a one-sided failure. It never produced proposals on the disputed issues in ways that contained any reasonable prospect of bringing the conflict to a sustainable end while allowing Israel valuable time to keep expanding their network of unlawful settlements, a form of creeping annexation that served, as well, to make the two-state mantra more and more of a cruel chimera, useful to pacify international public opinion that sought a sustainable peace for both peoples and an end to the conflict..
More objectively considered, these dual reactions to the partition solution can be deconstructed. The Zionist movement at every stage took what it could get, and then went about creating conditions on the ground and diplomatically for getting more, by expanding their political demands and expectations, or as sometimes observed, ‘shifting the goalposts.’ Reliance on such ‘salami tactics’ can be traced back at least as far as the Balfour Declaration when Zionists accepted the terminology of ’national home’ despite their aspirations from the outset to establish a Jewish state that disregarded Palestinian moral, legal, and political rights. Recent archival research has made it increasingly clear that the real Zionist goal all along was the imagined Israel of biblical tradition, ‘the promised land’ that deemed to encompass all of the city of Jerusalem, as well as the area known internationally as ‘the West Bank’ and in Israel as ‘Judea and Samaria.’
And with respect to the Palestinian response, initially ardently supported by the entire Arab world, as well as most countries with majority Muslim populations, rejection of the UN approach was based on the extent to which partition bisected Palestine without any process of consent by, or even consultation with, the majority resident population. It was an arrogant effort by the UN, then under Western control, to dictate a solution that was not sensitive to Palestinian concerns or in keeping with the spirit or letter of its own Charter. To treat Palestinian rejection of GA Res. 181 as indicative of anti-Semitism or even rejectionism is to accept an explanation of the disastrous legacy of partition that conforms to the Israeli narrative that misses the real dynamic at work that has kept the conflict alive all these decades. To this day Israel continues to create conditions that diminish Palestinian prospects while subtly depicting the Zionist Project as in reasonable pursuit of previously undisclosed ambitions with greater clarity.
This leads to the central question that also includes reasons why the Israelis did also not want partition, but felt correctly that its provisional and temporary acceptance was a way of gaining more political space both for maneuvering and for showing the world its reasonable face that included a commitment to peace. In contract, the Palestinians felt shut out and humiliated by the way the future of their society was treated by the UN and the West, and yet didn’t want to alienate the international community, especially Washington. This kind of attitude meant lending credence to the 1993 Oslo Framework of Principles, and acting as if the ‘peace process’ had something to do with ‘peace.’ This accommodationist mode of diplomacy practiced by the Palestinian Authority over the course of the last 25 years while Israel annexed and Judaized East Jerusalem and penetrated more and deeply into the West Bank created the impression in many circles, including Palestinian and others, that the Palestinian Authority was not nearly rejectionist enough, and either naively playing a losing hand or completely failing to understand the real Zionist game plan.
‘The Partition War’
To circle back to the contention that language is itself a site of struggle, it become desirable, even now, more than 70 years later, to call the 1948 War by a name that reveals more clearly its essential and flawed character, and this name is The Partition War. Only by such a linguistic move can we begin to understand the extent to which the international community, as embodied in the UN, was guilty of original sin with respect to the Palestinian people, and their natural rights, as well as their legal entitlements and reasonable political expectations. Endorsing the partition of Palestine was what I would describe as a ‘geopolitical crime.’
Tags: 1948 War, Discourse Control, Nakba, Nakba as Process, Oslo diplomacy, Partition War, Politics of Language, UN GA Res. 181, Zionism