Davin News Server

By Fathi Nemer  September 12, 2024

The Zionist end game in the West Bank is upon us. The last eleven
months leave little room for doubt as settlers continue to actively
depopulate Palestinian communities, kidnapping and torturing young men
and establishing new colonies. Israeli National Security Minister
Itamar Ben-Gvir openly boasts about seeking to build a synagogue on
top of the al-Aqsa Mosque compound. 

None of this should be understood as a new phase of Zionist settler
colonialism; rather it is its sharpening, its coming out into the open
in a more brazen way. What is happening in Gaza can and will happen
elsewhere in Palestine. Not because the contexts or conditions are
identical, but because they stem from the same supremacist logic and
system of colonial domination.

It is a mistake to believe that a ceasefire, regardless of its form,
will put the genie back into its bottle. We will not go back to the
pre-October 7 status quo and move on with our lives until the next
time Gaza is bombed. If anything, October 7 showed how completely
unprepared the West Bank is for what is coming, partly due to stubborn
self-deception nurtured over the last three decades: the idea that
there can be any semblance of normal life under occupation in return
for obedience.

How else can we explain building fragile glass commercial towers in
cities under occupation? This is not the infrastructure of a society
in confrontation or that plans to fight. Meanwhile, barely a few
kilometers away, settlements are designed like fortresses, even though
they are not under military occupation. They are designed in a way
that aids in their function, which is the colonization of Palestinian
land. This invites the question: what function do various Palestinian
communities in the West Bank perform today?

This is not to say that the West Bank has been sitting idly by. The
last few years have witnessed the rise of different resistance groups,
especially in refugee camps, and hundreds of Palestinians have been
martyred. These groups have developed their capabilities and
challenged Zionist colonialism to the point where the Israeli regime
reinstated aerial bombardment in the West Bank, something it hasn’t
resorted to since the Second Intifada.

While not everyone can actively resist in the same way, everyone is
responsible for creating the conditions that allow for resistance. In
this way, there is still more that the West Bank could be doing,
especially on the popular level. Perhaps one of the most urgent arenas
of struggle where more mainstream participation is possible is the
economic one, as this is a primary way through which Israel maintains
its control over Palestinians and hampers all kinds of resistance.

The de-development of the Palestinian economy and reducing the rural
Palestinian population into a proletarianized captive workforce inside
the colonial economy have been key tools for the demobilization and
domestication of Palestinians. Palestinian livelihood is held hostage
by the Israeli regime, which imposes a very high price for resistance.
To paraphrase Ismat Quzmar at a lecture on the occupation’s economic
policies since October 7, Palestinians are always stuck between their
immediate material interest and their long-term nationalist interest.
This is why the battle to weaken and dismantle this system of
domination is key to reinforcing Palestinian steadfastness on the
ground and establishing a more contentious political and economic
order.

Simply put, if we cannot feed ourselves, we cannot free ourselves. If
we cannot independently sustain the infrastructure of life, then this
same infrastructure will be used to cage us. Upon the occupation of
the West Bank, Moshe Dayan said that if Israel could “pull the plug”
and cut off Palestinian cities from resources, then it would be a more
effective control mechanism “than a thousand curfews and
riot-dispersals.”

These are not foreign or novel ideas. Self-reliance formed the basis
for an economy of resistance preceding and during the First Intifada.
Projects such as “Victory Gardens” saw land plots and house yards
turned into productive vegetable gardens to promote self-reliance and
independence. This meant that Palestinian cities and villages could
withstand closures and sieges for prolonged periods, ensuring that no
matter how much conditions deteriorated, Palestinians would not
starve.

After the signing of the Oslo Accords, these self-reliance efforts
would be gradually undone under the guise of “state-building.”
Instead, disenfranchised Palestinian farmers would be encouraged to
shift to cash crops, such as growing flowers to export to European
markets and integrate into the world economy. Coupled with land
annexations and working in the colonial economy, these transformations
have left Palestinian farmers in dire straits, with barely 26% of them
reporting agriculture as their primary source of income. This falls in
line with the concept of food security, where food is procured through
trade or aid. What this approach neglects, however, is how food is
produced and marketed, the monopolies on seeds, and other power
relations determining who gets to eat. It also neglects that
Palestinians are suffering under settler colonialism and that they
could be cut off from the outside world according to the whims of
petulant Israeli politicians.

The concept of food sovereignty arose to challenge the shortcomings in
the food security paradigm. It centers on small-scale farmers and
seeks to build sustainable local food production. It also focuses on
reclaiming land and resources, creating communally organized
production, and building the infrastructure needed to support
resistance. Adopting such a paradigm will help create alternatives to
extricating Palestinian labor from the colonial economy, supporting
the steadfastness of farmers on their land, and repulsing settler
encroachment. 

Our economic resistance strategy should be decoupled from pure profit
motivations and place heavier emphasis on the strategic value of
controlling our production of critical resources, such as wheat. Even
if this is more costly in the short run, it should be viewed as a
communal investment in a different future where resistance does not
automatically mean destitution. This goes beyond merely changing
consumption habits and will need to be accompanied by a social and
political movement that seeks to transform Palestinian communities
into resilient hubs of resistance.

What was it about a modest dairy collective of 18 cows in Beit Sahour
during the First Intifada that made it such a threat to the occupation
that no effort was spared to shut it down? What is it about
Palestinian dairy corporations today, with thousands of cows, that
does not elicit a similar response? This is the key question we need
to unpack.

The political order of the last 30 years has reached its end and
refusing to acknowledge that will not shield us from the
repercussions. It has failed to protect us or offer a vision for a
free future. It is understandable when a complicit international
community continues to sell us this delusion of temporary occupation
and two states, but another matter entirely for us to deceive
ourselves. We should act accordingly, and support -by all means
available- a widespread return to the land as a dynamo towards
reestablishing the resistance economy of the past and developing it to
tackle the challenges of the present.

Palestinians must work to support the infrastructure for resistance.
We need to feed each other as a collective or starve in our individual
households.

https://mondoweiss.net/2024/09/palestinians-in-the-west-bank-are-completely-unprepared-for-the-coming-genocide/