For Palestinians, disarmament would mean national suicide

Four months after the latest ceasefire in Gaza, Palestinians are still dying as a result of Israeli aggression.

If not by bullets and air strikes, then by winter cold, rain and enforced malnutrition. With Israel's failure to effectively utilise the Jabalia Doctrine, committing genocide to force surrender, it has now turned to humanitarian crisis as its primary tool of subjugation.

The choice presented to Palestinians is cruel: surrender your right to armed resistance or die a slow and silent death. 

During the height of the war, Israel weaponised the issue of captives to justify its ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Today, Israel is using the resistance's weapons as an excuse to maintain Palestinian suffering, leading to their physical and spiritual surrender.

Both the United States and Israel are explicitly demanding that the Palestinian resistance disarm as a prerequisite for the reconstruction of Gaza, cornering it into choosing between the biological survival of Palestinian society and the survival of the Palestinian cause.

While the disarmament demands are presented as a reasonable price to mitigate the apocalyptic conditions in Gaza, in reality, they aim to finish the job of ethnic cleansing.

The objective is not only to remove the cost of the Israeli occupation but also to escalate the settler-colonial process of eliminating the natives on all levels.

For Palestinians, agreeing to disarmament would mean national suicide.

Shifting goalposts

Throughout two years of relentless war, Israel weaponised the events of 7 October and the Israeli captives to justify the mass murder of civilians and the systemic destruction of civil society, including bombing hospitals, schools, churches, mosques and apartment buildings.

Israel's go-to talking point after every crime was the targeting of Hamas tunnels as an act of self-defence and the freeing of Israeli captives.

With the release of all Israeli captives, Israel is continuing the annihilation of Gaza by shifting the goalposts to the weapons of the resistance

With the release of all Israeli captives, Israel is continuing the annihilation of Gaza by shifting the goalposts to the weapons of the resistance.

Since the finite number of captives brought Israel two years of war, the weapons of the resistance can buy indefinite time. As long as a rifle or even a kitchen knife remains in Gaza, Israel can continue the genocide under the pretext of demilitarisation.

This emphasis on disarmament when discussing the "day after" is integral to the Zionist project of crushing the Palestinian spirit of resistance.

The founders of Zionism, building on European colonial legacies, theorised that destruction and displacement were prerequisites for building the state of Israel. Following the footsteps of European settler-colonial projects in the United States and Australia, Zionism is structurally a zero-sum project: there is space for only one people and one state.

Since settler-colonialism is fundamentally about land theft and the replacement of the native, Zionists established the state of Israel in 1948 by killing thousands of Palestinians and destroying more than 500 towns, leading to the displacement of at least 80 percent of the population of that land to make room for new European settlers.

Elimination process

In addition to the physical elimination of the indigenous people through ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism requires the severance of any connection between the indigenous people and the land. Israel is committed to the erasure of the history, culture and identity of the native.

This is clearly present in Israel's ongoing project of Judaising Jerusalem, a process of removing the Muslim and Christian character of the city and replacing it with a Jewish one.

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Starting with demographic engineering, seizure of Palestinian houses and shops, settlement expansion and the renaming of streets from Arabic to Hebrew, Jerusalem is becoming less familiar to the native.

Despite these efforts to expedite displacement, Palestinians actively maintain their historical, cultural and spiritual ties to the soil.

The resilience of Palestinians in Gaza in the face of these horrors led the coloniser to shift its strategy towards moral and psychological "displacement". This is where the coloniser employs population-centric counterinsurgency tactics, including genocide, to eliminate the popular infrastructure of the armed resistance.

The Jabalia doctrine: Genocide as a counterinsurgency policy

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This is why 7 October was viewed as an existential threat to Israel, as it demonstrated that more than 75 years of systemic ethnic cleansing had failed to kill the "native's" will, imagination and ability to resist and refuse erasure.

As a result, the Zionist project faced the stark realisation that Palestinians in Gaza have not been broken despite 17 years of blockade, accompanied by a high-tech open-air prison and calorie-counted diet. Gaza shattered the myth of the defeated native, proving that Palestinians are resilient political agents capable of fighting for their freedom and liberation.

To restore its image of "invincibility", Israel embarked on a genocide designed to destroy not just the infrastructure of resistance but the spirit that animates it.

The horrors of the genocide in Gaza were intentional, meant to make the cost of resistance so unimaginably high that natives would believe carrying a weapon, or even harbouring the spirit of defiance, is the direct cause of their material devastation.

Even though the armed resistance in Gaza could not stop the Zionist elimination machine, it made it costly, both materially and morally.

Israel dreams of a cost-free colonisation where it can manage the indigenous people as biological subjects instead of political ones, managing their death through non-spectacle means such as limiting calorie intake rather than dropping bombs.

Biological subjects

In essence, this demilitarisation campaign aims to strip Palestinians of the will and tools to resist their subjugation, rendering them biological beings without political rights or aspirations.

Palestinians have clung to their right to resist since before the Balfour Declaration because it remains their only means to structurally stop their colonisation and reject their assigned role as passive victims. In the face of a permanent structure of elimination, armed resistance becomes a structural necessity for survival, both physical and emotional.

Facing Zionist atrocities with political and legal international impunity, along with unconditional western support, Palestinians are left with no choice but to rely on resistance to protect themselves.

Although Palestinians are faced with a brutal choice between receiving basic human needs or keeping their weapons, the reality is that both options lead to subjugation or death

When they are rendered sub-human through dehumanising rhetoric and physical violence, Palestinians, like all colonised natives, respond by restoring their humanity and asserting their political agency through resistance. Resistance is a physical and psychological necessity for survival.

Although Palestinians are faced with a brutal choice between receiving basic human needs such as clean water, food and a home, or keeping their weapons, the reality is that both options lead to subjugation or death.

Disarmament is not just a decision to stop resisting. It is an erasure of the native's claim over the land, granting Israel total legitimacy and authority over the land and the lives of the indigenous people.

Ultimately, giving up the right to bear arms in the face of a violent and permanent elimination process is a complete surrender to the fate drawn by settler-colonialism.

Similar to the story of the Palestinian refugees in Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun, who suffocated silently in a tanker truck because they were too afraid to bang on the walls, Palestinians today face a similar reality: either they continue knocking on the walls until they achieve liberation, or they die silently.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.