In this confrontation with apartheid Israel, the Palestinians won

The unity which Palestinians demonstrated in the past few weeks marks the rise of a new national consciousness.

After the latest genocidal onslaught by apartheid Israel, some serious questions have been raised, once again, about the usefulness of resistance and whether the outcome of the war can, or cannot, be considered a victory for the Palestinian people. Those same questions were raised in 2009, 2012, and 2014, when Israel launched massive attacks against Gaza, and even during the non-violent 2018 Great March of Return, when Palestinians marched towards the fence around the Strip and were shot and killed by Israeli snipers. Some “liberals” resorted to the usual proclamations, blaming the “two sides of the conflict” – ie, the coloniser and the colonised, and concluding that Palestinians must stop launching rockets from Gaza. Once again, we were being challenged by those same “neutral” voices about the very definition of resistance. They fail to see, for ideological reasons, that resistance, broadly speaking, is not only the ability to fight back against a militarily more powerful oppressor, but also the ability to creatively resist the colonisation of one’s land. They fail to understand peoples’ power, in our case, “sumud” (steadfastness), or even to see that it exists.