By Ramzy Baroud
Days before my sister, Suma Baroud, was killed by the Israeli army in Khan Yunis, she texted me a long message about her future plans for the land where her home once stood.
In Gaza, virtually all of my extended family’s homes had been bombed or demolished by Israeli warplanes and bulldozers. Suma’s plan, however, wasn’t to build a bigger house or sell the land and leave the Strip. ‘Once the wreckage is removed,’ she wrote, ‘I want to build a community garden and make produce available to the whole neighborhood.’ While I supported her idea, I wondered where my sister would live after the war. For her, that seemed a minor issue.
Suma was an embodiment of family love and communal solidarity. Our parents believed that educating girls was as important – if not more important – than educating boys. They invested everything they had to make her a doctor so she could serve the community. After graduating from the University of Aleppo College of Medicine in Syria, she dedicated her life to uplifting women, serving as a role model to many girls, some of whom would eventually become doctors themselves. Her death sent a shockwave through Khan Yunis, despite the fact that mass killings had become a daily event.
Like most doctors in Gaza, Suma belonged to a social class that allowed her to live a comparatively comfortable life. Yet, also like most doctors in the Strip, she gravitated towards the same collective struggle that has united people throughout the genocide. It is no wonder that Israel has killed hundreds of medical workers since launching its assault on Gaza in October 2023. These medics were not just healers; they were community leaders whose dedication and sacrifice proved vital to a people facing extermination.
We rarely classify the work of doctors, teachers, journalists, artists, civil defence workers and the like as acts of resistance, although they certainly are. Their daily contributions rarely make headlines, yet without them and many others Palestinian society would have crumbled from within, its ability to withstand the Israeli war machine severely diminished.
The Gaza Strip, where I was raised, cannot be defined by its land mass – a mere 360 square kilometers – or its abundant resources, as it has little, but by the tenacity of its people. This is why Gaza, under siege for nearly two decades, represents the heart of Palestinian resistance throughout history – the very resistance that has allowed them to exist as a people when their enemy has invested endless time and resources to eradicate them.
Conquering the narrative
As we publish this edition, two years into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, hardly anything remains of the place I once knew. Ninety-two percent of all homes have been destroyed or irreparably damaged. Nearly every mosque and church has been decimated.
Hospitals, too, have borne the brunt: many have been deliberately targeted, destroyed, or forced to shut down, while a few now function only partially. The educational system has essentially been erased: over 95 percent of school buildings have been damaged or destroyed, and every university in Gaza has either been demolished or left inoperable.
At least 65,502 people have been confirmed dead with the true number likely far higher. Gaza is being slaughtered – the same Gaza where I spent my childhood and teenage years. Even when far away, Gaza remains, in my heart, my one and only home.
The images pouring out of the Strip today are not just a documentation of the present. They are a confrontation with a history we have been taught to ignore. To truly understand what we are witnessing, we must look beyond the immediate moment. This is not an isolated catastrophe. Nor is it, as Israeli politicians claim, a war to eradicate Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinian people, the apex of a century-long, settler-colonial project and a brutal climax to a long war for legitimacy and meaning. It is a struggle over whose narrative defines reality – whether the Zionist project’s claim to legitimacy can overwrite the lived history and rights of the Palestinian people, or whether Palestinian steadfastness will assert its own meaning against erasure.
For Israel, genocide is not a mere act of revenge but part of a strategy that is rooted in a long legacy of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé refers to as ‘incremental genocide’. Israel and its allies work hard to present the obliteration of Gaza as an act of defense that all started with Hamas’s assault on 7 October. In doing so they erase 100 years of colonization and displacement.
This is nothing new. In fact, the Zionist project did not just seek to conquer land; it sought to conquer the narrative, to erase Palestinian history, identity and presence. It framed Palestinians as a people without history, a land without a people, and their resistance as mere acts of ‘terrorism’.
Student protesters in Washingon, US, call out Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 9 May 2024. ZUMA PRESS/ALAMY.
This is an invitation to witness a people who, in the face of a century-long project of erasure, are not passive victims but agents of change
This war of words may be even more vital than the struggle on the ground. It is a struggle for cultural and intellectual legitimacy, a battle to define reality itself.
In his book Ten Myths about Israel, Pappé also reminds us that ‘history lies at the core of every conflict. A true and unbiased understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace. The distortion or manipulation of history, in contrast, will only sow disaster.’
We must understand that history is far more than dates and deeds that mark our calendars. It is intertwined with people’s history, or history from below – the vital players in the formulation of culture, ideas, and ultimately, collective behaviour. For example, the concept of sumud, the legendary steadfastness of the Palestinian people, that can be seen today in those who refuse to leave their obliterated homes in Gaza, is not rational, nor is it motivated or taught by the diktats of a specific political faction. It is a collective mindset that has been shaped by a long legacy of Palestinian resistance, what we can call ‘long history’, or the longue durée.
This Big Story is dedicated to this long history of the Palestinian people, the forces that have shaped it, and a challenge against the forces that have tried to erase it.
Anti-colonial resistance
Alongside a history of violence in Palestine stands a magnificent, unyielding history of resistance. Gaza has been a crucible of this struggle.
The first organized resistance movement to emerge from Gaza was the fedayeen, largely composed of displaced peasant refugees. These men banded together in the hope of reclaiming what they had lost during the 1948 Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’, when 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their ancestral homeland by Zionist militias. With refugees making up the majority of the population and confined to just 1 per cent of Palestine’s historic territory, Gaza naturally became a hotbed of resistance.
Fedayeen who survived Israel’s military operations later reorganized into various groups, eventually becoming part of the Palestine Liberation Army, established by the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964.
Following the 1967 Naksa, when Israel occupied the remaining Palestinian territories, these groups began to crystallize along ideological lines. Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp became the epicentre of the first intifada, or uprising, in 1987, ignited by the deaths of four Palestinian workers hit by an Israeli military truck. Stone-throwing protests were met with bullets, and strikes with imprisonment and torture.
As these events show, the Palestinian people are not passive victims of settler-colonialism, broadly defined as a form of colonialism in which the existing inhabitants of a territory are displaced by settlers who claim their land. As the anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon argued, resistance is a profoundly humanizing act in the face of a dehumanizing system. It is a means by which the oppressed reclaim their dignity and agency. ‘It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect,’ Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth.
In the first half of the 20th century, Palestinian thinkers already understood Zionism, the political ideology that called for the creation of a Jewish state, as more than a nationalist project: it was a Western-backed colonial endeavour aimed at displacing the Indigenous population. George Antonius, in his landmark 1938 work The Arab Awakening, made the case that the establishment of a Jewish national home was an imposition upon Palestine’s native society. He warned that ‘the cure for the eviction of Jews (from Europe) is not to be sought in the eviction of Arabs from their homeland’, underscoring the incompatibility of Zionist settlement with Palestinian existence.
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod later situated Zionism within a global history of colonization, rejecting the tendency to treat Palestine as an isolated or exceptional case. This perspective is crucial for understanding Palestinian resistance as an anti-colonial struggle.
Palestinians understand this through the concept of Muqawama. Though the word translates to ‘resistance’, in Palestinian popular culture, it is a transcendent concept that covers any and every act of defiance against injustice, colonial oppression and military occupation. It can be expressed in a song or a bullet, a painting or a slingshot, civil disobedience, a general strike, or the very act of wearing a Palestinian kuffiyeh – the traditional headscarf.
Palestinian resistance is an organic, intuitive, intergenerational force that has been tested by every invasion and every attempt at erasure. From the legendary resistance of Batis of Gaza (died 332 BCE) against Alexander the Great, to the popular uprisings against the British Mandate (1936-39), to the ongoing sumud in Gaza, Palestinian resistance has always been a testament to a deep, immovable faith in their land and their collective future.
This spirit is also embodied by the brave intellectuals who are building a shared vision and collective consciousness that defies the narratives of the oppressor. It is through this struggle that writers, poets and artists prepare the ground for liberation, making resistance not only a political act but also an intellectual and cultural one.
Practising parkour among the rubble of Rafah. The sport has become part of the cultural resistance in Gaza. AHMED YOUNIS
Workers against war
Though sumud has inspired other liberation movements around the world, the struggle for Palestinian liberation is not unique or an anomaly; it is a chapter in a wider struggle against colonialism and imperialism. It draws parallels with the fight against South African apartheid. This example proves that a system of racial apartheid, no matter how entrenched, cannot last forever when faced with native resistance and a steadfast global solidarity movement.
As was the case in South Africa, international solidarity with the Palestinian people, especially during these difficult, tormenting times, is key. Civil societies around the world are already proving to be indispensable in exposing the extent of Israel’s crimes during two years of genocide.
In countries like Spain, this solidarity has proved particularly effective in bridging the gap between civil society mobilization and government action, resulting in ministers cancelling massive military contracts with Israel. A refreshing development is that worker unions in many countries are now serving as critical pillars of solidarity, with Italian dockworkers in particular implementing direct action to prevent weapons from reaching Israel.
The long view
The enduring resistance and resilience of Palestinians is something even some Zionist historians have come to understand. Israeli historian Benny Morris once conceded that the Palestinians ‘look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective. They see that at the moment… they have no reason to give in, because the Jewish state can’t last. They are bound to win.’
Sadly, in his panic over what appears to be Israel’s inevitable fate, Morris – like many others – has failed to consider the possibility of coexistence within a single democratic state, where all citizens are treated as equals, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity.
But in some way, Morris is right. The Israeli occupation and apartheid can never truly secure itself on a foundation of systemic violence and ethnic exclusion. While the short-term events are marked by the devastating efficiency of its war machine, the long-term historical trajectory is shaped by the unwavering courage and collective resilience of the Palestinian people. The drones, the fighter jets and the bunker-buster bombs may alter the immediate landscape, but they cannot extinguish the spirit of a people who have already mastered the art of survival and resistance across millennia.
This Big Story is an invitation to engage with history on its own terms – not as a collection of isolated incidents but as a continuous, unfolding story of resistance. It is a story told by those who have refused to be vanquished and who continue to write their story with every act of defiance. Their struggle is not for our pity but for our understanding and solidarity. It is proof that in the end, love, faith and courage will always outlast the tools of colonization and war.
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