“All Palestinians are violent terrorists!”

Credit: the author.

Very few Israelis, save historians, or the outside world concerned over Middle East issues, know that Palestinians didn’t start the fire. The violence was started by the Jewish “defence” militia, HaShoMer, in 1909.

Even following subsequent Jewish paramilitary terrorists, at least some Palestinians did their best to resolve the conflict by nonviolent means.

The Fifth Noncooperation Congress (Mutamar al-La-taawun) of five to six hundred Palestinians, was held in Nablus in 1922 and the Sixth in 1923 in Jaffa. 

Both Congresses adopted the principle of noncooperation, but limited its applications to three forms: social boycotts of government receptions, political boycotts of government boards, and a consumers’ boycott of British and Jewish products. 

A ‘Buy Palestinian’ initiative was adopted. Attendees discussed nonpayment of taxes, but rejected such measures because landowners held sway.

An Arab National Committee formed and resolved that a general strike should be sustained until Palestinian demands had been met. Similar committees organized in towns and villages in what would be the last attempt to mobilize all Arab political tendencies into an interlocking program of noncooperation, now that protest activities had been forbidden. 

"The [Arab Higher] Committee intimated that, while they were not responsible for it, the agitation in favour of ‘civil disobedience’ must be regarded as a spontaneous expression of national feeling, and they added that they could not use their influence ... to call off the strike unless Jewish immigration was suspended. 

In the 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) used “from the river to the sea” to call for what they saw as a "decolonized" state encompassing the entirety of Mandatory Palestine. By 1969, after several revisions, the PLO used the phrase to call for a one-state solution, that would mean "one democratic secular state that would supersede the ethno-religious state of Israel".

“The settler produces the stimulus for anger while monopolising all legitimate means of acting upon it. Strikes and assemblies are banned: legal redress is blocked through military courts; peaceful marches are banned with military force; and then, when resistance turns violent after every civil avenue has been sealed, that violence is invoked as proof that repression was necessary all along.” — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, psychiatrist, philosopher, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial.

Qur'an commands: Turn to the principle of unity—the unity of God and the unity of mankind. We interpret this to mean that we can meet with Marxists on the common ground of standing up to the forces of international arrogance; we can meet nationalists, even secular nationalists, on the common ground of Arab causes, which are also Islamic causes. Islam recognizes the Other.... So Islam does not negate the Other; it invites the Other to dialogue. (1995)

The Olive Harvest Coalition, which formed in 2002, assists with the Palestinian harvest of olives, which is often threatened by the actions of Jewish settlers. The activity has become a tradition among the radical and human rights groups, which join together each year for this harvest, both veteran groups, such as Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) and newly established ones since the Al-Aqsa Intifada, such as Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch 

Palestinians are not all Hamas. That’s what Israel wants you to believe. Like people everywhere, the great percentage of Palestinians just want peace and sustenance for their families.