The recent shooting attack, which was carried out inside the "Nabi Jacob" settlement in Jerusalem, in which 8 settlers were killed by the Palestinian youth, "Khairy Alqam", on Friday evening, January 27, 2023, has shed light on the growing role of individual operations in the system of resistance against the occupation.
And as the data issued by the Israeli internal security service, the Shin Bet, indicate that the year 2022 witnessed a steady increase in the number of operations against settlers and occupation soldiers by 1933 operations, which resulted in the killing of 29 Israeli soldiers and settlers and the wounding of about 128 others, with a clear increase compared to the previous year 2021, which witnessed 1570 killings. There were 18 Israeli settlers and 196 others injured, an increase that seems likely to continue in light of the continuation of the Israeli occupation’s crimes against the Palestinians, the latest of which was the Jenin massacre, during which 9 martyrs died at the hands of the occupation just one day before this operation.
The process of transformations in the West Bank
This prompts us to reflect on the major transformations that the resistance system has witnessed in recent years.
It can be said that the middle of the year 2014 in particular represented a turning point for the reality of the West Bank. Before this year, and in the year 2011 in particular, the total number of resistance activities reached 320 activities, including popular confrontations with the occupation, such as throwing stones, burning tires and throwing Molotov cocktails. This number increased in the following year to 578 activities, then in 2013 to 793 activities[1]. This remarkable escalation jumped once in the middle of 2014, to reach 3699 resistance activities, including 16 stabbing operations, and 8 trampling operations, and it was a peak The shift in July by 886 resistant activity[2], to raise an important question here about the reasons that led the resistant activity to escalate.
We can talk here about three events in 2014 that constituted a key to the ongoing struggle situation in Jerusalem and the West Bank until this moment, which was characterized by a pattern of individual operations, which are not necessarily related to the Palestinian factions, even if these factions were not absent from the scene.
The first event, in June, was a cell, which later turned out to be affiliated with the Hamas movement, capturing three settlers in Hebron, then killing them[3].
Meanwhile, in search of settlers, the Israeli occupation forces stormed most of the cities of the West Bank, which doubled the popular resistance activity in the face of these forces. The repercussions of the incident were known as the “child Muhammad Abu Khudair gift,” and this gift was concentrated primarily in the occupied city of Jerusalem.
Child Muhammad Abu Khudair (communication sites)
However, the most important pivotal event was the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip starting in July, a war that Hamas called the "Battle of the Consumed Storm" and the occupation forces called it "Protective Edge"[5], and it was the longest battle in the history of the conflict with the Israeli occupation , In which the Palestinian resistance revealed an unprecedented combat performance in view of its limited capabilities, and the fact that it operates in a narrow, exposed and besieged coastal strip, and lacks a strategic back, and one of the most important features of the performance of the Palestinian resistance in this battle was its ability to capture a number of Israeli soldiers.
Gaza war.. and the emergence of individual operations
This war came exactly seven years after the Palestinian division, and during these seven years a lot of water flowed under the West Bank bridge. The Palestinian security system after the Palestinian division. This vision was not limited to the renewal of the Palestinian security apparatus, but rather was based on a broader framework that includes security, cultural, economic, social and political policies. It aims in its outcomes to neutralize the Palestinian masses in the West Bank from their historical mission by immersing them in a pattern of consumption that contradicts the requirements of Confronting the occupation, and this required a wide social engineering process. The efforts to exclude Hamas from the public sphere, destroy its platforms, and bulldoze its incubators were only one of its features.
In addition to the policies of dumping debts at the expense of agricultural and industrial development[7], the new societal engineering extended to razing the national movement in general, devoting the Fatah movement to a party of power, ending its liberating mission[8], and linking it organically to the authority, thus crippling its ability to lead any militant activity. influential, the nationalization of the entire public sphere, the weakening of the student movement, and this was accompanied by the push to highlight new symbols, such as the singer instead of the martyr and the prisoner[9], and the intensification of consumerist display, and the promotion of pure individualism, and so on, and this process continued, and for seven years, to exclude the Palestinian masses from Its mission is to confront the occupation.
However, the 2014 war on the Gaza Strip had the potential in itself to be a real break in the aforementioned societal engineering processes, and had it not been for the different regional and international circumstances, this battle would have been greater for Hamas than the battle of dignity was for Fatah in 1968[10], and at the very least it repeated this The battle is to introduce the Palestinian masses in the West Bank to the Hamas movement, which they no longer see its activity in its traditional incubators. It also raised the question of duty for the new generations that did not live with the experience of the Al-Aqsa Intifada and the policy of “cauterizing awareness” pursued by the occupation[11], nor was it affected by propaganda. The Palestinian division, and then the 2014 war was not only a case of high inspiration for them, but also asked them the question of duty regarding the challenges of Jerusalem, Al-Aqsa Mosque and settlements.
We can see the impact of this war on the public's restoration of awareness of Hamas, through the victory of its student body at Birzeit University by a decisive percentage after a long absence following the Palestinian division.
This victory indicated the displacement of the images of the events of the division from the memory of the Palestinians, and the clear bias towards the resistance project, which was then politically represented by the Hamas movement.
The most important thing is that the year 2014 was not a fleeting boom, and with the escalation of colonial challenges, such as the repeated targeting of Al-Aqsa Mosque and attempts to normalize the temporal division, opening a loophole for the spatial division[12], and the escalation of settler attacks, the worst of which was the burning of a Palestinian family in July 2015[ 13], the militant situation that opened in 2014 took root in Jerusalem and the West Bank, as the resistance activities in 2015 reached more than 5,383 resistance activities, including 186 stabbing operations, 42 trampling operations, and 123 shooting operations, and the peak of this year was in October, when the total number of resistance activities reached 1,328 [14].
The gift of Jerusalem
A Hamas cell in the city of Nablus launched, on the first of October, an attack on a car of settlers[15]. Two days after this operation, the young man, "Muhannad al-Halabi", coming from the city of Ramallah, carried out a stabbing attack in occupied Jerusalem. It led to the killing of three settlers and then his martyrdom, so that this operation would be the beginning of what was later known as the “Jerusalem Gift”[16], and for the “Jerusalem Gift” to be the most important station until then in the open struggle situation since mid-2014.
This uprising, in addition to being characterized by popular confrontations, was also characterized by the intensity of individual operations, which did not stop in the following years. In 2016, 10 trampling operations and 50 successful stabbing operations were carried out out of 4,785 resistance activities[17], and so this state of struggle continued in multiple patterns. And in various stations, individual operations remained a prominent feature.
During the following years, the phenomenon of individual resistance continued to escalate, leading to the year 2021, which in turn was considered an important turning point, after settler attacks and attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque, and successive campaigns of arrest and liquidation among Palestinian youth, prompted the strengthening of resistance activity.
According to the statistics contained in the annual report of the Hamas media office in the West Bank, the West Bank and Jerusalem witnessed 10,850 armed attacks in 2021, including 441 effective operations, which is four times the number of effective operations witnessed in 2020.
The same approach continued during the past year 2022, which witnessed a series of individual operations that relied on ramming and shooting techniques. One of the most prominent of these operations was the "Bnei Brak" city operation that took place near Tel Aviv last March, leaving 5 dead, and was the first of its kind since the Intifada. the second.
Later during the same year, it seemed that the individual resistance entered a stage of organization by announcing the Nablus and Jenin Brigades, and then the Lions' Den group in September as the most prominent development of the individual resistance phenomenon.
The group posed a clear challenge to the occupation authorities, not only because of its decentralized system of work and the lack of a clear chain of command for it, which made it difficult to track and penetrate intelligence, but more importantly, it provided a prominent new model for individual resistance fighters who move freely and without great organizational restrictions with the ability to strike painful blows. .
Look at the epic features
Throughout the history of the Palestinian struggle, individual initiatives have always been present, and even the patterns that have dominated individual operations in recent years are familiar to Palestinians, in the length of his struggle stations. Before the first intifada, “Khaled Al-Jaidi”[19] of the Islamic Jihad movement carried out successful stabbing operations. It contributed to crystallizing the events towards that intifada, and in the first intifada, Amer Abu Sarhan, from the Hamas movement, was known as the “detonator of the knife revolution”[20]. A trampling operation that led to the killing of 8 Israelis[21]. However, the most important difference in the recent individual operations is that they do not come from a context dominated by organizational effectiveness in the West Bank, as individual motives outside the organizational contexts prevail at this stage.
This does not mean a complete organizational absence, as reference has already been made to the organized operations that Hamas stood behind and inaugurated the events of 2014 and 2015, and a number of the movement's fighters who were chased by the occupation forces appeared for a short time, such as the martyr "Muhammad al-Faqih" who was martyred in 2016, And the martyr "Ahmed Nasr Jarrar", who was martyred in early 2018, and the martyr "Ashraf Na'alwa", who carried out his operation in October 2018, and was martyred in December 2018, and the martyr brothers "Saleh Al-Barghouti" and "Asem Al-Barghouti", who carried out two operations in December 2018, and a number of the perpetrators of the stabbing and trampling operations had previously belonged to Palestinian factions, such as the martyr "Muhannad al-Halabi" who belonged to the Islamic Jihad movement, and the martyr "Ibrahim al-Akari," who carried out a trampling operation in Jerusalem in November 2014. Which seems close to the Hamas movement, and the operation of the captive "Omar al-Abed"Who, in July 2017, stormed a settlement in the vicinity of Ramallah and stabbed 3 settlers to death, and it was found that he was influenced by the "ideological propaganda of Hamas."
Here, it is possible to talk about the predominance of individual motives with the overlapping of organizational work, in addition to the intensity of operations in number and quality, and the participation of Palestinians from occupied Palestine in 1948. In this context, the shooting attack carried out by "Nashat Melhem", a resident of Wadi Ara in Palestine, is present. Occupied in 48, in January 2016, to be martyred later after a brief chase, leading to the Beersheba operation carried out by "Muhammad Abu Al-Qia'an" in March 2022, during which 4 Israelis were killed, stabbed and trampled, and two others were injured, in the city of Beersheba in the Negev ( south), in a process that Israel has not seen on its scale in years.
Conclusion.. in the semantics
Relatively speaking, individual operations and their continuity mean the failure of social engineering operations and efforts to neutralize the masses in the West Bank, as well as the restoration of the culture of resistance in the West Bank affected by the scenes of the televised war in Gaza in 2014, and the instinctive awareness of the masses of the failure of the settlement project and its blocked horizons, and the growing Israeli colonial threats, especially With regard to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the most prominent address for most of the stations of the state of open struggle, as well as the challenge of the settlers and the increase in their attacks, which raises the sense of danger among every Palestinian, especially since these attacks have reached the point of burning homes, individuals and mosques, so the settlement scene is no longer a scene that threatens the land, and then Dedicating the colonial position only, but, in addition to that, it is expanding to directly threaten individuals with their lives and property.
However, the predominance of the individual character of the operations reflects the circumstance of the national movement in the West Bank, after the resistance factions depleted their cadres and ranks during the second intifada without being able to absorb the losses, and then after the division, when the Palestinian Authority targeted not only the structures of the resistance movements or their traditional opponent Hamas, but the entirety of them. The national movement was as previously described, and then the masses began to take the initiative, after organized action was dominant over the struggle history of the Palestinians.
The location of the Jerusalem operation.
(Reuters)
The continuation of individual operations means that the resistance model still dominates the depth of the Palestinian consciousness, and that these operations do not come in a temporary context.
And if the objective conditions do not allow until this moment to expand into a more comprehensive uprising or intifada, especially in view of the position of the Palestinian Authority that controls the Palestinian sphere in the West Bank, a position that prevents the expansion of forms and patterns of resistance, then it, that is, those processes, with their accumulation and continuity, open the way to creating Wider transformations in the Palestinian situation, which reminds of the series of intermittent actions before the first intifada, or the series of operations between the two intifadas. The result is a deep transformation process that does not seem to be interrupted, especially since the Palestinian case and its surroundings are going through a phase of high fluidity.
The question remains, when discussing the implications, about the short life of the Palestinian persecutor at this stage, whether he belongs to a Palestinian organization or not, and the answer is related first to the security capabilities that the occupation has accumulated since the second intifada, the elements of which are geographical engineering, bypass roads and checkpoints, and the installation of surveillance cameras Along the bypass roads and their paths and exits, in addition to the decline in the experience of the struggle as previously mentioned, and the fighter who undertakes to carry out an operation often realizes that it is the first and the last operation, and here emerges an important indication of the spirit of this fighter, and thus strengthens the resistance model within the Palestinian society, and the possibilities of its continuation these processes.