The essays in this series were written during the summer of 2024, and may not fully address rapidly escalating violence in the region.

Who are the men who crossed into 48 Palestine^[1] from the Gaza Strip as part of Operation Al Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023? In my recent book with Sireen Sawalha, My Brother My Land: A Story from Palestine, I worked with Sireen to tell the life story of her family, and in particular, her younger brother, Iyad Sawalha, a leader in the Islamic Jihad in the West Bank during the Second Intifada. On reflection, it seems to me the book could have just as easily been about one of the Al Aqsa Flood fighters or one of the resistance fighters in Gaza today, some of whom are fighting as part of the same Al Quds Brigades that Iyad fought for in Jenin back in 2002.

In the days after Operation Al Aqsa Flood, Sireen also thought about the fighters who crossed the Gaza barrier. She told me, “These guys feel like my brother. I feel I am reliving the hunt for them as though it is the hunt for him.” I, too, felt there was something familiar about them and their understanding of the physical stakes of anti-colonial struggle.

My research into the fighters of the Second Intifada makes today’s fighters seem all too familiar. Like those who came before them, they are motivated by the same land theft (intensified), the same settler colonialism (intensified), the same injustices (intensified). Reading the history of the Second Intifada, and the history of Palestine in general, teaches us about the continuous crimes against humanity committed against Palestinians, and brings the present into focus.

When not all-consumed by the destruction of Gaza and the victims of genocide, I still wonder about these men pre-figured by Western media in ways we will never see done to Israeli soldiers or settlers, even after their war crimes or genocide. The resistance fighters in Gaza are at once extremely present in, and central to Western discourse—they provide the justification for Israeli crimes to continue with impunity—and yet invisible. The lives of the fighters, and why they take up armed resistance, are dismissed and made insignificant because doing otherwise would force the United States and Europe to confront the root causes of violence and oppression: Zionist settler-colonial apartheid.

To understand the fighters of today, I think back to Iyad Sawalha…

Iyad had a big smile, he had a presence, the life of a gathering. He was tender with his sisters. He was strict with them. He was unforgiving. He was sensitive. He was also a planner of suicide bombings. That he couldn’t be all these things, that he can’t be a hero to people fighting settler violence, that he can’t be flawed, that the ambiguity in all this makes all Palestinians suspect, is a reflection of Western racism and the need to protect the Zionist settler-colonial outpost by framing its enemies as irredeemable one-dimensional monsters rather than three-dimensional flawed people or heroes. And of course, it is natural to demonize one’s enemies. So perhaps the question begs itself, why are Palestinians the enemy of the West and not the settler-colonial apartheid regime committing atrocious crimes against humanity against those Palestinians?

Iyad’s path to armed resistance, as I discovered while writing his story, is impossible to caricature or pinpoint. Infinite factors played a role in shaping him, including his own innate personal character. All of this should be familiar to anthropologists. We recognize that people’s experiences, decisions, and life choices are diverse and are shaped through complex structures. While people need to make their lives make sense, how they do so is circumscribed by the times in which they live. Yet, when it comes to Palestinians, they are not afforded this privilege of diverse life, or the right to fight their oppressor, or any understanding of the complexity this might entail.

As I write in the book, Iyad believed he was, “building something.” And not really caring if he would see the results or not. “We lay the seeds for others in any case,” Iyad says. And perhaps we can conclude that the seeds he sowed bore fruit. If only simply because his name still echoes in the alleyways, his photos still appear on village walls, and in 2019, a group near Jenin was established calling itself “The Gathering of the Martyr Iyad Sawalha,” as it threatened to expose (in quite problematic ways) spies and collaborators. Younger fighters, today, look up to him, and to other past fighters. They see themselves as a new generation of fighters in the Al Quds Brigades, confronting the Israelis with more advanced methods and weapons than Iyad had in his time. And believing that their elders, past generations of fighters, would be proud of them, especially those in Gaza, for persevering through a year of genocidal war.

Indeed, there is much continuity between then and now—both in Zionism’s destruction of life and in the motivations of the armed resistance. Thus, when Sireen and I have chatted over this past year, when she remembers Iyad and talks about him, I find myself wondering about the fighters of Operation Al Aqsa Flood and those in Jabalia and other places in the Gaza Strip today, but also in Tulkarem, Jenin, and the West Bank. Like Iyad, they appear to be confronting their genocide in tracksuit pants and hand-me-down slippers, “determined and motivated” as I wrote in the book, “by the principle that no occupier was ever expelled without armed resistance.”

Footnotes

^[1] Palestinians refer to the territory over the 1949 armistice line (or green line) that presently demarcates the Israeli state as 48 Palestine.