Decolonizing Resistance: Understanding The Palestinian Popular Struggle against the Israeli Apartheid Wall through Anti-Colonial Discourse.

When the Israeli government started constructing a Wall along the Green Line near Tulkarm in 2002, the indigenous Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank named it as a form of colonization and initiated an anti-colonial popular movement. The protestors were Palestinian people directly affected by the Israeli Apartheid Wall, as well as international and Israeli activists stepping forth in solidarity. A new movement began, locally known as the popular struggle (muqawameh sha’abiyeh in Arabic), and it lasted for several years. This moment in Palestinian popular resistance featured numerous unarmed tactics, many of which fit under the umbrella of what is often referred to as “pragmatic nonviolence,” expect for stone throwing, a tactic Palestinians have deployed for decades. Stone-throwing during this period complicated how international discourses interpreted Palestinian resistance, especially given how dominant frameworks often reduce resistance tactics to a violence vs. nonviolence binary. Today, 20 years since the inception of the Wall, the debate continues in the West about “appropriate” resistance tactics used by Palestinian activists. By critically examining this conversation this paper analyzes the implications of “colonial solidarity,” or the ways international activists seeking to ally with Palestinian resistance can intentionally or unintentionally reinforce the domination of Palestinians through the categories they use to understand Palestinian resistance. I take special interest in exploring the difference between concepts and strategies of resistance Palestinians use on the ground vs. those international actors have tended to adopt. Ultimately, if solidarity activists do not support the Palestinian act of stone throwing as a pragmatic tactic, conceptualized within the historical conditions out of which it has emerged, then these international actors are no longer in solidarity as activists but rather tourists to the movement.