Palestine: the long tradition of unarmed resistance
Share
The ceasefire in Gaza established by the US-brokered plan adopted in November 2025 is broadly holding. It remains in the first of three phases. Israeli forces remain inside the strip along what is known as the yellow line, and the deadliest incidents continue to occur around locations sheltering or serving civilians. In the occupied West Bank, raids and settlement expansion have not paused.
In January 2024 the International Court of Justice found a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and ordered provisional measures. Amnesty International and other rights organisations have since concluded that the threshold was met. Israel rejects that characterisation. This site reports what those bodies found rather than asserting a conclusion of its own.
That is the situation. What follows is the part that gets far less attention.
A century of civil resistance
The image of Palestinian resistance that circulates most widely is armed. The historical record is substantially different.
1936. Palestinians under the British Mandate began what became a six-month general strike, one of the longest in recorded history, alongside a widespread tax boycott. It was a mass civil action before it was anything else.
1987–91. The First Intifada is remembered internationally for stone-throwing, but its organisational core was civil: commercial strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods, mass refusal to pay taxes, alternative education networks when schools were closed, and neighbourhood committees running services. Whole towns withdrew cooperation from the occupation administration.
2000s onward. Weekly demonstrations in villages such as Bil’in and Nabi Saleh against the route of the separation barrier ran for years, drawing Israeli and international participants alongside residents. Several achieved partial legal victories in Israeli courts.
2005. Palestinian civil society organisations issued the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions — explicitly modelled on the anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa, and explicitly nonviolent.
You do not have to endorse any particular one of these to notice that a tradition this long and this consistent is missing from most coverage.
Two authorities, not one
It should also be said that Palestinians live under governing bodies that suppress their dissent. The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has detained and beaten critics and journalists. Hamas has done the same in Gaza. Neither fact softens anything about the occupation, and omitting them would make this a briefing rather than a description.
People living under occupation are not thereby well governed by the authorities nominally representing them. Both things can be reported.
Sumoud
The word that appears on the Palestine designs on this site is sumoud — usually translated as steadfastness. It refers to staying: remaining on land, continuing to farm it, rebuilding what is demolished, refusing to be moved.
It is a deliberately unglamorous concept. It describes persistence rather than victory, and it is the value most often expressed by people actually living there. That is why it is the word on the shirt.