In Bilin a weekly march takes place in protest of the racist Israeli separation wall, in which activists from all over the world participate and which witness clashes with occupation forces and settlers, usually resulting in a number of wounded and victims of Israeli gases. The protest marches are organized by a broad coalition of political forces, Palestinian civil society institutions and international organizations that combat racial discrimination, in addition to local inhabitants from the village and neighboring area. They also enjoy significant support from the Palestinians of territories occupied in 1948 and from Israeli peace advocates.
The image in Gaza is completely different. Since before Hamas forcibly took control of the Gaza Strip, the situation there has been deteriorating at every level, especially that of security and economy. Turning Gaza into a Hamas microstate has done nothing but reinforce Israel’s siege upon it and has made its people, whose numbers exceed a million and a half, along with all aspects of their life and death, hostage to the meanders of negotiations for the release of captive soldier Gilad Shalit and of complex international and regional calculations, characterized by this alternation between standstill in political negotiations and movement at military fronts. The return of armed tension at the border between the Gaza Strip and the 1948 territories in the past few days is only evidence to how near is the announcement that political negotiations have failed, whether at the level of Palestinian reconciliation or at that of finding a way out of the predicament which the Strip is subjected to, warning of clouds returning to gather in Gaza’s sky.
As opposed to open-ended civil action in Bilin, an insistence on militarization seems prominent, leading to additional dead-end confrontations such as that which devastated Gaza less than a year ago. Partisan and popular participation, or let us say patriotism, in Bilin, which is multilateral and able to gather local and international forces and to show the true face of the problem of occupation and the profound attachment of the Palestinians to their rights, including the right to remain in their land, is opposed in Gaza by a tendency to monopolize that is unable to manage historical Palestinian political diversity in the first place, and only succeeds at producing phenomena that carry the seeds of additional isolation, seclusion and extremism, of the kind of Jund Ansar Allah, to which Hamas and its government found no solution other than uprooting them military amid a river of blood.
And instead of the modest claims made by the organizers of the weekly marches, who do their work while insisting on characterizing it as peaceful protest being confronted by the occupation with violence and brute force, thus clearly distinguishing between the oppressed and the oppressors, in Gaza rise voices that promise final and decisive victories against the usurping entity, the liberation of Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, and similar claims that soon turns into calamities for the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants.
And if one sought to take this further, one would say that the Palestinian Cause faces in Bilin and Gaza two modes of political thinking and action separated by worlds, epochs and visions for the present and the future.
What makes matters worse is that the Israeli government stands indifferent to what is taking place in Bilin, and in fact contributes to imposing a media siege on the weekly civil event, yet displays exaggerate concern when a rocket fired from Gaza lands in a nearby garden, and begins to advertise threats and promises, from which it can be understood that those who launched the stray rocket have placed the existence of the state as a whole at risk, a fact which strengthens the Israeli government and deafens its ears to the calls of its citizens to dialogue.
Perhaps such Israeli behavior provides a sample of the role the occupation has been playing for decades in terms of escalating conflicts that are to say the least unreasonable, and confining, on the other hand, the assumedly realistic method to an unconditional surrender equal and equivalent to suicide
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