"I had moved to the West Bank during the brief season—we could not have known how brief—in which it was possible to believe that even the cruelest regimes might be toppled by people filling the streets and squares and, without weapons or the need for violence, demanding a life of dignity. That moment had passed by the time I left, but the movement limped on, growing closer to death while other approaches gained momentum: spates of solitary stabbings and car rammings. In 2015, the year after Israel’s previous war on Gaza, rammings increased by a factor of six. Over the next seven years, settler assaults on Palestinians jumped ninefold. The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers began to rise dramatically in 2021, and in the years leading up to the October 7, 2023, attacks, armed groups of Palestinians started to reappear in the cities of the northern West Bank.
Elsewhere the months rolled by, but whenever I returned or checked in with friends, Palestine seemed stuck in a rut: years of passivity and despair followed by giddy weeks of chaos in which it felt like everything might change, until despair settled over everything again. The repetition was hard to bear. People I had come to care about gradually disappeared. Those who could left. Others died or went to prison or suffered some slow internal death invisible to those who didn’t know them. Their absences haunt this story, but they also add up to a different kind of absence: the missing voices of people who have devoted their lives, at great cost, to speaking out, and who now find themselves too afraid to speak."
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/05/after-nonviolence-end-of-peaceful-resistance-west-bank-ben-ehrenreich/
#Palestine #WestBank #Nonviolence #PeacefulResistance #Activism #HumanRights #Genocide
Ecoar
Sue Cohen
Miguel Afonso Caetano
The-14
Dr Julia Molinari PhD SFHEA
