They Can't Assassinate Resistance
by Charlotte Kates
June 10, 2003
To be a Palestinian political leader is a dangerous profession. The
organizers of grassroots groups, resistance organizations, political
associations - civilian and militant - live as constant targets for
arrest, political imprisonment and murder.
The assassination attempt upon Dr. Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, a Hamas
political leader and spokesperson, illustrates that Israel is not now, and
never was, interested in a path to peace, justice, or independence for
Palestinians. Rantisi is the latest in a long line of Palestinians -
political leaders, fighters, organizers and community activists - targeted
for extrajudicial executions by the Israeli regime. Rantisi survived the
assassination attempt, as two bystanders did not; thirty other
Palestinians were injured in the attack, coming by way of missiles shot
into Rantisi's jeep by a helicopter gunship that fortunately missed their
target.
Israel must know, after its string of murderous attack upon Palestinians -
civilians, fighters and political leaders - that the killing of this or
that political leader will never destroy Palestinians' dedication to their
struggle for liberation. The Palestinian people are marching down a road
to freedom that is paved with the blood of their martyrs - and with each,
they have grown only more determined, never less. Assassinating Rantisi
would kill Hamas no more than assassinating Abu Ali Mustafa killed the
PFLP, no more than assassinating Abu Jihad killed the PLO or Fatah- and
no more than the bulldozer assassination of Rachel Corrie killed the ISM.
Instead, the assassinations are a reminder that Palestinian political life
means, very often, Palestinian political death at the hands of a Zionist
state that desperately wishes to crush Palestinian resistance.
The assassinations and assassination attempts have served as fertile
provocations for armed response from Palestinians determined to prove that
the targeting of their political leadership will not be accepted quietly.
Such attempts have traditionally coincided with the approaches of
Palestinian national discussions about possible cease-fires; immediately
pre-empting such considerations, they serve as a vicious reminder that
Palestinian liberation will not be granted by the oppressor, but rather
seized by the oppressed.
This latest attempt comes on the heels of the "road map to peace" that
demanded as one of its first principles that the Palestinian Authority and
its installed prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, turn its weapons upon its own
people to disarm Palestinian resistance groups and suppress Palestinian
political organizing. Perhaps designed in an effort to provoke Palestinian
civil war, the demand was met with a clear answer from Palestinain
resistance groups - they would not disarm themselves in support of the
US-Israeli "roadmap". Nevertheless, all remained committed to a clear path
of Palestinian national unity. The renewed campaign of Israeli terror
highlights the reality of the US demand upon Abbas - to leave the
Palestinian people disarmed and disunited in the face of the state which
has never been anything but a mechanism for oppression and occupation of
the Palestinian people and their land.
The Zionist state has attempted to rule Palestine with assassinations,
executions, mass detentions of political prisoners, bombings and
shootings, while simultaneously pretending to seek "peace" through the
establishment of Palestinian bantustans. Thus, every Palestinian voice
that refuses to accept the conditions that forever render Palestinians a
subject people is a target for all of the above; it is seen most clearly
with the leadership figures targeted for assassination, but the power of
the Palestinian struggle lies not in the persons of its leadership but in
the steadfastness of the people. There is no killing of Palestinian
resistance without the killing of every Palestinian. The power of the
Palestinian movement - that has allowed it to withstand decades of
oppression, occupation and dispossession - is in its roots; from the land,
from the people, arises resistance, arises revolution.
It is not something that may be killed by a missile, an Apache helicopter,
an F-16, or a machine gun; it is something that will not rest until
Palestinians know, not a Bantustan, not "provisional borders," not
"roadmaps", but the freedom to live, to work, to develop as a society, to
organize, to speak, to bear children without the expectation that one day
they will be martyrs as well, to determine the course of their own lives
and their own society.