By Rima Najjar
What is unfolding in Gaza now is not merely resistance — it is the rehearsal of liberation under fire. A resistance movement becomes a campaign of liberation when it transcends survival and begins to articulate a vision for post-oppression life — one that includes governance, justice, and cultural renewal. This shift requires codifying demands, building institutions, and claiming moral and legal authority by invoking international law.
Hamas exemplifies this transformation. After winning the 2006 elections only to be sidelined by the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority (PA), it began building autonomous governance in Gaza. Through grassroots organizing, parallel institutions, and external funding — including support from Iran and Qatar — Hamas established courts, security forces, schools, health clinics, and charities such as the Al-Salah Association. These efforts were not cosmetic; they filled voids left by the PA’s corruption and collaboration. In doing so, Hamas weaponized Gaza’s siege conditions to legitimize its rule, leveraging smuggling tunnels, local weapons production, and strategic aid distribution to frame itself as the sole entity resisting Israel’s blockade.
This consolidation allowed Hamas to survive sanctions, assassination campaigns, and multiple wars — transforming it from a guerrilla faction into Gaza’s de facto government. While isolated diplomatically, its ability to provide services and maintain a military presence has rendered the PA increasingly irrelevant. Hamas thus inhabits the contested space where resistance evolves into governance — where refusal becomes blueprint.
In Gaza today, the battlefield is not only kinetic — it is administrative. Resistance fighters are simultaneously managing aid distribution, coordinating ceasefire logistics, and negotiating hostage exchanges, blurring the line between insurgency and governance. Hamas operatives have reportedly overseen the allocation of food and medical supplies in northern Gaza, where international agencies rely on local networks to reach civilians amid rubble and displacement. Even under bombardment, tunnel infrastructure has been repurposed for transporting aid and sheltering wounded fighters, reflecting a dual-use logic that merges survival with statecraft. This fluidity — where combatants become coordinators and siege conditions produce governance improvisation — marks Gaza as a space where resistance is no longer reactive, but structurally adaptive.
In Palestine, this threshold between resistance and liberation has always been deliberately obscured by occupying forces and global spectators alike. The resistance in Gaza constantly oscillates between tactical survival and strategic nation-building, between reacting to atrocity and rehearsing statehood. Yet the grammar of liberation — the insistence that our struggle writes sovereignty before it’s achieved— remains irreducible, carved into our literature, politics, and memory.
Our narrative has never been mere lament; it is preemptive statecraft. Our poetry was policy before we had parliament. Our militancy was cartography before we had maps. We did not wait for the world to hand us nationhood; we authored it in exile. Every verse by Mahmoud Darwish, every act of defiance by Leila Khaled, every refusal by Ghassan Kanafani, every tunnel strategy by Mohammad al-Deif— these were not gestures. They were infrastructures of future liberation and governance in our homeland.
Darwish drafted the grammar of sovereignty in verse, not as metaphor but as legislative syntax. His work rituals survival, codifies return, and legislates dignity. Kanafani transformed allegory into insurgency; his assassination in 1972 by Mossad — though never officially confirmed — was a tactical strike against Palestinian futurity itself.
Leila Khaled weaponized spectacle to rupture silence, turning hijacking into pedagogy, insisting that armed struggle was not rage but roadmap. Deif, commander of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, turned strategy into infrastructure — operationalizing resistance through weapons production, tunnel networks, and siege adaptation.
When Israel assassinated him in July 2024 and boasted of it, it was because Deif’s resistance was battlefield legible; Kanafani’s was historiographically dangerous. And long before formal recognition or diplomatic overtures, Salman Abu Sitta reconstructed Palestine through forensic cartography — mapping over 1,600 erased villages and 30,000 place names from colonial archives and oral testimony. His Atlas of Palestine wasn’t just a record of dispossession; it was a tactical document for return, proposing logistical pathways for repatriation that defied erasure. Abu Sitta made geography militant — proving that even the terrain itself could be reclaimed in exile.
As a Palestinian, I did not simply inherit resistance; like so many others before me, I enacted it. At the American University of Beirut where I was a student, I didn’t wait for institutional permission to speak. I created Speakers Corner (modeled after Hyde Park Corner) — a breach in colonial order, a space of insurgent clarity. There, Leila Khaled spoke not in apology but in assertion, electrifying the campus with the grammar of refusal. That moment did not belong to history; it belonged to a continuum.
Yet AUB could not tolerate that continuum. Speakers Corner was shut down, deemed too volatile for academic containment. When it was later revived, its radical spirit had been exorcised — replaced with administrative protocols, limited access, and pre-cleared topics. The rupture was deliberate. But memory defies erasure.
That same resistance-to-liberation arc plays out now in digital terrain. Facebook, once a space of connection, has become a battleground of control. I receive “fact-check” spam dismissing verified reports of Israeli damage from Iranian strikes. This is not algorithmic misfire — it is epistemic warfare. It continues the same logic that assassinated Kanafani, surveilled Darwish, and policed Khaled’s movements: Palestinian testimony must be flagged, filtered, invalidated.
But we do not post to be believed. We post to archive, to indict, to survive narratively. Gaza burns, and we narrate it. Not just as catastrophe — but as calculus. This moment is not a breakdown; it is a blueprint. The liberation campaign underway today continues what Darwish composed, what Khaled choreographed, what Kanafani imagined, and what Deif engineered.
My presence — at AUB, online, in exile — is not symbolic. It is strategic. Because every word I write, every image I share, insists: we are not waiting. We are building it.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
17 July 2025
Source: globalresearch.ca