Human Rights and the Palestinian Struggle for National Liberation

Abstract

In a recent drawing, cartoonist Tony Auth portrayed what he apparently felt was a salient feature of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In the first panel a Palestinian man stands in front of his house surrounded by his family members; his fist is raised in a gesture of defiance to the Israeli occupation. In the next panel we see an Israeli army bulldozer demolish the home; now not only the man, but all the members of his family have raised their fists. Moral: not only do Israeli army actions fail in quelling resistance to the occupation, they backfire. By employing such methods of collective punishment as house demolitions, the cartoon implies, the Israeli authorities are shaking up the passive masses of the Palestinian population and involving them in the national struggle which had hitherto been the exclusive preserve of a handful of activists. Though well-intended in its effort to expose one of Israel's most abhorrent practices as an occupying power, the cartoon distorts the reality of popular resistance in the territories. Long before the uprising that began in December 1987, the dominant aspect of Palestinian resistance to occupation was its mass character. What sets the uprising apart from the preceding twenty years is its scale, its intensity, and its visibility-not its