When Gaza broke its chains, it created a flood of the unfathomable. Palestinians resisted their life sentence in prison, unleashing a revolution that has reverberated across the globe. I’ve been documenting this uprising where I can—mostly in the occupied West Bank and the streets of the U.S. East Coast. On a good day, Palestinians have seen how this movement has shaken empire to its core. On others, they are reminded of more massacres than weeks in the calendar. Of more martyrs in one year than in any other throughout our decades under brutal settler-colonial rule. This revolution, whatever we must call it, demands we look ahead while carrying the weight of what’s behind us.
On the second day after Al-Aqsa Flood began, children and teenagers were pasting posters on the walls of Qalandia refugee camp. “Yasser was my classmate,” they said, as they buried the 17-year-old who had been shot in the back by an Israeli regime sniper the night before. Yasser had braces, they were reflecting off of the sun—that’s the only thing I can remember from his janaza. My cousin, too young to wear braces, prayed at the funeral. The borderlessness of genocide crept into the West Bank from the start. The same fingers pulling triggers and reloading tank shells in Gaza are writing a similar script here too.
In the beginning–I mean, in this beginning–every day felt significant. As if something was always at the precipice of history. The popular protest movement in the West Bank was unlike anything I had seen before. For weeks, Palestinians held daily inter-generational protests and confrontations with the Israeli regime, bringing together survivors of the Nakba, organizers of the first intifada, and the new TikTok generation. Everyday people gathered to chant for some kind of co-curated future. Thousands filled the streets, calling for the downfall of the Israeli regime in one breath, and the Palestinian Authority in the next. It felt surreal, almost too good to be true.
When the Israeli regime bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza on October 17, roars filled occupied Ramallah as the city stormed the streets. No one would have imagined how many more hospital, wheat, or tent massacres would follow. The next day, when things then returned to “normal”— after hundreds were killed in seconds, broadcast at a press conference with bodies scattered, and rage sent as shockwaves—I knew that slogans alone would never be enough to free us from their swords. The regime Palestinians are fighting is the same one they have always known, the one Western hypocrisy insisted was fabricated.
Another series of massacres, every day hundreds martyred from thousands of pounds of explosives and eight floors of concrete. After the first two months, the protests began to fade. Many Palestinians turned to their living rooms instead, where Aljazeera Mubasher detailed every Israeli missile strike, interspersed with Instagram live broadcasts of Gaza’s mass starvation.
In a parallel universe, within the same West Bank, armed confrontations against the Israeli regime were taking place almost entirely outside of the Ramallah bubble. The north, the camps, the resistance—in the bantustans two checkpoints away, this is where the stakes of the decolonial movement are highest beyond the fabricated 1967 line.
The Palestinian autobiography has long referenced the revolts of ’36, the fighters of ’48, the fedayeen of the 60s, or those who rose during the Intifadas. In the northern camps of the West Bank, these histories are revived in a 21st-century ever present resistance. One that is totally misunderstood by think tanks, news directors, or the intellectuals who think they grasp Palestine. This resistance is not an abstract concept; it is the living legacy of generations fighting back. And for them, four generations into displacement, men younger than I, are disrupting the post-Oslo hypnosis, the status quo of surrender and the lifetime of humiliation.
This fight, however, is different from that of their predecessors. It is far deadlier. With the click of a button, the sky can fall. While killer drones fly and detonate in alleyways. Insidiously, the economic incarceration of the last two decades has left Palestinians drowning in debt, so much so that most don’t have the time to pick up a stone between working three jobs and fielding calls from the bank. Today’s resistance is proving that it must also be economic–—rejecting the fantasies of Western “prosperity” for “peace,” neoliberal loans, and the slow erasure of their dignity and land. Like their grandparents before them, they wield guns and makeshift explosives. This time, it’s black market assault rifles and shrapnel-laced propane tanks against billion-dollar Israeli regime battalions. For them, everything is on the line.
Palestine doesn’t need romanticizing—there’s been enough of that to taint the cause. The pain and sacrifice of resistance are real, and those who’ve lost soulmates or siblings know this too well. But unlike the stagnation in Ramallah, the resistance in the refugee camps, and in other cities, shows that Palestinians are choosing to refuse the perpetuity of occupation. Vetoing a reality of passive spectatorship, watching Gaza’s annihilation as if it’s a separate tragedy or a different regime. As if it’s not the same violence, calibrated in various forms and conditioned to another scale. These pockets of resistance are reminders that this uprising is far from over, even when loss feels unbearable and return seems lifetimes away.
Being in Palestine, seeing the decolonial struggle with this clarity is a privilege; there is no room for two-sideism. For those who have understood their role, it means their arrow—whatever form it takes—must refuse to bow or bend against the fundamentals of this cause.
When I first returned to the U.S., the clarity of the genocidal violence and the dissociative state of the U.S. threw me into a depressive slump. Glued to the news, I was consumed with anger. I was furious that all I could do was watch Palestine’s erasure from afar. While I could appreciate the protest movements, I was already disenchanted with slogans alone. They felt hollow in the face of the bloodshed. Yet there were those in the belly of the beast who were rising up for Palestine.
Direct action groups were shutting down weapons manufacturers across the East Coast. They stormed banks and corporate offices, they painted the war economy red. Autonomous and operating under pseudonyms, they outran cops and blocked bridges. They were young and from diverse backgrounds—Filipino, Arab, and Puerto Rican. There were white suburbanites who refused to be complicit, Jewish Americans renouncing Zionism, and awkward graduate students who’d never protested before. They were organized – guided and supported by elders from Occupy Wall Street, South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, and indigenous organizers from all over the world. Every morning, they woke up to the same massacres we did, but they refused to remain stagnant.
The U.S. police state steamrolled into fascism. It has always existed, its etymology as a white supremacist tool only becoming more emboldened. Eerily reminiscent of the punitive force used against freedom fighters in the 70s and 80s–from the Black Panthers to the American Indian Movement–today’s activists face felony charges, mass arrests, batons, and chokeholds. All these tactics work to force-feed Zionist sensibilities to a generation that rejects every bite. It became clear that the U.S. was facing its own Intifada. Much to the dismay of university presidents, Congress, and the war economy, this movement was deeply intertwined with the struggle happening 6,000 miles away.
During the student uprising the students flooded their campuses, set up tents, escalated their campaigns, and created micro-societies that became a thorn in the throat to university administrations. Students confronted their institution’s culture of acquiescence. The cops and university board of trustees trembled at the sight of a united movement. We all saw, with every arrest, hundreds more joined. With every raid, dozens of new tactics inspired. Their commitment to Palestine seemed impossible to shake, centered on ending the siege on Gaza and dismantling their university’s collaboration with genocide.
The student movement pushed Palestine to the forefront of public opinion in the West, despite every trick the other side played. Yet, we must resist the urge to overly symbolize this movement. Classes have resumed, but Zionist aggression is far from over in Palestine and Lebanon.
A year into this, most actions feel like symbolic gestures when the scale of decolonization and layers of justice that Palestinians deserve remain beyond the horizon. However, October 7 made it starkly clear the cost of this struggle–who capitalizes from white body bags, and whose lives are rendered invisible to protect the imperial core.
We bear the enormity of recognizing the true consequences of these systems of violence. Never before have their webs spread across this globe been so visible–nor the solidarity and joint struggle they provoke. Perhaps all of the popular surges from the last seventy-five years have culminated in October 7.
In Palestine, our hero’s journey is often inscribed into the everyday actions of our people, rarely magnified on the world stage. We must not eclipse this. There are countless ways to oppress, maim, and incarcerate Palestinians—or to imprison our imaginations. Yet, the greatest generosity amidst this genocidal rampage is found in those writing this autobiography: the children walking to school after an Israeli regime raid, the family collectively picking every piece of flesh together as they bury their son, the insistence to climb from rubble and demand return, or the millions in Gaza, engulfed in unimaginable hell, yet still raising a victory sign.
Maen Hammad
Maen Hammad is a Palestinian-American documentary photographer, writer, and human rights researcher. He is currently based in the occupied West Bank.
