PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: What happened to the Palestinian popular struggle?

This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:

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Welcome to the +972 Podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m Dikla Taylor-Sheinman, Editor at +972 Magazine, and your host of today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the river and the sea. Before we dive in, a quick reminder that what we do would not be possible without you, our readers and listeners. If you believe in our mission and would like to support our work, head over to 972mag.com/members and find out how to become a member of 972 or make a one-off contribution.

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The Palestinian Olive Harvest, once a quiet, family-centered tradition and pillar of the West Bank economy, has become a symbol of Israel’s intensifying campaign of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territory. Settler pogroms, military roadblocks, ever-expanding movement restrictions, and sweeping arrests of harvesters and solidarity activists have blurred the line between resistance to Israel’s regime of occupation and apartheid, and survival itself. Today, I’m speaking with Munther Amira, a veteran Palestinian activist and social worker who has spent decades organizing non-violent, grassroots resistance to the occupation. We’ll be talking about how the tactics and priorities of the Palestinian liberation struggle on the ground have shifted from the post-Oslo era to the post-October 7th reality, and why, amid increasing personal risk of violence, he continues to resist. Thank you so much for having us here, Munther. We’re here in the youth center in Aida Refugee Camp, which is just outside of Bethlehem, where you were born and raised.
But I understand that you’ve been spending some time away from home because of the annual olive harvest in Palestine, which is becoming one of the most violent in recent memory. Since early October, the Wall and Colonization Resistance Commission has recorded 259 separate attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers against olive pickers. And many of us, you know, myself included, have seen horrifying footage come out of places like Turmus’ayya, Burin, and Mukhmas. So can you tell us a little bit about your involvement in this year’s harvest? What have you been seeing on the ground? What has it been like to move around in the West Bank?

Munther Amira:
This olive harvest season used to be the place to be happy, to gather with the family, to show solidarity with the people — that we are coming to be with you. And the people who used to come used to enjoy it, like enjoy the meal that we would have there together, singing together, to have the coffee break together. It was something that we love a lot. But after the 7th of October, it started changing. The first year, the people did not harvest their olives, like just 30% of the people could reach their land. The second year, 2024, I would say that some of the people could reach, but they forbid them, we try our best.
This year, we said “That’s it. We have to reach our land.” But the price was very high. As you mentioned, a lot of people have been injured. A lot of people have been imprisoned. They closed the road. They announced many areas as closed military areas. We are facing an organized militia each time we try to reach the land with the people: the settlers attacked us, and the army, after that, would come to continue the attack of the settlers, throwing us away, announcing the area as a closed military area. In Turmus’ayya, we saw very clearly how the people have been attacked, even attacking the international and the Israeli activists. This year was something else. In one day, the Israeli government, this fascist government, decided to deport 32 activists from Spain, from Italy, from France, from the U.S. They just took a decision to throw them out. I would tell you, this would put us into a place [where] we would be more scared because we thought that this presence of the international activists would create a kind of protection.
It seems not. Not the internationals and even not the Israelis, because they have been attacked the same [way] that they are attacking us. And in some places, they are attacking them more than us. It’s hard, but it’s worth that. We want to help and to protect our farmers and to tell the whole world that this is the settlers, the Israeli settlers, and this is the Israeli government that you are supplying with weapons.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
So from what I’m hearing, the violence has really gotten much worse over the past two years. I’m curious, maybe we can take a step back a little bit, because you have been an activist for a very long time. I imagine you were around 16 years old when the First Intifada happened. And that’s also when you were first arrested for throwing stones. And in the early 2000s, you became involved in grassroots popular resistance committees, which were organizing against various Israeli policies, including the construction of the separation barrier in 2002, which we’re sitting quite literally, a few meters from, it feels like. So I’m wondering if you can just speak a little bit about your early experiences with popular resistance and what drew you into the movement?

Munther Amira:
The occupation — I just opened my eyes in a refugee camp in a very, very ugly house, two small rooms with an iron roof. In the winter, you would be very cold. It was very hard to live in a refugee camp more than you can imagine now, because now we have good houses, concrete houses at least. It is poverty, yes, but worse than poverty, [is] the fear that you would live in, because you don’t have [a] future.
The streets that we are playing on always have soldiers. You are running from the soldiers since you are like 10 years old or 12 years old, just hearing about your uncle in prison or your dad in prison or your uncle’s friend have been killed, your neighbor in prison. So we are trying to help the people to have a good quality of life because I don’t want them to have the same experience that we had. So I thought that I have to be involved to end this kind of life. I want a better life.
The First Intifada was a popular intifada for all the people — the women have something to do, the children, the young people, the old people. So everything around you is pushing you to be part of the struggle. If not, you are useless. Usually from the First Intifada, how we used to resist is [by] throw[ing] a stone and to run[ning] away. We would not be in front of an Israeli soldier, you know, face-to-face at all. Usually we are just running from them and they are chasing us. We thought always that this monster would eat you, would kill you. So you could not even look in his eyes. So yes, I took the decision, but I paid the price very early. I went to prison. I was just 18 years old.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
So we’re talking about the First Intifada.

Munther Amira:
Yeah, the First intifada. It was hard, but, you know, it opened the windows for me to start thinking more and more and how to do it. But it starts confusing — after that, coming with [the] Oslo agreement, I thought that’s it. Oslo came, we will live in peace. Even they will not let us return to our homeland or even that we will not have a good independent state — name whatever. I’m a human, I want to live in peace, this was the thing that I want[ed]. So I thought that’s it. But day by day, we find ourselves in a trap, that it’s not true. We are not living in peace.
I made a big mistake when I celebrated Oslo. It was the biggest mistake, not for me as a person or as an activist. I don’t know if I would — even [in] that period — [if] I would present myself as an activist. We used to be “munadilin,” fighters, but we had more and more settlers. We had more and more checkpoints until the start of the Second Intifada. And at the same time, an armed resistance [was] trying to organize themselves.
But I was trying to continue my activism through these demonstrations, asking for our rights, and it’s not easy. Maybe in the villages and the cities you can speak freely about non-violence, but in the refugee camps, it’s not easy at all. I think the turning point was one day we had a summer camp here in the camp while they were building the wall. And we said, “Let’s do a demonstration against building the wall.” It was maybe the first time that I stood in front of a soldier face-to-face. I saw that I had the power. For me, this is what I can do. This is what I believe in: I can do popular resistance, showing the world that Israel is not doing enough to let the Palestinian people to live free and to live in peace, and their aggression against us. They are not going through even the agreement that we signed together. So maybe non-violence would be more powerful than the M16 that we would use.
I will tell you a story about the children here. I came one day and the children were very nervous here, they were screaming. So I asked them, “What is happening here? Shoo fii?” They told me, “The soldiers from Kever Rachel came and attacked us, and we ran away. So they took our bicycles to the military basement.” I told them, “We can do something.” They said, “What can we do?”
I told them, “We can go to this gate that is in front of the camp and we have to ask for our bicycles. But I don’t want to lose any one of you. If anyone throws stones or does anything wrong, they will arrest all of us. So let’s do a non-violent activity.” They were laughing at the beginning, even though they are small kids. But I convinced them, so we went. We spent one hour just singing.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
To give back the bicycles?

Munther Amira:
To have our bicycles back. [Yelling] “thieves!” and, you know, screaming, and even singing songs. At the end, the commander came and he asked me, “What are you doing here?” I told him, “Your soldiers stole our bicycles. We want our bicycles back.” So he went to his soldiers and he came back again while we were making noise, just noise. He told me, “If you go down, we will discuss the issue.” I told him, “It’s not my decision, it’s their decision.” I came back to the children and I told them what happened. So we agreed that we would go down 10 meters for 10 minutes. If they do not bring back our bicycles, we will continue.
They were excited that we were in front of Israeli soldiers. Usually the only thing that they would see from the Israeli soldiers [is] shooting — and it was just two years [before]. Abdel-Rahman was 13 years old, he had been killed in the same place by a sniper. It was not easy to convince them and to give them the power to come.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
Abdel-Rahman was their peer, a friend.

Munther Amira:
Yeah, a friend of theirs. He had been killed here. So we went there and before the end of the 10 minutes, he brought the bicycles. It was, for me, yes, it’s [was a] victory to have the bicycles, but more important to tell them that you have the power to do it. We are dealing with a fascist government doing anything to kill the Palestinians and to throw the Palestinians out of this land.
So we have to continue. Even as non-violent activists, they would come and arrest you and threaten you. And it’s not easy even to participate non-violence here — they don’t want any sound from anywhere. [Like] sending me to prison for three months after the beginning of the war, they want us to be silent.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
Yeah, you were saying that even before October 7th, non-violent resistance carried many risks. You were also arrested in 2017 when you were protesting the U.S. moving the embassy to Jerusalem and the arrest of Ahed Tamimi, and you just briefly mentioned that in December 2023, you were arrested and accused of publishing posts on Facebook that the Israeli authorities said incited violence. Turns out that the posts in question were lines from a poem of Nizar Qabbani, the Syrian poet, it seems he wrote the poem during the First Intifada about the people of Gaza. You were never charged with a crime, but you did spend three months in administrative detention at Ofer Prison near Ramallah, which was also not your first time at Ofer Prison. So I’m wondering if you could speak a little bit about that experience, being at Ofer in 2024, and what that was like compared to serving time in the past.

Munther Amira:
I think it would be considered the worst experience of my life. Not just my life — anyone who had this experience. When they were taking me to the military basement here near the camp, my daughter was in the window, so she started screaming, “Dad, I love you!” I made a very big mistake: I replied. I told her, “I love you too, don’t worry.” From this moment, they start[ed] beating me till I reached the military basement, and they brought a doctor for me there. I thought that the doctor came to help me. [But] he was worried that I was not dead.
And again, they put me into the entrance of a military vehicle and they start[ed] taking me to Aston, in Aston. Usually, they used to take off our clothes, but you would have your underwear. So they took [mine] off for security reasons, they want[ed] to search [me], so they told me to take off my underwear. I refused. They start beating me. They took it off, and the only place that they wanted to search for metals was between my legs. Putting the magnometer there, searching, asking me to calm down so they can play more and more, anything. Anything they would ask me to do, I did. To raise my leg to my hand, and they start laughing. And at the beginning they said, “Let’s start the party.” Imagine the whole period I was thinking that they took pictures while I was naked and while they were playing with the magnometer.
But always, even after that, I thought, I was praying, “I want to go to the cell.” Imagine that the place that you want to go is the prison. Yalla, do whatever you want, but send me to my cell. But it was just the beginning — I didn’t want to be beaten again because I didn’t want to take off my underwear. It started being normal. I will do it. Usually in Ofer, before, in the cell that they send me to, it used to be like five people. I came in with 13 people in the cell with five beds.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
Were any of the people that you were detained with from Gaza?

Munther Amira:
No, but I was in the same section with people from Gaza. Each section has two sections together. From the other side, I heard sounds like men crying and screaming. The sound of the chains on the ground, they were forcing them to do so many things, like all the prisoners would scream, “Am Israel Chai” and they are forcing them to do it. They were broken.

I want[ed] to tell them “We are good, let’s think how we can live here. Even [though] we are 13 people, even [if] they are humiliating us.” They told me, “Munther, please wait, don’t rush. It’s not like before. It’s a place that you don’t know about, anything.” I was in prison before many times. From the first time that I have been arrested, they were trying to, to break me. But at the end, we used to have something to eat, we used to have a television, we used to have papers, we used to have pens. And it was not because Israel is a good state. It was because we paid [a] very hard price — we had more than 258 prisoners pass away through the struggle to have all these items in the cantina or to have a radio or at least to have leadership even in prison. But after the 7th of October, everything changed. The only thing that we had there was your mattress and the blanket that if I would put the blanket between me and you, I can see you. It was cold, no medicine, no water.
Imagine that they are giving you the lights — electricity during the night — and during the day, they are taking it off. Nothing — nothing means nothing. At the beginning, we used to have just two meals. You would have two spoons of rice at lunch. And you would [have to] go to the corner, like they put them in four corners and they will open the cells, we have to go like cats to the corners to eat. It was humiliating us there. I lost, in three months, 33 kilos. This was because of the food, because I have to get my medicine. They brought the medicine just for blood pressure, they sent the medicine after one month, but I have another prostate problem. They brought me the prostate medicine just before I was released, and I was bleeding because of the prostate.
I witnessed there two young people that they tried to kill themselves by suicide, and this is not part of our culture. And it’s not just because of religious reasons, [it’s] because we are Palestinians. Our fight is for life, not for death, so we will not kill ourselves. Imagine that a Palestinian prisoner would [die by] suicide.
How could he do it? Or let’s say, why he would do it after this long time of building our culture, our Palestinian culture that suicide is not part of because we have hard experience[s], but it’s not hard. I don’t know which words I can use, but it is [an] experience that would send you to a place [where] you say “It’s better to be killed than to be in this misery.” You are in a nightmare. I consider the place that I was in as a cemetery.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
Yeah, you said something really striking in an interview shortly after you were released from Ofer with Gideon Levy and Alex Levac. You said, “Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, wrote that the prisoners are the source of hope for the Palestinian people. That is no longer true. It’s the first time that detainees are trying to commit suicide. The first time I felt that the door of the cell is the door of a grave. An Israeli prison is now a graveyard for the living.” What do you think Darwish meant when he originally wrote that?

Munther Amira:
We were the source of hope: We are not there because we are criminals, [but] because we are freedom fighters. We were there because we were seeking the freedom of our people. We were ready for everything. But they send us into a place [where] we are living in a nightmare. We would not think that we can [leave] this place.
We don’t have enough food, we don’t have medicine. Imagine for the first month, I didn’t have underwear. And one of your dreams [is] to have underwear. What is this big dream? Our dream was freedom, and it ended up [being] a dream that I want to have underwear. But I [made] a decision, [that] I will speak, I will raise my voice. Even [though] they told me that it’s forbidden to speak to the media.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
The Israeli authorities did that?

Munther Amira:
Yes, so I [made] a decision to raise their voice and to speak on behalf of them, [expressing] that they are under very bad condition[s] and they are dying every day. Yes, people know now about the massacres that happened in Gaza, the big genocide, but we have another genocide inside the Israeli jails that the people have to know about. If I would be silent, I would tell you that they succeed with the thing that they want, so I’m not silent. I’m not stopping my non-violent activism until we reach the freedom of the Palestinian people here.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
Basel Adra and Mohammad Huraini wrote something about a month and a half ago for +972 about four separate, very bloody settler assaults that happened in Masafer Yatta — in Susiya, Umm Nir, Khilet Al-Dabe’. These attacks all happened in the span of a few weeks in August and September. Residents and activists alike were beaten severely — each time several people had to be hospitalized. They spoke with you when they wrote this article and you said that this explosion of violence after October 7th — state backed, settler violence — has triggered a fundamental shift in the nature of Palestinian popular resistance, that basically surviving, survivalism, has become the primary concern of activists and residents on the ground. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about this shift. You’re saying that you’re not going to stop, right? You’re not going to stop?

Munther Amira:
Yes, I will tell you that it’s not, it was not [an] easy experience for, not just for me, [but] for all the activists, because it put them into a place — so many activists — [of] danger. They don’t want to go through such experience, and they [don’t] have even a direct threat from the Israeli occupation. The shift would be like this: we have to do whatever to help our people first. Yes, our major task was to do demonstrations, to tell the people about what we are going through. But after this huge violence, not just from the settlers, [but] even from the army and from the government, and these regulations that they put around not just acting, [but] even speaking, put our activism in a very dangerous place.
Many people stop[ped], and some people are doing it carefully. We have to be clever enough to continue doing everything. But I think our major task today is to help the people to stay on their land because their target today, I think, and it’s clear, [is] the land and the people who are living in Area C. So, the first thing that we are doing, empowering them in Area C, in the Bedouin communities, in Masafer Yatta. Imagine that we, as an activist, would offer food parcels or we have to offer lights for the communities because they don’t have lights. We have to offer school bags, because they could not offer their children school bags.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
You all are quite literally providing basic necessities for life.

Munther Amira:
Yes, these things. But we have to compare them with the people and [messages] that I would [use before] — like in the school bags that we did — we used to visit the schools, and we would tell the children there, “We came here to thank you because you are in the front line here. You are defending all the Palestinian people. So we are coming here with this small present to tell you thank you from our hearts.” But from another perspective, like with giving them lights, the lights are very important for their safety. So it’s a kind of protection like the fire extinguishers that they need if they [settlers] would attack to burn something, they need these fire extinguishers.
I would tell you that it’s not enough. We have all the time to be with the people — we are doing now more with the Israeli activists or with the international activists, we are offering for some people to sleep with them, to be with them because they are under very big threat. Our next step has to be, we have to be there.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
“We” as in Palestinians?

Munther Amira”
As Palestinian activists. As usual, I would tell you, before the 7th of October is not like after the 7th of October because the risk is very, very, very high and not all the people would accept to be under this risk, even the activists.
We are trying to do everything in our lives as a part of our activism. So, this is the shift that happened: We have to continue our lives as activists, and all the actions that we are doing are a part of this activism. Like I told you before about here, about the center, we are opening a space for women, young people, children, for education, for playing, for enjoying. But we are connecting this with our resistance. Again, I would tell you that the worst thing [that] happened was Oslo, because it did not change even just our way of resistance, or we did not have our independent state, but it changed our social life.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
This notion that Oslo really undermined the social fabric of Palestinian society is very interesting. Can you say a little bit more about that? Why do you think that people went from being more communal to these kinds of more individual modes of existence?

Munther Amira:
One of the things that has been targeted after Oslo [is] the voluntary concept that even voluntary work — we have [a] lack of volunteers now. And it’s part of — because of — our culture. Our culture will encourage us to do voluntary work. But imagine after Oslo, the UNDP came and they were giving them money to do voluntary work. A lot of organizations used to come to ask to do workshops for women — democracy, how they will participate in, etc.
Yes, we were agreeing to do that, we did like 20 workshops for women.One day, I was inviting one of the women to do a workshop. She told me, “No, I don’t want to come.” I asked her “Why?” So she told me, “Munther, you did a lot of these workshops. We need work to help our families. We don’t need more workshops to go to elections. We can go to that to do elections. We know how to raise our children. We know how to be free. But we need food for our families.”
They did not do sustainable development for the Palestinian people. We have two political traps that we fell on in our political lives: The first one was Oslo. The second one was the 7th of October. So, we are trying to bring back the idea of voluntary work — we have a sports team for boys, for girls, we have after-school activities, [in] which we are combining academic and social activities together, so [as] to empower them in their academic life.
We have so many activities for women, empowering women. We have scout groups. We are doing summer camps, taking them to enjoy their life there. But we are connecting all this with our way to freedom, [making it clear] that we are doing this for you — to stay here and to be an active part of this fight so as to live free and peacefully. This is the thing that we are trying to do — our existence here is part of the resistance.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
We’re also in a so-called ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. But if we look back at January 2025, when there was a brief ceasefire, the Israeli military essentially redirected its focus to the West Bank. There are still 40,000 Palestinians displaced from Tulkarem, Nur Shams, Jenin — they are continuing to carry out large scale operations there. Movement restrictions intensified everywhere across the West Bank — new gates, new roadblocks. So yes, maybe the ceasefire has brought some measure of relief to people in Gaza, but how do you feel about all of this? Is there a sense of unease given the history of how Israel acts in the West Bank when there are so-called ceasefires in Gaza?

Munther Amira:
I think Israel would not have a ceasefire at all, not in Gaza and not in the West Bank. They are acting like they are in a war — they would not act differently [with a ceasefire]. Speaking about the West Bank, more than 42 Bedouin communities have been displaced.
They are controlling now an area that is bigger than the area of Gaza. They put more [than] 1,250 gates all over, which means that we are living in ghettos: Bethlehem would be separated from all the villages around Bethlehem. But we have to find a way to reorganize ourselves, and I would say now, even [though] we have a lot of people against our strategy, I think the most important way that we can do it [resist] is — you can call it popular resistance, you can call it non-violent resistance, you can call it civil resistance, whatever — through a way that we can refuse their actions,stop their actions, prevent and protect our people, especially the people in Area C. So, the first step to do it, to be united, to understand and to put our strategy. We don’t have any other way to do it. It’s a kind of protecting ourselves, yes. So, I think we have to learn.
We have to sit together to put the analysis on the table, how we can do it. Let’s do it together.

Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
Thank you, Munther. Thank you for having us here. It’s been a really interesting discussion. It’s given us a lot to think about.

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Dikla Taylor-Sheinman:
This episode was produced by Jennifer Cutler with help from the +972 Editorial Team. Make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a review, it really helps new listeners find the show. Visit 972Mag.com for in-depth reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine. And And don’t forget to download the +972 app and subscribe to our newsletters. Plus 972 Magazine is an independent, non-profit media outlet home to Palestinian and Israeli journalists committed to equity, justice, and freedom of information.
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