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Though a fragile ceasefire holds in Gaza, Israeli violence in the West Bank is spiraling. In recent weeks, the annual olive harvest has become the primary target; the Palestinian Farmers’ Union reports that incidents of settler and soldier attacks on harvesters have quadrupled compared to before October 7, damaging thousands of trees and saplings and wounding more than 100 Palestinians this harvest season alone.
International activism, too, is increasingly coming under assault. In late October, Israel arrested and deported 32 volunteers who were assisting Palestinian farmers near the village of Burin. Alongside the arrest and expulsion of participants on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, this represents one of the largest mass deportations of international activists from Israel-Palestine in recent memory.
The intensification of attacks against Palestinian communities in the West Bank and the international activists who support them, combined with Israel’s sweeping repression of Palestinian speech during the genocide in Gaza, has triggered a reckoning among longtime activists in the popular struggle — the mass non-violent resistance movement against Israeli colonization.
In this episode of The +972 Podcast, we speak with veteran activist and former political prisoner Munther Amira about what drew him — as a son of Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp, once described by researchers as the most tear-gassed place on earth — to the popular struggle, and where it should go from here. We also discuss Oslo’s erosion of Palestine’s social fabric, how his recent experience in Israeli prison differed from previous detentions, and how Palestinian nonviolent resistance must adapt to a reality in which the line between survival and resistance has faded.
