Independent Jewish Voices

Despair, surely, is what Israeli policy has been resolutely instilling in Palestinians from the beginning. It is pointless to resist! Abandon any dreams of justice and sovereignty. This is why, for many Palestinians, resistance is simply about surviving. It is what Eyad himself emphasized, observing ‘the long path of humiliation and despair’ that lies behind the creation of a so-called ‘terrorist’: ‘the struggle of many Palestinians is how not to become suicide bombers’, he wrote thirteen years ago. [3] He tirelessly sought to prevent such destructive martyrdom, standing implacably against all forms of violence, whether from Palestinians or the infinitely deadlier modes of Israeli state violence: that ‘eye for eyelash’, as Schlaim put it. Eyad liked to insist that the Israelis and Palestinians needed each other: ‘for only the Palestinians can release Israel from its moral guilt, from all that has gone wrong since those first Zionist dreams to the nightmare of living in a country permanently at war with its neighbours; while only the Israelis can negotiate a just peace with Palestine, allowing them control over their own affairs and thereby laying the basis for security, freedom and dignity for both sides’.[4]