"The simple and unvarnished truth is you cannot keep 2.2 million people confined to a latter-day Indian reservation for 17 years, control their access to electricity, clean drinking water — and all the other necessities of life — while also denying them freedom of movement, dignity, hope and a future. No, you can not do all that and expect resistance to it to consist of holding hands and singing Kumbaya.
This is the context in which Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, launched by Palestinians in Gaza three year ago, must be understood. No ugly oppression has ever given rise to a pretty resistance. Of this, history leaves no doubt.
The pretext for this audacious Palestinian operation was the repeated violation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Islam’s third holiest site, during Ramadan in 2023. It was also predicated on the unrelenting refusal to accept the normalisation of their condition as a colonised and dispossessed people across the Arab and Muslim world, as set out in the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords."
