INTRODUCTION

In 1989 one of the authors (Marwan Darweish) interviewed an activist in Gaza. It was at the height of the Palestinian popular uprising against occupation, the first intifada – a time of high hopes and great expectations for Palestinians. The interviewee commented, 'You sense that the leadership is not separate from the Palestinian people, but that it is present everywhere. ... You feel a unity and an amazing solidarity which differs from anything else we have felt in the twenty or so years since the PLO was formed.'

At around the same time Andrew Rigby was interviewing a former political prisoner living in the refugee camp at Far'a in the West Bank. This informant echoed the sense of solidarity and hope expressed by his Gazan contemporary as he described the key feature of the popular resistance at that time: 'Everyone helps each other ... all the people have the same way now, the same struggle against the occupation – from the children to the old men, all the same, they want to get rid of the occupation. One soul through many bodies, through many voices.'

More than 20 years after these interviews took place both authors interviewed a senior Fatah official and member of the Palestinian Authority (PA) at his offices in Ramallah. We were trying to discover how such a person in a leadership position within the party and the administration viewed the spread of popular resistance that had started amidst the violence of the second intifada in opposition to the construction of the Separation Wall and had spread to challenge settlement expansion and land expropriation in other parts of the West Bank. Like the politician he was, he provided us with an up-beat assessment:

Popular resistance is spreading and intensifying ... we are planning a more comprehensive approach to nonviolence which will include not just demonstrations but other areas such as the economic boycott of all Israeli goods, not just settlement produce. This will impact on Israel. The aim is to create a culture of popular resistance, a way of living. ... We are planning a publication on how to become part of the popular resistance. ... There is a degree of consensus amongst all the parties on the importance of popular resistance. Even Hamas supports this form of resistance. In the reconciliation talks between the PA and Hamas this strategy was accepted and agreed.

Nearly two years later, in November 2013, we interviewed another senior Fatah member and district governor with the PA. He was far less sanguine in his assessment of the 'state of play' with regard to popular resistance (the term used by Palestinians to refer to their civilian-based unarmed resistance to occupation):

If there was a massive popular resistance, there is a possibility of success. ... As a Fatah person I feel that if we do not lead the movement, then it will not move – but Fatah has no programme, so how can we lead? We need a plan, not just an ad hoc reaction to events. But some of the leaders have a personal interest in the status quo. ... There is a price to be paid in resistance, and the leaders should be to the fore. It should not just be the people paying the price. So this is part of the cycle of mistrust. People want to see their leaders to the fore, as an example to people on the ground. ... At the moment popular resistance is very localised, every Friday the same few villages, the same thing. It is not popular as it does not include the mass of people. If we were serious we would make life hell for the settlers, blocking the roads, making the soldiers work. That would be popular resistance.

Through the voices captured in these four quotes we can begin to grasp the trajectory followed by many Palestinians over the past quarter of a century: from a time of hope in the late 1980s and early 1990s when there was confidence in the power of popular unarmed resistance as a means of bringing an end to the Israeli occupation, through to the waning of that hope and the acknowledgement of the weakness of leadership that has accompanied the failure of the wave of popular resistance that started in 2002 to halt the construction of the Separation Wall. The aim ofthis book is to delve deeper into the dynamics of this trajectory by examining the Palestinian struggle against occupation through the lens of unarmed civilian-based resistance.

THE RESEARCH PROCESS

Both authors have had a personal and professional interest in the role that unarmed civilian resistance might play in bringing an end to the occupation since the 1980s. As part of this involvement we have made repeated family and research/consultancy related visits to the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel itself. Over time our friendships with Palestinian and Israeli activists have deepened and our contact lists have grown accordingly. In late 2010 we felt that Palestinian interest in unarmed modes of popular resistance had grown to such an extent that the time might be ripe for an in-depth study of the potentialities (and limitations) of such an approach, in the context of the disaster of the second intifada and the clear indications that the so-called 'peace negotiations' were leading nowhere. So it was with that intention that we made contact once again with our friends and associates. From them we gathered a basic guide to the main sites of contestation within the West Bank and contact details for key members of local popular resistance committees in each location. Essentially these consisted of those villages that had been active in the struggle to protect their land and their well-being by trying to stop the advance of the Separation Wall; those were the sites where Palestinians had been inspired by the resistance to the Wall and had taken up the struggle to resist the expansion of local settlements that threatened to expropriate more of their land, and those sites both rural and urban – in territory designated by the Oslo Accords of 1995 as Area C where Palestinians were engaged in an ongoing struggle to protect not just their land but also their homes and their way of life from the assaults of Israeli settlers supported by the Israeli occupation forces.

Starting in 2011 we began to make contact with these local activists, and we stayed in touch with them through to late 2013 when the main body of our fieldwork was completed. During the early period of our fieldwork we shared with our respondents their sense ofhope that the struggle against the occupation was taking on a new power with the spread of resistance to new sites. As one of our contacts observed, 'We came alive in the first...