Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas arrives at Jenin refugee camp on July 12, 2023, in the wake of the most wide-ranging "Israeli" military invasion of the camp since the Second Intifada. Photo: Thaer Ganaim/APA Images
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The PA’s deadly campaign against the resistance in Jenin is breaking long-standing taboos against spilling Palestinian blood. It is also raising profound questions over the future of resistance in the face of the Gaza genocide.
For more than three weeks, the Palestinian Authority has waged “Operation Protecting the Nation,” a large-scale campaign to dismantle organized Palestinian resistance in the northern West Bank. The operation aims to disarm factions, composed primarily of young men in refugee camps, that have entrenched themselves in Jenin and its rural areas in the past couple of years. To date, the operation has claimed the lives of three Palestinians at the hands of the Palestinian Security Forces. Two PA officers have also been killed.
During the operation, a widely circulated video captured a young Palestinian fighter in Jenin confronting members of the Palestinian Security Forces (PSF), a moment heavy with the unresolved tensions fracturing Palestinian society. His voice—steady, grief-stricken, and accusatory—is the only sound we hear. It cuts through the scene as both a weapon and a lament, accusing the PSF of betrayal and mourning the disintegration of a shared national purpose. The young man shames the PSF, invoking the memory of “Israeli” soldiers who fell or were injured on the very road the forces now use to assert control over Jenin’s refugee camp—a searing reminder of battles waged by the resistance against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy. A masculine voice that calls on the PSF to find their manhood in refusing to fight the resistance, and in joining it. His words bristle with pain and urgency, as he accuses them of forfeiting their manhood and implores them not to force the resistance into using deadly force.
With a mix of fury and restraint, he points to the power of the Palestinian resistance in Jenin—improvised explosive devices lying in wait, not detonated, a calculated restraint meant to convey both strength and purpose, but also the choice not to explode them in the invading PSF. By the end of the clip, his voice rises to an anguished crescendo: “Ya Hayif,” he cries, a lament that reverberates with the weight of betrayal and loss, uttered in moments of profound disappointment and disbelief. The phrase Ya Hayif is used colloquially acrossBalad al-Sham to express deep sorrow, regret, or disappointment in the face of perceived wrongs.
Over the past decade, certain moments have laid bare the deep fractures within Palestinian society, but few have resonated as profoundly as the voice of Aseel Suliman. On November 20, 2020, in a searing two-minute broadcast, the local radio host unleashed a scathing critique of the PA decision to resume security coordination with “Israel”—a move that the minister of civil coordination, Hussein al-Sheikh, had incongruously hailed as a “victory for Palestine.” Suliman’s voice, trembling with indignation, channeled the frustration of a public long disillusioned by the PA’s attempts to reframe submission as triumph. Her words dismantled the hollow rhetoric, cutting through layers of political posturing with raw clarity. By the end of the broadcast, she reached for the poetry of Amal Dunqul, the Egyptian poet of heartbreak and defiance.
Dunqul in his poem “do not reconcile” conjures the specter of an Arab unburdened by shame, a figure who betrays the innocence of childhood memories and, after years of struggle, chooses the path of normalization with the enemy—a quiet submission dressed up as pragmatism. “Would my blood turn to water in your eyes?” he writes, the accusation ringing sharp and intimate. “Would you forget my clothes, soaked in blood? Would you drape yourself—over my blood—in garments adorned with silver and gold?” His words are unrelenting, a poetic autopsy of betrayal, probing the uneasy intersections of memory, dignity, and complicity. Although Dunqul’s “Do Not Reconcile” was written as an anthem against the looming specter of Egyptian peace with “Israel” in 1976, it has long since outlived its immediate context.
These moments of lamentation and shaming—whether in the anguished cry of “Ya Hayif” echoing through the battles of Jenin today, or in Aseel Suliman’s sharp critique of the hollow declarations of victory from the West Bank’s ruling elite—are saturated with layered emotions and entangled politics. They embody not just indignation but a deeper reckoning with loss, betrayal, and a collective yearning for accountability. It is within these spaces of raw confrontation that figures like Nizar Banat emerged, wielding piercing political analysis and rhetorical prowess to launch scathing diatribes against the Palestinian Authority. These are moments of collective introspection, heavy with the dread of asking, “What have we become?” and the uneasy recognition of a fragmented national body, the inability to fight back, and the complicated place of resistance in the contemporary landscape of Palestine.
On one level, these lamentations harbor a lingering hope: a belief, however fragile, that the agents of the PSF remain redeemable, that they can still be shamed into recognition of their complicity, they can be changed. On another level, these laments underscore the profoundly difficult choices confronting Palestinian fighters in Jenin and beyond—a stark reminder that to resist the PA is, at times, to resist one’s own kin. To fight back is to confront the self, and this confrontation lays bare the PA regime’s insidious ability to enlist the bodies of young men as instruments of its will. As one Palestinian from Jenin observed, “They embezzle us with some of our own flesh.”
This is a politics of intimate betrayal, where the lines of battle blur, and the fighters emerge from the same streets, speak the same dialect, yet wage war for futures that could not be more opposed. The power of the PSF does not lie in their operational capacity or the American training imparted in Jordan and Jericho. Their true power lies in the slow, methodical erosion of belief and trust in resistance—a process as deliberate as it is relentless. By sending young Palestinian men to face off against young Palestinian men, the PSF orchestrates a tragic theater of Palestinian blood spilled in battles where there are no winners. What unfolds is not simply a clash of arms but a grinding duel of endurance, a contest over who will yield first, who will step back, and who will refuse to go any further. Who will say, “Palestinian blood is not worth it.”
For many Palestinians, the specter of full-scale infighting is too devastating to justify, no matter how noble the cause, how urgent the need, or even how deeply cynical the motives might be. Yet the PA’s ability to command young men into battle—and for these young men to willingly confront their peers—reveals the unsettling power of cooperation at this fraught juncture. In Jenin, many of those targeted by the PA’s campaign are sons or relatives of PSF security members, themselves products of the same social fabric. Many hail from the very communities that identify with Fatah, the ruling party of the PA, blurring the lines between loyalty, resistance, and betrayal in ways that make the confrontation not just political but deeply personal.
The growing strength of cooperation
In the current political moment, one of the most disconcerting realities—and perhaps one of the clearest signs of a global moral decay—is the world’s inability, or unwillingness, to stop genocide. This is not merely the absence of action; it’s the quiet normalization of atrocity, even among those who claim solidarity with Palestine. But also the presence of mass-scale actions that have not yielded enough power to halt or pause “Israel’s” military machine.
“Israel’s” unyielding campaign against Gaza, its transformation of the strip into an apocalyptic ruin, is not just a military operation—it is a performance, a deliberate spectacle of cruelty. Supported unflinchingly by Europe and the United States, this devastation broadcasts a chilling set of messages: to the Arab world, a grim reminder of its impotence; to Palestinians, the insistence that resistance will meet unrelenting destruction; and to the so-called global south, a veiled warning that when the stakes rise, international norms and rules will be discarded, replaced by the unrestrained force of empire.
For Palestinians outside Gaza, the violence is not just endured—it is absorbed, pressed into their lives as though it were an immutable truth. Each child buried, each family obliterated, each home reduced to rubble becomes a reminder of their place in a world that refuses to stop the massacre and often enables it. With every cry from Gaza falling on deaf ears, every bullet targeting a doctor or nurse, and every social media post announcing another martyr, Palestinians internalize a cruel narrative: that they are disposable, their lives discarded long before their deaths. Palestinians are cast, unwillingly, into a tragedy that plays out on a loop, as if their suffering is both inevitable and eternal, and with every massacre they are reminded by those who seek to uproot the idea and practices of resistance:“Why did you dare and rebel?”
As the normalization of failure to stop the genocide takes hold, a perverse displacement of anger begins to fester. The rage that should be directed at the architects of monstrosity—”Israel”—increasingly turns inward, aimed at resistance itself, both as an idea and as a practice. Tufan al-Aqsa, the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ operation of October 7, is reframed as an uncalculated moment of madness, “Israel” cements its narrative of victory, and the PA seizes the opportunity to wield its power against the resistance who have dared to challenge the status quo. The dampening of belief in resistance, the erosion of trust in its possibilities, has unfolded to the point where resistance itself becomes the scapegoat, and the earlier wager by the PA to remain on the sidelines starts to pay off.
For over fourteen months, the world has watched the destruction of Gaza, followed by “Israel’s” success in neutralizing Hezbollah’s military and political capacity to lend support. This current moment paves the way for those who have long wagered on paralysis, like the PA, to finally act, and direct their muscle toward what remains of Palestinian resistance in the West Bank. The hellscape of Gaza—the pain, the trauma of a world unmade—has been met with an extraordinary global outcry. Loud voices spoke up, millions of students, activists, and ordinary people raised the stakes, media organizations tirelessly exposed “Israel’s” crimes, and the barbarism of sadistic “Israeli” soldiers was laid bare for all to see. And yet, none of it stopped the machine. The grinding inevitability of destruction continued, indifferent to the resistance, indifferent to the humanity it annihilates. But as the world watched, so too did Palestinians living within “Israel’s” domain—those whose survival has come to hinge on a fraught calculus, secretly placing their bets on cooperation as a means to endure. For them, survival means navigating the machine’s relentless gears, hoping to outlast its crushing weight, even at the price of such cooperation.
The transparency of betrayal
Long ago, one of the most frequently repeated injunctions employed to justify supporting Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) was the claim that he is “truthful.” Those who advanced this line emphasized a peculiar virtue: unlike his predecessors, Abu Mazen does not traffic in fantasies or performative political gestures. He is unabashedly committed to cooperation with “Israel”—he is honest about it, direct, and unapologetically one-dimensional in his approach. With Abu Mazen, what you see is what you get. But here lies the paradox: this “truthfulness” is not a virtue in the conventional sense but an honesty-in-betrayal.
It is as if Abu Mazen’s disarming candor in aligning with “Israel’s” interests functions as a peculiar ideological lubricant, one that smooths over the profound contradictions at the heart of his leadership. Here, “truthfulness”—a truthfulness understood not as integrity but as a cynical transparency—emerges not as a moral virtue but as a tool to obscure the extraction of financial surplus for family and cronies.
In this twisted economy, the very transparency of the regime becomes its concealment: the open admission of shortcomings, failures, and moral bankruptcy acts as a calculated strategy to shield itself from critique. What masquerades as disarming honesty is, in fact, a cunning choreography, aligning words seamlessly with policies and actions—a betrayal masked as coherence, a spectacle of confession performed to disarm dissent. Abu Mazen is not hypocritical, but exactly what he says he is.
Honesty, when wielded as a political tool, opens a world of inversions and lies. To be honest, in Abu Mazen’s sense, is to destabilize the very ground on which meaning rests. It is to invert values with the precision of a scalpel, turning courage into criminality, solidarity into sedition, and resistance into a threat against the collective.
This “honesty” functions not to illuminate but to obscure, creating a kaleidoscopic landscape where every truth morphs into its opposite. Such a strategy weaponizes candor; and here, Abu Mazen’s candor performs a curious function. Instead of being a nationalist leader who might in the future disappoint or betray the cause, his candid betrayal from the outset rewrites the very narrative of leadership and accountability.
By openly embracing a politics of complicity, Abu Mazen creates a paradoxical shield: betrayal, confessed and acknowledged, becomes a strategy to sidestep accountability altogether. Yet, for many Palestinians, this candor is strangely welcomed—a bitter relief in a landscape where the cyclical crushing of hopes has become an unbearable norm. Better, perhaps, to endure a leader who openly admits his capitulation than one who cloaks betrayal in the rhetoric of liberation—or, more tragically, a leader who genuinely seeks liberation, is willing to die for it, and yet is ultimately met with the same crushing disappointment.
This transparency, however, is not without its accomplices. It finds its first ally in the discourse of “realism” and “reality,” where the reality of a vicious and monstrous “Israel” protected by imperialism is used to dismiss questions of ethics or resistance as naïve. The second ally is an economic infrastructure finely tuned to consumerism, which operates as both a material and symbolic logic. This infrastructure does not merely shape the desires of a population but actively enforces the conditions in which submission appears as the only “rational” course of action, but also one that fulfills the desire to follow TikTok trends, to fall in love in a modern-day Mall, or open the doors to life where the heaven of consumer products is readily available. In this sense, betrayal is not just a political choice; it becomes a mode of existence, cloaked in the language of necessity and inevitability. But more than anything else, with Abu Mazen, there are no moments of pure political potentiality—no Tufan al-Aqsa, no breaches or transgressions that rupture the status quo and open horizons of liberation. Instead, there is a recurrent rhythm of complicity—a rhythm that, while costly, remains steady and stable, offering a grim predictability in place of transformative possibility.
Already in the very early days of “Israel’s” air campaign of destruction over Gaza, videos of Abu Mazen’s speeches and diatribes against the unrealism and madness of resistance made their way to TikTok. Over time, Abu Mazen’s logic will displace Sinwar’s breach of Gaza’s Envelope—a gesture that tore through the fabric of control, provoking the ensuing war. The quietism of Abu Mazen aligns not only with the machinery of occupation but also with a deeply ingrained fear, syncing with the subdued despair of Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and within “Israel”. It is a politics that declares its own honesty through the very act of capitulation, a dialectic where paralysis and betrayal mask themselves as the only viable alternatives to chaos and annihilation.
Abu Mazen’s logic, hammered into the rubble by the bombs, begins to weave itself into the intellectual fabric, gaining traction as familiar refrains resurface. Palestinian intellectuals return to rehearsed critiques of the Axis of Resistance, calling into question its authenticity, decrying the self-interest guiding Iranian policies, and lamenting the supposed futility of armed struggle in generating political possibilities. Many of these intellectuals champion alternate “forms of resistance,” or, more insidiously, the quietism of submission. Meanwhile, others murmur of a Nakba more devastating than that of 1948—a quiet catastrophe unfolding in its own inexorable rhythm. The arguments pile up like debris: the invincibility of “Israel’s” military, fortified by unabashed support from Western ruling classes; the inevitability of subjugation framed as realism. The rhetoric folds back upon itself, disarming resistance not through brute force alone but through the erosion of its intellectual and moral ground, leaving silence not as consent but as the echo of a deliberate abandonment.
What was surprising was not merely that the PSF launched a new operation against what remains of the organized resistance in the northern West Bank, but the extent of intellectual, media, and political complicity that has accompanied it.
The operation has not just been tolerated—it is actively legitimized, often through critiques of the very foundations and logics of resistance itself. For many Palestinians, it was met with silence, a collective quiet that betrayed the absence of widespread protest or action, save for the immediate social circles surrounding the armed movement in Jenin. The bombs, the intellectual assaults, and the relentless psychological warfare—combined with “Israel’s” monstrosity and its success in containing the axis of resistance—have hollowed out the call to resistance. Its values, its affective architecture, and the emotional resonance that once unified a collective struggle now lie diminished, leaving behind a terrain marked by disillusionment and doubt. In this context, the stability and brutal clarity of betrayal seem preferable to the uncertainty of resistance.
Breaking the taboo
The inferno of Gaza has culminated in a moment where the breaking of norms feels almost natural. The once-firm taboo against direct confrontation between the PSF and resistance factions in the northern West Bank has disintegrated. High on its immediate success in demonstrating to Palestinians that cooperation ensures survival—for now—the PA now dares to march its forces into the heart of Jenin’s refugee camp. There, it guns down a key resistance leader, spilling the blood of a Palestinian child in the process, and vows to remain until control over Jenin and its camp is disarmed.
For years, among Palestinians—especially those committed to resistance—an unspoken rule prevailed: avoid internal infighting, above all the spilling of Palestinian blood. This principle, more than a mere abstraction, was a guiding ethic, even in moments of unbearable pressure. When the PSF surrounded Bassel al-Araj and his comrades, he could have fought back, engaging in a gun battle that might have turned the encounter into yet another tragedy of Palestinian against Palestinian. Instead, Bassel chose surrender, enduring arrest and torture rather than violating the fragile boundary that held together a fractured and embattled society.
This reflects the current moment, where “resistance,” both as a concept and a practice, has buckled under the crushing weight of “Israel’s” relentless monstrosity and its readiness to deploy the full force of its American-manufactured arsenal. The Palestinian Authority, ever eager to satisfy the demands of “Israel” and the United States, seems increasingly willing to gamble with the specter of internal civil war, if not with bloody civil war itself. It is prepared to spill Palestinian blood—not only to demonstrate the abilities of its counterinsurgency tactics but also to exploit the symbolic and moral gravity of the specter of fratricide, a weapon as potent as any in maintaining its hold on power. It chose to do so at a moment when resistance movements are in retreat, and the forces advocating for survival through cooperation are on the ascent.
This operation is undoubtedly risky, carrying the very real potential to backfire as internal fighting threatens to spiral, and the targeting of those cadres involved in the PSF operation—or those who ordered it—becomes both more palpable and, for many, more justifiable. The PA is wagering that, like Bassel al-Araj, the resistance and its cadres will choose to avoid internal bloodshed, opting for capitulation, even at the cost of arrest and torture.
Yet what is certain is that the long-standing taboo against spilling Palestinian blood—a fragile yet crucial moral boundary—has historically provided a buffer that protected both the ruling class and those seeking to challenge its authority. It has attempted to prevent family feuds and the intensification of internal contradictions between various political forces.
By crossing this line, the PA not only risks further eroding its legitimacy but also dismantles a shared ethical barrier that once restrained a descent into internal conflict. The PA has chosen to break this taboo at a moment when its logic of cooperation—bolstered by “Israel’s” monstrosity and the narrative of necessity—is at its peak. Yet this decision is not without peril; it risks complicating the PA’s grip on power in the West Bank, potentially deepening the very fractures it seeks to suppress. After all, an operation of this scale, like any form of active engagement, inevitably generates uncertainty, unraveling one of the facets that compels Palestinians to cling to the PA in the first place.
The longer the PSF operation drags on, the bloodier it becomes, and the greater the sacrifices it demands, the louder the bells of danger will toll for the ruling class in the West Bank. In such a landscape, the language of lamentation or shaming will falter under the weight of spilled blood. As the toll rises, cries of revenge will drown out appeals to restraint, transforming grief into a relentless demand for reckoning.
