Summary
The May 2021 uprising in which Palestinians across historic Palestine joined a struggle against Israeli settler-colonialism, culminating in a general strike on 18 May 2021; Chapters 16 and 21 of From the River to the Sea treat it as a vision of convergent Palestinian resistance whose infrastructure collapsed quickly under repression (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 1131-1137, 1641-1647).
Details
- Soheir Asaad: the uprising manifested leadership growing irrelevant and organizing shifting from parties to decentralized forms, with a new social class entering as leaders, anonymous manifestos, mutual aid to besieged Lyd and a general strike demanded from below and subsequently adopted by official parties (lines 1131-1133).
- Israel’s response, in Asaad’s account: military mobilization, live ammunition, curfews and mass arrests — more than 2,000 arrested, 545 indicted, mostly under terrorism and racially-motivated-crime laws; the solidarity and mutual-aid structures collapsed extremely quickly, deterring mobilization in 2023 (lines 1135-1139).
- Toufic Haddad: the strike was a one-off at the tail-end of a Jerusalem uprising that began in Sheikh Jarrah and spread to the Old City, Al Aqsa and Gaza; it took place as Palestinians across historic Palestine witnessed the convergence of their conditions under Israeli supremacy, including the 2018 Nation-State Law for citizens of Israel, but was not sustained enough to generate new political momentum (lines 1641-1647).
Related pages
From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, Soheir Asaad, Toufic Haddad, First Intifada, Second Intifada, Nation-State Law