This is Basil Idris's 2024 translation of Basil Araj's article On the Claim That the Intifada Harmed the Palestinians, published in Arabic as الانتفاضة دمرتنا عن هذه الادعاءات أتحدث on the 26th of September, 2013. This is translated from the original in I Have Found My Answers, 1st edition by Bissan Bookshop, pp. 122–123.

Translator’s Introduction

Basil Araj باسل الأعرج died on the 5th of March, 2017. The date of his biological birth scarcely matters, for he was truly born the day he died, in a hail of bullets, facing the enemy alone.

Basil was an intellectual, a militant intellectual مثقف مشتبك. In fact, he was so much so to the point where "The Militant Intellectual" is always understood to refer to him specifically. A militant intellectual is not–necessarily—one who holds a rifle, but one who uses his knowledge to confront the enemy and contribute to the struggle, rather than stashing it away in a corner of his mind, leaving it to molder until it is dusted off at the next trivia quiz game. Basil organized seminars and discussions of revolutionary theory and Palestinian history though the Suleiman Halabi Study Circle for Colonial Studies and Intellectual Liberation¹ (who publish the Babelwad Magazine and are present on Twitter as @decolonizenow1). He also volunteered as a tour guide in trips to educate Palestinian youth about their history.²

He was chased, arrested, and tortured by the Oslo Authority. He knew that it would not be too long before the Zionist state came after him, and so he fled, took up his rifle, and became a muṭārad مطارد, an "outlaw" or a "wanted man".³ In March 2017, the IDF caught up to him and besieged him for hours before killing him with an ENERGA anti-tank rifle grenade. People flocked to see the scene of his death in Bireh, his blood mixed with his keffiyeh and the shell casings from his rifle.

If one were to visit his Wikipedia page, one would find it completely inadequate. beyond the constant Zionist heckling of the page, it is very short, badly sourced, and does not convey the importance or magnitude of Basil's legacy among Palestinians. A more complete biography of Basil is still unfortunately unwritten.

One of his key ideas, beside that of the militant intellectual, was the idea of resistance as an accumulative investment المقاومة جدوى مستمرة. As Ameed Faleh explained:

[R]esistance is not measured in the contemporary military inferiority, an inferiority that is natural in the context of colonialism; otherwise, colonialism wouldn’t exist in Palestine. Resistance should be measured in the painstaking strides taken to improve the efforts of fighters to close the qualitative gap.

Acts of resistance beget more acts of resistance. As the colonizer cracks down on those who fight him, the people must keep the flame alive, investing their blood and sweat into maintaining a baseline of resistance to prevent total collapse, while laying down the ground for future resistance. Hamas began as a small brigade of non-professional fighters, and eventually grew into the force that can cause serious damage to the IDF, through piecemeal "investments": small qualitative and quantitative improvements to equipment, training, and experience. Not only that, but even small acts of resistance can improve the lives of ordinary people over generations. As Basil puts it:

In this area of Jenin, there is not a single colony today ... there used to be four of them ... what happened was that the people of Jenin made a certain investment twice: in the Revolution of 1936, when they fought ferociously [against the British and the Zionists] and made this area into a triangle of fire, thus preventing Jewish settlement in the area. This benefited their grandchildren who, decades later, find that there are no settlements in their area, unlike my village for example, which is choked by settlements. And so, every small price you invest into resistance will yield great returns, if not in your lifetime, then in the lifetime of those who come after you. This is what we mean by resistance as an accumulative investment. By 2005, there had been built four settlements here. When the Jewish settlements in Gaza were dismantled,⁴ those four in Jenin were dismantled too. They try to give reasons for it ... but it's all nonsense. It was due to the investments of the Second Intifada.⁵

This phrase, resistance is an accumulative investment (much catchier in Arabic) has become a watchword and a defiant slogan raised by many in the face of Israel's collaborators in Palestine and the Arab World.

He said in 2014, as Gaza faced the worst (now second-worst) Israeli attack in its history:

All the phrase-mongering of pacifist ideology is now being exposed as a fraud. The claim that "the armed struggle is useless" has now fallen; Gaza is trying to snatch true liberation from the jaws of the enemy. It can indeed achieve this in the not-too-distant future; this here is the investment it's making ... Gaza, with the tactics of the resistance, is smashing the weapons of the enemy, which renders moot the pacifist argument that we are hopelessly outmatched by Israel's technology. The tunnels, the IEDs, and the snipers are all currently neutralizing the enemy's advantage. The conditions of Gaza are ten times as harsh as those in the West Bank, and yet here is Gaza achieving miracles, while the people of the West Bank are being sold illusions by charlatans⁶ ... the West Bank's realities are the result of Oslo, and Gaza's realities are the result of the Second Intifada, which itself rose up against Oslo. The Oslo Authority begs Israel for 3G mobile networks, while the Gaza Resistance smashes the army of 4G.

In this article, Basil defends the Second Intifada as a part of the process of accumulative investment in the Resistance against those with superficial understanding of its results, who only saw the brutal Israeli response⁷ and not the real, tangible outcomes, the least of which is the liberation of Gaza.

I translate this piece because much of Basil's work remains untranslated and obscure to those outside the Arab World, even to those in the international Palestine movement. Basil's works, articles, and even social media posts were collected and published in Arabic by as “I Have Found My Answers: Thus Spoke the Martyr Basil Araj” in 2018. The title comes from Basil's handwritten last will and testament:

[...] It is very difficult to write your own will, and for years I read the wills of martyrs. These have always confused me—they were always terse, quick, devoid of literary merit or answers to my burning questions about martyrdom. And yet, here I am, walking to my own death, satisfied, convinced, having found my answers! Oh, woe betide me, is there a more elegant answer than that of the martyr's action! ... Why should I answer this for you, you living people; you go find your own answers! As for us, the dwellers of the graves, we only seek God's mercy.

“On the Claim That the Intifada Harmed the Palestinians” by Basil Araj

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Black Hand revolt⁸ began in Palestine, but it was suppressed and crushed in a matter of four months, and the insurgents were all dead, imprisoned, or exiled. Also during that time, the Communist Party in Vietnam attempted to launch a revolt, and it too was suppressed, almost causing the destruction of the Party.

The important point is that these revolts led to some of the greatest achievements of mankind: the Black Hand revolt was a direct catalyst for the 1936 Palestinian Revolt, and the Communist Party's revolt was also a catalyst for the Vietnamese revolution against the French; the leadership in both nations learned the lessons of the past attempts, avoiding mistakes and adjusting their tactics.

People at that time did not reject armed struggle and didn't swallow the colonialist propaganda that claims that the armed struggle is useless and doomed to failure. Instead, they analyzed the experience and used the knowledge to launch new revolutions. In contrast, some Palestinians regurgitate the refrain that the Second Intifada brought destruction upon us, and this leads them to dread future Intifadas in fear of similar consequences.

I have no idea when those people had the chance to sit down and evaluate the results of the Second Intifada and its military experience in a scientific way. Usually, when you hear someone speaking of the destruction and the horrors and the losses and the futility, he is simply rephrasing Zionist propaganda in his own words. This propaganda has several mechanisms aimed at influencing the Palestinian mind, and is not constrained to official Oslo Authority statements (and the speeches of Mahmoud Abbas). The war on Palestine continues, symbolic and hidden violence is the paradigm of the day. What they usually do when an experiment fails is that they constrain their criticism to shortcomings in practice and not to the ideology or theory that stood behind the experiment.

Furthermore, the results of the Second Intifada are not as they always portray. Was every last settlement in Gaza not dismantled? Didn't the Resistance in Gaza not gather enough strength to enable it to entrench itself and even reach a level of hybrid warfare⁹ as a result of the gains of the Second Intifada? Is the Resistance not currently striking Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with rockets whose first iterations virtually resembled fireworks? Is it not true that some settlements in the West Bank (around Jenin and Nablus) were dismantled because the cost of protecting them became too high? Didn't the Intifada cost Israel billions of shekels? Do you not know what horrors our people avoided due to the Intifada? I personally believe that the Intifada delayed a planned ethnic cleansing operation.

If we are to study the military experiences of the Intifada, we can tell that the arming of the Intifada wasn't the cause of its negative outcomes; these were caused by other factors: the leadership was not up to the task, and was unable to organize Palestinian society and prepare it for a protracted people's war, and some people also held a naive view of the armed struggle—their superficial view never exceeded "just take the rifle and start shooting".

Beyond the lack of sufficient consciousness and social and psychological readiness, the lack of proper organization among the armed factions produced leaders without the necessary capacity and skills. The popular incubator¹⁰ was undeveloped, and a wide gap existed between the people and the armed struggle.

Add to that the counterrevolution which arose during Yasser Arafat's siege¹¹; the secret communications and the treasonous deals conducted covertly with the enemy. The leadership's actions were seriously hampered by the lack of preparation, strategy, and military tactics. Their goals never breached the ceiling of Oslo (Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza [i.e. the "Two-State Solution"]). Here, we do not forget the dependence of the Palestinian Authority and its financial, functional, and administrative bodies on Israel and the imperialist camp. Some believed that the armed struggle could never change the realities on the ground, and instead viewed it as a tool to merely improve the terms of negotiations.

To sum up, the first thing that the colonizer does is to define what's possible and what's impossible for the colonized. He is usually aided in this by some individuals in the colonized population, and this is conducted in direct and indirect ways. So, do not believe what is told and retold and planted in our minds, and weigh these assumptions according to the logic of liberation and the strength of the people's struggle∎

Basil's father salutes his son's body during the funeral