The Arabic word “sumud” means steadfastness. Like the olive trees that symbolize “sumud,” Palestinians see themselves as deeply rooted in the land, and endowed with a staying power that will enable them to survive Israel’s agenda of ethnic cleansing and dispossession.  

That steadfastness has been at the heart of Palestinian creative nonviolent resistance to the violence of the Occupation, from the unarmed uprising of the entire civilian population known as the First Intifada with its demonstrations, general strikes, and various forms of civil disobedience (1987–1993), to the popular village resistance to Israel’s Occupation and land and water theft that is now nearly two decades old.  

Organizing to stop the confiscation of land by Israel’s “separation wall” (declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004), popular resistance committees in Bil’in (the setting of the Oscar-nominated film Five Broken Cameras), Nil’in, Nabi Saleh, Jayyous, Budrus, Burin, Beit Sira, and the Jordan Valley have refused to be intimidated by the sometimes lethal violence unleashed by Israeli soldiers against mass weekly demonstrations involving women, men, and children and other creative actions.  

After two years of protests, Bil’in, a village of fewer than 2,000 residents, won a partial victory in 2007 when Israel’s High Court of Justice ordered the wall to be re-routed in order to return to the village a portion of the confiscated land. It took another four years of protests costing two residents their lives before the High Court ruling was carried out.  Weekly nonviolent actions—often disrupted by army violence—continued in subsequent years, as demonstrators, including international solidarity activists, made Bil’in a symbol of resistance to the Occupation and Israel’s settlement expansion. 

If the incursion of the wall onto their land was the catalyst for resistance by the residents of Bil’in, in Nabi Saleh the spark was provided by the seizure of the village’s Ein-al-Qaws spring by settlers from the nearby settlement of Halamish in 2008. Here, too, nonviolent weekly demonstrations in which Israelis and internationals often took part were violently disrupted by the Israeli army. Demonstrators have been killed—most recently on October 25, 2022—and hundreds injured by tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. As in Bil’in, the army has tried to overcome the steadfastness of the village by conducting routine night raids, making mass arrests including of children, resorting to “non-lethal” methods such as spraying houses with skunk water and barricading villages so no one could drive in or out.

Over the last few years, as Palestinian residents of Jerusalem neighborhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan have resisted settler take-overs of their homes, Palestinian farmers have resisted intensified efforts of settlers to drive them off their land. As an example, in 2021 the “Defenders of the Mountain” in Beita and other villages near Nablus conducted what The Nation called a “fiercely creative” struggle against the settler seizure of village land for an outpost on Mt. Sabih that even Israel called “illegal.”  At least nine Palestinians have been killed in the protests, and thousands wounded by soldiers and settlers.  

Around the West Bank, villagers have organized, often with internationals and some Israelis, to protect their olive trees and harvests from settler rampages—more than 100,000 Palestinian olive trees have been uprooted by Israelis since 2010. Meanwhile, groups like Youth of Sumud and Good Shepherd Collective are trying to stop the ethnic cleansing of a thousand villagers from the Masafer Yatta area of the South Hebron Hills, which was given the go ahead by the Israeli High Court in May 2022.  

In addition to opposing Israeli land confiscation and ethnic cleansing,  popular resistance committees have focused on community building and consciousness raising. Guided by a process of egalitarian decision-making, they have encouraged villages to rebuild what Israel has destroyed, to replace uprooted olive trees and to boycott Israeli products.