Why do Palestinian armed resistance groups consistently make such a hash of effective resistance? Such groups regularly launch impotent rockets towards Israel, supposedly in an effort to win freedom from Israeli occupation, only to have said ‘rockets’ land (almost always) harmlessly in the desert. To add insult to injury, such attacks are then used by the Israelis as justification to respond, in a massively disproportionate way, with their deadly US-made missiles against the Palestinian population as a whole.
On virtually every occasion when a ‘Middle East peace deal’ has provoked a bout of existential jitters among the Israeli elite because it looked like it might actually force them to the negotiating table, some ‘armed Palestinian group’ has obligingly carried out some misguided attack against an Israeli target, or launched a few Qassam’s at the Israeli desert. Who then can argue that, overall, the Palestinian’s long struggle for independence has been a lesson in how to shoot oneself in the foot, over and over again.Share