Is there any hope to be found here?

For some inexplicable reason, I am drawn to repeatedly watch the point-blank range shooting of Ashraf Abu Rahme, an unarmed protester objecting to the construction of the wall on his village's lands. While I want to take solace from the fact that this episode was captured through the efforts of an Israeli human rights organisations, I am also reminded by the dozens of very similar videos which were broadcast from the West Bank and Gaza during the 1987-1992 intifada. While the 87 intifada did lead to a new political reality--albeit an imperfect one--for the Palestinians, it is not widely thought that the infractions against Palestinian human rights, and the attention this garnered on the world stage, had much to do with it.

Nevertheless, there is this sense of indestructibility of the Palestinian resistance which I get from watching the video. As in the same videos from 2 decades ago, a lone Palestinian man was taken away from a group surrounding him in order for him to be brutalised in front of the others; to emasculate, humiliate and dehumanise the victim, and to make a show of tearing apart the Palestinians as a people...and yet, yet, we survive, not just as individuals, but as a group.