JEHAD ABUSALIM This essay explores the genesis of the Great March of Return in the context of a fragmented Palestinian body politic, blockade, and occupation, highlighting two major issues: the Palestinian refugee plight and the decade-long blockade on Gaza. The essay argues that the march represented a rare opening for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to reclaim a factionally controlled political sphere, and demonstrates that the organizers of the march valiantly strove to keep it going in the face of insurmountable challenges. It also contends that Israel’s bloody crackdown, the difficulties of organizing in a divided Palestinian body politic, and international inaction were factors in the protest’ s loss of momentum, which ultimately set back the mass mobilization of the Gaza Strip. The march left Palestinians with many questions about the viability of nonviolent methods in the face of disproportionate Israeli force. ON 7FEBRUARY 2018, a young Palestinian journalist named Muthana al-Najjar posted a video on his Facebook page showing a tent standing in the middle of a verdant plain. The tent that al-Najjar had erected with his friends was like no other, and the plain was equally singular: it was the Gaza side of the 1949 armistice line with Israel, approximately five hundred meters away from the border “fence, ” where the Great March of Return would unfold, holding out the prospect of a new page being turned in the Gaza Strip’s long history of struggle. The so-called fence, a vast and intricate system of earth berms, high-technology surveillance towers, barbed wire, and a one- kilometer buffer zone, is for Palestinians a daily reminder of the tragedy that they identify as the Nakba, when the State of Israel was established in 1948. 1 In an eleven-minute live broadcast from his tent, al-Najjar spoke of the Nakba and of his yearning to return to the village of Salama, near Jaffa, from which his family was expelled. Explaining his action, al-Najjar said: “This is the tent of return with (which) we convey the message of the refugees. It paves the way for our return to our towns and villages.” 2 The video, widely shared by Palestinians on social media, was one of the first concrete responses to online calls by activists for Palestinians in Gaza to realize their long overdue right of return. Launched on 30 March 2018, the anniversary of Land Day, 3 the Great March of Return came about as a result of multiple and intertwined developments in and beyond the Gaza Strip. Foremost among these was the Trump administration’s opaque Middle East policy. The deep Palestinian Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XLVII, No. 4 (Summer 2018), p. 90, ISSN: 0377-919X; electronic ISSN: 1533-8614. © 2018 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2018.47.4.90. 90 || Journal of Palestine Studies The Great March of Return: An Organizer’ s Perspective