Palestine Liberation Organization factions - slow death
Talk about reforming and democratizing the PLO institutions is as old as the organization itself. The reasons cited for neglecting this task for long periods or sidelining it to this day are many and varied, and addressing all of them requires a full book and study. Therefore, I will focus on the factions and their role in this article...
Today, after more than 52 years since its founding, no one demands the democratization of the PLO and its institutions as a primary fundamental goal... Now, everyone inside and outside the organization calls for restoring the organization's legitimacy first, after it was aborted in the last century's Deal of the Century – the Oslo Accords, Paris, and subsequent side agreements.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was implicitly, before dismantling its institutions and placing what remained in the morgue, the legitimate representative of all the Palestinian people wherever they were... Everyone; Palestinians, Arabs, and globally, both popular and official, dealt with the organization from this standpoint. Moreover, the PLO gradually became the unifying national identity for the Palestinian people... Therefore, relinquishing the PLO is unacceptable as it would ultimately mean relinquishing the national identity.
The legitimate question in this regard is: are the components of the organization, including factions, parties, and leaderships, primarily willing and secondly capable of restoring the dignity of this unifying national identity?
The Palestinian factions, with their various colors and diverse ideological and political orientations, have become the primary obstacle to the development of the Palestinian situation in general and to restoring the dignity of the PLO as a unifying national identity in particular... The undeniable truth states explicitly: those who, over many years and under such critical and decisive circumstances, cannot find the greatest common denominator among themselves and agree to work on this basis for the supreme national interest, are incapable of restoring the PLO as a lever for national identity.
The prevailing impression among the Palestinian situation and widespread among the general Palestinian people in all their places of residence is a distancing from Palestinian organizations and turning their backs on them and their components.
The confidence of the Palestinian masses in the national factions, especially those under the banner of the PLO, has been continuously declining for years and has nearly reached a dangerously low national level.
The widespread public discontent with the Palestinian organizations, leaderships, and parties has its reasons and components... Although much of the discourse, talk, and description about the factions is venting or an opinion stemming from a revenge instinct rather than a realistic critical reading of the situation. To understand the above hypothesis: that the Palestinian factions desire to develop the Palestinian situation but lack the capability to do so... I list some reasons:
The Palestinian factions, especially those that accompanied the Palestinian journey since its difficult beginnings—Fatah, the Popular Front, the Palestinian People's Party (formerly Communist), and the Democratic Front—have provided very important struggle and thought... Without them, the Palestinian cause would have scattered to the winds and been aborted by some Arab regimes... All rational people hold great respect and appreciation for these factions and their members... They are the ones who raised the flag and the rifle and presented the political and struggle programs for the liberation battle... But this does not mean they hold a pardon that absolves all their political confusion and strategic failures... Their history places them before a higher national responsibility, and they bear doubled and complex tasks required by the stage... Their belief that their struggle history guarantees their survival and influence is the main reason for their failure.
The Palestinian factions closed the door on their strategic offensive program as a national liberation movement operating under complex and volatile conditions in the mid-1970s by adopting the phased program and armed struggle as a liberation strategy... This was the last well-crafted strategic program and a positive qualitative leap for the Palestinian situation... After this phase, the Palestinian factions either became tools for regional and global powers promoting their ideas and policies or remained stagnant in their struggle and thought... Even after the Oslo Agreement was signed, this loss continued, and these factions did not develop their strategies at all; rather, they lost their compass and fluctuated between the Oslo team's Western-drawn strategy that the Palestinian situation was now in the process of state-building and the nostalgia for armed struggle and liberation movement... This loss caused the Palestinian factions to lose their credibility. The Palestinian factions, with their various political colors since the late 1960s, have proven with their negative record that personal and factional interests of the leadership are more important than the supreme national interest... Thus, the establishment of factions and parties later came through internal division... The Democratic Front split from the Popular Front, and before that, Fatah split from the Muslim Brotherhood... Then Abu Musa and Fatah al-Intifada split from Fatah, and before that, the Popular Front – General Command split, then FIDA split from the Democratic Front, Mustafa Barghouti and the Initiative split from the Communist Party, which split from itself and began calling itself the People's Party, then Dahlan split from Fatah and Fatah invented various shops under their name, and Fatah became almost a “movement mall”... This entrenched the idea of division in people's minds, and the factions failed to plant the idea of renewal instead... The inevitable result was, and still is, the alienation of the masses from the factions and the dominance of the thought: “them and us” to describe the relationship between the masses and the factions. The late President Yasser Arafat succeeded in making the Fatah movement the dominant organization within the Palestine Liberation Organization and the sole influencer of its decisions, and the other parties and movements under the PLO banner became “satellite parties” revolving around Fatah and Yasser Arafat, without whom they could not survive... Arafat also succeeded with the “stick and carrot” policy in linking the fate of these parties, their policies, and orientations to his personal desires... Arafat continued this approach after signing the Oslo Agreement... Everyone knows the splits that occurred within Palestinian movements instigated, managed, and orchestrated by Yasser Arafat and his inner circle... This weakness of the leftist parties in particular and the dominance of Fatah and Yasser Arafat were met by the Palestinian masses with a slow distancing from this “quagmire.” The stagnation of renewal was not limited to the strategic and tactical intellectual performance of the Palestinian factions but also affected the internal structure of the parties and movements... Renewal in leadership and the first ranks of the parties is symbolic and superficial, not substantive, even after political and electoral failures... The prevailing situation in most movements, except for Hamas, which is the most dynamic Palestinian movement in power and leadership rotation, is that very senior leaders lead mostly young masses! The general popular description of this situation has become: assuming a leadership position in a party ends either with death or the party's demise! Boasting democracy in political discourse while lacking internal democracy does not increase the credibility of the party and leadership but rather the opposite. The factions most demanding the restoration of the Palestine Liberation Organization's status are the Palestinian left factions. Hardly a day passes without reading or hearing such a demand... But this left, with its various compositions, does not meet three essential conditions to plant credibility and increase acceptance of its demands among the masses... First, this left is financially linked to the Palestinian National Fund and cannot survive without financial injections from this fund dominated by Fatah... Ultimately, “whoever wants to eat from the Sultan's bread must strike with his sword” or starve... Fatah allows these to oppose within limits it alone defines. Second, the Palestinian left forces, differing only in name and sometimes in the strength of their nostalgic militancy, have not yet been able to build joint work among themselves to strengthen their position within the Palestinian political entity, due to the arrogance of the leadership and their fear of losing personal privileges only... Third, these factions are governed by a vague media democracy and clear internal dictatorship, a fact recognized by the masses that diminishes the prestige of these parties and undermines their standing.
The Palestinian factions that have remained stagnant organizationally and intellectually for decades... live in intensive care units facing a slow death... Some have become corpses but have not yet decided on a burial date... It is mistaken to think that the splits arising from narrow personal interests have ended or are confined only to Fatah! Observers of the Palestinian leftist factions and parties fully realize that this situation also prevails among these factions, and it is only a matter of time before the divisions, which have begun with contradictory political discourse within the leadership of some of these parties, surface and become a reality.
