Palestine Liberation Organization – PLO – A Bright Past, A Painful Present, and An Uncertain Future!

Recently, there have been many articles and studies predicting the end of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the extinguishing of its candle that has illuminated the path of Palestinian struggle since its establishment after the first Arab-Palestinian conference in Jerusalem in 1964.

These predictions do not come from nowhere but are the result of conclusions drawn from what the PLO has experienced of internal and external marginalization and fierce war on its institutions, with various Palestinian parties participating and still continuing to this day...

In the past quarter-century, the PLO faced external pressures that forced its leadership to recognize the State of Israel before the latter recognized the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and the establishment of their state on the remaining historic Palestine occupied by Israel in 1967, before defining its geographical borders and identifying its people... These Arab and Western pressures led the PLO leadership to amend the Palestinian National Charter before ending the occupation amid a massive project of increasing Zionist settlements in occupied Palestine without any significant price paid by the occupying state!

During the same period, the PLO and its institutions were further marginalized by the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority in 1994, which in the eyes and actions of the dominant faction in this authority became the practical alternative to the organization, and the responsibilities of the national authority's institutions overlapped with those of the PLO, making it impossible for the ordinary observer to distinguish between the authority and the organization... In my opinion, this was the greatest achievement of the Oslo architects, who plunged the Palestinian situation with all its human and institutional components into an ongoing survival struggle...

During this period, the factions of the PLO also fragmented... Fatah, the largest faction, fell into the trap of authority and state and failed to draw a strategy balancing between being the ruling party representing only a small part of the Palestinian people and the most important faction in the PLO representing the entire Palestinian people wherever they reside. This split led to defections and exclusions within Fatah, weakening it and turning it from a solid cohesive movement into a political mall consisting of shops for movement figures, or as I call it, 'shop in shop'...

The leftist national and liberal left factions transformed from partners to followers and failed to escape the predicament they found themselves in after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, becoming a tug-of-war block between Fatah and the authority and the Islamist current led by Hamas. After the political, geographical, and social split resulting from Hamas's armed coup in Gaza and the erosion of President Mahmoud Abbas's legitimacy and authority, the crisis of the Palestinian left worsened, and it became a pawn in the field of the two dominant parties in the Palestinian situation.

Hamas played a fundamental role in weakening the PLO and eroding its prestige inside and outside... Since its establishment in 1988, Hamas has aimed at two possibilities: either seizing the PLO and Islamizing it in line with its Brotherhood ideology, or creating an alternative organization led by itself and joined by some national and Islamic factions from inside and outside the PLO... Neither strategy has succeeded despite many attempts so far... Hamas has been working for years according to a new reconciliatory strategy to keep the debate about its joining the PLO open, presenting itself as a 'safety valve for Palestinian unity and a banner of struggle against occupation,' while simultaneously building parallel institutions, unions, communities, and frameworks in all places where the Palestinian people reside worldwide, parallel to those built by the PLO and its factions... Hamas not only maintained its skepticism about the PLO's sole representation of the Palestinian people, established by the PLO since its founding and confirmed by the struggle of its military and political factions over more than four decades, but also cast doubt on the organization's legitimacy and leadership of the Palestinian people.

This painful reality of the Palestinian situation in general and the miserable state the PLO has reached is the result of a complete internal Palestinian failure before being an inevitable consequence of global and regional changes as some have read it...

This reality is not a dialectical development of the PLO's past... It is true that the PLO's past was not always a beacon of wise leadership or a lighthouse of institutional democracy, but it was a past full of cumulative successes... In the past, the PLO managed to gain global recognition as the legitimate and sole representative of the Palestinian people, entrenched the Palestinian cause in regional and international forums, brought the Palestinian cause to every home in the world, established it as the key to any future solution in the Middle East, and wrested the right to represent the Palestinian people from the Arab guardianship that conspired against it for a long time... Palestinian struggle for self-determination became an inspiration for liberation movements worldwide.

Despite the many failures recorded in the history of the PLO and its leadership, its shining past and numerous successes made it, in the eyes and conscience of the Palestinian people, not only a legitimate political representative that no one can bypass but also the PLO became a fundamental backbone of Palestinian national identity... Here lies the danger when some predict the end of the PLO! Here also lies the responsibility to preserve and renew the PLO programmatically and structurally...

The future of the PLO as we know it has become unknown, and no one can, with the help of past memories and present realities, read the coffee cup to see where the PLO's journey will anchor... The calls launched by some Palestinian factions and national figures, which we have heard for a quarter of a century demanding the reconstruction of the PLO's institutions and restoring their legitimacy, despite their credibility and importance, I personally place them in the realm of wishes, not possibilities, for the following reasons:

First, the reform discourse adopted and circulated by all Palestinian factions lacks credibility... Not out of self-conviction by the factions of the importance of reforming the PLO and its institutions... I am fully convinced that all factions, members and leaders, believe in the importance of reform and developing the Palestinian reference, but this belief is not consolidated through an internal reform and development process within the factions to convince the masses that the calls for reform are not just slogans but a program that can be achieved! All Palestinian factions without exception allow their members to 'play the democracy game,' but in reality, they live under the dictatorship of the founders and a minority of veterans holding decision-making centers in all Palestinian factions affiliated with the PLO... We see dictatorship and clinging to power in these factions despite their successive failures... Failures in politics, presence, party or movement status, parliamentary and municipal elections, and instead of taking responsibility for these failures and putting the organization's interest above their personal interests, they cling to their positions and increase their influence within party institutions through nepotism and blind loyalty from the organization's sons and daughters... So how can this leader and his organization convince the ordinary citizen that they aspire to democratize and restore the PLO institutions by putting national interest above organizational and personal interests? In short, the credibility of Palestinian leadership in PLO factions among the masses approaches zero.

Second, the calls to restore the PLO's legitimacy and rebuild its institutions on democratic and comprehensive political foundations, despite their sincerity, are merely expressions of frustration as they are not based on presenting a new political program for the PLO that takes into account all developments in the homeland, region, and international arena.

The political program of the PLO has lost its effectiveness, and here I do not mean the Palestinian constants and red lines but the political program dealing with the current reality of the people and the new political situation in the homeland and region... The political program is no longer the broad common denominator for all Palestinian factions; we now see important factions for whom Palestinian struggle in its various forms has become a burden, and they see security coordination with the occupation as a refuge. Some factions still call random violence armed struggle and do not dare to draw a new strategy for this struggle that aligns with the new reality in the homeland... Others cling to revolutionary nostalgia for fear of announcing their political and struggle bankruptcy... And another section uses a double-tongued strategy, or as I scientifically call it, the inside-outside strategy, where this political faction speaks and addresses the West and the occupation state in one language and addresses the Palestinian masses in another, fearing political exposure as it lacks a clear realistic political program.

Before talking about rebuilding the PLO, we must set the political foundations for reconstruction and derive struggle strategies that take into account developments in the homeland and region; otherwise, the calls of Palestinian organizations will remain mere expressions of frustration.

The Palestinian situation is currently going through a phase of leadership ossification mixed with the loss of a political strategy surrounded by struggle tactics shaped by reactive instincts rather than diligent, programmed struggle supported by a clear political strategy agreed upon by the political majority.