Since the official announcement of the call to convene the Palestinian National Council after a hiatus of about twenty years, the Palestinian situation has been in turmoil on all fronts. Discussions and statements conflict over the legitimacy of the call, who is behind it, the objectives of convening now after the deliberate sidelining of the National Council and its role for many years, who participates and who has the right to participate, and the purpose of participation or abstention… All these discussions and statements are valid and appropriate but they do not reflect, neither closely nor remotely, the bitter truth the Palestinian cause is going through and the critical reality into which the Palestinian leadership has plunged its people and cause. In previous articles, I extensively analyzed the state of detachment and loss experienced by the Palestinian political leadership across its spectrum from the concerns and aspirations of the people. In the following lines, I want to put my finger on the wound transparently regarding the step taken by President Mahmoud Abbas, its objectives, and the mafia-like tactics and political blackmail preceding the call to convene the National Council. I will also address the confusion experienced by other factions within the PLO regarding their response to the call, the criticisms thereof, and their loss of political compass despite the credibility of some factions’ demands to rebuild the sole reference for the Palestinian people on modern democratic foundations that consider the social and political conditions of Palestinians wherever they reside, taking into account the upheavals shaking the region over the past four years.
Statements by Fatah leader Azzam Al-Ahmad commenting on the call to convene the National Council that Oslo is over, and statements by his colleague, Central Committee member Abu Al-Enein, that the Authority can at any moment end security coordination with the occupation, indicate that the Authority and its orbit remain committed to their strategy based on the notion that the people are naive and that a political faction can manipulate the people's emotions with catchy slogans even though it is fully aware that the reins have slipped from its hands and it no longer has strength or means. The Palestinian Authority and Fatah, the largest and most important faction in the PLO, have tied their fate to a policy of national destruction that began in Madrid, culminated in Oslo, and was adorned with security coordination. The words of the brothers in Fatah are no longer just dust in the eyes but have become confusion like a drowning man fighting death and annihilation. Oslo has not ended, and convening the National Council in Ramallah under the eyes, approval, and sponsorship of the occupation is the final step in achieving all Oslo’s goals, which were drawn up by the Israeli operations room with American and European support and naïve acceptance by the dominant leadership in the Palestinian situation, headed by Fatah leadership.
Oslo has two readings: one Palestinian based on wishful thinking and waiting, and another Israeli Zionist based on a studied program and detailed plan to achieve their fundamental goals that they could not achieve through their wars against the Palestinian people and its sole legitimate leadership. The late President Arafat believed his political savvy and ability to manipulate the parties to the conflict, as he did for four consecutive decades within the PLO and its factions and institutions, would enable him to reach his noble goal of liberating the land and people, forgetting that the other parties who mixed the bitter Oslo potion he drank were fiercer and stronger than the PLO factions, and what the operations room offered him and Fatah as sweets at the beginning of the journey was originally aimed at eliminating him and the cause he carried and fought for. The Israeli-American operations room was preparing to abort Palestine as a people, leadership, land, existence, and here we are now before a tragic scene that no sane person disputes.
The Palestinian people are fragmented and divided against themselves, and the land of Palestine is divided geographically, politically, and socially. The sole legitimate representative of the entire Palestinian people has become nothing but a ghost. The Palestinian liberation movement, which engraved the legend of struggle in human history and inspired peoples and movements worldwide, was the only obstacle to the Zionist project, and their goal was to abort this movement and create an alternative. The Zionists and their Arab and foreign collaborators waged wars, opened battles, assassinated leaders, and fabricated alternatives such as village leagues and others, but they failed, and the PLO remained the backbone of the Palestinian people and cause until Oslo came and began building a coffin for the PLO. The convening of the truncated National Council in Gaza under Zionist sponsorship and American supervision was a continuation of building the coffin whose first plank was the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, which replaced the PLO, sidelined it politically, marginalized its institutions, and destroyed its infrastructure. The PLO’s bankruptcy peaked in dealing with the Nahr al-Bared issue, Yarmouk camp, Ain al-Hilweh camp, and the entire regional changes.
The Zionist program to eliminate the PLO as a prelude to eliminating the entire Palestinian cause is now within reach. Convening the Council session in Ramallah under these circumstances and this background, which we have been monitoring for months, and amid Hamas-Zionist consensus on a Gaza peace, constitutes the final step in the program to abort the PLO. By signing the agreement with the Zionists, Hamas will become, in the eyes of both parties, Hamas and Israel, the Western world, and also in the eyes of the regimes behind Hamas supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and their projects, the real and effective representative of the Palestinian people who established their Palestinian state in Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas’s attempt to cling to what remains of the PLO as a mirage to save the Fatah Authority and movement from extinction if Hamas takes its ominous step is understandable but also a plan, as prepared in the president’s kitchen, that will certainly fail, and the way of clinging is wrong and destructive. Mahmoud Abbas fully understands that signing the truce between Hamas and Israel, whose first lines were set in 2005 in Ahmed Youssef’s paper before Hamas’s legislative elections in 2006, will mark the end of the Palestinian Authority’s journey, beginning with the reduction of Western and Arab support for the Authority, and I also do not rule out its complete deletion and the pursuit of Fatah leaders and activists and PLO factions in the West Bank by the occupation. He also understands that the project to expand the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian state, towards Sinai will be implemented after the scenario of its release and marketing globally, Palestinian, and regionally is completed, and also after taming Egypt and enticing it to accept the idea.
This scenario is not fate or destiny but a planned project, and fate and destiny have a place in the unseen, not in politics. Destructive, liquidation political projects are answered by studied, sound, and well-planned national political projects based on the broadest popular base and widest factional solidarity, not by fabrication and deception. Before clinging to the marginalized PLO and its ghostly institutions, Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Executive Committee, should have started serious work to build a strong structure for the PLO, and resistance factions, especially the democratic left factions, should not have rushed to come to Ramallah after the announcement of the call to be just a fig leaf and a false witness to fix the last plank in the PLO’s coffin. The response to the creation of the Hamas alternative to the PLO, which began with the Muslim Brotherhood project before the first Intifada, is still possible, achievable, and a national duty for all patriots, factions, and individuals. The beginning of the answer is to boycott the PLO factions, especially the democratic left, the fabricated National Council session in Ramallah, and to go out to the streets hand in hand with the honorable sons of Fatah who are tired of their organization’s leadership arrogance and its poor and failed conflict management style, demanding immediate elections for the National Council according to a modern democratic electoral law far from rigged elections and detested quota distributions. Such a step must be preceded by a wide popular demand for the Authority to cut all contacts with the occupation, starting with stopping security coordination, exposing the climbers from the Authority’s thugs who, despite knowing the Zionists’ alternative tactics, still pilgrimage to Tel Aviv and European capitals to meet their Zionist friends, ending with supporting the open popular movement against the occupation and settler gangs and backing this movement with all the money and power we possess. We must not forget here that the honorable sons of Hamas, led by the Al-Qassam Brigades, have not yet supported the project of Hamas leadership abroad and are unlikely to follow Mashal’s project, and prominent figures from the leadership, such as Al-Zahar, may join the Hamas rejection front, not out of love for the PLO but out of hatred for the Hamas leadership abroad and a dispute with this leadership over the correct political line of the movement. This Hamas leadership abroad has become a puppet in the hands of its financiers and a chess piece in the game of dividing the entire region. I am fully confident that these honorable sons of Hamas and the Al-Qassam Brigades will stand with their people and for their sacred cause and will trample on liquidation and division projects. The success of such a movement is undoubtedly linked to a steadfast, deterrent, and mobilizing program against loss and annihilation. Those who think that the factions and leaders are now facing a struggle over legitimacy here or there are mistaken… The Palestinian people and cause are in the midst of a real existential battle that requires more than narrow tactics not based on a long-term national strategy.
The statements and criticisms made by PLO faction leaders in response to President Mahmoud Abbas’s step to call for the National Council session, which essentially claimed that the president wants to consolidate his position in the Executive Committee to monopolize decision-making and ensure a pro-majority for himself and the Fatah side he represents in the National Council, etc., all these criticisms come from the desire to “save face” and nothing more. They are worn-out criticisms we have heard hundreds of times and have no relation to the reality of the organization at all. The truth is that President Mahmoud Abbas and before him the late Yasser Arafat did not consider the opinion of the Executive Committee or the Central Council at all. Does anyone remember when any PLO institution was able to implement a decision contrary to the president’s opinion even if the majority of the institution voted in favor of the decision? Fatah and its leadership dealt with the PLO as an authoritarian base, not as a national consensus, identity, and legitimate reference. They consider the PLO, its institutions, and everything related to it as their property and deal with the organization and those inside it accordingly. In the fifty years of the PLO’s existence, no complete financial report has been submitted for the organization’s institutions, and the PLO chairman considered this a matter for himself alone. History testifies to the occasions when PLO funds were used by Fatah to blackmail other factions or punish them for their political positions. The PLO, in their view and dealings, is just a mask to be worn and replaced whenever needed. Now, with the looming prospect of a comprehensive agreement under distinguished regional sponsorship between Hamas and Israel to establish a “Palestinian state on liberated Palestinian land,” President Mahmoud Abbas sees the carpet being pulled from under his feet. I do not exclude that Hamas will respond to its critics from the PLO by saying that what it intends to do is merely the embodiment and realization of the phased program that the PLO could not achieve over the past five decades. I also do not exclude that Hamas leadership will blackmail the president and PLO factions and try to barter the truce agreement with Israel for participation in the PLO according to the usual Hamas conditions, and Mashal’s demand to President Mahmoud Abbas last Monday to postpone the National Council session is proceeding along the same path.
The correct response now is a radical response to the requirements of the stage, not a cosmetic response to save face and privileges that can be obtained from the influential in the people’s institutions.
