In earlier articles I made clear to the reader the predicament of the Palestinian situation and its difficulty and the reasons for the loss of the political compass of the leadership of the Palestinian people. And I affirmed repeatedly that the Palestinian people have a pillar of strength, not a third to the two of them, in their conflict with the occupier and under the regional and world developments, and they are: the will of the Palestinian people and its unity.
Among the most important arts of managing political conflicts, which every novice politician masters, is that the political leadership of a people fortify itself with the pillars of strength available to it before waging fateful political battles – otherwise the movement becomes either surrender and a sale of the national interests or a cheap political suicide.
The Palestinian leadership under President Mahmoud Abbas leaves no opportunity without emphasizing that it is holding on with all the strength it has been given to the negotiations with the occupation. This wrong conviction, built on the hypothesis of “the pressure of western governments on the occupation,” has not wavered despite all the occupation's shameful acts against the Palestinian people and its usurped homeland throughout the past two decades. Settlement, dispossession of lands, daily killing and intimidation, arrest and liquidation of leaderships – these are only a small sample of the terms with which we can describe the phase of the futile negotiations. In the end the negotiations and what they spawned – a Palestinian authority supported by security coordination – became nothing but the mulberry leaf covering the shame of the occupation.
It is time to open a new page with a clear strategy to drive out the occupation.
The failed negotiations on the one hand and the futile appeasement on the other, and holding on to both by parts of the various Palestinian factions, is nothing but a flight from the obligations of the phase and an escape from finding appropriate answers for the crisis-ridden Palestinian situation. For the Palestinian leadership failed to exploit the fascist reality of the occupation state and the hardening running through Israeli society to launch a political offensive supported by popular struggle against the occupation and its policy.
The factions of the Palestinian resistance, from their farthest left to their farthest right, welcomed the popular struggle and sang of the heroism of Kufr Qasem and Bilin and other villages that have confronted the occupation for years with the bodies of their sons and daughters, thereby writing a new epic of struggle in the history of the Palestinian resistance, which met with tremendous sympathy from world public opinion resembling that sympathy and understanding for the Palestinian situation in the period of the first Intifada, before its achievements were offered as a sacrifice on the altar of the White House. The Palestinian factions, Islamic and national combined, have offered only a little worth mentioning to support the popular struggle, and all their resounding speeches remained ink on paper!
The liberation movements of the world, from Vietnam to South Africa, recognized the importance of drawing resistance and political strategies suited to every phase of the struggle. These movements succeeded in their struggle against colonialism and occupation through mastery of the equation of the political offensive nourished by the support of popular struggle and armed struggle, each in its time – and not through the spontaneity of a deadly struggle such as the factions of the Palestinian resistance have pursued in recent years.
The left, represented by the Democratic and the Popular Fronts, as well as the currents of political Islam, are still clinging to armed struggle, leaving out the link of popular struggle despite their knowledge that armed struggle has become nothing but opium to soothe the people's conscience and tickle its emotions. And the Palestinian authority has put all its eggs in the basket of the futile negotiations despite knowing that it is a waste of time – for the people and its cause – and a very profitable gain for the occupation to continue its colonial program in historic Palestine.
The political bankruptcy of the Palestinian authority becomes clearly evident by its abandonment of the gains that could have been reaped from the United Nations recognition of the state of Palestine as an observer member in the United Nations, and the puffing of this precious ammunition into failed Abbas-ist tactics, and trading entry into time-buying negotiations for the occupation against the release of some freedom prisoners or the false temporary freeze of settlement – all this is nothing but testimony to the loss of the compass and the helmsman in the Palestinian political vessel.
The Zionist leadership succeeded in the past two decades, under the cover of the futile negotiations, in convincing world public opinion that the Palestinian right of return would mean the end of the existence of their “Jewish state,” and it also succeeded in leading the Palestinian leadership into the whirlwind of numbers before entering the heart of the matter and opening talks on solid foundations. The question of who and when is entitled to return is contained in the international norms and laws, and it is not a subject of discussion at the beginning of the talks. The Palestinian leadership should have demanded at the start, before everything, that the Zionist state and its helpers among the colonial states recognize their historical responsibility for the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people. After this recognition begins the discussion of how to achieve the return for the displaced and their kin, and the discussions of numbers begin. The Zionist argument about the “demographic risk” is a toy that revealing it was and remains the easiest of things, and no one knows why the Palestinian leadership did not exploit this winning card. It would suffice here for the Palestinian authority to demand that Israel permit the return of the three hundred-odd refugees who reside in the Jewish state. These refugees are citizens by force in the Zionist state, and their return to their villages, from which they were displaced and most of whose lands remain Musha'a, neither prefers nor changes in the demographic structure of Israel. And more useful than all of this is that the Palestinian leadership should also realize that some Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories of 1948 succeeded in wresting their right of return before the Zionist judiciary, except that the Zionist governments have refused for decades to implement the decision of their own judicial apparatus! Why then does the Palestinian authority protect the shame of the Israeli “democracy” and not expose it in the international forums?
The answer to this question is very easy: The Palestinian authority is politically bankrupt, and all it has to do is submit its resignation and return the file of the national cause to the legitimate and sole representative of the Palestinian people, which is the PLO. And to return the vital responsibilities of the citizens of occupied Palestine to the hands of the occupation. Only thus, and with a step backward, can the Palestinian leadership see the reality clearly and draw a new resistance and political strategy to drive out the occupation.
Dissolving the Palestinian authority now is the solution!!!
