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When the ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian organizations entered the Gaza Strip in the first hour of May 21, celebrations erupted across the Palestinian world. From Israeli villages and occupied territories to refugee camps in the surrounding Arab states, Palestinians took to the streets to express calm at the end of Israel’s latest uprising, confirming the restored unity that had sabotaged the Israeli war machine.
It is a remarkable transformation that has given new life to the struggle for self-determination in just a few weeks and has been a great force in the Arab world – and far beyond.
As in March, the Metternich headquarters of the Trump administration, Prince Jared of Kushner, triumphantly announced that “we are seeing the last vestiges of the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict.” Rejecting the Palestinian issue as a “real estate conflict” by chance, his centrality in the region was ridiculed as a “myth” that he effortlessly dug into with the F-35’s fist.
Kushner was confident that along with former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he would resolve the Palestinian issue with a formula that has been hidden for seven decades: that it does not exist and will disappear.
On one level, the reality shaped by the events of the last three decades seemed to be increasingly aligned.
The municipal model of Palestinian politics
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was for many years a truly representative and absolutely popular national movement. If the PLO began to reduce forced exits from Lebanon in 1982 and subsequent internal divisions, it was offset in 1987 by the First Intifada that erupted in the occupied territories in 1987. This mass uprising had such great force throughout the region within a few weeks. The Lebanese Amal movement and the Syrian government felt compelled to kill the year-long siege of Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut.
The 1993 Oslo Accords created a turning point. The separatism implicit in Palestinian nationalism was formalized in an agreement that separated the Palestinian issue from the Arab-Israeli conflict. It could be said that Egypt set aside Arab levels, the Arab states were concerned about the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Gulf states the PLO after the 1990-1991 Kuwait crisis and the main Fatah movement, the rise of Hamas in the occupied territories, and then Syria – and therefore Lebanon. Preparations to negotiate a peace deal with Israel left PLO leader Yasser Arafat with few alternatives. If so, he chose one of the worst options.
With the feather blow, the Palestinian diaspora and the Palestinians in Israel – which make up more than half of the Palestinians in the world – were pushed to the margins of Palestinian politics. As the center of gravity shifted from the newly created PLO to the Palestinian Authority (PA), these communities were explicitly excluded from participating in its institutions and elections. While the Palestinians in Israel had their own political parties, the political significance of the diaspora, which was disproportionately directed and maintained by the national movement, was diminished only by demographic reality.
A similar process was taking place within the occupied territories. When cheap labor in the occupied territories of Israel began to be replaced by foreign workers after the First Intifada and economic transformation demanded less, successive governments increasingly isolated the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip from Israel. and from each other.
After the arrival of the PA in the mid-1990s, this process of geographical division accelerated exponentially, which is still in force in each of these territories today. This policy is a key component of the 2007 Fatah-Hamas schism, and many analysts have stated that maintaining a divided Palestinian policy has become a priority for Israelis ever since.
The fruits of these efforts, held by the Palestinian leadership, which was responsible for maintaining power and cultivating foreign aid for their factional struggles rather than in conflict with Israel, became increasingly visible.
Like municipal governments, and with few exceptions, the leadership of each Palestinian community dealt only with local issues. Thus, Hamas’s relationship with Israel was reduced to seeking relief from the punitive blockade of the Gaza Strip, while Israeli Arab parties focused on the state’s increasingly daring racism with its components, while in Ramallah, President Mahmoud Abbas was almost entirely destined to be killed. office. At the formal and institutional level, national politics was a thing of the past.
At the regional level, a similar trend emerged. Convinced of Abbas’s paralysis and Israel’s walls and fences, which eventually freed Kushner and Netanyahu from the troubling Palestinian issue, the Arab autocrats opened up Greater Israel for special treatment in Washington. They played that the Palestinians would no longer be embarrassed by the insurrection and martyrdom and that their people would inevitably leave it in the hands of the courts to resolve and move forward what was left of this “real estate conflict”.
Palestinian mobilization
Palestinians have a habit of rising at the weakest and in despair and it is proven that they have left their grave fate. And they did that in 2021. Palestinians were evicted from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah district of East Jerusalem and in repeated attempts against the Al-Aqsa mosque, against which Israeli calculations would kidnap and impoverish the state’s power. The people of East Jerusalem mobilized Palestinians within the Green Line, first into the Holy City and then within Israel.
Compared to its previous dealings with Israel, this time Hamas delivered its first blow and did so for reasons apparently unrelated to the conditions on the Gaza Strip. Within a few days Palestinian protesters in Jordan and Lebanon, along with at least other Jordanians and Lebanese, were restricting the border, as more and more demonstrations erupted in support of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Arab world.
General Mark Milley of Washington warned the military chief of the “danger.” [of] wider destabilization … [and] many negative consequences, if the fight continues ”. In other words, the main creators of the myth revealed that they were Kushner, Netanyahu, and now invisible partners.
Collectively, the mobilization sent an unmistakable message that, despite efforts to the contrary, Palestine remains a national and Arab cause. Perhaps because of the strong echo of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It is likely that the dynamic was a crossroads that created collective ownership, that if rights are not defended here and now they will be lost forever. In any case, the municipal model of Palestinian politics has been shattered.
In the recent past, the 1987-1993 Intifada moved to Oslo, the 2000-2004 Intifada ended in Abbas’s rule and was largely domesticated by the Palestinians. Israel and its western allies will now work hard to reconcile the Palestinians, and focus Palestinian attention primarily on the interior and restore a model that has worked so well for its opponents.
For Palestinians, being mobilized is key. More importantly, they need to find a way to seize the moment and send the fragmentation of the past once and for all to face the existential challenges they face nationally. The alternative is the duration of what is wrongly called the status quo. Instead of being a static state of affairs, the status quo is a dynamic reality, a continuous process of expropriation that shows no sign of diminishing.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the attitude of Al Jazeera’s editorial.
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