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WILL THE PALESTINIAN GROUPS CREATE A NEW PALESTINIAN POLITICAL
PROJECT?  
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Vijay Prashad
May 8, 2024
Peoples Dispatch
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_ The first task is to prevent the attack on Rafah and end the
genocide. However, soon thereafter, the political malaise that has
befallen the Palestinian people must be overcome. _

1970 - Arafat with Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine
leader, Nayef Hawatmeh and Palestinian writer Kamal Nasser at press
conference in Amman. Palestinian groups are now trying to strengthen
their existing unity., (Photo: Wikimedia commons)

 

In Cairo, representatives from Hamas held
[[link removed]] indirect
negotiations with Israel for a ceasefire. The sticking point for
several of the rounds was the order of events. Israel wanted the
hostages to be released before it would stop the bombing, while Hamas
said that the bombing must stop first. Israel has called for the
disarming and dismantling of Hamas, which is a maximalist demand
unlikely to be met. Hamas meanwhile would like not only a ceasefire
but an end to the war. Both sides blamed each other, which made the
task of the Egyptian and Qatari negotiators more difficult.

The best outcome possible from the Cairo talks is an end to the
current genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza. The
negotiations to end the war took on an extra urgency as Israel bombed
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edge of Rafah, the only city in Gaza not yet decimated by Israel. With
no place to flee, the Palestinian civilians in Rafah cannot be
sheltered from any attack, even if it is not as violent as conducted
by the Israeli army against Gaza City and Khan Younis. Those attacks
have created [[link removed]] 37
million tons of rubble, which are filled with contaminants and an
immense number of unexploded bombs (which will take 14 years to
disarm). Israel believes that the last organized remnants of Hamas
exist in Rafah, and that it will either bomb the millions who live
there to destroy it, or it will have to agree to destroy itself
through negotiations. Both are unacceptable to the Palestinians, who
neither want more civilian casualties nor the break-up of one of the
fiercest defenders of the right of Palestinians to self-determination.

Despite Hamas’s agreement with the ceasefire proposal, Israel
launched violent attacks on Rafah and seized
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of the Rafah crossing into Egypt (thereby cutting off the main access
route for aid into Gaza). The talks continue but Israel is simply
unwilling to take them seriously.

PALESTINIAN UNITY

Israel’s disregard for the negotiations and the level of its
violence can be measured based on two political realities. It does not
take negotiations with the Palestinians seriously and it feels that it
can bomb with impunity. This is so because, firstly, Israel is backed
fully by the Global North states (mainly the United States and Europe)
and secondly, it does not regard Palestinian political views as vital
because it has succeeded in breaking the political unity amongst
Palestinians and it has succeeded in politically disorienting the
various factions by the arrest of their main leadership. This does not
entirely apply to Hamas, whose leadership was able to set up
operations in Damascus and then later in Doha, Qatar. While it is
impossible to imagine a rapid about-face from the Global North
countries, it has become entirely clear to the Palestinian factions
that absent their unity there will be no way to compel Israel to end
its genocidal war, and then of course its occupation of Palestinian
lands combined with its apartheid policies inside Israel.

In late April 2023, Hamas met
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Fatah, the other major Palestinian political force, in China as part
of a long process to create common ground between them. Relations
between these two major political parties broke down in 2006-07, when
Hamas won the parliamentary elections in Gaza and when Fatah—in
charge of the Palestine Authority—contested these results; indeed,
the two factions fought each other militarily in Gaza before Fatah
retreated to the West Bank. During Israel’s genocidal war, both
Fatah and Hamas sought to bridge the gap and not to permit their
differences to allow both the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and
the defeat of Palestinian political aims in general. High
representatives of these two parties met
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Moscow earlier this year, and again in China in May.

For this meeting in China, Fatah sent its senior leaders, including
Azzam al-Ahmad (who is on the central committee and leads its
Palestinian reconciliation team), while Hamas sent equally senior
leaders, including Mousa Abu Marzouk (a member of the party’s
Political Bureau and its de facto Foreign Minister). The negotiations
did not result in a final agreement, but—as part of a long
process—it has deepened the dialogue and the political will between
the two parties to work together against the Israeli genocidal war and
the occupation. Further meetings at this high level are being planned,
with a joint statement to follow later regarding a call—encouraged
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China’s President Xi Jinping—for an international peace conference
to end the war and a joint Palestinian platform regarding the way
forward.

GAPS

Fatah, the anchor of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO),
was founded in 1959 by three men, two of whom came from the Muslim
Brotherhood (Khalil al-Wazir and Salah Khalaf) and one of whom who
came from the General Union of Palestinian students and would
eventually become the main leader (Yasser Arafat). The PLO established
itself as the core of the Palestinian struggle against the catastrophe
of 1948 that lost them their lands, made them second-class citizens
inside Israel, and sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into
decades of exile. The Muslim Brotherhood imprint did not form within
the PLO, which took on a national liberation tone that was sharpened
by the various left factions such as the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP, formed in 1967) and the Democratic
Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP, formed in1968).

The PLO became hegemonic in the Palestinian struggle, coordinating the
political work in the camps of the exiles and the armed struggle of
the _fedayeen_ (fighters). The factions of the PLO faced concerted
attack from Israel, which invaded Lebanon to exile the leadership and
its core to Tunisia. With the fall of the USSR, the PLO began to
negotiate earnestly with the Israelis and the United States, both of
which imposed a form of surrender on the Palestinians called the 1993
Oslo Accords. Fatah took charge of the Palestinian Authority, which
operated partially to maintain the Israeli occupation of East
Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank.

Angered by what appeared to be a Palestinian surrender at Oslo, eight
factions formed the Alliance of Palestinian Factions in 1993. Within
this Alliance, the largest groups belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood
tradition. They included Palestinian Islamic Jihad (formed in 1981)
and Hamas (formed in 1987). The PFLP and DFLP initially joined this
alliance but left in 1998 over differences with the Islamic parties.
The Islamist parties won the parliamentary elections in Gaza with a
slim margin (Hamas’s 44 percent against Fatah’s 41 percent), a
result that angered Israel and the Global North states who then tried
to undermine them.

The path to political power through the ballot box having been denied
them, and then facing sustained Israeli suffocation and bombardment of
Gaza, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad strengthened their armed wings and
defended themselves against humiliation and attack. Every attempt at
peaceful protest—including
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Long March of Return in 2018 and 2019—was met with Israeli violence.
There has never been a moment when the people of Gaza have experienced
a year of peace since 2007. The current bombardment, however, is at a
different scale than even the worst of the previous attacks by Israel
in 2008 and 2014.

The main political disagreements between the factions include their
different interpretation of the Oslo Accords, their respective
ambition for political control, and their separate aspirations for
Palestinian society. That their political leaders have been imprisoned
for decades and that they have been prevented from normal, democratic
political activity (such as maintaining their political structures and
as canvassing the people) has prevented them from bridging their
distances. However, in prison the leadership have had sustained
dialogues on these issues. Right after the parliamentary elections in
Gaza, the leaders of the five major factions imprisoned in Israel’s
Hadarim prison wrote
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Conciliation Document of the Prisoners_. Marwan Barghouti of Fatah,
Abdel Raheem Malluh of the PFLP, Mustafa Badarneh of the DFLP, Abdel
Khaleq al-Natsh of Hamas, and Bassam al-Saadi of Islamic Jihad.

The _Document of the Prisoners_, which was widely circulated and
discussed, called for Palestinian unity and an end to “all forms of
division that could lead to internal strife.” The text did not lay
out a new Palestinian political agenda, but it called for the various
factions “to formulate a Palestinian plan aimed at comprehensive
political action.” The development of this plan, now almost 20 years
later, is a major objective of the talks between the various
Palestinian political organizations.

There is agreement that the first task is to prevent the attack on
Rafah and to end the genocidal war against the Palestinians. However,
soon thereafter, the sense is that the political malaise that has
befallen the Palestinian people must be overcome and a new political
project must be used to motivate a new political atmosphere amongst
the Palestinians within Israel’s borders, in the Occupied
Palestinian Territory of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, in
the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, and in the 6 million
strong Palestinian diaspora.

_VIJAY PRASHAD is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is
a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an
editor of LeftWord Books [[link removed]] and the
director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
[[link removed]]. He has written more than 20 books,
including The Darker Nations
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Poorer Nations
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His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements
for Socialism
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(with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the
Fragility of U.S. Power [[link removed]]._

_This article was produced by Globetrotter
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* Palestinians
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* Yasser Arafat
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* Hamas
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