Azmi Bishara
The New Arab / January 27, 2026
Azmi Bishara’s keynote address at annual Palestine Forum tackles the future of the Palestinian national project in a new post-genocide global order
The fourth Annual Palestine Forum concluded this week in Doha. Organized by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACPRS) and the Institute for Palestine Studies, the Forum featured research sessions, workshops, and a symposium focused on rebuilding the Palestinian national project, reconstruction in the Gaza Strip, and political and strategic transformations in the “day after” phase. The Forum was attended by hundreds of researchers and participants from around the world.
Dr. Azmi Bishara, the General Director of the ACRPS, delivered the keynote lecture of the Forum. He shed light on the concept of the Palestinian national project in Palestinian political debate and struggle. Bishara traced the trajectory of this concept since the aftermath of the Nakba in 1948, and the successive developments and realities that shaped the transformations of the Palestinian national project. Below is a translation of the text of the keynote lecture.
I recall that in 2013 the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies held a conference entitled “The Palestine Question … The Future of the Palestinian National Project”, and in 2015 another entitled “An Academic Seminar on the Future of the Palestinian National Project”. Since then, discussions under this heading have recurred within the Center’s environment and academic network. In truth, it is difficult to imagine circumstances more adverse than our present ones in which to discuss this subject and to say something that might open a window of hope onto a horizon that appears closed. Perhaps the convening of the annual Palestine Forum after a war of annihilation—continuing at a lower intensity and morphing into an attempt at the political liquidation of the “Palestinian national project”—provides an occasion for a cautious return to this discussion, amid the major transformations experienced by the Palestinian people and their political forces after that war and the creeping annexation of the West Bank.
I begin by addressing the prevalent conflation between the national project and the political programme. There is no doubt that a programme is a principal component of any political system deserving of the name “national project”: it lays down general principles and formulates objectives in a way that allows for the construction of a strategy to achieve them, based on the realities and latent capacities at hand. Yet the definition remains incomplete if it is confined to the programme alone and does not include the organisational structures and social carriers of that programme. Political objectives may appear in a passing political article or a speech, but their mere articulation does not make them a national project. A national project encompasses objectives and the forces that carry them—forces qualified to claim that they represent national legitimacy. At a minimum, this means broad popular engagement with, and support for, the programme being advanced.
In the Palestinian case, the regional and international contexts acquired a significance exceeding that found in other national liberation movements, for reasons connected to its entanglement with European colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century; its intersection with the Jewish question in Europe; its subsequent interweaving with the Arab question and the emergence of independent Arab states, with differing regimes, shifting agendas, and intensifying rivalries and conflicts; the special relationship between the United States and Israel; the Cold War between the two poles of the global system; and American influence in the region. I have addressed this subject elsewhere on several occasions. I therefore will not today set out in detail the evidence for the decisive importance of the Arab and international context and its impact on the Palestinian national project, which—as noted—includes both the political programme and the social and political forces that carry it.
Armed struggle within the Palestinian National Project
When the attention of the elite displaced from their homes in 1948 focused on the priority of preserving the Palestinian people and their national identity, the outcome was the establishment of an organisation representing the national entity of the Palestinian people against the backdrop of their dispersal across different countries; the Egyptian administration of the Gaza Strip; Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank; and the presence of some 150,000 Palestinians who remained within the borders of 1948 Palestine, where Israeli citizenship was the price of their staying.
The creation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation came after a decade and a half of futile demands for the implementation of the right of return enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194. It affirmed a single Palestinian entity in the context of the Arab–Israeli conflict, at a time when no Arab lands other than Palestine were occupied, and when modernising Arab regimes were locked in struggle with the remnants of colonial domination in our region. This was during the height of the Cold War between two global systems whose competing alliances in the Arab world deepened rifts among ruling regimes.
Even in those circumstances, the Palestine question enjoyed an Arab political and cultural consensus that transcended these conflicts—at least at the level of political discourse—to the point of competitive displays of commitment to the liberation of Palestine and mutual accusations of betrayal. Yet the military defeat suffered by the three Arab states directly involved in the 1967 war, which resulted in the occupation of what remained of Palestine as well as lands belonging to other Arab states, imposed new political standard-bearers for the Palestinian national project: the armed struggle factions, which came to dominate the PLO. The organisation’s political programme did not in fact change, but Palestinian armed struggle became, in the vision of the new leadership, the sole path to realising that programme. This assertion was enshrined in the National Charter. The continuation of armed struggle in the aftermath of defeat became the source of the factions’ legitimacy in taking control of the organisation.
There is no doubt that those who raised the banner of armed struggle and practised it genuinely believed it to be the only path to liberating Palestine, influenced by national liberation movements in Asia, Africa—especially Algeria and Vietnam—and Latin America. While acknowledging the conviction and sincerity of those who embraced this option, two fundamental factors that shaped it must not be overlooked.
The first was the continuation of the Arab–Israeli conflict after the Arab defeat that justified the factions’ control of the PLO, and the existence of Arab states that rejected peace with Israel on its terms and were prepared to host, finance, and arm the Palestinian resistance, given the standing of the Palestine cause in public opinion and in these regimes’ own self-understanding and social bases. As these regimes competed for leadership and diverged in their interests and alliances, this was reflected in their adoption of different Palestinian currents and forces, and in the fuelling of rivalries among them. Regimes allied with the resistance held that the question of war with Israel and its timing could not be left to armed factions outside the state, even as they permitted themselves to use Palestinian armed action to exert pressure on other fronts. Accordingly, from time to time they sought to control Palestinian decision-making and subordinate it to their agendas.
The second was that Palestinian armed struggle also became an arena to contest leadership within the Palestinian national movement. Initially, the political action of the armed factions was directed against the PLO’s political leadership, composed of urban Palestinian elites who had relied on Arab state efforts—especially Egypt before 1967. After taking control of the organisation, political action shifted into two arenas:
- Entrenching the independence of Palestinian decision-making, led by Fatah, and affirming that the PLO was the sole legitimate representative; and
- Competition among factions to demonstrate their role in armed struggle and their share within the organisation’s institutions through specific indicators—such as the number of operations carried out against Israel and the number of martyrs—rather than through indicators related to the accumulation of achievements in the central struggle against settler colonialism and their effectiveness in realising the programme: the liberation of Palestine.
The phrase “the only path to the liberation of Palestine”, embedded in the National Charter, did not yield an actual strategy for liberating Palestine. Reliance remained pinned on the resolve of Arab states to wage a war to liberate their lands, despite the spread of notions such as a protracted people’s war; the majority of the Palestinian people and the PLO’s human base lived in Arab states.
For that reason, armed struggle was never evaluated, at any point, on the basis of its link to achieving the political programme. Those who list its achievements do not speak of gains made along the path towards the objective; rather, they cite the preservation of Palestinian identity, the rejection of the reality of settler occupation, and the prevailing spirit of liberation. Even in assessment, we still hesitate greatly to use terms such as the “setback” of this option—though for objective reasons—because of the halo of sanctity surrounding the subject, stemming from its entanglement with collective identity, in which memory constitutes a central component. Memory—as you know—is one thing; historical evaluation is another. Historiography deals with the past by recording, documenting, interpreting, and understanding it from the standpoint of the present. Memory, by contrast, is the life of what settles in people’s consciousness of the past within the present: it is the selectivity of remembering and forgetting, political and cultural, intensely present; it intertwines with self-understanding and with reality, and rebels against attempts to evaluate history as though it were simply “past”.
In any case, the Arab and international context reasserted itself. When the long-awaited war broke out in October 1973, it became clear that it was a necessary prelude to negotiations between Israel and Egypt over the territory occupied in 1967. After the Camp David agreement was signed between Israel and Egypt, the latter exited the arena of conflict, and that was sufficient to put an end to wars between Arab states and Israel. The Zionist leadership understood this equation fully, and was entirely prepared to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for peace with it. That did not occur with any Arab state after Camp David: no wars broke out, and no occupied lands were returned.
Land-for-Peace and the Palestinian National Project
After Camp David, and the failure to confront it Arabically, two important developments occurred.
First, official conviction grew in applying the land-for-peace model to other fronts, including the Palestinian one. In the Palestinian case, this meant the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Second, the factions of Palestinian armed action were expelled from their last strongholds adjacent to the land of Palestine, by an Israeli decision, with American support, and under the umbrella of the peace treaty with Egypt. This was the declared aim of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982—an assault planned without any attempt to disguise it behind “defensive” pretexts, unlike the war of annihilation on Gaza after 7 October 2023. Despite the relocation of armed forces to Algeria and Yemen and the continued presence of some armed factions in Syria after the war, it can be said that this war inaugurated a new phase in the history of Palestinian armed struggle, which had been carried by factions affiliated with the PLO: all Arab fronts were closed to it. Yet armed action had already shifted from a means into a principle—indeed, a justification for existence—and national forces do not abandon principles under enemy pressure. Thus, without relinquishing the “principle” itself, and without reviewing the experience of armed struggle under the new conditions (except for what some researchers or former faction leaders undertook), the centre of gravity in confronting Israel moved from armed struggle from outside Palestine—which also supported armed operations inside—to supporting the organisation of popular committees and unions and peaceful mass struggle inside the occupied territory, culminating in the intifada at the end of 1987.
The broad Arab and international support the intifada enjoyed coincided with a shift in the interim programme: from establishing a “fighting national authority” on any area liberated, to a Palestinian state on any area liberated as a stage on the path to liberation, then to the programme of a Palestinian state on the basis of UN resolutions since 1947, as stated in the Declaration of the State of Palestine in Algiers in 1988—which also implies UN General Assembly Resolution 181. This constituted a fundamental change in the Palestinian national project: it became a project of a Palestinian state within what is called the “two-state solution”. Its tools became mass struggle inside Palestine, as planned by political forces in the West Bank and Gaza with the support of PLO factions, which had lost their main bases in Lebanon in 1982 after having lost their bases in Jordan in 1970.
It was not long before the PLO leadership embraced direct negotiations with Israel—what was then termed the “peace process”—after Israel recognised the organisation, which in turn met the condition of amending key provisions in the Palestinian National Charter. With the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, the process of transforming the national project was completed.
There is no doubt that Palestinian armed struggle saw resurgences towards the end of the first intifada as Israeli repression intensified, and as new differentiations emerged within the national movement in the occupied territories. A new generation of the Muslim Brotherhood rose, determined to participate in resisting the occupation through the establishment of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), which took up arms against the occupation during the intifada after mass struggle had entered multiple crises for reasons difficult to separate from regional changes—such as the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War—and international changes—such as the collapse of the socialist bloc. Yet beyond resisting the occupation, Islamic armed resistance also expressed competition with PLO factions, from the side of a movement that emerged outside the organisation. This competition contributed to Israel’s recognition of the PLO and its readiness to negotiate with it. After the first intifada, the village leagues linked to the occupation were no longer the alternative to the PLO; rather, the Islamic Resistance Movement was.
The outlines of a split into two Palestinian projects became visible.
The first was the project of a state within the two-state solution, carried by the PLO, whose focus shifted increasingly towards the national movement in the interior—that is, in the West Bank and Gaza—more than the diaspora, culminating in the Oslo Accords of 1993 and the agreements that followed, which were regarded as an interim stage towards establishing a Palestinian state. Negotiation became the principal option. The state was no longer a stage on the road to liberation; rather, the Palestinian Authority established under Oslo became a stage towards the state, which itself became the final objective.
The second was what Hamas proposed: armed struggle and the liberation of Palestine as a waqf land (Islamic endowment in perpetuity) that could not be relinquished, in addition to other details set out in its Charter (issued in 1988, and effectively abandoned through the publication of its General Policy Document in 2017).
Radical transformations followed the Oslo agreements and the establishment of the Authority, as well as the Arab and international developments after the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the United States’ declaration of the “war on terror”, including the war on Iraq in 2003. Israel exploited this phase of the so-called war on terror to move from suppressing the second intifada to assassinating Yasser Arafat. Hamas decided to participate in the 2006 legislative elections of the Authority and achieved an unexpected victory, accepting to lead the government of the Authority under the Oslo framework. All of this increased the weight of Palestinian domestic politics in the calculations of Palestinian political forces, with the existence of an authority, albeit under binding agreements with Israel. The United States, however, refused to recognise the new reality, and its alignment with Israel blinded it to its significance.
Yet when the establishment of a Palestinian state became the agreed programme among rival factions, there ceased to be a single Palestinian national project. True, the state became an almost consensual objective, but two distinct—indeed, sharply antagonistic—projects persisted, from 2007 onwards, to the point of armed confrontation, in addition to the political and geographic rupture created by the emergence of two authorities: one in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip.
The former committed itself to security coordination with the occupation in accordance with the Oslo agreements. Its principal base is Fatah, present across the Palestinian arena. The latter remained besieged in Gaza. Its principal base is Hamas, also present across the Palestinian arena, and it did not relinquish the option of armed resistance. The Palestine Liberation Organisation was in practice transformed into a department within the Palestinian Authority, constrained by the Oslo agreements and incapable of freeing itself from their security obligations, remaining loyal to the path of negotiations as the sole option, without bargaining power. In reality, those negotiations began under American tutelage, ended in full Israeli tutelage, and then ceased altogether.
From that point onward, Israel continued to expand settlements and entirely repudiated its obligations to implement the stages of the Oslo agreements. Several Israeli wars of aggression were waged against the Gaza Strip, while Hamas consolidated its authority and armed base there. The Palestinian people, however, were struck by what befell their national project, which had been divided between two authorities in the West Bank and Gaza. The division became one of the principal reasons for the marginalisation of the Palestine question internationally.
On the other hand, Hamas established a more independent Palestinian authority, albeit one besieged by Israel and, to a considerable extent, by Arab states. Yet it possessed a combative ethos in the struggle with Israel, which increasingly became resistance to the siege itself, after Israel rejected all initiatives to ease it in exchange for long-term truces. Hamas relied on its social base and on the support of a regional axis that crystallised under Iranian leadership, known as the Axis of Resistance. A state of stagnation prevailed. It appeared as though Israel was invested in maintaining the status quo: marginalising the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, halting negotiations with it, sustaining the siege on Gaza, and launching punitive wars of retaliation in response to rocket salvos that were meant to remind the “world” of the siege whenever it seemed in danger of slipping into oblivion.
After the Al-Aqsa Flood
The eruption of the Al-Aqsa Flood came against the backdrop of Israel’s insistence on tightening the noose around the Gaza Strip, and its persistence in expanding settlements and Judaizing Jerusalem, including the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. Much has been said about the operation—its background, objectives, and outcomes—so there is little purpose in expanding on this today. But it is naïve to believe that one can continue to think about the Palestinian national project on the basis of the same premises and tools after the major transformations produced by the scale of the Israeli response to the Al-Aqsa Flood and the American and international complicity in it: the infliction of crushing blows on the Axis of Resistance; the expansion of Israeli influence in the region; and, above all, what Hamas itself and its authority in Gaza have endured, as well as what Palestinians in Gaza—then in the West Bank—have suffered.
The Al-Aqsa Flood was a vast and shocking event, but the Israeli response at the level of Palestine and the region transformed it into an earthquake that inaugurated a new phase. With a far-right coalition in power, founded on a clear programme—expanding settlement in the West Bank, intensifying the Judaization of Jerusalem, and openly repudiating the Oslo accords—and under the weight of the immense shock and the profound Israeli sense of humiliation, Israel launched a war of retribution against the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, openly aimed at eliminating Hamas. With American backing and international acquiescence, it became a comprehensive war of annihilation, designed to displace Gaza’s Palestinians and impose a radical socio-economic and political transformation upon the Strip. If displacement plans fail, Israel intends to reduce Gaza to a mere population enclave preoccupied with survival under a war that strips it of the basic conditions of life, on the condition that it be severed from any Palestinian national entity. The war expanded regionally to encompass what is known as the Axis of Resistance, beginning with the implementation of an existing plan to curtail Hezbollah, or eliminate its armed power.
International focus shifted from achieving a just solution to the Palestine question to calls for the delivery of humanitarian aid, the meeting of basic needs, and perhaps reconstruction—under international and Israeli supervision.
Let me recall what was noted above regarding the cessation of Arab–Israeli wars. What Israel has waged since the 1973 war has been wars against Palestinian armed resistance—first against the factions of the PLO, then against the Lebanese resistance, and then against Palestinian resistance outside the PLO, namely Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Finally, in the war of annihilation against Gaza extending into the end of 2025, the circle has closed around armed action itself, while Arab states are divided between the sympathetic, the passive onlookers, and the complicit.
Under the conditions of Israel’s military structure and its organic integration with the United States; in the absence of any regional backing for the armed option; and with any such option besieged Arabically, no central Palestinian force remains capable of seriously proposing armed struggle as a path to liberation. The discussion here concerns strategic political options within the Palestinian national project. This does not mean that the reality of occupation and its violence will not continue to provoke resistance and violent responses.
If we return to the words of Hamas leaders (who were killed during the war) on the first day of the Al-Aqsa Flood, and then to the statements of its spokespeople in the initial weeks, we will recall declared objectives of the operation that are no longer mentioned today, because what has materialised is their very opposite. Settlement in the West Bank has expanded; Arab states have not severed diplomatic relations with Israel; and those without such relations are subjected to pressure, with some even preventing their own populations from demonstrating in solidarity with Gaza against the war.
It is true that the marginalisation of the Palestine question was reversed by the Al-Aqsa Flood, by the scale of Israeli crimes and the embarrassment they generated, and by the steadfastness of Palestinian resistance for two years—something no other resistance, let alone Arab states, has achieved. Israeli practices, and the concealment of them by Western media—exposed on social media—have produced profound shifts in global public opinion, particularly in Europe and the United States.
Yet international attention to the Palestine question since then can be classified into two categories.
The first consists of various attempts to contain the issue under conditions of a war of annihilation—such as convening an international conference to restore prominence to the two-state solution, which had been thoroughly marginalised in the years preceding the Al-Aqsa Flood. Let us regard this effort as positive to some degree. Yet it includes no means of exerting pressure to halt the war, nor of advancing towards statehood. Strikingly, it diverts attention from the central issue—occupation—towards demands such as “reforming” the Palestinian Authority, as though mismanagement by the Authority were the reason Israel refuses a Palestinian state. The other face of this official, containment-oriented international attention lies in the creation of a Peace Council to oversee the administration of Gaza, with direct US involvement. A cursory glance at the disparity between the size of this council (and what it represents) and the geographic and demographic scale of the Gaza Strip suffices to reveal the extent of the desire to contain the Strip and fragment the Palestinian national project after all that its people have endured—with the complicity of many of the states represented on the council, foremost among them the United States, the principal backer of the war of annihilation. The grave and scandalous symbolism of the presence of an Israeli construction magnate alongside figures such as Tony Blair and Jared Kushner on the council’s executive body offers a key to understanding its mission.
The second category of international attention consists of global solidarity movements, the like of which Palestinians have not experienced since 1948. Even the very high degree of international solidarity with the first intifada—owing to its character as a peaceful struggle between an occupying power and a people under occupation—did not reach this level of continuity and radicalism, taking into account the absence at the time of social media; the vast difference between the brutality of Israeli repression during the first intifada and what has occurred and continues to occur in Gaza today; and other factors I cannot expand upon here, related to the heightened role of values in the struggle against the far right hostile to migrants and aligned with Zionism. Polls have repeatedly shown the alienation of young people in Western democracies from Israel and its policies, and the growth of solidarity with Palestine.
The principal obstacle to the development of protest into a movement resembling the global campaign against apartheid in South Africa is the lack of clarity surrounding the Palestinian national project that ought to guide it and ensure its continuity after the war ends. The solidarity movement cannot substitute for such a project. It remains a movement opposed to Israeli occupation and the crimes that flow from it, but it is not a movement in support of a Palestinian national project. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza is not a unifying Palestinian project; it is preoccupied with internal struggles over leadership and with preserving itself against Israeli efforts to eliminate any trace of Palestinian control over areas between Palestinian cities—or even over the cities themselves. Hamas, even during its period of control over Gaza, was not the Palestinian national project, nor did it claim to be. It is now engaged in defending its very existence against Israel’s plan to eradicate it, and perhaps in reassessing its subsequent political role. It has recently expressed readiness to hand over authority to the Gaza administration body appointed by the United States in consultation with Arab states and some Palestinian forces.
After the marginalisation of the project of a Palestinian state, the expansion of settlement, Israel’s insistence on isolating Gaza from the West Bank, the refusal to recognise the refugee question, and the declaration of war on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) as though it were a terrorist organisation, it has become clearer than ever that what is being constructed in Palestine is a form of apartheid—Israeli in character, and akin to the defunct apartheid system in South Africa. Unlike Israeli governments since 1967, the current Israeli government states openly that it will accept no withdrawal from any part of the territories occupied in 1967, and that, if it consents at all, it will tolerate only functional Palestinian authorities within the framework of Israeli sovereignty. True, the internationally proposed solution remains the two-state solution—entailing the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza—but the states that endorse this solution are unwilling to take any practical steps towards it. As a result, reiterating it has become a rhetorical tax that allows its proponents to claim that they are “doing something” in the face of the scenes of Israel’s war of annihilation.
Since before the Al-Aqsa Flood, resolving the Palestine question has no longer been a condition for Arab normalisation with Israel, as became evident in the so-called “Abraham Accords”—whose continuation the war of annihilation has made more difficult. This has been accompanied by the emergence of an official discourse in some Arab countries that shifts blame onto the Palestinians and mobilises public opinion against them. We have thus returned to the Palestinian state as a slogan only: the demand is now that Israel accept a political process leading to it. We have learned all too well what phrases such as “a credible process leading to…” actually mean. Was the Oslo process not once a “credible process” leading to a Palestinian state? Nearly thirty-three years have passed, during which facts on the ground have been entrenched that prevent the establishment of such a state.
You will not have missed the ongoing change in both the international and regional contexts: the current US administration has openly elevated power over law, without equivocation, and has declared—explicitly—the privileges and dictates of the powerful (and wealthy) on a global scale. This logic now applies equally to regional powers in the West and East, North and South of the globe.
There are clear indications that Israel is benefiting from this new norm in its tireless effort to transform the Arab Mashriq into a zone of its own influence, extending that influence along the Red Sea, into the Horn of Africa, and even to the southern Mediterranean. The outcome is not, of course, an inescapable fate; it depends on the Arab response—whether to submit individually or to challenge collectively, at least by some states, perhaps in cooperation with regional powers such as Turkey and Iran, which themselves currently face the gravest threat since the revolution (and there are, so far, no encouraging signs of such cooperation). The Palestinian national project—its existence and effectiveness—is among the most important factors shaping the required Arab response. This response will not arise merely from conviction in the justice of the Palestinian cause, important as that is, but from the harm caused by installing Israel as custodian over the Arab region.
When we speak of the Palestinian national project under present conditions, we cannot ignore the new, openly declared reality in Palestine: the annexation of land or the entrenchment of control without granting rights to the population, and the demographic re-engineering of the occupied territory so that population centres are transformed into gated ghettos, easily monitored and controlled.
National liberation now means liberation from the existing apartheid system—one that has proven willing to commit acts of annihilation and displacement in its pursuit of retaining land and eliminating its inhabitants. Liberation from this system may result in a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, or in a democratic system based on citizenship across historic Palestine. But there is currently no political programme or strategy leading to either model without first establishing a national project whose banner is the struggle against apartheid in Palestine, and which mobilises international forces opposed to Israeli occupation in support of this national project—democratic in its essence—grounded in the values of equality and national and human dignity, as the antithesis of settler-colonial apartheid.
As I stated at the outset, a national project is not confined to a political objective—in this case, liberation from Israeli apartheid as a prerequisite for any just solution—but extends to the organised social and political forces that carry it. The challenge today lies in their formation. In my view, this is a matter of time: national and rational forces that grasp what has occurred and is occurring will inevitably conclude that a political institution must emerge to unite Palestinians inside the occupied territories and abroad, and to lead the struggle against apartheid in Palestine. Without this element of will—which is not inevitable, but contingent upon the choices of free people—the geopolitical, regional, and international realities alone will not produce anything approaching a just solution to the Palestine question.
The construction of a national project does not ignore Palestinian factions as existing political and social forces with accumulated experience and standing; their role and history cannot be dismissed. But they require a review of their policies and methods, and perhaps the integration of some among them. Nor may one dismiss the importance of building institutions under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and under Hamas in Gaza, nor even that of the administrative committee for Gaza established by an American decision with Palestinian consent—just as that committee errs if it ignores existing administrative structures in Gaza. No society can endure for long without educational, health, productive, and even policing institutions. States that achieved independence did not begin from nothing, nor did their peoples live in chaos prior to independence. Even colonialism created institutions inherited by liberation movements and governments of independence. Israel, unlike any other colonial power—and because its colonialism is settler and eliminatory—did not build institutions in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian society did, as did the Palestinian Authority.
This is the nature of life. Political and ideological positions must not lead to nihilistic stances that ignore societal needs and the requirements of living under occupation—what may be called steadfastness. This is not the point of contention with the Palestinian Authority. The point of contention lies in its political choices, and in its attempt to monopolise Palestinian representation despite its subordination to security coordination with Israel, and its subjugation of the PLO after emptying it of all substance save its name, instead of itself being subordinate to a PLO freed from the Oslo agreements and capable of mobilising a global campaign against apartheid in Palestine. The Authority cannot even conceive of subordinating itself to a unified Palestinian national project that directs the struggle against apartheid while accepting, at the same time, an authority that administers the lives of the population without security commitments to the occupation.
Non-political, quasi-municipal administration in a society under occupation can be national without itself constituting the Palestinian national project. The fact that political forces carrying the national project do not officially administer these institutions in Gaza and the West Bank frees them from obligations to the occupation and from the burdens of managing daily life. They may value those who perform these tasks under occupation and not denounce them so long as they do not exceed that role into security coordination against the national movement. Those working in such administrations may belong to the political forces carrying the national project—indeed, it is preferable that they do. Yet those same political forces, as organisations committed to a liberation project, continue their struggle through a democratic national discourse aimed at dismantling the apartheid system imposed by Israel in Palestine, forging international and regional alliances without committing to any agreements with Israel of any kind prior to the dismantling of apartheid and agreement on a just solution based on its elimination.
Any future Palestinian state will undoubtedly benefit from existing institutions. Their effective management under occupation is therefore important, as is ensuring that they are imbued with a national spirit sympathetic to resistance against apartheid and receptive to democratic development through nationally regulated elections. One must not underestimate the importance of elections, if they are fair and do not contain the seeds of civil rupture, even under occupation: any form of popular participation in such conditions carries a national, supervisory dimension.
Without a unifying, liberation-oriented national project that brings together Palestinian forces and institutions inside and outside the homeland and commits them to the political objective, the constructive dialectic between the national and the civic, between national goals and the requirements of the moment, degenerates into political struggles over authority before liberation from occupation and apartheid. It is precisely this destructive dynamic that has led us to where we are today, since the Oslo agreements.
Azmi Bishara is a prominent Palestinian academic and intellectual
