The Orphaned Intifada

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Palestinian people has experienced many intifadas throughout the history of the conflict with the Zionists, and these intifadas have differed in their intensity, severity, and sometimes their methods, but none of them has ever risen to the level of the challenge imposed upon it.

The challenge (the occupation) is armed with the latest types of weapons, and enjoys broad international support favoring aggression against the Palestinian people, especially from the militarily and security-wise powerful Western states, and the enemy gives its aggression against the people of Palestine free rein to exceed every moral and legal standard.

The continuous aggression against the people is savage, criminal, and barbaric, armed to the teeth, while protest actions in the form of peaceful or semi-peaceful intifadas do not match the intensity of its fire nor the level of its criminality and barbarism. This is why it has been, and remains, difficult for intifadas to achieve a clear victory leading to the recovery of part of the Palestinian people’s fixed rights.

The Al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000 witnessed several martyrdom operations carried out, especially in the territory occupied in ‘48, and these operations had preceded the intifada in the 1990s, striking the Zionists with great panic and dread and leading many of them to emigrate from Palestine in search of security and safety in European states and North America. But the problem is that these operations did not continue and stopped suddenly, and consequently the results that could have been reaped were lost — a problem the Palestinian struggle has suffered from over the years, since struggles were never sustained until results were actually harvested.

The Palestinian people has offered enormous sacrifices in every struggle it has waged against the British Mandate and against the Zionists and Israel, but short breath was a serious affliction preventing it from reaching positive results, to the point that the Palestinian people sometimes paid a heavy price after relaxing its efforts, as happened in the 1987 intifada.

The people offered great and numerous sacrifices at the time, and the result was that the PLO recognized the Zionist entity — recognition that could have been given without any sacrifices at all.

For an intifada — any intifada — against the Zionist entity to succeed, a number of factors must be present, as follows:

First: the unity of the Palestinian people and the unity of its movement in confronting the occupation. An intifada requires broad mass action and a popular flow in confronting the occupation, because people support one another, and this generates reassurance and comfort in people’s hearts.

The unity of the people reinforces values of collective action and mutual cooperation, and without these values, no people can successfully forge its path in the various fields of life. This is why states work to entrench national unity, to reinforce mutual trust among people so that the level of collective action and mutual cooperation rises, and the Palestinian people needs national unity, and perhaps pan-national unity, more than any other people in the world, because of the harsh circumstances it faces.

But unfortunately, the Palestinian people may be one of the most fragmented peoples, despite all the compelling factors pushing it toward unity. There is sharp division in the Palestinian street, whether inside Palestine or outside it, and the level of trust between the feuding parties is very low, preventing any move toward collective action.

Second: a leadership that believes in confronting the challenge. An intifada poses a challenge to the occupation, and requires a leadership at the level of this challenge to direct and devise methods of confrontation, define roles, and rouse people. The Palestinian people’s problem in this regard is that it has always suffered from leaderships lagging behind mass activities.

The Palestinian people usually takes the initiative, and only then do the various leaderships, whether political or factional, follow suit. The people offer the sacrifices, while the leaderships usually offer the concessions, sowing division and corruption in people’s ranks because of their non-productive rivalries and their attempts to seize and monopolize mass action, claiming it as their own.

How many times have leaderships spoiled people’s struggles, frustrated them, and bargained over their blood and demolished homes? There is now no leadership that believes in the challenge, and the currently existing leadership — an illegitimate leadership — believes in tickling the occupation and in a peaceful mass movement that is supposed to confront tanks and aircraft with further submission and surrender.

Third: arranging popular committees, which are supposed to work on gathering forces and mobilizing energies, overseeing the smooth running of citizens’ civil life, and confronting the daily problems facing ordinary life.

From the very start, focus must be placed on establishing committees or bodies to manage people’s affairs, providing everyone’s daily needs, and especially those of the protesters. Supply problems arise, and groups emerge unable to meet their daily needs because of the disruption to work and jobs an intifada entails, and a body must be found to oversee these matters and coordinate people’s efforts so they support one another.

Fourth: distributing roles among the various social groups. It is the task of the popular committees — which are supposed to be spread across the various villages and cities — to distribute roles so that every professional or worker knows their role in the intifada, leading to the formation of sub-committees, such as health committees, committees overseeing education, which can continue without schools, and committees of lawyers and farmers, and so on. As long as the intifada is a mass movement, the public must be involved in running their daily lives and managing their means of livelihood.

Fifth: providing the necessary funding, which entails great expenses. An intifada requires money, because the protesters need to move from place to place, need to disseminate statements and directives, and may need food, especially if they are full-time participants, and they also need money to help certain people who cannot manage their daily needs.

Some assume the national struggle requires no money because it is voluntary. It is true the national struggle is not a business and must not become one, but a volunteer inevitably needs some expenses, and not every volunteer has the material means to spend on his activities, and expenses become large if the intifada turns into resistance and military action begins to interweave through it — military actions require large funding because of the heavy costs entailed by precision and professionalism in the work.

The Palestinian movement currently underway has not yet risen to the level of an intifada, because of its limited scope in time, place, and mass participation. The Palestinian people in the West Bank has not yet surged toward the points of confrontation, and intifada actions have not spread across the breadth of the West Bank.

For it to expand, a leadership must develop to direct it and craft for it the programs, methods, and means that can be followed to achieve the best results. Below are the leadership scenarios that could be candidates for leading the movement and raising the level of its impact:

1. The leadership of the PLO: this leadership is no longer suited to lead the Palestinian struggle, because it came to the West Bank under agreements with the Zionist entity that defined its security obligations toward Israel. This is a leadership that does not dare touch Israeli security, because the price it could pay is extremely heavy.

The fact is that it abandoned the national struggle the moment it accepted entering Palestine under the enemy’s guns, receiving weapons licensed by the enemy. This is an open, above-ground leadership, closely monitored by Zionist security, and fears racking up marks against itself, since its interests have become tied to Israel and the will of its security forces. It is a leadership that coexists with the occupation — indeed, obtains privileges from the occupation — and has no willingness to sacrifice the benefits and advantages it has obtained.

2. Experienced popular leaderships: there is a large supply of people experienced in confronting the occupation. Some participated in combat operations outside Palestine, some experienced fedayeen work against the entity inside Palestine, and some practiced struggle work in the two major intifadas of 1987 and 2000, and have extensive experience in prisons and detention.

But most of these people are no longer reassured by the security situation prevailing in the West Bank, because they face both Zionist security apparatuses and Palestinian security apparatuses, and they have grown older, taking on increasing family financial obligations. The Palestinian Authority has created a bad security atmosphere in the West Bank, such that a person no longer trusts, security-wise, even the people closest to him, and has begun to realize his national struggle will not last long because of the spread of spies and the abundance of watching eyes.

3. The leadership of the resistance and the opposition: the Palestinian opposition has failed to form a reference body for itself that could serve as an alternative leadership to the PLO. Of course, the PLO is no longer a genuine leadership for the Palestinian people — it is merely a media leadership cooperating with the occupation, and Palestinian parties still believing in resistance and the necessity of recovering the Palestinian people’s fixed national rights ought to have worked to form a reference leadership body, outside Palestine especially.

It is difficult to form a leadership inside Palestine because of security constraints. Perhaps the resistance — Hamas especially — entertained the idea of forming a reference leadership body, but retreated after PLO leaders and pillars cooperating with Israel rose up against this idea and thwarted it.

The Palestinian opposition has demonstrated its failure, because it preferred to remain on the internal Palestinian sidelines, hesitating to enter the field to become a genuine guide for a portion of the sons of the Palestinian people. Had a reference leadership body existed outside Palestine, it would have been possible to address the people openly, away from Zionist power, and it would have been possible to arrange the necessary funding to enable the protesters to continue.

4. Faction leaderships: just like the PLO leadership, the leaderships of the Palestinian factions placed themselves in a cage when they decided to enter the West Bank and Gaza and accepted Israel’s conditions. These leaderships have come under the occupation’s ceiling and no longer have the capacity for struggle action, not to mention that their interests and benefits have become tied to the occupation, and it is no longer possible to rebel against the master of their blessings, whether that be the occupation, the Americans, or the Palestinian Authority.

5. Some have tried to form a reference body to preserve Palestinian fixed principles, and some were optimistic about this direction, but this group seems to have retreated, and we no longer hear from them about this matter. It is possible to form a team of this kind to affirm Palestinian rights, but working inside Palestine is full of security minefields, and it is not easy to attract funding to support an intifada.

For this reason, the movement currently underway in Palestine remains orphaned, and it is difficult for it to find extended hands. All those optimistic about developing this movement into an intifada, and then into resistance, must provide the necessary financial support — media support is not enough, and incitement through media outlets may not be useful, and could even backfire. It would be better to move toward forming a reference leadership body that bears responsibility.

Another great concern is that the parties of the Palestinian opposition are not of one mind — they are disparate parties, sometimes feuding, and they sometimes air their disputes publicly before the people, which greatly affects their credibility.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الانتفاضة اليتيمة” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.