Palestine: Thirty Years Trapped Between Revolution and State

Dr. Ibrahim Nairat

The decision of the Palestinian leadership to enter into the Oslo Accords and establish the Palestinian National Authority was not a fleeting decision in the history of the Palestinian national movement. Rather, it represented a strategic shift that moved the national project from the logic of revolution to the logic of seeking a state through political settlement. This was a transition fraught with risks, because the Authority was not established on liberated land, but rather emerged under the occupation itself, with all the direct political, security, and economic restrictions that this entails.

Nevertheless, the option of establishing an authority under occupation, despite its difficulty and complexities, was not necessarily the most dangerous of the options available. The alternative option, i.e., the continuation of armed resistance in parallel with the settlement project, also carried equally grave risks, as it would have given the Israeli forces rejecting the Oslo Accords the pretext they needed from the beginning to assert that the Palestinians were not seeking peace, and that any Israeli withdrawal would lead to more violence. Thus, the opponents of the peace process within Israel found in every escalation an additional opportunity to weaken the project on which the agreement was based, which is now approaching its actual end.

However, this does not mean that the Palestinian leadership was required to trust the occupation or rely on its good intentions. The facts that accompanied the first years of the Oslo Accords, from the continued settlement expansion to the procrastination in implementing commitments, were sufficient to entrench a deep doubt about the possibility of the political process reaching its natural conclusion. From this, it was understandable that the leadership sought to retain alternative options, and not allow the spirit of national initiative to be extinguished, or to permanently close the door to the option of resistance in the event of the collapse of the settlement path.

However, the question posed by experience, after more than three decades, is no longer: Was this doubt justified? Rather: Was the way this doubt was managed wise and effective?

Politics is not built on intentions alone, but on the harmony between strategy and tools. If the historical choice was to adopt the peaceful path, then the logic of this choice required the Palestinian leadership to continue on it until its logical conclusion, while re-formulating the political system in accordance with it. This meant building an authority that monopolizes national decision-making, enforces the rule of law, monopolizes the use of force, and becomes the sole reference in managing the relationship with the occupation, whether in negotiation or in any future shift in national strategy.

However, what actually happened, according to this reading, is that the leadership chose an integrated model that combined the logic of authority and the logic of revolution, and between the state project and the liberation movement. It retained the legitimacy of the settlement path, but it did not completely end the multiplicity of decision-making centers and initiatives in managing the conflict. Thus, the Authority remained responsible to the international community for political and security commitments, while it was not the exclusive decision-maker in everything related to managing the confrontation with the occupation.

This hybrid model came as an attempt to combine the advantages of both options at once: maintaining the negotiating path on the one hand, and not squandering national power cards on the other. However, experience, it seems, has proven that combining two projects, each based on a different logic, may ultimately lead to weakening both. The Authority did not succeed in establishing itself as a state that monopolizes decision and sovereignty, nor did the revolution succeed in remaining united under a single political leadership that possesses a comprehensive strategic vision.

The result was that each party found in reality what reinforced its own narrative. Israelis opposed to the Oslo Accords used armed operations to confirm that the agreement had failed, while Palestinians saw the continued occupation and settlement expansion as evidence that Israel was not serious in implementing the requirements of peace in the first place. Between these two opposing narratives, trust gradually eroded, until the political foundation on which the peace process was based collapsed.

Today, the paradox seems clearer than ever. What the Palestinian Authority should have initiated since its establishment—from institutional reform, renewing legitimacy, enshrining the rule of law, and unifying national decision-making—is now being imposed on it from outside, under the pressure of regional and international transformations. Thus, what could have been a sovereign decision that strengthens the independence of the national project has turned into a requirement linked to donor conditions and the calculations of international powers.

And here lies the most important lesson. The problem was not the lack of trust in the occupation; doubt was legitimate, and perhaps necessary. But the problem was in managing the state project and the logic of revolution at the same time, without a clear resolution for either. A state can only exist by monopolizing decision and power, while a revolution does not succeed if its strategies are multiple and its references contradictory. As for combining the two logics for a long transitional period, it produced an authority in which the components of a state were not complete, a revolution that lost its unity of decision, and a peace process whose foundations gradually eroded.

Perhaps the mistake was not in choosing the path of peace, nor in maintaining doubt towards it, but in believing in the possibility of remaining for a long time in that gray area between revolution and state. History often proves that transitional moments cannot last indefinitely, and that a project that does not resolve its identity often ends up losing the advantages of all the options it tried to combine.