Is there a chance to survive?!

The human massacre that our people are being subjected to in the Gaza Strip, and the acceleration in implementing a plan for a political massacre in the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, clearly does not only aim to undermine the political system and continue to engineer it to adapt to the plans of the fascist right-wing government in Israel. Rather, in light of what the results of the war of extermination on the Gaza Strip will lead to, this government believes that international developments, and not just Trump’s return, will not constitute an obstacle to plans to liquidate the Palestinian cause, including ethnic cleansing and mass displacement in the context of the plan to eliminate the Palestinian presence, which may expand to include the masses of our people inside the land occupied since the Nakba of 1948. The hard-line thinkers of the right, and not just Netanyahu’s thugs “Smotrich and Ben-Gvir,” have always called for correcting what they call the historical mistake of 1948, by not displacing those who held on to their land in the Galilee, the Triangle, the Negev, and the rest of the land of historical Palestine, i.e. the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This is the essence of the racist Zionist project, and the strategies of uprooting, dissipation and liquidation that it is based on.

However, despite the Israeli racism's ability to commit genocide crimes to implement these strategies, due to the military, political, economic and legal support it receives from the makers of the Hebrew state, especially in Washington, London and other Western capitals, and the unprecedented complicity and inability of the official Arab regime, which brings back memories of the Arab and regional situation on the eve of the Nakba. Despite all of this, this Israeli ability is not absolute, especially since the Palestinian people have acquired, through their experience that they paid for with their blood and not only with their land and sources of livelihood, that their strongest weapon is their adherence to their land and their ability to survive and endure. This is simply because they are fully aware that the price of defeat or surrender to defeat, as some promote, is immeasurably higher than what they are being subjected to today in terms of genocide and war to control their land and future.

The question that we will keep asking, so that Ghassan Kanafani's question is not repeated: "Why did Abu Qais, Asaad and Marwan not knock on the walls of the tank, while they were suffocating in a closed tank in the desert maze of the Nakba?" And what if they had knocked on the walls of that tank? It is: Will the Palestinian people, after all these sacrifices and the path of resistance that has extended since the Nakba, and the high prices they are paying today in confronting the racism of the Zionist project, and the dangers threatening their national destiny, allow the tragedy of the Nakba to be repeated and to be lost in the desert maze of asylum and displacement?! Here lies the bet first and last.

It is true that the crimes of genocide against our people in the Gaza Strip, and the accompanying groans of the souls of children, women and elderly whose blood is being shed under the destruction of their homes and the ashes of their tents, bleed the hearts of our people and all the peoples of the world who are biased towards the values of justice and humanity. However, until now, they have not been able to change the reality of silence and helplessness resulting from the state of division, or to force international decision-makers to back down from continuing to cover up these crimes. However, this is not the only picture in the general scene, despite its bleak pessimism. The mere continuation of the ability to resist confirms that Israel is incapable of subjugating our people, which confirms time and again the failure of the military options that have always aimed to extinguish the spirit of revolution and resistance in preparation for liquidating our people’s national rights and just cause. Israel has not yet succeeded in achieving any of the goals of its criminal war on our people, except for the shame of genocide that has exposed its moral downfall and abhorrent racism before the peoples of the world. It certainly realizes that its continued failure means the defeat of its political project, betting on the possibility of overcoming this failure by preventing our people from addressing the weaknesses that the Palestinian situation suffers from, especially with regard to the continuation of the state of division, and separating the fate of the Gaza Strip from the national entity, and in a way that enables it to tear apart not only this entity, but also the unified national representation that the Palestine Liberation Organization has always expressed, which previously led the national struggle as a broad, united national front, and with this role it extracted the legitimacy of its sole representation of our people, and succeeded in accumulating the achievements it made. So where are we today in this role?! Did any of our people imagine, even in their worst nightmares, that their leadership would continue, despite the ugliness of the unprecedented genocide they are facing since World War II, to prefer following the mirage of a settlement that Israeli racism is trampling over the corpses of our people’s victims, over responding to the popular will and national consensus calling for confronting the war of genocide and liquidation by returning to the position of the PLO as a unified national leadership for our national struggle, and as a broad national front that previously led this struggle with distinctive models in the path of our people, perhaps the most prominent of which was represented by the Great Intifada in 1987 and its unified national leadership, which placed the Palestinian cause at the top of the priority list of international attention, and even corrected the position of the PLO and the entire national struggle, including within Israeli society itself, as a liberation struggle, and not terrorism, as the occupation governments have been accustomed to stigmatizing it.

The international and regional variables are not entirely in favor of the Zionist project. The crime of genocide and ethnic cleansing has created a major breach in the wall of the Zionist project. The question directed to those dominating the national scene and decision-making is: Can the continuation of the situation that has become impossible, in light of the announced liquidation plans, and even being implemented on the ground, save our cause from liquidation, protect the achievements and safeguard the enormous sacrifices made by our people?! Or, as the national experience itself has confirmed, does it require a return to the formula of the unified national front within the framework of the PLO as expressed in the Beijing Agreement, and providing hope to our people for the precise and immediate implementation of this agreement, and assigning a national consensus government supported by the popular will and national consensus. Then we may be able to lead our people’s cause towards salvation, and move forward to mobilize its full energy, in a way that preserves its sacrifices and achievements, and enhances its unity and national immunity on the path to freedom, return and self-determination?