The Palestinian National Project is in danger

It is not the first time that one of the officials, leaders, and cadres has addressed us, and he is striving in his speech for the people to stop putting pressure on him or his authority, under the pretext that the Palestinian national project is in danger, and that what is required is to protect this project.

Not far from us, that huge press conference was held by the Palestinian Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh in the presence of all his government ministers in addition to the head of the intelligence service, Majed Faraj, and the captains of large sectors of our people, including the captains of doctors, engineers, health professions, and teachers who were within the framework of an agreement with the government that ends their strikes and protests. The speeches of Shtayyeh and Faraj, the danger that threatens the national project and the importance of protecting this project! As if the danger that threatens him comes from the strikes of these unions and the tragedies and torments of the employees and their demands for fairness to live in dignity! Or as if these strikes were an obstacle for them and others from performing their national duty to protect the Palestinian national project and work to achieve it and transform it from theory to practice?

The repetition of the phrase protecting the Palestinian national project raised many questions about the nature of this project. And what does it look like? Is he in crisis? What are its main challenges? This sparked controversy among the prisoners, just as it raises controversy among the rest of the Palestinian society, and clarifying this ambiguity in the subject of the national project became important, and therefore we initiated work on a research project, looking at what the Palestinian national project is and its most important challenges? What we found in the framework of our research was:

The project is the idea before realization, and it is a future vision and strategy that combines thought and practice, approach and performance, and goals and means of achieving them.

And when it is said a national project, it means that this is a project related to the homeland "the place of residence of a person and his headquarters, and to him he belongs whether he was born in it or not."

Therefore, when the homeland is exposed to a threat that affects its existence, it must have a national project that will restore the homeland's consideration as free. Anyone who follows the history of peoples subject to colonization will notice that these projects have always been projects of national liberation in thought and practice, and when the national liberation dimension is absent from them, they turn into a tool in the service of colonialism or in the service of elites that employ the national idea for the benefit of the people. The national project is the project of freedom, independence and national dignity for every nation.

Thus, the national project in its general sense is the project of liberating the stolen homeland, Palestine, and returning to it for self-determination. Hani Al-Hassan says: "People are all peoples. The constants of their national project revolve around three criteria: preserving prestige and national dignity, and adhering to every grain of sand from the soil of the homeland."

The Palestinian national project, whose first seeds began to take shape in the year of the Nakba 1948 AD as an antithesis to the occupation and the Zionist colonial project, has undergone a set of transformations that began with the launch of the Palestinian national liberation movement, Fatah, in 1965 AD, which clearly defined the form of the national project as a national liberation project based on the goal of liberating Palestine and armed struggle. exclusive method to achieve the goal.

The beginning of the transformation in the form of this project was in the year 1974 AD, when the National Council approved the interim political program by approving the establishment of the independent national authority of the people over any part of Palestine that would be liberated, to completely transform the form of the Palestinian national project from the complete liberation project to acceptance of partial liberation, and to move From the idea of the homeland to the idea of the state.
In the year 1991 AD, at the Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid, the form of the national project deteriorated, which was decided in the year 1988 AD by declaring independence in accordance with Resolution 181 in order to accept Resolutions 242 and 338 as a basis for negotiations for a final solution to the Palestinian issue.

On September 13, 1993, the PLO signed with Israel the Oslo Accords, which determined in the long run the ceiling of the Palestinian national project, not exceeding the development of Palestinian self-rule into a non-sovereign state - viable?! - subservient to the domination of the occupying state in all fields .

Shlomo Ben-Ami (worked in Barak's government) says: "The Oslo Accords are based on the rules of the neo-colonial system, and this means that they were founded on a kind of life characterized by the dependence of one of the two parties on the other forever."

In the year 2005 AD, Abu Mazen was elected president of the Authority, and he clearly adopted a peaceful path and denounced any armed resistance that ended the Al-Aqsa Intifada and squandered the ability to benefit from its results, which cast a shadow over the form of the national project, which turned into a peaceful project based solely on the method of negotiations. The crisis of the Palestinian national project was exacerbated by the division of Palestinian political geography following the division in 2007 between Fatah and Hamas (the West Bank and Gaza), which led to its duality and threatened its unity as a project and national liberation with one goal and one national action strategy.

Thus, it ended up that the logic of the authority prevailed over the logic of the revolution, and in the direction that works to further consolidate the division between the two parties of power and government (Fatah and Hamas), so that the Palestinian national project that exists today is shackled with more restrictions, which made the Palestinian issue far from any solution that recognizes the rights of the Palestinian people. Even the interim ones, which require the evacuation of the occupation from the occupied land on the fifth of June 1967 AD, the dismantling of the settlements, the return of the refugees, and the establishment of an independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital, is out of reach, and why?

Because the solution offered today is, in essence, a security solution that aims to quell the armed resistance to ensure Israel's security and free its hand to build more settlements in the West Bank and complete the Judaization of Jerusalem, and so that there is nothing left to negotiate if the negotiation is to one day emerge from the tunnel of its security titles.

The main Palestinian factions, Fatah, Hamas, and the Popular Front, have enumerated several reasons for the impasse of the national project, and although they differed in presenting them in form, they unanimously agreed on the essence, which is that the Palestinian national project is in trouble and faces great challenges.

Among the most important challenges of the internal self-dimension, which we consider the most important to overcome the other dimensions, facing the Palestinian national project are:

■ First: The Palestinian National Authority, which was endorsed by the PLO Central Council and established in 1994 AD, quickly became the controlling part and upset the equation by resoundingly marginalizing the PLO and Fatah, which became two tools in its hands, and it erased any possible role for them.
Weakening the PLO and Fatah, and pushing them to the sidelines in favor of the National Authority, made the center of resolving the Palestinian issue dependent on the will of the strongest party in the Oslo Accords that established the National Authority, which is the occupation.

■ Second: Hamas and political Islam, which has reaped what it wants in the political arena, taking advantage of what religion has paved for it, which is linked to faith in the hearts of the people, to win the legislative elections in 2006 AD, and to proceed with its project to firmly control Gaza and split the rest of the country into two parts in a division that affects governance and geography. Politics, economy, society and the Palestinian national project. Just as Fatah did not succeed in protecting itself from the temptation of the Authority, Hamas did as well.

■ Third: The division that has been dominating the Palestinian scene since 2007, causing a deep rift that reached the depth of Palestinian society, its intellectual security, and its national affiliation, which led to the loss of the ability to reach reconciliation or agreement, at a minimum, on one national strategy that reformulates the unified national action program. , which can alleviate the dilemma of the Palestinian national project, and objective and international conditions do not allow the adoption of two or more strategies simultaneously; Because that would eliminate any achievements, even insignificant, achieved or achieved by any of the strategies.

The continuation of this division is linked to the ruling and dispersed political elite, which has become practicing the self-destruction of the Palestinian national project by insisting on giving priority to partisan and personal interests over the general national interest.

■ Fourth: Abandoning the right of resistance. Resistance is every action aimed at realizing Palestinian aspirations for liberation from occupation and independence. This action has varied between popular uprising and armed commando action (popular action and elite action).
The Palestinian resistance has suffered from a decline in the clarity of the form of resistance required of it, from the formula of armed struggle to the formula of struggle by all means to the formula of sound popular resistance, and then soon these means turned into a single method which is negotiations, and the adoption of international legitimacy as a substitute for struggle legitimacy.

Adopting resistance as a strategic option and emphasizing all forms of struggle is one of the main entry points to extricate the national project from its crisis. Reaching a political solution with an aggressive, settler-occupying entity like Israel is virtually impossible.
Here the question arises, how can we get out of the impasse?

Our use of the word impasse instead of crisis came as an expression of what is greater than the crisis, and it indicates a real danger threatening the pillars of the Palestinian national project, and a critical and decisive moment related to the future of the Palestinian cause and the fate of those in charge of it as well.
The crisis is a complex problem, turmoil, and a stressful situation in which the usual methods of solving problems become incapable of understanding the circumstances of the crisis and reaching a solution. Therefore, without creative solutions that are out of the ordinary, the crisis will deepen further and turn into a dead end, in other words, it will reach a dead end, from which there is no way out except by exiting the same path that brought us to the closed end and returning to the premises that led to this dead end, as the corrupt premises lead to bad results.

There are many points of agreement that have always brought together the factions of Palestinian national action, especially Fatah and Hamas, the two poles of the crisis of the Palestinian national movement. Starting further, and in this context, reference can be made to the accord that took place in 2015 in Beirut, and the accord that obtained the Prisoners' Document (the National Accord Document).

Saving the Palestinian national project requires collective will and boldness in proposing and confrontation, and organized thinking in which we re-read the Palestinian reality, based on the supreme national interest and towards building a comprehensive and unified national strategy that clearly defines and unifies goals, constants and references, and prepares plans, tools and means for follow-up and implementation of action programs in the form Who invests in crises and uses unfamiliar (creative) methods that can respond to the aspirations of the Palestinian people, and produce a gap in the wall of the impasse of the national project that opens the door to hope in resolving the Palestinian issue.

The results of the field study that we prepared, which surveyed the opinions of more than a hundred prisoners from Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front, about the nature of the Palestinian national project and its challenges, came as follows:

1- The level of support of the Palestinian prisoners for the Palestinian national project as a complete and resistant liberation project is very high, compared to a very low level of support for the Palestinian national project as a partial and peaceful liberation project.

2- The Palestinian prisoners’ view of the existing Palestinian national project today is very negative, as the prisoners saw it as an unclear and ambiguous project, in which there are more variables than constants, and it is not defined politically and geographically and does not have defined features and goals, and is linked to a certain elite and the Oslo Accords and their secretions, and it does not achieve independence. political and economic, and does not stop subordination to the occupation.

3- The prisoners ranked the challenges facing the Palestinian national project as follows: First: the National Authority, Fatah and the PLO, second: abandoning the right of resistance, third: division, and fourth: Hamas and political Islam.

4- One of the remarkable observations was in the result of the differences in the prisoners’ level of awareness of the seriousness of the challenge of division on the Palestinian national project: that the level of Hamas’s awareness of the seriousness of the challenge of division came (very low) in contrast to the level of (very high) awareness of the seriousness of the challenge of division on the Palestinian national project among the rest Political trends (Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front). This result opens the door wide for many question and exclamation marks that require further study and investigation!!