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May 21, 2015<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/21/nakba-and-the-question-of-palestinian-strategy/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/21/nakba-and-the-question-of-palestinian-strategy/</a></small></small></b><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle">Why It's Important</div>
<h1 class="article-title">Nakba and the Question of ‘Palestinian
Strategy’</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by RAMZY BAROUD</div>
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<p>“What is the Palestinian strategy?” is a question that I have
been asked all too often, including on 15 May, the day that
millions of Palestinians around the world commemorated the
67th anniversary of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians by Zionist militias in 1947-48.</p>
<p>The question itself doesn’t require much elaboration, as in,
“What is the Palestinian strategy to combat Israeli military
occupation, siege violence, apartheid and racial
discrimination?” The painful reality is well known to many,
although few take on the moral responsibility to confront it.</p>
<p>And the posing of the question is telling in itself. It
wouldn’t be asked if there was a strategy in place, being
implemented, and regularly revisited and modified. The
question is a testament to all the failures of past
strategies, and the political disintegration of any credible
Palestinian leadership, currently represented by Mahmoud Abbas
and his circle of wealthy businessmen and “politicians”.</p>
<p>But the very idea of formulating a strategy would require
urgent prerequisites that are currently lacking. These
prerequisites are not only essential, but most critical if
Palestinians wish to overcome the current stalemate and
surpass the dead-end process that is the so-called “peace
process”.</p>
<p>First, the centrality of the Nakba for the Palestinian
historical narrative must be transformed to be central to the
political agenda of any Palestinian leadership that is truly
representative of the political aspirations of the Palestinian
people.</p>
<p>But why is the Nakba important if it is an event that is
supposedly located in the past?</p>
<p>What makes the Nakba a particularly poignant and painful
experience is the fact that it has never truly concluded. The
original 750,000 who were removed or forced to flee their
historical homeland have morphed to over five million, and
those who became internally displaced in their own Palestinian
homeland, later renamed the State of Israel, continue to fight
for basic rights. This makes the Nakba a present political
event, granted its historical origins.</p>
<p>The Nakba, or Catastrophe, was an earth-shattering experience
for the entirety of the Palestinian collective. Rarely before
was a society almost entirely displaced in a relatively short
period of time with such brutality and violence, followed by
every possible attempt at erasing every piece of evidence,
every link, every claim, every memory that the refugees
affiliated with their homeland.</p>
<p>That ruthlessness, however, is further accentuated by two
major events. One is that for 67 years Israel has both refused
to recognize the original sin upon which it was created, and
two, it has done its utmost to deny the disaffected
Palestinian people any political aspirations that would
finally allay the pain of dispossession, handed from one
generation to another.</p>
<p>Palestinians in exile subsist in a nomadic political
landscape, as they only belong to a place that has been stolen
at gunpoint, yet are forced to exist in places that they
cannot see as home for a whole set of reasons.</p>
<p>Palestinians in the occupied territories – from the occupied
West Bank, annexed East Jerusalem or besieged Gaza –
experience the Nakba in its most raw and painful forms. It is
not just an event that delineates memory, but the very event
that ushered in a process of dispossession, dislocation and
deprivation, not just of land and freedom, but even of the
right to form a national identity within the safety of a place
that Palestinians can call home.</p>
<p>This year in particular, the 15 May events commemorating the
Nakba within Israel’s Palestine ’48 community – made up of
Palestinian citizens of Israel – was massive and involved all
aspects of society, including the political leadership. These
events highlighted the centrality of the Nakba question to 20
percent of Israel’s own population, who were disaffected
directly by the dire consequences of the Catastrophe and all
of its negative impacts until this day.</p>
<p>If the Nakba is Israel’s original sin, discounting the Nakba
and the right of return for refugees by the Palestinian
Authority (PA) is the Palestinian leadership’s own sin against
its people. This takes us to the second prerequisite for the
formulation of any sound Palestinian strategy: the current PA
leadership structure is simply contrary to the aspiration of
the Palestinian people.</p>
<p>The PA is one of the most corrupt political structures in the
Middle East. The current government in Ramallah is not an
elected one and its “president” continues to serve with a
mandate that expired years ago. Naturally, fair and democratic
elections are unwelcome by both the PA and Israel – for it
would probably lead to other unpleasant outcomes such as those
that brought Hamas to power in 2006.</p>
<p>The PA and its Israeli benefactors are keenly invested in
perpetuating the status quo, for it is allowing the latter to
cement its military occupation at a minimal cost of policing
occupied Palestinians, while the former benefits in terms of
enjoying access to international funds, investments and the
chance to move freely in and outside occupied Palestine. The
vast majority of Palestinians, however, are confined behind
walls, checkpoints and barbed wire. Their imprisonment is
guarded as carefully by Palestinian security forces as by the
Israeli army.</p>
<p>Sure, there is always the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO), an old political structure that is more politically
representative of Palestinians and reasonably democratic –
especially if compared to the corrupt elites of Ramallah. But
sadly, the key to the resurrection of the PLO lies exclusively
in the hands of Fatah, the PLO’s largest party, and the one
currently controlling the PA. Without a revolt within Fatah
itself, there can be no restructuring of the PLO, for a
democratic PLO would most likely challenge the PA head on and
dismantle its entire wretched apparatus of political peddlers
and businessmen.</p>
<p>Thus, the third prerequisite would have to wrangle with the
question of leadership, one that doesn’t serve necessarily as
an alternative to the PLO, but rather as a platform that
unifies Palestinian energies in the occupied territories, in
Israel and throughout the shatat (diaspora). This platform
must be essentially political with grassroots links, so it
communicates clear political messages, but representative and
difficult to crush. Also, it would have to remove the
obstacles that hindered Palestinian national unity, throughout
Palestine, Israel and the world.</p>
<p>That alternative body must also be based in Palestine itself
for that’s the only way to secure a degree of authentic
representation and remain directly connected to the land. But,
it should give an equal and fair representation of all
Palestinian communities especially those in refugee camps in
Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. Doing so would eliminate the danger
of elitism and ensure that the refugees are not a question or
a problem to be contended with, but the center of the
Palestinian political initiative.</p>
<p>This body must not be factional either, and cannot be seen as
a competitor to Fatah, Hamas, the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine and all the rest, for it’s a platform
that is essentially meant to overcome factionalism, and open
the door for factions to break away from the tribal confines
of politics to something entirely different.</p>
<p>This is not a strategy per se, as only the Palestinian people
– once they have a platform and a democratic representation
centered on the question of the Nakba and the right of return
– should have access to the very idea of formulating a
strategy in the first place.</p>
<p><em><strong>Ramzy Baroud</strong> – <a
href="http://www.ramzybaroud.net/"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.ramzybaroud.net']);">www.ramzybaroud.net</a>
– is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media
consultant, an author of several books and the founder of
PalestineChronicle.com. He is currently completing his PhD
studies at the University of Exeter. His latest book is My
Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto
Press, London).</em></p>
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