The third death of Palestinian politics

This is part of a series of occasional posts critically assessing Palestinian politics and 7 October

This post is also available in Arabic:

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Speaking at the annual Palestine Forum in Doha, Qatar, at the end of January 2026, Palestinian commentator Hani Al-Masri argued that the Palestinian “national project” has reached what he describes as a “comprehensive structural impasse—indeed, a state of actual collapse.” Masri has long criticized the 1993 Oslo Accords and the policies of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and so his sweeping acknowledgement that “the official Palestinian leadership, the resistance factions, and political elites of all orientations have all reached a dead end” is particularly striking, especially as it did not leave out Hamas or its self-portrayal as the standard-bearer of armed resistance.

Palestinian politics faces an existential crisis. But this is neither new, nor simply an outcome of the destructive war waged by Israel against Gaza since October 7, 2023, and its accelerating and increasingly aggressive annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Rather, the roots of the crisis go back just over three decades, to the multi-level failure of the various Palestinian armed factions to make an effective political transition or develop new modes of confronting Israeli occupation and control in the wake of the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Whether the Oslo accords offered any advantages for the Palestinian struggle for freedom and statehood or were an unmitigated disaster, as their many opponents argued, they marked the end of an entire era of political modes and discourses shaped by the guerilla factions [fasa’il] that formed in the mid- to late-1960s around the credo of armed struggle. Their fusion with the bureaucratic, quasi-state structure of the Arab-sponsored Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1968 generated what may be labelled a political order: formalized understandings regulating political contestation and competition for recognition and resources. As I discussed at length in my history of the PLO, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, the credo—if not always the practice—of waging armed struggle against Israel was moreover a primary source of acquiring legitimacy and thus laying claim to leadership . But although the PLO gave way to the Palestinian Authority and its associated governmental structure, legislature, and judiciary in the occupied Palestinian territories following the Oslo Accords, the armed factions reproduced, rather than transformed, their model of politics (as they also did in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria).[1]

In failing to meet the challenges of the post-1993 context, the armed factions both lost any opportunities it offered and denied the new political order institutionalized by the PA vitality and sustainability. External interventions certainly played a baneful role, but the seeds of the serial crises that were to hit Palestinian politics over the next quarter of a century—the bitter rift between the PLO’s dominant faction, Fateh, and Hamas, which finally split the PA in two in 2007 and led to the enduring division between the West Bank and Gaza ever since—were laid in the failed internal transition in the 1990s.

Persistence of the armed faction model in the 1990s was predictable, and seemed logical to many, given the reality of continuing Israeli occupation and comprehensive control over every aspect of Palestinian lives. This, certainly, was the view of Hamas, which had only come into being and adopted armed resistance as a central creed five years before the Oslo Accords. But all the armed factions—both those that were members of the PLO, and Hamas and its junior partner, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, that were not—failed to seize the opportunities to generate new forms of political struggle made possible by the Oslo framework.

Rather than deepen the potential for a democratic new politics through the freely elected Palestinian Legislative Council and the commendable Basic Law it passed, Fateh aided and abetted PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s focus on consolidating domestic control over Palestinian society. Keen to transfer their quota of jobs and resources and of official representation that they had previously received in the PLO to the PA, the leftist factions acquiesced. This included the Palestinian Communist Party, the only PLO member that had never been an armed faction (which renamed itself the Palestinian People’s Party after the collapse of the Soviet Union). As a result, attempts to break with the armed faction model of politics by launching new parliamentary parties representing diverse social outlooks—from leftist to centrist to Islamist—were doomed to failure, and are not even remembered any more.

The extensive grassroots associations that had presented the Israeli occupation with its greatest challenge in the largely-unarmed first intifada of 1987 should have been revived and reinvigorated after years of Israeli repression, both to confront ongoing Israeli settlement expansion in the 1990s and to support Palestinian demands for full statehood in the negotiations with Israel that were scheduled to start in 1999. Instead, trade and labour unions and non-governmental organizations were largely co-opted into the PA bureaucracy or subordinated to the factions. Indeed, the entire factional spectrum failed to mobilize mass civilian resistance to Israel’s settlement drive and control matrix in the occupied territories, let alone draw the Israeli peace camp actively into this fight, at a time when this kind of confrontation was still feasible—before, that is, the armed, second intifada of 2000 broke out and completely relegated mass mobilization to the margins, as Rema Hammami and Salim Tamari argued at the time. Last but not least, although the key gain of the Oslo Accords was mutual political recognition, there was no systematic effort to take advantage of mostly open borders to engage with Israeli Jewish audiences, or even with the Palestinian citizens of Israel or the Druze community.

By the time Fateh activists resorted to their guns in the second intifada, their organization was effectively moribund, in the sense of developing new visions for Palestinian politics or taking meaningful initiatives in any domain, whether relating to the struggle to end Israeli occupation and attain statehood, or to domestic social and economic policy issues and needed institutional reforms. Leftist factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine clung to an oppositionist discourse and, in the case of the PFLP, residual manifestations of armed struggle, but they dwindled into more a memory than a material presence with political impact or vigour. Despite being a latecomer to the armed struggle ethos, Hamas was in effect the “last man standing” of the post-1960s era, but it committed suicide on 7 October—at least as an armed faction in the old model—for which it has yet to be held to political account among Palestinians.

Politics rarely dies completely, except under the most totalitarian of regimes. Palestinians have continued to show passion, energy, and commitment, but their politics now suffers the highest degree of fragmentation and loss of leadership—political and ethical—since the dismantling of their national movement and dismemberment of their society in the course of the Nakba—the mass expulsion of 1948—and indeed in the decade leading up to it. If 1948 saw the first death of Palestinian politics, then the 1990s witnessed the second, and the post-7 October collapse that Hani Masri spoke of is the third.

The challenge for those struggling for Palestinian freedom and statehood is clear. For any form of collective politics to be effective—or even to emerge at all—it must develop shared arenas, common understandings, and recognized leadership. Without these elements, sustaining mobilization and organization is extremely difficult, attaining goals impossible.

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[1] Among many critical assessments of the armed struggle and Oslo eras, I especially like “The Political Economy of Palestinian Nationhood, Independence and Development in the Wake of War,” Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS), April 2025, by Zayne Abudaqqa, Nur Arafeh, Fatina Jaouni, Ashraf Khatib, Maher Kurd, Anmar Rafeedie, Mushtaq Khan, Raja Khalidi (https://mas.ps/en/publications/12348.html); and Anas Iqtait’s “Reclaiming Strategic Purpose in Palestinian Politics,” Survival, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2025.2561484.