Palestinian Answers in the Arab Spring

Overview

Palestinian youth are asking how the popular democratic uprisings in Arab countries can inform their national struggle. They launched the first intifada in 1987 and fueled the second intifada in 2000, and they believe they have a role to play in the Arab youth uprisings calling for democratic changes. Palestinian political and civil society organizations are also seeking answers to this question. Al-Shabaka policy advisor Jamil Hilal argues in this policy brief that the answers cannot be found abroad. Rather, he contends that they can only be found in an understanding of the Palestinian condition, which differs significantly to that of Arab states. Hilal identifies some of the key principles necessary for a “Palestinian spring,” including a reunified body politic with representative mechanisms and political and intellectual pluralism.

The Palestinian Condition

Palestinians are the only Arab people without a state. Each of its dispersed parts faces different circumstances including settler colonialism, stifling siege, national and racial discrimination, refugee status, and Diaspora. Thus, the national cause is inseparable from the democratic imperative. Beginning in 1993, the Oslo Accords institutionalized the fragmentation of the Palestinian people. As a result, many issues need analysis. This includes a post-Oslo national agenda; the lack of a unified national leadership endorsed by the majority of Palestinians; the absence of overarching legislative and executive institutions; the splits in the national movement.

Since Oslo, the institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) have been marginalized and effectively absorbed into the Palestinian Authority (PA), the self-governing body with limited powers established in 1994. Meanwhile, the PLO’s sectoral and professional associations -– the mass and trade union organizations of students, women, workers, engineers, teachers, writers and journalists, among others –- gradually lost the role they used to play of engaging all parts of the Palestinian people in the national struggle for liberation. The institutions and mechanisms that used to connect the Palestinian national movement to the Palestinian people in the 1970s and 1980s gradually eroded. The result has been the fraying of the fabric that used to bind the struggle for national, democratic and human rights.

Reconstituting the Palestinian National Movement

The Palestinians’ aspirations for self-determination, liberation, and democracy will remain unfulfilled unless they can reconstitute their national movement. How can this be rebuilt on representative foundations, re-engaging its constituents in historic Palestine and beyond? A review of the PLO’s experience during the first three decades of its existence suggests some key issues that must be taken into account so as to move forward.

Re-unifying the Palestinian Body Politic

All parts of the Palestinian people inside historic Palestine and beyond need to be represented in a way that relates to the specificities of each Palestinian community. In other words, the Palestinian National Council (PNC) should encompass the immediate demands as well as the socio-economic and political challenges facing each of the major three different Palestinian components. The Palestinian citizens of Israel are working against racial discrimination and for national rights as a minority. Meanwhile, Palestinians in the West bank and Gaza Strip are struggling against the settler colonial occupation of their land and the siege. Similarly, Palestinians in the Diaspora are seeking to keep alive their right of return to their homeland and to end government security surveillance of the refugee camps in the countries where they live, as well as to have their civil rights acknowledged.

These distinct sets of rights compose the elements of the struggle of Palestinians for self-determination and freedom. It is in the interest of the entire Palestinian people that the occupation should end, that discrimination should cease, and the right of return be realized. Taken together, the fulfillment of these rights would address the historic injustice inflicted on the Palestinians. The only time when conflict arose is when one part of the Palestinian people acted to address its own immediate demands, reducing the Palestinian cause to an end of occupation of territories occupied in 1967. This is why many felt that the Oslo Accords served to fragment the Palestinian people by ignoring their history prior to 1967.

Representative Mechanisms

The mechanisms for democratic representation present a challenge. How each segment of the Palestinian people can participate in an election to choose representatives to best address their interests in the PNC must be studied carefully, evaluating the best and most appropriate historical examples. This could range from direct elections, as in the occupied Palestinian territories for the Palestinian Legislative Council to Internet voting in the Diaspora, to other ways that can be devised and agreed upon.

There will be greater challenges among refugees and exiles as well as for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Although, for example, the records of United Nations Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA) can be used among refugee communities in Arab countries in drawing lists of those eligible to vote and stand for elections in the Diaspora, would Palestinians in Jordan be willing to identify themselves as Palestinians to vote, at a time when Jordan is beginning to withdraw citizenship from Jordanians of Palestinian origin? Palestinians citizens of Israel would also face serious repercussions, if they take part in electing their representatives to the PNC. However, other ways could be found to make their views known. In the past, they stated their needs and demands and these were taken into account without their having to be official members of the PNC.

It is worth recalling that the PLO’s Basic Law does state that the members of the PNC should be directly elected. However, the PNC relied largely on the quota system, as did some of the mass organizations, apportioning seats between the political factions according to a set quota - something along the lines of Fatah having half the seats plus one in the secretariat, with the rest distributed to members of other groups. The only exception was the Palestinian writers’ and journalists union where Fatah did not have a majority and where the general secretary was independent.

The quota system served to paralyze the PLO’s institutions and limit the healthy competition and dynamics needed to ensure real representatives of Palestinian constituencies, and that might have been achieved using other methods such as proportional representation. Direct elections were carried out in some branches of the students’ union (as is still the case in the universities of the West Bank and Gaza Strip) and occasionally in the branches of other unions, although those outside the occupied Palestinian territories were forced to conform to the quota system. These elections were also used as a way of sidestepping host government concerns about the Palestinian status of their residents – as well as Arab governments’ fear that their own people might demand elections. In theory, the democratic wave ushered in by the Arab revolutions should make it easier for Palestinian communities to hold direct elections in host countries.