Our position: Overthrowing the puppet Oslo Authority and building a revolutionary Palestinian alternative is necessary for restoring the path of liberation and return
The last round of the struggle against Israel, its allies and its complicit followers achieved a set of strategic gains for the struggling Palestinian people, who rose up once more against the attempts to liquidate their cause. They scored a historic victory that terrified these hostile and repressive forces and reflected the vivid embodiment of the unity of the people, cause and land, integrating the Palestinian struggle in Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and occupied Palestine ’48, as well as on the borders of the surrounding countries and in all regions of exile and diaspora. These were significant achievements that showed the world that the defeat of the Zionist project can be transferred from the realm of theoretical possibility to the realm of practical reality.
Accordingly, these enemy forces hastened to take steps aimed to return matters to before the May uprising, seeking to break the overwhelming unity that the Palestinian people had succeeded in forging despite all odds. To this end, the enemy intensified its campaigns of arrest, prosecution and intimidation against our Palestinian people in occupied Palestine ’48, while simultaneously continuing its aggression against our people in Jerusalem, aiming to forcibly displace them and impose Zionist sovereignty throughout the Palestinian capital. The Israeli occupation regime also aimed to steal even more Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, as in the towns of Beita and Jalal Sbeih.
This came in parallel with intensified repression targeting the Palestinian masses in exile and diaspora. The imperialist states allied with the Zionist project and the Israeli regime attempted to prevent or forbid demonstrations and attack, intimidate or defame the demonstrators. We witnessed this from the thugs of the Palestinian Authority in front of the Authority’s embassy in Beirut, as we did from the right-wing, ultra-Zionist government in Germany, whose parliament in its last session issued a number of racist resolutions and laws hostile to the Palestinian, Arab and international struggle. The pace of Arab reactionary regimes’ normalization projects intensified in various ways, perhaps the most recent of which is the systematic attack on Palestinian refugees and increased repression and restrictions aimed at forcing them to emigrate. This comes in addition to the crude, continuous interference of some Arab regimes in Palestinian affairs, such as the Emirati, Qatari and Saudi regimes alongside other reactionary forces in the region.
Simultaneously with all of this, the Israeli regime and the Oslo Authority (which despite its formal title, is neither Palestinian nor national) coordinated the assassination of Palestinian struggler Nizar Banat. This indicates the aggravation of the situation from silencing voices to direct physical liquidation and public political assassination of those with critical opinions, Palestinian national positions and free voices. This coordination has, in fact, long been a component of the enemy camp, which has contributed to circumventing and undermining the victories of the Palestinian revolution and confiscating its achievements in the service of a small sector of beneficiaries that impersonate the representation of the Palestinian people. They dare to falsely claim that the Palestinian people accept to surrender 78% of the land of Palestine and recognizes the legitimacy of the existence of the Zionist project on any inch of its land. The puppet Oslo authority is one of the most dangerous components of the enemy camp due to these claims, but it is also the weakest link in this camp and a party that must be overthrown as a prelude to overthrowing Zionism and its partners throughout occupied Palestine.
We in the Masar Badil, the alternative revolutionary Palestinian path, urgently call upon all components of the Palestinian national cause to isolate and overthrow this authority of treason and dishonor that continues to commit crimes against our people: from cancelling the Palestinian national charter and recognizing the Israeli regime, to cooperating with it in persecuting the resistance and honorable people, handing them over, torturing, imprisoning and assassinating them, to the theft of the people’s wealth, the generalized corruption, and the marginalization of more than half of our Palestinian people in the diaspora and in occupied Palestine ’48, in addition to participating in all forms of aggression and attacks against our people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
The puppet Oslo authority supports the Zionist colonial project; that is its purpose for existing. It acts as the spearhead of the occupation and an effective means of ensuring the success of the Zionist project. It is responsible for the exacerbation of the crimes of the Israeli occupation not only because of its full partnership in killing, torture and arrests, and not only because of its role in preventing resistance operations and snuffing out resistance before it can fully blossom, but also because of its major political and historical crime – in reality, the most severe – which is to strike down the revolutionary consciousness of the Palestinian people and aim to replace the culture of resistance and struggle with a culture of subordination and submission to the will of the Israeli regime, global imperialist powers, and their followers in the Arab reactionary regimes.
The time has come to turn the page from this infamous period in the history of our Palestinian cause and to start building an alternative revolutionary path to the devastation caused by this authority of treachery. The masses of our people have called for the departure of this political class, chanting with one voice: The people want the Overthrow of the Oslo regime! That is, the people want to dismantle the system of Oslo, and all of its derivatives and consequences, and they want to return to the path of revolutionary struggle, the path of liberation and return. We consider the Fateh movement to bear a primary responsibility for this outcome. There is a significant link between Fateh and the authority that has not been broken. The Authority was established as a poisonous plant to be sown on Palestine, following a treacherous agreement by that movement’s leadership with the Israeli regime in shrouded and shameful back rooms, hidden from the view of the Palestinian people.
We call on the masses of our people and our resistance not to be drawn into the failed project of saving the Authority, and not to provide it with a lifeline by rushing to absurd meetings and choreographed photo opportunities under insincere slogans of “reconciliation,” “national unity,” or “reform” of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Reconciliation does not take place with those who coordinate with the Israeli enemy, and national unity is not possible with the corrupt who steal our people’s wealth, and the only road to reform the PLO is by removing these criminals and traitors and restoring and integrating the revolutionaries and marginalized Palestinians.
Today, we affirm that this treacherous and disastrous approach must be stopped once and for all so that an alternative course of revolutionary resistance action can begin. We also call upon our people, wherever they are, to work to restore their institutions and achievements that were built by generations of strugglers, before the Oslo gang confiscated or eliminated them, leaving millions of our people in the open and stripped of all their arms and resources in the face of a Zionist, imperialist and reactionary enemy in possession of many weapons of domination, control and aggression.
The Palestinian embassies around the world are first and foremost the rightful domain of the refugees. They have been plundered by a group of thieves, and they must be liberated today as the public property of the Palestinian people, part of their confiscated wealth. They must regain their natural role as headquarters for revolutionary action for liberation and return, not as private shops for the Oslo sector through which they practice the exclusion of our marginalized people in their countries of asylum and displacement, and through which they continue to undermine the Palestinian cause. These embassies pose a danger to the Palestinian resistance strugglers, through coordination and communication between them and hostile intelligence services – as we saw in Bulgaria with the assassination of the martyr Omar Nayef Zayed. They are today an extension of the security agencies of the Oslo authority, operating under the command of the occupation army and Western intelligence officers. They must be transformed, inside and outside Palestine, to popular and national centers that work under the command of the Palestinian people, dedicated to achieving their higher goals.
We call upon all of our people everywhere to organize and close ranks to confront the current frenzied attack launched against them by the various components of the enemy camp. Confronting these forces today requires the formation of popular protection committees to confront all forces inclined to attack the Palestinian people or undermine the inalienable rights of the Palestinian Arab people. These popular protection committees should be the basic nuclei and struggling brigades of a self-reliant, mass-based, popular movement in order to continue the alternative revolutionary path, which is truly a popular alternative to the Madrid-Oslo path of destruction. This Palestinian, Arab and international path, which sets its sights on the liberation of all of Palestine from the river to the sea and the return of the refugees to their homes and lands, must be built over the ruins of treachery and shame that the time has come to overthrow.
We urge all of the Palestinian national and popular currents and forces struggling for liberation to cooperate and develop new forms of this organizational trend that proved its value and effectiveness during the Great Popular Intifada (1987-1993) and in many other moments of struggle. We must benefit from all of the previous experiences of the Palestinian popular resistance, in parallel with the guidance of similar global revolutionary experiences. The priority of forming popular protection committees throughout occupied Palestine ’48 is paralleled by the establishment of similar committees in the diaspora that can play various roles, determined by the nature and type of confrontation taking place in that area. The establishment of such popular protection committees in the villages, towns and cities of the occupied West Bank is a task of exceptional importance, not only because of the treacherous role of the Authority nor because of the ongoing invasions of Zionist settler colonists and their criminal gangs under the protection of the occupation army, but also because of the urgent need to reestablish the roots of organized revolutionary action with broad popular involvement.
In conclusion, the misery created by the Oslo Accords and their annexes, the difficult Palestinian reality that they have led to, and the betrayal of the official Palestinian leadership, which has continued its humiliation and lives today in its worst days, amid a state of national and popular isolation, requires changing this difficult reality that our people are living through, through revolting against this situation and overthrowing the puppet Oslo Authority. This is a lever to advance our liberation cause and the resistance of our people, especially since the recent escalation of the crimes of the Authority, including the murder of the martyr Nizar Banat. All of this calls for the overthrow of Oslo and its creations as an urgent national necessity.