Al-Aqsa Flood and the responsibilities of the Arab parties in 1948 occupied Palestine
by Khaled Barakat
The following article by Khaled Barakat, a member of the Executive Committee of the Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, was published first in Arabic at Al-Akhbar newspaper in Lebanon.
Since October 7, 2023, the Al-Aqsa Flood has revealed the sharp political and social contradictions that plague Zionist society. It has unveiled the many flaws in the Zionist movement and its branches, both inside and outside Palestine. The society of the enemy is rent with raging division, worsening and deepening on a daily basis. At the same time, however, and perhaps to the same extent, the Al-Aqsa Flood has also revealed Palestinian and Arab weaknesses and flaws. It has put everyone — individuals, organizations and countries, to the test of moral and political responsibility. The entire Palestinian political situation has become a test. With every massacre committed by the enemy, the image of helplessness, emptiness and unfitness of the collaborationist “parties of the Authority” in occupied Ramallah surfaces, and with them, the Arab “parties of the Knesset” in occupied Palestine 1948. This sector has decided to observe the daily massacre in the Gaza Strip and not to lift a finger. It has failed even in symbolic “solidarity” with the steadfast masses of Gaza, and with the prisoners who face all kinds of torture and death within the prisons of the occupier. Moreover, its role has not even risen to the level of the solidarity movement with the Palestinian people in Western countries, nor even to the level of Zionist movements that, for their own interests, took to the streets for an “exchange deal with Hamas!”
Openness and self-confidence are better and more honourable than silence and more effective than beating around the bush. The burning questions cannot be ignored. Gaza has been crying out for 20 years of siege and 10 months of daily massacres. Why has the leadership of the Arab parties inside the “Green Line” not yet moved to support their people? Why has silence become a general and comprehensive state? How did the leadership of these forces fall, regardless of their intellectual or political current? Where does the fault lie?
Criticizing the behaviour of a Palestinian political party, any party, is not an attack on the masses, on identity, on history, on a record of struggle, or other words and claims that some seek to hide behind, yet have nothing to do with the topic at hand. They may claim to view every legitimate criticism as a form of “one-upmanship” or “competition,” a concept that is sometimes difficult to explain or translate. Criticizing these parties, questioning them and exposing their shortcomings is the right of every Palestinian man and woman, and is necessary to push us to confront the challenges facing our national liberation movement in the homeland, Palestine, and in diaspora and exile. No one, and no party, falls outside the circle of responsibility.
The policy of repression and intimidation practiced by the occupation forces against our people in occupied Palestine 1948 is directly related to this matter, as hundreds of youth, students and workers have been subjected to various forms of punishment, especially after the Battle of Seif al-Quds in May 2021. Dozens were imprisoned or lost their jobs or their seats in university. There are over 200 Palestinians of occupied Palestine ’48 held in the Zionist prisons. Hundreds like them are under house arrest, and the laws of Judaization, house demolitions, the “legal” siege and the emergency law cannot be ignored, in addition to the countless challenges, such as “organized crime” (boosted by the Zionist regime), poverty and the threat of further displacement. However, all of this must lead to defiance and confrontation rather than becoming a justification for the state of helplessness and inaction, and the half-hearted positions issued by some Arab parties in occupied Palestine 1948. The policy of burying one’s head in the sand regarding the daily genocidal slaughter has become a form of complicity and shame.
In addition to the Zionist massacres in Gaza, the assassinations and the enemy army’s storming of cities, villages and camps in the occupied West Bank, the prisoners’ movement is subjected to various forms of killing, torture, isolation and starvation. Prisoners are taken immediately from detention to hospitals upon their release; some have been martyred immediately at the time of release, and some are released from detention with their limbs amputated. The enemy continues to imprison hundreds of bodies of the martyrs, including martyred prisoners, while Palestinians in Jerusalem are subjected to wholesale attack, repressive and racist laws and policies. So what is preventing the leadership and officials of the Palestinian and Arab parties of occupied Palestine 1948 from taking serious action on the political, popular and media levels, even within the limits of a minimum program? Why don’t they at least withdraw from, resign from or boycott the parliament of the entity that is committing massacres against their people?
The behaviour of the party leaders, especially the parties of the Knesset, does not live up to the requirements of the glorious October 7th, nor does it express the conscience or reflect the readiness of our people in occupied Palestine 1948 who moved with strength and courage in May 2021, nor does it contribute to ending the genocidal war of extermination engineered by the fascist Netanyahu government of the Zionist regime. What is happening in Gaza — the killing, genocide, siege, starvation and thirst — reveals the weakness of the leadership of these parties and their absence to the point of disappearance. It indicates a deep crisis eating away at the body of these parties, similar to the point of being identical to the inability of the marginal Palestinian and Arab factions that watch the bloody scene in Gaza and did not even dare to issue a political statement to rebuke the so-called “presidency” of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and say clearly to the Oslo gang: Swallow your tongues before attacking the valiant resistance and the leader Mohammed Deif!
Can these parties call for demonstrations in the squares and streets to demand an end to the genocidal war, as millions of people do everywhere in the world? Or at least to call for an exchange deal with the resistance, as even some Zionist forces do for their own reasons? To end the crimes in the occupation prisons? The shouting of Arab Knesset members against Netanyahu and Ben Gvir from behind the podium of the enemy parliament is a sound that some enjoy, but at a deeper level, arouses pity and disgust. It is a discord that exposes more than it conceals and has no value in the scale of this decisive historical battle, serving instead to polish the image of the entity’s “Israeli democracy,” and may merely give the speaker a momentary feeling of self-satisfaction in faux “courage”!