The Alternative Revolutionary Path: Transforming the Shatat from a Space of Solidarity into a Space of Confrontation
Khaled Barakat

The convening of the conference of the Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, in March 2026 in the city of São Paulo, Brazil will not be a routine organizational event. Rather, it represents a concentrated expression of a deeper political transformation the movement has undergone over the past five years, alongside a parallel shift in the position of the Palestinian shatat within the equation of struggle against the Zionist project. What is taking place today cannot be read as a mere accumulation of activities, but as a qualitative advance of a revolutionary condition that has become a genuine source of disturbance to the Zionist enemy and its allies.

Within a relatively short period of time, the Alternative Revolutionary Path has succeeded in moving from a nascent framework to an international political actor, by building organizational and popular presence in North America and Europe, and by leading a series of conferences and popular mobilizations that have restored the centrality of Palestinian international action in the diaspora. This trajectory has broken the constraints imposed by the Madrid–Oslo phase, during which the diaspora was stripped of its role and relations with the world were confined to official channels and complicit regimes, at the expense of the natural relationship with peoples and liberation movements.

In this context, the organization of the “Week of Return and Liberation” in Brussels in 2022, along with the mass demonstrations that accompanied it in several European capitals, marked an important station in the movement’s development. Thousands of demonstrators, Palestinians, Arabs, and internationalists, took to the streets carrying images of resistance martyrs and symbols of the prisoner movement, chanting for the “Jenin Battalion” and the “Lions’ Den,” in scenes that went beyond the logic of “humanitarian solidarity” toward clear political participation. These mobilizations were organized with the endorsement of one hundred parties and movements. The failure of Zionist entity ambassadors to suppress or defame them indicated a real shift in the balance of action within the arenas of the diaspora.

The movement and its supporters also succeeded in organizing a massive popular march on October 6, 2024, in the heart of the Spanish capital Madrid, on the margins of its general conference. This march reaffirmed a clear position in support of the resistance in the Gaza Strip, despite attempts by the Zionist entity to cancel the march and criminalize the Alternative Revolutionary Path. From within this revolutionary orientation, the Tariq al-Tahrir network emerged as the movement’s youth and student arm.

In my view, the significance of this advance lies in the clarity of the political line adopted by the movement. The Alternative Revolutionary Path does not engage in linguistic maneuvering, nor does it hide behind ambiguous slogans. Rather, it declares an explicit position rejecting the “two-state solution” as a liquidationist project, and restores centrality to the goal of liberating Palestine from the river to the sea, as a unifying framework for national and social struggle. It is precisely this clarity that has made the movement a direct target of repression and criminalization, including attempts to place its organizations on so-called “terrorist lists.”

Yet this frenzied attack has exposed the depth of the anxiety provoked by the movement. Organizations such as the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, the Alkarama Palestinian Women’s Movement, the Tariq al-Tahrir Network, and other mass frameworks affiliated with the Alternative Revolutionary Path have not been targeted because they are weak, but because they represent a genuine nucleus of an international popular base that transcends the logic of non-governmental organizations. They reconnect the diaspora with the resistance in Palestine, particularly with the prisoners’ movement and the refugee camps and the environments of resistance in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In this context, the movement also advances a necessary critical approach to the experience of the boycott movement, recognizing it as an important tool that must not be separated from the right of return and the struggles of refugees, prisoners, and resistance, nor transformed into a substitute for a revolutionary project of change. Boycott, without a clear liberatory political horizon, risks being emptied of its content and absorbed into sanitized liberal frameworks.

The convening of the São Paulo conference carries an additional significance that goes beyond the Palestinian dimension. It comes from Latin America, a continent where U.S. imperialism continues to plunder the wealth and subjugate the peoples of the region, where colonial memory remains alive, and where popular struggles still see Palestine as a mirror of their own battles. It affirms that the world is wider than the imperial center, and that building an international popular base passes through Asia, Africa, and South America, just as it passes through the very heart of the colonial states themselves.

In sum, what the Alternative Revolutionary Path puts forward is not a ready-made formula for liberation, but a restoration of fundamental truths that were deliberately obscured: there is no liberation without organization, no resistance without the masses, and no confrontation with the Zionist movement without shattering the illusions of settlement produced by the Oslo era. From this standpoint, the March 2026 conference marks the declaration of entry into a new phase of open political confrontation, in light of the results of the ongoing genocidal war in occupied Palestine. This revolutionary momentum, led by Palestinian and international forces at the vanguard, is pressing forward with determination to once again transform exile and diaspora from a space of solidarity into a space of confrontation.