Palestine’s enemy today is not only Israel and its US backers, but also those who are rewarded for complying with Oslo: the Palestinian Authority, those who take money from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the diplomatic and lobby missions – like the Muslim Leadership Initiative – that reflect Zionist aspirations.

From the Jordanian monarchy and US-funded Egyptian leadership to the treachery of Gulf countries and big Arab capitalists, normalization in a post-Oslo world is a concept and practice rejected by Palestinian fighters, organizers and activists in the homeland and diaspora.

These different forces normalize the existence of Israel and the “two-state” concession plan as envisioned by Oslo. Those who cling to the futile “two-state solution,” and believe a Zionist, settler-colonial entity can reform and thus become some kind of “normal” partner of Palestinians and Arabs, must be isolated and defeated. These normalizers help silence, arrest, assassinate and surveil members of the Palestine liberation movement and our allies, per the Oslo security protocol drawn up by Zionists and the US.

The betrayal by Yasser Arafat and those around him at Oslo – keeping negotiators in Madrid in the dark over the secret talks – manifested into a public “peace” initiative that abandoned the Palestinian people after the sacrifices and steadfastness in Lebanon in the 1970s and early ‘80s, and the first intifada of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the fight for liberation, from the river to the sea, continues despite the Oslo-born PA.

The constants

Palestinians and Arabs have the right to resist military occupation and settler-colonialism, including by armed resistance. The Palestine liberation struggle is committed to the thawabet (“constants”), which truly unifies the movement and are today maintained by the coordinated resistance in Palestine and support from the entirety of the diaspora. These thawabet are:

1) Self-determination and independence for the Palestinian people from the river to the sea, with Jerusalem as our indivisible capital;

2) The non-negotiable Right of Return (including restitution and reparations) for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants to the homes and lands they were exiled from since the beginning of Zionist colonization, in 1947-1948, and again in 1967;

3) The right of resistance in all its forms to end the colonization and occupation of all Palestinian and Arab lands.

Palestinian martyrs, prisoners and refugees bear the brunt of sell-out Oslo policies, which laid the groundwork for the especially shameless “security coordination” between Israel and the PA. This coordination targets our own people, including Bassel al-Araj, who openly decried the PA’s treachery and was assassinated by the Israelis in 2017.

PA thugs did the deed themselves when Nizar Banat, a prominent and popular leader who amplified anti-corruption and anti-normalization demands, was killed last year.

Hundreds of Palestinians in the homeland rallied for justice for Banat and were met with batons and other violence by the PA police and “security forces.” The US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) is currently one of a number of US-based organizations that are in the leadership of an international campaign to ensure accountability for Nizar’s murder.

When Al Jazeera journalist and US citizen Shireen Abu Akleh was murdered by the Israelis in Jenin in May of this year, all of the contradictions of Oslo came to the fore once again.

Security collusion

Except under exceptional circumstances, the agreement bans Israel from entering “Area A,” (which constitutes approximately 18 percent of the land of the West Bank) and is ostensibly under full civilian and security control of the PA). But Israel ignores this and attacks Palestinians whenever and wherever it wants.

Israel has brazenly ignored its responsibilities within the agreement for decades, but the PA continues to function as if Oslo is binding. The PA did not and could not protect Abu Akleh. And the fight for justice and accountability in the international arena and in the US Congress is being fought mostly by her family and advocates.

The PA’s security apparatus, in collusion with Israel and the US, also targets student organizers. Students in Hebron, Birzeit, Nablus and other places have been abducted and imprisoned by PA police, and it is clearly Oslo and security coordination that is the source of the repression.

The PA sometimes even delivers Palestinian revolutionaries to Israel, as we have seen over many years in, among many examples, from the prominent case of Ahmad Saadat, to, just recently in September, when two Palestinians – one of whom is high on Israel’s “wanted list” – were arrested by the PA in Nablus. Palestinians there responded to this arrest by confronting the PA police, which shot and killed a protester.

The security coordination between Israel and the PA feeds into Israel’s colonial political prisoner system, where any Palestinian can be jailed without charge and tried before a military court, a tool used regularly to target influential organizers, create fear and trauma, and fracture the grassroots resistance movement.

A number of institutions in the US have initiated and supported campaigns to advocate for the release of abducted political prisoners like Khalida Jarrar, Khitam Saafin, Ata Khattab, and Ubai Aboudi, and children like Ahmad Manasra, while also championing hunger strikers like Khalil Awawdeh and Hisham Abu Hawash.

Some of these prisoners are leaders of grassroots institutions – such as the six recently designated as “terrorist organizations” by Israel – that organize to create a reality independent of Zionism and corrupt PA influence.

Oslo also created conditions for economic partnerships between Israel and the PA. These settler-colonial investments favor a class of Palestinians that operates to control and exploit the working class masses. Oslo left the PA almost entirely financially reliant on international donors and Israeli tax collections, and thus vulnerable to donor sentiment and Israel’s good graces. Not surprisingly, this has caused anything from food insecurity and monopolizing capital to exposing Palestinian villages like Birzeit to toxic waste and hazardous working conditions.

Rejecting the PA

PA agents for Oslo have been active in the US for years, but many organizations have rejected PA attempts to engage them in dialogue.

Last year, USPCN publicly called out a coalition effort that was ostensibly formed to unite Palestinians in the US, but ultimately exposed as a front for the PA. Also last year, a PA initiative to revive the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) was rejected by Palestinian students in the US, who exposed it as an attempt to detract from their already-successful organizing outside of the PA’s influence. (For the sake of clarity, there is a GUPS at San Francisco State University that has been active for decades, and has absolutely no connection to the PA.)

In addition, institutions across the diaspora stood firmly alongside forces inside Palestine that rejected the most recent Palestine National Council meeting in April. This was not out of a lack of support for the PNC, but because Palestinians in the US were clearly handpicked by the PA to attend and help elect a new Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee that is, unfortunately, no longer representative – as it was in its heyday – of all Palestinians in the homeland and diaspora.

To reject Oslo is to reject normalization, all two-state solutions, and US and other imperialist funding. And despite living here as immigrants, refugees and citizens, Palestinians and Arabs in the US are still part and parcel of the Arab world and the indivisible nation of Palestine. In the US, our communities recognize that the tactic of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) is also a rejection of normalization, and an effective tool to place economic pressure on Israel.

One of the major lessons of Oslo is that Palestinians are not in any kind of state-building stage, as the PA has tried to argue for decades. We are still in the national liberation stage of our movement, and accordingly, we must unite across political lines, ideological persuasions and social sectors to defeat the colonizers. Palestinian political unity around the thawabet (constants) and unity within the resistance itself are prime examples of what our people want and the trajectory of the liberation movement.

Today’s PLO is used duplicitously to consolidate power in the hands of the PA, which is still led by a stream within Fatah. This does not mean that the PLO should be abandoned or liquidated. On the contrary. To uphold the thawabet, the PLO must be rebuilt and reformed to again become the sole legitimate representative of all Palestinian social sectors, political forces, resistance organizations and geographical regions across Palestine and further afield, including those that were not part of the original body. The PLO must again lead our unified national liberation movement.

The vast majority of Palestinians worldwide are anti-Oslo, anti-normalization, anti-PA and pro-resistance. When it was clear that the deal was a “peace for capital” arrangement and not a path to liberation, Oslo was ultimately rejected by the Palestinian people. It could never, and will never, silence our unbreakable will on the road to liberation.

Kareem Youssef is a long-time organizer with USPCN’s Southern California chapter and a PhD student in Materials Science at UCLA. Mishlin Mekleh is an organizer with USPCN’s Southern California chapter and serves the greater Arab community of the Southland with mental health support and healing.

This article first appeared November 10 in The Electronic Intifada.

#UnitedStates #Palestine #Oslo #FreePalestine #USPalestinianCommunityNetworkUSPCN #MiddleEast

On the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine demanded to leave the path of Oslo and negotiations. On the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn in Washington, DC on September 13, 1993, which fell this year on Friday, the PFLP demanded that the Palestinian negotiating team immediately withdraw from the confidential, suspicious bilateral negotiations and instead return to the United Nations and its institutions and the implementation of relevant resolutions.

Furthermore, the Front demanded that the authority recognize and defer to the national consensus position and refuse pressure and external interventions that undermine the Palestinian position not to return to negotiations. Instead, all Palestinian political forces must prioritize confronting the occupier, building national unity, ending the division, as the method to change the balance of power in favor of the occupation, and achieve the rights of our people to freedom, independence and return.

The Front warned about the insistence of the United States and the occupation state to proceed with the confidential so-called “negotiations” and bilateral solutions away from international legitimacy, while they continue the Judaization of Jerusalem, attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque, uncontrolled settlement, state terrorism and settler terror and violence.

The occupation state supports negotiations as a mechanism to cover its acts undermining Palestinian rights, including independence, return and self-determination, recognized in international law, and the Palestinian right to Jerusalem. The negotiations serve the occupation state, and the U.S. strategy to continue to dominate the region, its people, and their wealth, while undermining the culture of resistance and national steadfastness, and containing democratic processes, struggles and transformation in Arab countries.

The Front demanded that Palestinian officials, the League of Arab States and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to uphold their responsibilities and call for the UN Security Council to condemn and stop the war crimes in Palestine, settlement and ethnic cleansing, and challenge the credibility of the U.S. administration regarding the illegal settlements. Further, the Front called for Israeli officials to be pursued and held accountable in international courts, and to reflect this orientation at the General Assembly of the United Nations in September, cutting the path of the Israeli government’s manipulation, deception and disinformation on the issue of Palestine. The US and Israel seek to replace the Palestinian struggle as the core conflict in the region with the so-called Sunni-Shia conflict and the “Iranian nuclear file,” said the Front.

#Palestine #PopularFrontForTheLiberationOfPalestine #Zionism #Israel #Oslo #IsraeliOccupation #MiddleEast

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine welcomed the release of 26 of the Palestinian prisoners held since before the implementation of the Oslo agreements, and sent its congratulations to the heroic freed prisoners, their families, and all people of freedom. At the same time, the Front warned against subjecting the file of the prisoners to the futile ‘negotiations’, saying that for twenty years, the prisoners and the nation have paid a great price. The experience of Oslo and the repeated broken promises of prisoner release was a bitter experience that threatened the rights of all prisoners as a whole and kept them subject to the blackmail of the occupation and its security forces, and turned the unprecedented arrests and decades-long detention of prisoners into a normal topic of the ongoing negotiations. This runs contrary to all experiences of national liberation movements and the revolutionary struggle against colonialism and occupation.

The Front called on all the forces of our people to reject these negotiations, which resumed August 14 in occupied Jerusalem, and demanded that the Palestinian Authority leadership retreat from its dangerous decision, which serves the occupation and its strategic objectives alongside its US ally. Further, it called for an immediate end to these negotiations in accordance with the Palestinian national consensus and the decisions of PLO institutions.

The Front said that it will remain – whatever the cost, with our people, in a continuous path of struggle in a grassroots campaign to bring down the Oslo accords and their devastating consequences for the Palestinian cause.

#Palestine #PopularFrontForTheLiberationOfPalestine #PoliticalPrisoners #Israel #Oslo #MiddleEast

This is not to say that the death of Oslo and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) victory in the PLC elections will immediately lead to freedom and independence for the Palestinians. The Israeli military continues its occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem and there are still approximately 5.5 million Palestinian refugees calling for their right to return – back to the lands and homes in historic Palestine they were forced to flee in 1947-1948 and again in 1967. The paradox of a democracy under military occupation, or a ‘government’ of any kind under military occupation, is what doomed Oslo from the outset, so there were strong and consistent arguments from some Palestinians that the elections could only be a farce and a waste of time and resources. In fact, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad carried this opinion into a boycott of the entire process.

But even as we acknowledge that the result of the elections is not a panacea to the issues that afflict the Palestinian people, 78% of eligible voters turned out to state defiantly that they support resistance and liberation over the status quo of a failed state-building project. Yasser Arafat’s death in November 2004 has definitely caused a crisis in the leadership of his Fatah Movement, but this is not the only reason why it lost so resoundingly to Hamas. The Palestinian Authority (PA), which was formed after Oslo and dominated by Fatah, could no longer claim – even while Arafat was alive – that it was representative of the Palestinian people, that it was providing for the safety and security of the Palestinians, or that the ‘peace process’ and ‘negotiations track’ were leading to anything but the continued construction of the apartheid wall, land expropriations, home demolitions, imprisonment of activists and organizers and the injuring and killing of Palestinian civilians. The PA had become a failure at building a state infrastructure and, at the same time, a failure at resisting the Israeli onslaught against Palestinian people.

And at its worst, some of the PA’s top leadership could even be considered complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people. Hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid and infrastructural support is unaccounted for, and ‘security cooperation’ between the PA, the Israeli intelligence and military agencies, and quite often, the United State CIA, led directly to the arrests of hundreds of Palestinian freedom fighters.

All of these factors helped lead to the Hamas victory. The municipal elections from a few months back had already semi-predicted this outcome, but the clearest champion today is the Palestinian national movement in general. The Palestinian people in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem voted for the Right of Return, for self-determination, and for continued resistance to Israeli and American plans for the region. On Dec. 23, 70 U.S. senators passed a resolution labeling Palestinian resistance organizations as “terrorist groups” and attempted to prevent them from running in the elections. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (a Marxist Palestinian group) as well as other resistance parties and movements responded by threatening to boycott the elections if the PA acceded to these U.S. and Israeli demands against democracy.

The U.S. and European Union also threatened to cut aid to the Palestinian people if Hamas or any of the other resistance organizations were victorious in the elections. Millions of U.S. dollars were pumped into Fatah’s campaign, but the Palestinian masses refused to be bullied by intimidation or fear tactics.

The different social forces and political parties in Palestinian society made this election a mandate on the Palestinian national program. The last PLC election was boycotted by the majority of these forces, because at the time, Oslo was in its infancy and those elections were considered a referendum on that agreement. Members of Fatah dominated that PLC, and it degenerated into nothing more than a body that rubber-stamped all of the PA’s policies and decisions. Now, as the Palestinian masses made clear their support for these legislative elections, the PLC is a more representative body that will protect the achievements of the five and a half years of this popular Intifada and the 58 years of resistance to Israel’s racist and brutal colonialism.

So, Hamas is not the only winner today in Palestine. Victorious also is the Right of Return, freedom for political prisoners, self-determination, resistance and maybe the most important concept of all – the fact that Palestinians are an indivisible nation, inclusive of all those in the 1967 occupied territories, the 1948 territories, and especially the shatat (Arabic for Diaspora).

After Oslo, the Palestinian Legislative Council ostensibly replaced the Palestinian National Council (PNC, the ‘parliament in exile’ and the highest decision-making body of the Palestine Liberation Organization), and over the last fifteen years, a new discourse was being developed and pressed on the Palestinian people – one that was slowly attempting to erode the rights of the Palestinians in the shatat, especially the refugees. But the refugee community, in camps throughout the Arab world and the occupied territories, and under the leadership of the worldwide Right of Return Movement (including Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, active in North America, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe), rejected this discourse and forced the movements and parties that represent them in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza to take note. These forces made the Right of Return the main issue in their respective election platforms, and they rode these platforms to victory over the self-serving rhetoric and defeatism of some elements of Fatah and the PA.

Also defeated was the rhetoric of the international community, including the United Nations and some of the Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs), many extremely well-funded, which have been continuously making the argument that, as the Electronic Intifada website co-founder Ali Abunimah wrote, “Palestinian ‘reform,’ rather than an end to the Israeli occupation, is the way to resolve the conflict.”

These ruling class (PA) and NGO-based Palestinians, as well as the ‘quartet’ (Russia, the EU, the UN and the U.S.), have been essentially lobbying for a two state solution, one that does not take into consideration the political, social and economic demands of the majority of the Palestinian people, in Palestine and the shatat. So the PLC elections must be analyzed in the context of the worldwide movement of Palestinian social forces, those that are shifting once again to the re-establishment of the institutions of the PLO, especially the reformation of the PNC.

A few months ago, a historic conference took place in Geneva, Switzerland, in which over 90 shatat Palestinians from across the world, including a delegation from North America, met to debate the state of Palestinian affairs in the Diaspora. These attendees agreed to begin discussions about rebuilding Palestinian-led institutions in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with the ultimate goal of organizing PNC elections in these regions. This is imperative to understand, for if this movement in the shatat is successful, the new PLC members will ultimately become members-at-large of the PNC, and exiled and refugee Palestinians will again take their rightful place in the leadership of the worldwide Palestinian National Movement, under the auspices of a rejuvenated PLO.

Hamas must understand this as well, because the masses of Palestinians who marked their votes for the Islamic Resistance Movement were not voting for a specific Hamas program; in fact, it did not offer one. They were not voting for an indiscriminate ideological shift to an Islamic solution for the Palestinian people. These revolutionary forces of workers, peasants, women, teachers, students and youth, among others, were voting for a change in discourse, for a popular, democratic representation that they have not experienced since Oslo and the demise of the PLO. They fought the Israeli and U.S. war machines for this vote, and they deserve to join their exiled and refugee compatriots in establishing unified institutions that will continue the struggle for national liberation.

Now that Hamas has the opportunity to work with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to appoint ministers approved by the PLC and, at least nominally, govern in the West Bank and Gaza, the PA must become a different entity. One that understands that the Palestinians are still in the national liberation stage of their struggle and the importance of re-forming the PNC and the PLO in this context, disavows corruption, governs by democratic principles and never attempts to negotiate away the core demands of the Palestinian National Movement – among them the right of resistance, the Right of Return, freedom for all political prisoners and an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital.

A number of Palestinian political prisoners won seats in the PLC, most notably Marwan Al-Barghouthi, leader of Fatah’s armed wing, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Ahmad Saadat of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Saadat is being illegally held (according to a Palestinian High Court decision) in a PA detention camp in Jericho and Hamas will be expected to release him and many others being held there as well.

There is also some concern that Fatah will challenge Hamas’s victory in the streets and we have already seen a few armed Fatah demonstrations that led to clashes with Hamas. But the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade criticized the organizers (probably referring to Mohammad Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, soon to be ex-PA security ‘chiefs’ who have little popular support and are widely considered favorites of the U.S. and Israel) of these demonstrations as the “ones who spread corruption and greatly contributed to the humiliating Fatah defeat.”

The Palestinian people have spoken in a collective, unified and strong voice. The Palestinian shatat is also speaking, congratulating its compatriots, supporting the continued resistance to Israeli/U.S. occupation and colonialism, and expecting the Palestinian Legislative Council election returns to lead to renewed popular support for worldwide Palestinian representation in the decisions of its leadership.

#Palestine #PalestinianElections #Oslo #Intifada #MiddleEast