[lbo-talk] What happened to Palestine's youth-led struggle?

Marv Gandall marvgand2 at gmail.com
Mon Feb 12 11:11:00 PST 2018


A report in yesterday’s Al Jazeera describes how Palestinian resistance has fallen on hard times.

It correctly sees the 1993 Oslo Accords as a turning point. What seemed at the time to be an advance for the Palestinian cause instead helped to defuse it. An outgrowth of the First Intifada, the accords divided the Palestinian territory into isolated enclaves, established a Palestinian Authority funded and controlled by Israel, and compromised the secular left which controlled the quisling PA, ceding leadership of the Palestinian national struggle to Hamas.

Hamas’ patriarchal ideology hasn’t helped. The report notes that “during the First Intifada the majority of demonstrators were women. However, today, in Gaza, it is rare to see women participating in protests.” One young female activist told Al Jazeera that “many told (her) that, as a woman, it’s better for her to stay at home or to focus on her education.”

The divisions within Palestinian society are clearly a factor, but they should be seen more as a consequence than a cause of the decline of the national movement. The decline is mainly attributable to the inevitable exhaustion of the Palestinian masses after decades of heroic but fruitless struggle to establish their own state against a more powerful and fiercely repressive Israeli adversary.

The tepid response to calls for a Third Intifada in the wake of Trump’s stated intention to move the US embassy to Jerusalem is further proof, if such were needed, that the struggle for the so-called two-state solution under the current Palestinian leadership is long past its due date.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/02/happened-palestine-youth-led-struggle-180211154056240.html



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