We distinguish between the great and the small when it comes to critical and pivotal situations, and how they deal with them. Those who rise to the challenge in leadership, understanding, responsibility and management are judged as great. Those who fail in such situations are judged as small. Of course, we are not talking about age as much as we are talking about mental and practical maturity, and the ability to overcome trivial matters, personal grudges, bitterness, partisan feuds and political disputes when dealing with major events.
The matter becomes even more urgent when it comes to the fates of nations and major issues. This requires leadership and political maturity, as well as courage, wisdom, foresight and the ability to formulate visions, projects and plans and implement them. It also requires the ability to inspire confidence and hope among the people, and the ability to differentiate between marginal and vital issues.
This is what makes a person in a position of responsibility a leader, not just an official. Unfortunately, this is what the Palestinian people lack in their current official leadership. The official Palestinian leadership is not only aging, but its lack of creativity and inability to offer visions for the future has afflicted the entire Palestinian cause with paralysis that equates to the paralysis of willpower within that leadership. It is as if the erosion that occurred over time in the structures of the individuals in this leadership — physically, psychologically, and mentally — have extended to the entire Palestinian cause.
Israel resumed its brutal genocidal war in the Gaza Strip on 18 March. Hundreds of Palestinians, mostly women and children, were killed as they slept in their tents or prepared for the pre-dawn meal ahead of another day of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, despite having little food or water under the crippling Israeli blockade.
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Israel has never respected or upheld its commitments under the ceasefire agreement, which came into effect on 20 January.
The war of extermination against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continued during the ceasefire, albeit more slowly and with less intensity. What was the response of the Palestinian Authority, which watched with suspicious silence as another war of extermination and ethnic cleansing was waged by Israel against the Palestinians in the areas under its control in the West Bank? The response was shameful in every sense of the word. The Palestinian Authority equated the oppressor with the oppressed.
It equated the killer of its people with a portion of its people being slaughtered by the knife of this criminal killer. Even at the moment the Palestinian blood was being shed, when the blood of its people was flowing, the official Palestinian leadership was unable to set aside its political differences, partisan disputes and bitterness with Hamas. “We condemn Hamas’s irresponsible actions” (without clarifying what he was condemning), said Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh, on the same day Israel resumed its massacres of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. If this isn’t a decisive standard for defining smallness, what is?
A week earlier, Abu Rudeineh himself had issued a statement on behalf of the Palestinian presidency condemning Hamas’s contacts with “foreign parties” and its conducting negotiations without a “national mandate”. This was in reference to meetings held by the movement’s leaders with US President Donald Trump’s envoy for prisoner affairs, Adam Boehler. Regardless of whether those meetings were wise or not, the audacity with which the PA spoke of a “national mandate” is astonishing.
It is as if the PLO leadership has ever sought a national mandate for all the agreements it signed with Israel, starting with the Oslo Accords in 1993, or as if the PA leadership had ever sought to secure a national mandate for its blatant security cooperation with Israel. Did the PA obtain a national mandate when it launched “Operation Protect the Homeland” in and around Jenin refugee camp (December 2024), during which it killed its own people while targeting Palestinian resistance in the camp, before its security forces retreated after the Israeli army advanced into the camp in January, as well as other cities and towns in the West Bank, to complete the mission, without the PA taking any action?
If Hamas is damaging the Gaza Strip, as the PA leadership claims, then the PA itself is also damaging not only the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but the future of the entire Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people as a whole. Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly mentions “sole Palestinian legitimacy” and “unified arms”, as he recently did during the emergency Arab summit in Cairo in early March, as if this legitimacy has been granted to him, despite the fact that his presidential term constitutionally and legally ended in 2009.
When the Palestinian factions, including Fatah, agreed to hold presidential and legislative elections in 2021, he decided (unilaterally) to cancel them. As for the PLO, which Abbas refuses to reform and has turned into a scarecrow that he can use whenever he wants to use the stick of “legitimacy”, it itself has lost legitimacy after it calcified and became an arena for absurdity, political immaturity, and a lack of representation.
The Palestinian cause is currently at a crossroads. Scenarios of displacement from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are no longer mere concerns; they are a glaringly obvious reality to anyone who refuses to turn a blind eye, ignore, or play dumb. The war of genocide and ethnic cleansing is underway.
The Palestinian cause desperately needs leadership and senior leaders who have their sights set on the nation, the people and their interests. It certainly does not need small officials who are there with the approval of the occupation and its allies, haunted by political illusions, bitterness, personal grudges and factional rivalries. The Palestinian people have proven themselves to be a great people, but they have failed to create an official leadership that matches their greatness and sacrifices.
This article first appeared in Arabic in the Palestinian Information Centre on 22 March 2025
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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.