The return of Donald Trump to the White House confronts Palestinians in the occupied territories with daunting prospects. Daily life was already stark and often violent for Palestinians even before the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. The ensuing Israeli war on Gaza, accompanied by a sharp increase in Jewish settler violence in the West Bank, took the level of brutality Palestinians experienced to new extremes.
There was little prospect of genuine relief under a U.S. administration headed by President Joe Biden or his nominated successor Kamala Harris, but conditions are almost certain to become even grimmer under Trump. The global solidarity movement with the Palestinians that emerged over the past year will face a mounting task even as it comes under increasing pressure, nowhere more so than in the United States as the new administration sets its sights on repressing social and political dissent generally—with pro-Palestine protest, higher education, and press freedom high on the list.
And yet even as the challenges mount, the Palestinian national movement is in no position to present effective responses. Many regarded October 7 as a demonstration of the dynamism of Hamas and of the viability of the armed struggle it claimed to lead against Israeli occupation and the denial of Palestinian rights. But the attack obscured a deeper reality: for the past quarter century, Hamas was the last effective faction within a moribund Palestinian political system, and following Israel’s decimation of Gaza and its population, Hamas faces the same fate as the rest of that system. Seen this way, October 7 drove the final nail in the coffin of the contemporary Palestinian national movement. The killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar on October 17 and of his predecessor Ismail Haniyeh nearly three months earlier was merely a marker along that trajectory, not its cause.
The Palestinian national movement that emerged in the wake of the Nakba—the catastrophe, as Palestinians call their mass dispossession and expulsion from then British-controlled mandate Palestine during the Arab-Israeli war of 1947–1949—was subsequently embodied in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Formed in 1964 and taken over by the mainstream nationalist movement Fatah and other, smaller guerilla groups in 1968, the PLO eventually signed the 1993 Oslo Accords with Israel, enabling the establishment of an autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA) in parts of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967.
In the eyes of their critics, the Oslo Accords made Fatah and its leader, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, accomplices of the Israeli occupation. Whether this was fair or not, the accords effectively marked the end of the Palestinian national movement. Palestinian society was demobilized. Tens of thousands of activists who had taken part in the first, largely nonviolent intifada of 1987 and thousands of prisoners whom Israel released in the wake of the peace agreement were placed on the PA payroll, while labor unions and other grassroots associations were coopted as extensions of Fatah and PA control.
The PLO’s longstanding quota system ensured that Fatah followers took the lion’s share of appointments and benefits in the new public sector, which immediately tripled to 39,000 and then 86,000 by 1997, reaching 71,000 civil servants by 2003 and 89,000 security personnel by 2006. Smaller factions also received their share. Fatah members initially spearheaded the second, militarized intifada that broke out in late 2000, but this was the organization’s last significant action against Israel. A major portion of its remaining organizational capability and coherence was dismantled when Israel reoccupied much of the Palestinian autonomy areas in the West Bank in 2002.
In the following years, Fatah failed visibly to mobilize its large membership to amplify and sustain nonviolent grassroots initiatives against deepening Israeli colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The village of Bilin, where Palestinian, Jewish Israeli, and international solidarity activists successfully resisted an Israeli land grab in 2005–2007, was notable precisely for being the exception rather than the rule. Fatah’s loss of control over the Gaza Strip to Hamas in 2007 and its bystander status as Israel tightened its siege of Gaza and waged four wars with Hamas over the next seventeen years underlined its irrelevance. Admittedly, Fatah had limited means to influence events in Gaza, but its inability to impede Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, let alone attain independence, attested to a bigger inadequacy.
Long before October 7, Fatah had arguably become a cadaver, with no independent will of its own or capability for autonomous action. Its political demise was further highlighted as the official Palestinian security services, which originated from its own ranks, displaced Fatah as the main instrument of PA control amid authoritarian transformation in the West Bank (mirrored by the Hamas security services in Gaza). Former guerilla groups and political parties to Fatah’s left—most notably the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and its Fida offshoot, and the Palestinian People’s Party (formerly communist)—have also been relegated to irrelevance.
Hamas was never officially part of the PLO, but it was part of the wider Palestinian national movement—and has not escaped a similar fate. Above all, Hamas never departed from, let alone broke or transformed, the paradigm that dominated the Palestinian armed struggle under the PLO and its dominant faction Fatah. Like them, Hamas mobilized the means of violence in order to conduct politics: to acquire nationalist legitimacy and compete with its main Palestinian rival, Fatah, for leadership, and to negotiate with Israel.
Even though Hamas remained rhetorically committed to “total liberation” of Palestine, which meant the destruction of Israel, its military actions were never commensurate with that goal. Whether suicide bombings during the 1990s and early 2000s, rocket attacks after taking full control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, or the more ambitious October 7 attack, Hamas’s political purpose was always more modest: to supplant Fatah in the battle for Palestinian public opinion, deter or respond to Israeli assassinations, obtain the release of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, ease the Israeli siege of Gaza, or, ultimately, force a negotiation on Israel following the Hamas acceptance of a two-state solution in its revised charter of 2017.
Hamas was retracing the path previously taken by the PLO under Fatah between 1973 and 1988, when they formally committed themselves to a two-state solution and recognized Israel’s right to exist. But Hamas did so years after the window for a two-state solution had closed, with the second intifada of 2000. For the same reason, when Hamas lent its weight to a largely nonviolent strategy embodied in the Great March of Return in 2018–2019—during which tens of thousands of unarmed Gazans marched to the security fence separating them from Israel, and Israeli troops killed 214 and injured over 36,100—this was again too late. By then the ultra-religious nationalist transformation within Israel was ascendant and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had formally committed the country to Jewish ethnonationalism and to preventing Palestinian statehood. The old PLO paradigm of violence-for-negotiation was already long broken, but Hamas had neither replaced it nor had it been any more successful than its rival Fatah in reversing degenerative trends within Palestinian society and politics.
Hamas may have been condemned to failure, as analyst Tareq Baconi argues, by Israel’s insistence on managing rather than resolving its conflict with the Palestinians, and on denying demands for Palestinian sovereignty. Its fighters continue to engage Israeli forces a year after they entered Gaza, and it will live on as an idea, even as an organization. Hamas derives, after all, from a stark material reality: dispossession of two-thirds of the entire Palestinian population in 1948, military occupation in 1967, a grinding siege of Gaza since 2007, and now a war that surpasses all that came before in its comprehensive brutality. Palestinians are right when they argue that Sinwar’s death changes nothing for those who cannot but resist seemingly endless Israeli occupation and discrimination. But neither does this alter the sober conclusion that Hamas was the last man standing in a Palestinian national movement that must, now, be radically rethought and reimagined if it is to put the struggle for Palestinian freedom solidly back on track.
