A Photograph of Spray-Painted Slogans of the 1st Intifada, Ramallah1987 - The Nahla Qourah Collection. Photo: Palestinian Museum Digital Archive.
By Al-Akhbar – Mar 10, 2026
The time has come to stop prioritizing Western approval, to stop promoting conciliatory frameworks, and to stop treating the strategy of resistance as obsolete. Instead, we must align with the masses in their steadfast fight for liberation.
Translation of a statement by Palestinian and Arab thought leaders, including Ghassan Abu Sittah, Sbeih Sbeih, Wissam Al-Faqaawi, Salah Hammouri, and others.
As liberation movements in the Global South forged their new political language reflecting the perspective of colonized peoples, AmĂlcar Cabral was one of several leaders who identified the role of intellectuals and the educated elite as a critical vulnerability at the heart of popular revolutions.
Some intellectuals have sought to promote Western-friendly approaches while normalizing conciliatory, defeatist frameworks.
Cabral’s warning resurfaces sharply in the Palestinian and Arab context, after a brutal and unprecedented genocide met with a widespread silence and betrayal from the public, and complicity on the part of many Arab and Muslim regimes. A prevailing trend among “functionary” intellectuals has exchanged the trenches of resistance for the salons of liberalism and neoliberalism, preferring to retreat from the organic struggle of the masses in favor of academic cosplay from within the colonial core.
Arab intellectuals, and especially Palestinian intellectuals, can only fulfil their historic national role through organic alignment with the masses, who are the primary incubator of true resistance and its ultimate horizon. Intellectuals must devote their efforts to help organize and channel the immense potential energy and moral reserves of the masses, whose displays of steadfastness and sacrifice during the recent wars of extermination have rarely been equalled in contemporary history.
Some intellectuals have sought to promote Western-friendly approaches while normalizing conciliatory, defeatist frameworks. They introduce terms such as “weapons regulation” – rather than calling it by the proper term, “disarmament” – to strip the armed struggle of its liberational character and recast it as a procedural or security matter.
This echoes the “security chaos” discourse of the Oslo Authority, which framed any weapon held outside imperial or Zionist control as a threat. Weapons were transferred from the domain of popular resistance into the embrace of bureaucratic institutions bound by international obligations. In effect this domesticates the weapons and neutralises their role in resistance, which is what has happened before under conditions of surrender.
This “Day-After” thinking relies on the distortion of concepts with deep existential significance and reduces them to artificial, shallow contexts.
It comes as part of a wider strategy. Those supporting “weapons regulation” invariably fail to address any comprehensive strategic framework for resistance. Global solidarity is held up as an alternative to struggle in the field; resistance is declared dead; and the Palestinian people are relegated to passive victims awaiting a global awakening that has been promised for decades but has never materialized. It represents an inversion of reality: field resistance is the primary force, and solidarity follows in its wake. Replacing resistance with solidarity undermines popular agency and scorns the bloodshed of countless sacrifices.
At its core, this trend aligns with systems of dependency and the liberal frameworks which seek to confine Palestinian and Arab resistance within modes deemed acceptable to the West and the Zionist entity. It reframes the struggle as a human rights issue to be settled with negotiation and recasts disarmament and surrender as intellectual positions under the guise of “weapons regulation”. Such narratives exploit humanitarian crises, while promoting political liquidation and absolving cultural elites from confronting the structural nature of colonial oppression.
These voices theorise a “new era” which is an imposed ideological construct designed to reshape national aspirations in the service of dominant powers, highlighting the close connection between cultural decline and political failure.
For decades, certain Arab regimes have branded Palestinian resistance as “terrorism”. Today, some intellectuals appear to echo that position, using the suffering of Gaza to argue that the historic conflict has ended and Palestinians must accept defeat. Respect for the blood that has been shed demands we remain faithful to the national project, and do everything we can to consolidate popular steadfastness, rather than abandoning it. Zionist settler-colonialism continues to pursue a strategy of a final solution, banking on exhausting the resistance and support from the masses. Promoting such defeatist theses strengthens such a strategy ideologically at the very moment we need maximum political and cultural steadfastness.
Recent publications, conferences and literature have failed to grasp the genocidal and settler-colonialist nature of the Zionist entity and its links to Arab regimes. Key terms are misused, producing a superficial and misleading discourse. These voices theorise a “new era” which is an imposed ideological construct designed to reshape national aspirations in the service of dominant powers, highlighting the close connection between cultural decline and political failure.
This “Day-After” thinking relies on the distortion of concepts with deep existential significance and reduces them to artificial, shallow contexts. Political decay inevitably produces intellectual and cultural decline, a pattern familiar in liberation movements across the Global South. Comparative studies of colonialism and genocide are distorted to serve agendas hostile to resistance, making conceptual clarity essential.
These writings reveal more than a cultural decline. By attempting to write the obituary of resistance movements in order to justify future arrangements dictated by Zionist, American, and compliant Arab authorities, such thinking in fact sounds the death knell of Arab intellectuals themselves, and the cultural currents they espouse, in an act of profound submission and fragmentation.
The term “apartheid” is often invoked by Palestinian intellectuals and politicians, but they understand the concept superficially at best. It is nothing new—even a former US president used the term. While it might be useful as a diagnosis, the description is limited, partial, and potentially misleading. Most settler-colonial regimes have practiced segregation. What they have not followed is the structural logic of mass extermination, which defines the Zionist project, as many experts agree.
This simplification obscures the genocidal nature of Zionist settler-colonialism, misrepresents erstwhile solidarity movements, and criminalizes resistance.
The existential threat posed by Zionist settler-colonialism lies in its fundamentally genocidal structure, not merely its practice of segregation. It is not a copy of South Africa’s apartheid and invoking South Africa as a model is misleading. Segregationist systems have been seen from North America to Australia. What distinguishes Zionism is its mechanisms of structural extermination. Reducing the conflict to a kind of apartheid ignores this reality and risks the promotion of solutions based on unrelated historical contexts.
Viewing Zionism through the lens of apartheid isolates the outcome while erasing three centuries of colonial causes in South Africa. It normalizes long-term colonial domination, and presents international solidarity, legal action, and boycotts as the only “solution”. This simplification obscures the genocidal nature of Zionist settler-colonialism, misrepresents erstwhile solidarity movements, and criminalizes resistance.
By contrast, the Algeria model is analytically closer to Palestine. Instead of settling for rhetorical lamentation, the cause openly advocated for armed revolution; it identified structural colonialism as the cause of the problem; and insisted on its removal as the path to liberation. Algeria’s example challenges the dominant discourse by emphasizing resistance as the means to achieve freedom, not negotiation within imposed limits.
Repeatedly invoking apartheid offers Western audiences a simplified view that focuses on individual criminals or extremist settlers while ignoring the settler-colonial state itself. It also serves Palestinians and Arabs who lack the political courage to confront the core issue. Limiting criticism to apartheid reproduces the legalistic mindset of international human rights frameworks, which inadvertently justify the system by condemning “repression” while leaving colonial sovereignty intact.
Return to the Masses: A Call for Revolutionary Intellectual Alignment
AmĂlcar Cabral, founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, coined the concept of “returning to the source” as a call to re-root liberation in the lived reality of the people. It was not a nostalgic gesture, but a strategic imperative: for Cabral, the popular masses—their authentic culture and extraordinary willingness to sacrifice—formed the first and most essential line of resistance.
Central to Cabral’s vision was a challenge to the intellectual elite. In colonized societies, the petit bourgeoisie occupies a precarious position: possessing the knowledge and tools to manage society, while being socially and culturally conditioned to serve as intermediaries for the colonial system. Cabral left them with a stark choice: betray the revolution or undergo a radical intellectual and class realignment, embedding themselves in the struggles of the masses.
In the Palestinian context, this dilemma is plain for all to see. Many intellectuals have aligned themselves with comprador regimes and imperial centers, shaping the national project to suit external interests rather than reconnecting with the grassroots struggle. Our proposal for a “Charter for Comprehensive Revolutionary Liberation” calls on Palestinian and Arab intellectuals—academics, NGO workers, researchers, and political and military bureaucrats—to confront this historic moment with courage and ethical commitment. The call is clear: return to the source—to the environments that sustain resistance, where ordinary people create extraordinary acts of sacrifice, as witnessed in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen. This contrasts sharply with intellectuals who compete for personal gain at the expense of their people.
Global South intellectuals are constrained by the dominance of “colonial enlightenment”. Many interpret resistance through a Western lens, shaped by class and personal priorities, while fearing—or even opposing—the revolutionary potential of the masses. For them, liberation becomes a request for insignificant concessions rather than the dismantling of colonial structures. Returning to the grassroots—the refugee camps, villages, cities, traditional social networks, and local resistant practices—is treated as a burden, something to be jettisoned in pursuit of a false promise of colonial modernity and individual advancement.
Their discourse is deliberately convoluted, indirect, and donor-friendly, creating a knowledge gap that separates them from the frontline actors paying the ultimate price.
The harmful role of compliant intellectuals emerges in their attempts to “modernize” and “civilize” resistance to suit colonial sensitivities. They strip liberation movements of their struggle-driven content and recast them within liberal institutional frameworks. Many deliberately ignore—or deride—the revolutionary potential of local grounding, and prefer to import liberal fantasies, such as treating victims and occupiers as “equal citizens”, while the reality is one of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and systemic destruction.
When these intellectuals promote ideas like a “state for all its citizens”, institutional reform, liberal democracy, or national unity within such frameworks, they exclude the popular masses whose sacrifices sustain the struggle. After decades of failed settlements, such proposals are pathways to diplomatic fixes rather than liberation. Cultural authority is weaponized to mask the structural brutality of the settler-colonial and imperialist project, transforming it into a tool for negotiation rather than resistance.
Their discourse is deliberately convoluted, indirect, and donor-friendly, creating a knowledge gap that separates them from the frontline actors paying the ultimate price. It serves as a class disguise, concealing ties between compliant elites, allied Arab regimes, and the colonial core. This results in the exclusion of the masses as drivers of their own liberation struggles, and reduces existential conflicts to academic exercises.
Any national project loses its revolutionary core if it ignores historical actors and actors in the field, particularly armed resistance fighters, and becomes merely an instrument for elite authority. True ideology, in contrast, is a practical force which enables the masses to decode layers of exploitation imposed by complicit cultural stewards. The problem is not merely academic abstraction—it is a fundamentally opposed class and political position, stripping liberation movements of popular momentum and reducing them to intellectual exercises favouring colonial and comprador states.
For Palestine, success requires structural rejection of dependent state apparatuses and colonial systems. Every revolutionary, every fighter, and every intellectual must sever intellectual, political, and cultural ties with the instruments of compradorship—from the colonial core to allied functionary regimes—to restore popular agency and pursue genuine liberation.
Charter for Comprehensive Liberation
We, as members of the Palestinian Arab people and the wider Arab nation, and as academics, researchers and workers in intellectual and cultural fields, recognize the profound existential predicament brought about by class structures, functionary positions and cultural backgrounds under a genocidal settler-colonial system.
We therefore declare our full and unwavering alignment with the choice of our popular masses, their historic struggle and their comprehensive resistance in all arenas. Without hesitation, we affirm our readiness to bear any cost that may arise from this position, regardless of how great it may be.
This statement calls on Arab intellectuals to stand with us in declaring an end to the intermediary intellectual and the functionary agent, and the birth of the resistant, organic and engaged intellectual who views knowledge and culture not as a luxury or a profession but as a central weapon in the struggle of our people and our nation toward comprehensive liberation and unity.
Accordingly, we affirm the following:
First: Concepts of liberation and the national project must be formulated from the real material conditions of resistance environments: the refugee camp, the village, the prison cell, the trench and the tunnel. We reject imported liberal frameworks and ready-made formulas designed according to the preferences and interests of comprador forces and the colonial core. These models are used as tools for social engineering to freeze and neutralize Arab social and political forces from the real struggle, while the enemy continues to pursue its goals ruthlessly to their conclusion. True liberation begins with dismantling epistemic colonialism as a prerequisite for full liberation.
Second: We reject all forms of comprador-based funding, regardless of its source. Such funding is politically conditioned and aims to domesticate Palestinian and Arab consciousness under different labels. It is essential to dismantle the authority of intermediaries and to reject the rent-seeking structures of Arab intellectuals and bureaucracies tied to donors and financiers if we are to achieve a genuine and revolutionary understanding of the national project. Turning national and resistance work into employment within NGOs, government bodies or research centers funded by imperial powers or comprador regimes constitutes the most dangerous structural breach of the national project that will inevitably lead to defeat and ruin.
Therefore, we call for complete revolutionary transparency and rejection of all outside funding. The sole criterion for any activity or program must be its value towards resistance, without conditions imposed by funders or donors. This charter also rejects any false claim of neutrality by Arab intellectuals. The intellectual is neither mediator nor neutral bystander. One either stands with the people in the trenches of confrontation and resistance or one finds oneself in the camp of the enemy. Any discourse that ignores the genocide and the necessity of comprehensive resistance in favor of reformist language is complicit.
Third: Actors in the field must be reinstated as the sole and ultimate reference. The national project cannot be directed remotely from imperial capitals or the capitals of comprador regimes. Legitimate political authority is seized by those who carry arms and by the supporting environments that directly confront the colonial machine on the ground without pause. They offer daily sacrifices and blood, and their authentic local culture forms the moral and existential shield of the national project.
Fourth: Comprador bourgeois cultural identity must be dismantled. Intellectuals must consciously abandon the pursuit of academic prestige or career advancement tied to the approval of international institutions and subordinate functionary organizations. Knowledge and its production should instead serve resisting social structures such as refugee camps, villages and popular resistance communities.
Fifth: A strategy of class alignment and transforming knowledge into material force. We call on every Arab academic and intellectual to end their submission to the privileges granted by the colonial core and comprador regimes. Their research tools and technical knowledge must become ammunition in the hands of the resistance. Knowledge that is neither understood nor used in trenches and battlefields is sterile and historically hostile to the national project. A true intellectual committed to the liberation of their people must move from observation to participation, placing technical and intellectual expertise in all fields at the disposal of the resistance’s popular base without conditions.
Sixth: We call for exposing and boycotting intellectuals and academics who persist in acting as functionary agents of the colonial core and its Arab instruments of compradorship. This is not a matter of personal reprisal. It is a necessary structural purification of the liberation path from the impurities of compradorship in a national project that is greater than any individual.
After the recent wars of extermination, in which our people paid with hundreds of thousands of martyrs and wounded, after the total destruction of Gaza, and amid ongoing aggression in the West Bank, across Palestine, Lebanon and the Arab region, silence has become a betrayal of this blood.
We call for the intellectual and political unmasking of all who refuse to relinquish their roles as intermediaries and agents. Committed intellectuals should monitor and document any discourse that adopts the language of the colonizer and publicize it as an example of cultural betrayal. We also call for the exposing of conditional funding received by organizations and research centers that imposes agendas of normalization or pacification on Arab societies, particularly on Palestinian society.
We also call for the isolation and boycotting of elites that choose to align with the colonial core and comprador regimes, and the rejection of their representation of the national project in any forum. The principle that must be established is clear: no representation without resistance, and no mandate except revolutionary legitimacy. Its sole source is the social geography that sustains resistance, the trenches, the tunnels and the prison cells.
On this basis, we call for establishing an Observatory for Liberation Culture as an independent popular body composed of committed and engaged intellectuals dedicated to the national project and its requirements. Its mission will be to evaluate the performance of cultural and political institutions according to their adherence to, or distance from, the Charter of Comprehensive Liberation.
The Cultural Alternative of Resistance
The purpose of this charter is not limited to criticism. It also seeks to propose an existential and intellectual alternative as a moral, national and historical responsibility. From this perspective, we affirm our commitment to building a cultural alternative of resistance that emerges from the collapse of epistemic domination. This requires adopting the epistemology of resistance as an engaged field of knowledge rooted in the lived environment of popular resistance and collective struggle.
Accordingly, we affirm the following principles:
First: Rooting knowledge in lived reality
Localizing knowledge means recognizing the living field and material conditions of popular resistance environments as the primary laboratory for intellectual work and knowledge production. The organic intellectual committed to national and Arab liberation cannot remain a neutral observer or retreat into academic isolation. Instead, methodological tools must become practical instruments that serve the historical sources of resistance – the fighter, the farmer, the worker and the refugee. The central role of academics and intellectuals is to bridge specialized knowledge gaps in ways that strengthen the durability and effectiveness of the resistance project.
Second: Intellectual sovereignty and dismantling the colonial lexicon
We call for genuine intellectual independence by breaking decisively from the lexicon of colonialism and developing unified conceptual tools for resistance. Purging our language of terms and frameworks shaped within imperial centers and aligned with their interests is an existential necessity. Concepts such as disarmament, terrorism, governance and neoliberal reform are frequently deployed to fragment national structures and dilute the struggle. Confronting this requires dismantling Westernized linguistic frameworks within Arab academia and replacing them with a vocabulary rooted in the popular language of resistance.
The value of any academic thesis or intellectual position should be measured on the basis of whether it can be understood and used in the trench, the refugee camp, the tunnel and the prison cell. The task of the intellectual committed to resistance is to help provide a strategic compass for the masses, not to produce abstract knowledge that entrenches political alienation. We also reject Western centrality as the sole reference for truth, particularly in writing the historical narrative and value system of our people and their resistance.
Third: Democratizing knowledge and turning ideology into material force
Revolutionary ideology is not a collection of slogans. It is a framework that clarifies the geopolitical dimensions of the struggle and exposes structural exploitation, including the intersecting interests that link sectors of Arab society with imperial powers and the Zionist settler project. At the same time, resistance environments provide intellectuals with lived experience, practical knowledge and concrete facts that prevent theory from drifting into the abstractions of liberal discourse.
The shared destiny of the fighter and the intellectual transforms knowledge from an intellectual luxury into symbolic weapons that operate side-by-side with material weapons. This connection grants resistance action its historical meaning, its existential horizon and its moral legitimacy.
This charter calls for reclaiming national decision-making from elites accustomed to acting as intermediaries and agents, and returning it to the masses and the social environments that sustain resistance and shape history through their sacrifices. It is a call to move beyond the politics of begging towards the dismantling of colonial structures.
In light of the immense sacrifices of the masses, the minimum ethical responsibility of the Arab intellectual is to abandon elite privilege and narrow self-interest and to fully align with the act of resistance. We affirm our pride in belonging to the resilient Palestinian people, to our Arab national identity, and to our intellectual roots in the Global South. From these foundations we derive our human and international outlook and seek to reclaim the history that colonialism has attempted to erase.
We reject the hierarchies of Western centrality and the illusion of chasing its defective model of modernity. We refuse the role of the subordinate mimic. Resistance knowledge alone can help shape the emergence of a free Arab human being who not only removes the colonizer from our land but uproots its influence from our consciousness.
Our will cannot accept accommodating the existing order, but on dismantling its foundations, regardless of the balance of power.
Let us break the chains of knowledge until victory.
Long live an Arab Palestine.
