Palestinian Peoples: on Disintegration and the Conditions for Intifada

By Moussa al-Sadah – Aug 7, 2025

The call of October 7 will remain, unmistakably, a realization of what Algerian revolutionary Larbi Ben Mhidi once described as “throw the revolution into the streets.” But the second half of his statement, “so the people may embrace it,” has yet to come true. Instead, we find ourselves suspended in the painful, incomplete transfer of revolutionary momentum, from the mountains of the Urals to the Mediterranean coast, or in today’s context, from Gaza’s frontlines to the cities of the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Understanding the reasons behind this social and political paralysis is a responsibility that falls on each of us. Our current impasse is not only shameful; it is the prelude to deeper disintegration with catastrophic consequences on every level.

At stake is the very idea of the Palestinian people as a cohesive, collective body bound by shared history, oppression, and a common political horizon. What we face is not only metaphorical fragmentation into “Palestinian peoples,” but the real danger of disintegration: of emotional, political, and historical bonds unraveling after decades of surviving colonial attempts to fracture and reengineer our geography, our economy, and our social fabric. These bonds are now under immense strain.

Without intervention, the outcome will be disastrous, regardless of the possibilities the future holds. Even if the occupation were to somehow end tomorrow, how would we, as Palestinians and Arabs, begin to construct a national narrative that places Gaza, Ramallah, and Haifa side by side in a shared liberation story? For us Arabs, for whom the distortion of the story of our political formation, our history, and our struggle against invaders will disrupt every dynamic of life.

Worse still, the continuous splintering into separate social blocs while sharing the same colonizer risks crossing the final threshold of the settler-colonial genocide: the elimination of the people as a political subject. What remains then is not a nation, but scattered recollections of “local” or “native” communities.

We insist again and again: anti-colonial struggle is, above all, a process of constructing an identity. That identity is not built through slogans, folklore, or nationalist songs on Ramallah TV. Nor can it be fabricated by algorithmic activism and virtual crowds. It is built through shared material struggle, through real confrontation — something that necessarily requires the offering of the blood of martyrs for the sake of spilling the blood of enemies.

The “Sword of Jerusalem” battle, and the uprising it helped ignite, showed that a rupture was possible. From the Lions’ Den in Nablus to the Jenin Brigades, the resistance in Gaza saw that potential. October 7, too, seemed to anticipate such a mass response. But it never came. Why?

One answer lies in the aftermath of May 2021. That moment, as Abu Ubaida later stated, helped crystallize the planning for the “Flood.” But it also warned the enemy. What followed was a series of preemptive, punitive, preventive Israeli security operations. Meanwhile, the October 7 operation was never simply a spontaneous revolt; it was a call to action directed squarely at organized resistance. It reflected a political clarity: that intellectual, political, and military engagement cannot exist without organized society.

This is not a new lesson. It is foundational. Leninist revolutionary thought hinges on it. Gramsci called it the bridge between theory and practice: organization.

In a moment like the ‘Flood,’ with the rapid shift from theory to practice, only organized societies are capable of keeping pace. This was evident in the swift response of resistance factions in Palestine and the region, who bore the historical responsibility before anyone else. The same applies to the semi-organized and hybrid structures of the armed brigades in the refugee camps of the northern West Bank. Meanwhile, in terms of the broader public in the rest of the West Bank and Jerusalem, the issue is not merely a lack of organization; it is that society is under the organizational grip of a structure that collaborates with the occupation, namely the Ramallah Authority, as well as the occupation itself.

This is why there was no spontaneous uprising. But it raises another question: why wasn’t there at least a serious attempt to organize? Why didn’t this war, this genocide, produce even a minimal wave of political initiative?

To answer that, we must revisit the history of the two Intifadas. The First Intifada emerged after the PLO’s exile from Beirut and the collapse of Arab strategy against Zionism. The Second came in the ruins of Oslo. Intifadas are not born from hope, they erupt from despair, from a sense of suffocating closure.

And crucially, political action often begins inside the uprising itself. It is born of the chaos and rupture that shake existing systems, just as Hamas and Islamic Jihad were born out of the First Intifada.

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But for the past 20 months, the West Bank and Jerusalem have been suspended in waiting. Political initiative has been outsourced to Gaza, and to the Axis of Resistance. And here lies the bitter irony: even as settlement expansion, forced displacement, and unprecedented destruction sweep across the West Bank (the largest wave since 1967) these events have become peripheral. Palestinian society has remained frozen, passive, expectant.

Outside Palestine, the discourse of the Axis of Resistance and the media machinery that props it up have created a public that no longer imitates or organizes; it watches and waits. It cheers. It posts. It mistakes performance for participation. The more intensely one signals loyalty in the digital realm, the more one believes they are part of the struggle, while the hard work of organizing, mobilizing, and sacrificing on the ground is avoided or deferred.

The two Intifadas offer us the conditions for popular uprising, not as a deterministic outcome, but as a probability shaped by the convergence of certain factors. These include the current deadlock, the nature of steadfast resistance in Gaza, the decline of regional influence, all culminating in the West Bank and Jerusalem now facing the prospect of total liquidation. This comes as the US and Israel thirst for a decisive resolution, and the growing marginality of both European and Arab actors in sustaining investment in the Palestinian Authority project.

The convergence of conditions does not guarantee an uprising, but understanding these conditions is crucial to identify our duty in sparking the uprising itself, supporting its mechanisms, and adopting it as the next strategic approach. From the perspective of an optimism of the intellect: in every revolutionary experience, the phase of popular confrontation follows the stage of colonial military dismantling.

Algeria was not liberated from the French, nor was Saigon from the Americans, through a sweeping entry of exhausted armed forces following years of peak violence. Rather, liberation came through a process of attrition targeting the colonial structure itself, which had assumed that its brutality toward the resistance forces was a final solution, only to be confronted with the reality that the struggle endure.

Now, two years into this renewed phase of the Palestinian revolution, we are faced with two futures. Either Israel completes its conquest of the West Bank and Jerusalem unopposed, thus ending the Palestinian people as a political subject, or we impose a new kind of confrontation on the ideologically exhausted Zionist project, one that echoes the First Intifada’s stones and the Second’s fire.

Our two options are to either be like a docile sheep, as Abu Ibrahim al-Sinwar warned, or to revive the very idea of the Palestinian people, the people referred to by Muhannad Halabi when he said, “I don’t believe we are a people that accept humiliation.”

The settlers are on their way. The enemy has made its decision.

Have we made ours?

(al-akhbar)