Do the Palestinians still produce political thought?

author

Taher Tayseer Al-Masry

It is a disturbing question that is difficult to ask without hesitation: Are the Palestinians still producing political thought, or have they been living for decades on funds accumulated by previous generations? Political thought does not mean an abundance of statements and statements, but rather that thinking that redefines reality, gives people a new language to understand it, and reformulates urgent questions: Who are we? What do we want? What does liberation mean? What remains of the national project when the land, the people, and the world change?

Perhaps we suffer today not from a lack of political speech, but rather from an excess of it. Is its abundance evidence of the life of thought? Or do we rearrange the words we inherited, such as liberation, resistance, state, settlement, return, legitimacy, and national unity? Is it enough for the word to remain present in order for its meaning to remain alive?

At an earlier stage, Palestine was not just a subject of politics, but rather a generator of ideas. Around it, magazines and research centers arose, and discussions took place about defeat, liberation, exile, and identity. Since Constantine Zreik, who made the Nakba a question that goes beyond sadness to question its causes, through Ghassan Kanafani, who did not see culture as a margin of resistance but rather as part of its structure, all the way to Edward Said, who rethought the novel, representation, exile, and the relationship of knowledge with power, there has been a belief that understanding what is happening to the Palestinian is one of the conditions for his change.

Hisham Sharabi was digging into the structure of society, authority, and patriarchy, as if liberation would not be complete with the disappearance of external oppression if its forms remained stable on the inside. As for Faisal Hourani, he wrote from within the national experience, recalling it and criticizing it, while Maher Al-Sharif, from the position of researcher and historian, continued to work on the history of Palestinian political thought, its transformations, and its questions. Despite the differences between these and others, they have a basic meaning in common: The issue does not only need someone to defend it, but also someone to think about it, review its paths, and re-ask its questions.

So what happened? How did we move from a time when the Palestine Liberation Organization, factions, universities, newspapers, and even cafes produced, in addition to politics, ideas, concepts, and discussions, to a time when the production of a position seems much faster than the production of an idea? Have politics, the intellectual, or the public changed? Why has the dispute sometimes become a struggle over positions and loyalties rather than between different visions of the future?

What is noteworthy is that the occupation itself realized the power of the idea. Why did he target writers, researchers, and intellectuals, and deal with cultural and research institutions as part of the conflict field? What could a military force fear from a man who never carried a gun? Is it not because the occupation does not only fear those who resist it, but also those who interpret it, give what is happening a name, and transform the scattered facts into an understandable structure? If the occupation saw the idea as a danger, then when did we begin to treat thought as a luxury sometimes?

Certainly, the occupation is the most influential force in shaping the Palestinian reality and narrowing its political and intellectual space. Questioning our internal reality does not mean removing this reality or reducing its responsibility. But it opens another question about what happened to the Palestinian environment that is supposed to produce thought and protect the right to difference. Does political life today tolerate an intellectual who does not belong entirely to a camp? Is it possible to criticize the authority, the opposition, or the tools of political action without immediate classification? If the thinker must prove his loyalty before presenting his idea, what remains of the function of thought?

Perhaps the Palestinian thinker did not disappear, but rather the environment that gave him influence weakened. Thought needs institutions that receive it, parties that discuss it, universities that tolerate it, and an audience that has patience for an idea that cannot be reduced to a slogan. In the age of speed and means of communication, has the intellectual been required to take a position before he thinks, and to answer before the question is complete?

Then what about the new generation? Did he inherit the issue, or did he inherit with it a dictionary ready to understand it? We ask him to believe in liberation, the state, return, and resistance, but do we ask him what these words mean to him? Is the Palestine imagined by those born after Oslo the same one imagined by the Nakba generation or the generation of the rise of the PLO? If the experience changes, isn't it natural that the language that expresses it changes?

The occupation, with the killing, oppression, settlement, displacement and control it imposes, remains a question that cannot be jumped over. But his resistance does not eliminate an inherent question: What freedom do we want to build? The Palestinian was forced for a long time to be preoccupied with survival, resistance, and seizing the right, until thinking about the day after liberation seemed like a luxury in light of the urgency of the present. But isn't imagining that day part of the act of liberation itself? What society do we want? What is the form of the relationship between the individual and the state, between the interior and the diaspora, and between national liberation and social justice?

Perhaps the most confusing question is: Did thought falter because politics faltered, or did politics lose its ability to renew because thought was no longer able to invent its questions and tools? Does our crisis lie in the inability to achieve what we want, or in the decline in our ability to imagine what we want to build? The matter is not about glorifying the past or sanctifying its symbols, from Constantine Zureiq to Kanafani, Saeed, Sharabi, Hourani, and others, but rather restoring their courage to question their reality, and ask the questions of our time in its language, instead of regurgitating the answers of their time. Perhaps the question today is not where the Palestinian thinker disappeared, but rather where are the questions that generate new thought, capable of reviewing our assumptions, holding both the authority and the opposition accountable, challenging the narrative of the occupation, and pushing the Palestinian to rethink his reality and future?

Has Palestinian political thought really dried up, or is a new thought taking shape away from the old institutions, in a language that we have not yet learned how to listen to? If it appears, will we recognize it, or will we reject it precisely because it will not resemble what we are accustomed to calling Palestinian thought? Our crisis may not be the lack of answers, but rather that we no longer dare enough to ask questions that might change them.