The Spark Preceded the Plan: How Sakhnin Created the Moment and the Open Question "What About Tomorrow?"

Sakhnin was not just a city that got angry; it was a political moment that revealed that the problem lies not in people's readiness to participate in protests, but in the structure of leadership itself. What happened in Sakhnin was not a fleeting event, nor an emotional explosion that could be contained by a statement or a single demonstration. It was a revealing political moment, not only about the extent of popular anger, but about the limits of our organizational tools and the serious gap between the speed of the people and the slowness of our leadership structure.

The first spark actually ignited spontaneously. A respectable person, Abu Ibrahim, who resembles all the people of Sakhnin and in our Arab community, closed his shop and refused to pay the "protection money." It was not a political statement, nor a party call, nor a decision issued by an organized leadership body, but a direct individual act, filled with determination and defiance that touched the daily experience of thousands of people, who seek nothing but a safe and dignified life. Abu Ibrahim was not an exception but rather a concentrated model of a person who simply wants to live safely in his city, yet distinguished by his ability to take an unexpected step: refusal rather than submission to crime.

The news transformed within hours into a collective expression, and support in confronting organized crime, reflecting a repressed anger that had built up over years due to police complicity and the state's failure to protect the people. People did not mobilize because someone called them, but because they were already on the brink of explosion.

However, this truth leads us to a deeper question: Why did this particular spark turn into a national event, while dozens of similar sparks in other Arab villages and cities ended in silence? The answer does not only relate to the individual act itself, but to the environment in which this act fell, and the local organizational capability to capture it and convert it into a collective pathway.

It is no coincidence that this moment emerged from Sakhnin; the city has a legacy of struggle, an organizational structure, and field experience that historically made it one of the most capable sites of transforming anger into organized collective action. It is one of the cities from which the spark of Land Day ignited in 1976, and since then it has become accustomed to hosting and organizing major national demonstrations. This history is not merely symbolic, but embodies a living and effective organizational capacity, including an experienced popular committee, strong local political frameworks, parent committees, active social and popular leaders, and a local authority that knows how to move in moments of tension, along with a network of activists capable of turning anger into organized action within hours. In short: the spark fell on soil saturated with struggle experience and political work.

I believe that if this spark had occurred elsewhere, in a different local environment, in any Arab village, it might not have resulted in anything notable; for a spark alone does not create an event, just as anger alone does not create a pathway. What truly made the moment in Sakhnin significant was the meeting of sincere individual action with a ready popular and organizational environment prepared to capture it and convert it into collective action. This convergence between individual initiative and local structure is the central reason that turned a local incident into a national political moment.

The transition from local to national was also not coincidental, nor was it an unintentional act. Here, the influential role of the network of popular committees under the Follow-Up Committee emerged, as they communicated directly with each other. The secretariat of the popular committees coordinated calls, and the stand-ins transformed from local reactions to organized collective action at the country level. The clearest evidence of this is that almost all of the stand-ins emerged under the same slogan: "Sakhnin, you are not alone."

Within just one day, more than thirty-five towns announced their intention to join the strike or organized protest stand-ins at the entrances of the villages, which expedited the Follow-Up Committee's decision for a general strike from the protest tent in Sakhnin on Wednesday evening, turning the local strike into a general strike.

The response was widespread in most Arab towns and villages, except for one town, Kafr Qasim, where the local popular committee and council did not respond to the strike request, a detail that did not diminish the overall picture of commitment to the strike, but is in need of review and accountability.

This sequence of the protest's development shows that what happened was not without leadership. It is true that the spark did not originate from a national leadership body, but the organization was not random. There was a clear type of leadership of the event, primarily represented in the popular committees, which are mostly led by the active party cadres in the local field. In other words, leadership existed in the field, not at the national level.

The spark preceded the plan, and this is the central point. Abu Ibrahim's act did not need a comparison that diminishes its value or places it in a false dichotomy with leadership. On the contrary, what occurred proves that sincere individual action can open a major political moment if there is a ready local organizational structure to capture it and turn it into a collective pathway.

It is important to affirm that leadership in our community is not confined to party heads or Knesset members. Our people are filled with local leadership in popular committees, parent committees, local authorities, social networks, reformists, civil society organizations, and others.

These leaders are the ones who enforced the strike, formulated slogans, obtained licenses, coordinated logistical and security pathways, and opened communication channels between the towns. This leads me to say that the real investment needed is not only in national structures, but in strengthening popular committees, field party leadership, and empowering them organizationally and politically, so that they take their natural place among the people as a permanent activist lever, not just as an emergency tool.

Nevertheless, the success of the local and field level in capturing the moment does not conceal the fundamental paradox that the more effective local performance was, the more apparent the weakness of national frameworks became. What succeeded in the field within hours, the national structure failed to translate into a clear strategic path over days.

What was actually absent after this movement was a ready plan at the national level. The spark indeed preceded the plan, and no national framework had a pre-prepared scenario to deal with a popular explosion of this magnitude. When matters reached the national space, we found ourselves improvising in public instead of moving according to a pre-prepared escalation pathway.

I was present at the Follow-Up Committee meeting, which included dozens of young people in the Sakhnin municipal building after the demonstration. The meeting was open, and the people entered tired, scared, and charged with the feeling that time is running out. This was not an ordinary organizational meeting, but a collective release of pent-up anger and fear accumulated over years.

The leaders spoke of developing the protest with long-term strategic steps, but the general mood was summed up in one question repeated in various forms: "What do we do tomorrow?"

In the meeting, the gap of time manifested itself clearly to everyone; the leaders spoke the language of stages and planning, while the people spoke the language of bullets, funerals, and fear for their children. What emerged was not just a gap of trust, but a lack of a ready escalation plan for this very moment. It was clear that the leaders themselves were compelled to improvise under the pressure of the moment, rather than moving according to a pre-prepared scenario.

The shouts of anger directed towards: “We do not trust you” and “You are all self-interested” were not an insult, but a blatant expression of a deep crisis of trust between a generation that feels existentially targeted and a leadership structure that lacks tools commensurate with the danger and has failed to innovate new tools.

Then came the sudden shift at the end of the meeting, as the direction of the discussion turned to a unifying demand that emerged from the very hall: the rebuilding of political unity through the establishment of a joint Arab list. In my personal opinion, what unfolded was not merely a technical electoral demand, nor a situational political maneuver, but a psychological-political expression of a collective feeling of existential danger.

These young people are not demanding the joint list because they suddenly became dreamers of romantic unity, nor because they calculated the electoral threshold, the number of seats, etc., but because they feel that the criminals and the state, each in its own way, target the unity of their community and their existence. Crime dismantles [society] from below, while the state dismantles it from above through neglect, complicity, and institutional racism.

In this context, the