The Addiction to Producing Deficiency: How Palestinian Politics Became Detached from Reality?

The issue is not the lack of solutions, but rather the incapacity of the political structure to produce its own conditions. Based on this premise, which I've addressed in previous articles, the Palestinian situation can be read as a concentrated example of what can be termed "the addiction to producing deficiency," where the crisis ceases to be a temporary circumstance and transforms into a chronic impasse, wherein politics is reframed as the management of blockage rather than mechanisms to overcome it.

This situation can no longer be approached through traditional analytical tools that reduce it to performance defects or leadership shortcomings, or even to division. These approaches, despite their procedural importance, implicitly assume the existence of a political system operating under normal conditions and experiencing issues amenable to reform. However, the Palestinian experience reveals that we are not merely facing a performance crisis or a leadership crisis, but a crisis in the ability of the political system itself to produce a real domain for action, representation, and decision-making.

In critical historical moments, the vitality of political movements is measured not by their ability to produce a new discourse but by their capacity to break the conditions that reproduce their crises. In the Palestinian case, a sharp structural paradox is embodied; while society creates advanced forms of steadfastness and life under the harshest conditions, the political system "invents" equally complex forms of managing deficiency. Here, deficiency is not transient; it becomes a function, and failure is not a mere outcome but transforms into a mechanism for preserving factional and personal interests.

In this sense, the question is no longer about the nature of the actors as much as it is about the realm within which they operate, and whether this realm is still capable of producing policy in the actual sense, or if it has become a framework for managing its boundaries and limits. Deficiency does not appear as incidental failure; it manifests as a form that contains pressures and reshapes crises without effecting a change in the rules of the game, save for increased blockage and decline.

From Producing Politics to Managing Its Boundaries

This pattern is reflected in its capacity to undermine reform attempts and close off any possibility for change. Thus, the crisis shifts from an emergency state to a perpetual impasse, with deficiency becoming an environment for reproducing the structure itself and ensuring its survival.

This is evident in a political scene where calls for "reform and renewing legitimacy" have been repeated for many years without leading to any actual changes in the decision-making structure or representation mechanisms. Even moments that were supposed to constitute a foundational turning point, from repeated national dialogues to promises of conducting general elections, ended up reproducing the same stagnation, such that the announcement of change became part of the mechanism for delaying it.

This pattern cannot be understood without revisiting the historical transformation in the nature of Palestinian political action. In the foundational stage, politics was an open-ended liberatory action, deriving its legitimacy from its ability to produce the action itself. With the major intifada, the political space expanded to encompass the entire society; the people were no longer just a mere incubator for the organization but directly produced political action. However, with Oslo, and after containing the collective mobilization and social action generated by the intifada, politics gradually shifted from a state of changing reality to managing what is possible within it, turning the "temporary transition" into a permanent state in which public life is managed.

With the establishment of the Authority, which lacked a governing philosophy linking the completion of national liberation with the enhancement of steadfastness, it did not form a tool for transition to sovereignty but rather a device for managing its absence. The division added a thick layer of complexity, creating a state that can be described as the "authority of division," functioning as a stable pattern that reproduces itself through the very division.

While Palestinian society faces profound transformations under the weight of war, economic disintegration, and daily exhaustion, the political structures in the West Bank and Gaza seem more preoccupied with managing their internal balances and maintaining the conditions of their survival than with reconstructing the inclusive national space. Even the political language itself sometimes seems detached from the priorities of the people, as it continues to invoke terminologies of legitimacy, unity, and resistance without an actual ability to translate them into a tangible political horizon.

Excess of Steadfastness and the Deficiency of Political Translation

At the heart of this structure lies a central paradox comprising an excess of social action juxtaposed with a deficiency of political translation. The Palestinian society continues to produce forms of life and steadfastness, yet it does this without a political channel capable of transforming this action into representation, decision, or a unifying project.

This situation can be understood as an increasing separation between social vitality and political structure. This separation not only explains the system's incapacity to change but also clarifies the failure of reform attempts. The problem is no longer the absence of ideas or initiatives but the lack of conditions that make them possible. Reform projects are proposed within a structure not designed for change but rather to regulate and recontain it, such that every reform attempt becomes part of the mechanism of reproducing the crisis itself.

From here, many current political and organizational obligations can be read as manifestations of this pattern. Instead of serving as stations for review, they transform into tools for re-establishing the balance of interests. In this context, major movement conferences gain significance beyond their administrative dimension, as they function to reproduce the structure through a formal renewal of legitimacies and absorb pressures without touching the essence of the distribution of power and overhead interests, making the rearrangement of positions within the structure a substitute for questioning the structure itself, i.e., managing change without allowing it to happen.

The catastrophic war on Gaza, with its unprecedented levels of destruction, extermination, and national exposure, has starkly revealed the limits of all existing political structures. Despite the historical magnitude of the catastrophe, the political response continues to revolve within the same calculations, as if the event, despite its enormity, was not enough to mandate a comprehensive structural review. Here, one of the most dangerous signs of disconnection from reality is manifested: when the continuation of the structure becomes a higher priority than questioning the conditions that led to the catastrophe.

Under these conditions, the structure continues to manage its crisis and reproduce itself despite the erosion of its legitimacy, while the separation between society and the system deepens, without ensuring that any potential explosion will lead to the birth of a viable political alternative. Overcoming this cycle requires re-establishing the political space itself.

However, this path is confronted by deep structural constraints concerning the monopoly of representation, the disintegration of the national space, and adherence to external conditions that limit the freedom of action, which means that the crisis is not merely about a lack of will but about a fundamental incapacity to produce an alternative.

Perhaps the harshest paradox lies in the fact that Palestinian society—which continues to produce astonishing forms of steadfastness, initiative, and solidarity under fire, siege, and disintegration—often appears more vibrant than its political institutions. While people move within the open historical time poised for great transformations, the political system continues to manage the moment with a mentality geared towards preserving the status quo, even if that means doing so on the ruins of the national space itself.

From here, it is impossible to envision exiting the current state without reopening the political space itself, i.e., rebuilding the conditions that make political action possible and convertible. This requires redefining politics as a production of the space, not merely its management, and opening the space for more expansive forms of representation that break its monopoly without dismantling society, linking legitimacy to social actions, and transforming the surplus of steadfastness into foundational energy, alongside producing a temporally and functionally defined transitional phase that allows for rebuilding the relationship between action and authority and the trust of the people.

In this framework, one cannot view major movement conferences or potential electoral processes as a solution in and of themselves, but as a tool within a broader foundational path. The issue is not about invoking procedures, but about reconstructing the field that grants them substance.

Here, the question radically shifts. It is no longer, how do we reform the existing structures, but rather, how can we re-establish Palestinian politics in a way that reconnects it with its living source and vital space? How does society transition from a subject of administration to a source of legitimacy? How does steadfastness shift from a defensive state to a foundational force?

Only there, outside the structure that has exhausted its conditions, can politics regain its meaning, not as crisis management, but as the ability to break it and open a new historical horizon for advancing its requirements.