Between the Catastrophe of Yesterday and the Confusion of Today: Can Tragedy Turn into a Farce?

On May 15, 1948, Palestinians did not enter the Nakba merely as disarmed and dispossessed individuals, but also stripped of a national structure capable of protecting their community from collapse. The disaster occurred while traditional dominance, familial and feudal, held sway over Palestinian society, unable to build a modern liberation project that unites people around a collective national vision. The Arab regimes, which raised the banners of rescue and liberation, entered the war with conflicting wills and struggles for influence that turned Palestine into more of a battleground than a cause. When defeat occurred, Palestinians were left not only between refuge, exile, and betrayal, but their cause was also contained and subjected to the logic of guardianship, dissolution, and political and national obliteration.

After nearly eight decades, and despite a long struggle since the onset of the contemporary Palestinian revolution, major popular uprisings, and the enormous sacrifices of the Palestinian people, the latest of which involves the people of Gaza facing extermination, starvation, and total destruction, the scene appears to be reverting with different names and tools. The national movement, originally established to overcome that historical impotence, safeguard the national identity from obliteration and fragmentation, and restore its status as a united people, is gradually eroding under the weight of division, power struggles, factional interests, and the disintegration of the political and ethical structure that was supposed to carry the national project.

The most dangerous aspect of this erosion is happening at the most perilous moment since the first Nakba, where the right-wing Zionism no longer conceals its project based on the final resolution of the Palestinian issue, through displacement, cleansing, and transforming the Palestinian existence itself into a removable burden. What the fascist right in Israel proposes today is not merely a permanent occupation but a graduated completion of the Nakba, by driving Palestinians to despair, breaking their capacity to survive, and transforming Gaza in particular into an uninhabitable area.

How Similar Today is to Yesterday

As the homeland was once reduced to incapable traditional leaderships, today the cause is being reduced to structures and leaders that have largely lost their vital connection to the people, national goals, and reality itself. Indeed, the noise around "legitimacies," "institutions," and "democratic practices" has often become merely a cover for reproducing the same dominance within a decaying political structure. Democracy is summoned not as a tool for renewing popular will, but as a formal mechanism to entrench individual rule, dominance, and exclusion, redistributing shares within the same closed circle, far from any real accountability or serious and comprehensive national review.

At a time when Gaza is facing an open existential war, large sectors of the Palestinian political class appear to be mired in calculations of positions, quotas, succession arrangements, and representation conflicts, as if the fundamental question is no longer how to stop the catastrophe and save the people and the homeland, but who has the right to speak on their behalf after the catastrophe?

Here lies the most critical dilemma. The division has transformed from merely a political disagreement into a mode of governance, administration, and hegemony, thriving on sustaining the crisis instead of resolving it. Thus, some political structures seem to be consuming Palestinian sacrifices politically, media-wise, and organizationally, without offering a clear answer to the essential question: why do people sacrifice? And what is the national project for which these enormous costs are paid?

This very void may explain the increasing erosion of people's trust in the existing political structure and the growing feelings of isolation, anger, and loss of meaning. People can endure pain, but they cannot tolerate the trivialization of their sacrifices or the transformation of their blood into a material for political or symbolic investment.

Yet, what prevents complete collapse until now is neither the efficiency of the political system nor the wisdom of the elites but the survival of the Palestinian person itself, alive within their cause, steadfast on their land. The people who faced the Nakba, exiles, sieges, and repeated wars still possess an exceptional ability to endure and cling to the homeland, even when the institutions intended to embody and protect this meaning erode.

For this reason, the priority of the current moment should not be rearranging the balance of power within the crumbling political system but rather saving what remains of the national project itself. Any discussion about elections, legitimacies, or reshaping institutions loses its meaning if it is not part of an overarching national consensus that redefines priorities based on clear principles, foremost of which is stopping genocide and aggression, saving Gaza, protecting the unity of the people, and renewing the collective national legitimacy, rather than entrenching individual dominance and exclusion.

What is needed today is not merely recycling power but rebuilding the very idea of national leadership; a leadership that considers its primary function to protect the people and enhance their resilience and capacity to survive, not to manage division or compete for influence. Furthermore, what is needed is not just to renew institutions but to establish a transparent and accountable governance structure that derives its legitimacy from serving people and defending their national rights, rather than monopolizing representation or possessing tools of power.

Thus, the question becomes more poignant than just a historical comparison: does history really repeat itself?
Or does tragedy, when the elites fail to learn from it, gradually transform into a form of dark comedy; where people continue to pay the prices of their existence while political structures busy themselves managing their ruins?

Perhaps the deeper challenge in this historical moment, as we seek to draw lessons from the Nakba, is: how can the national movement be rebuilt as a tool for liberating the Palestinian person and preserving their existence, rather than a burden that lives off their sacrifices? And how can the unified national decision be genuinely restored to the people who have paid, and continue to pay, the highest prices in defense of their right to survive, live, and enjoy their national dignity?