Ksenia Svetlova: You see how time and again people in the West Bank and in Gaza, even more so in the West Bank than in Gaza, say yes, we support Hamas.
Samer Sinijlawi: I would not rely on polls very much during these days, not to test the feelings of the Palestinians and not to test the feelings of the Israelis. They [polls] are a bit misleading these days. You can feel there is a cocktail of anger, sadness, grief, hatred that is prevalent in both societies, but this is because of the 7th of October and the war. It is not whom the Palestinians really are, nor the Israelis.
Ksenia Svetlova: Please explain to our viewers the difference between Fatah and shadow Fatah. What is shadow Fatah?
Samer Sinijlawi: Usually the [official political] opposition is a minority. When you are part of an opposition camp, it means that you are in the minority. In our case, the opposition is a majority. Ninety percent of the Palestinians are requesting that President Abbas leave political life, even better that he leave the country. If 90 percent are requesting this, they are in the opposition. This is the 90 percent who are requesting change.
President Abbas has failed for the last 19 years to bring about any positive development in the life of the Palestinians. I don’t know if it is out of bad luck, because he had Prime Minister Netanyahu on the other side, or if it is out of bad performance. I think maybe it’s both, but I would emphasize the part of bad performance.
President Abbas has been dealing with six different American presidents, nine different Israeli prime ministers, and he couldn’t achieve anything with any of them. It means his strategy is broken. And it’s not only broken in terms of creating good dynamics in Israeli-Palestinian relations. It’s broken internally. He couldn’t improve the economy of the Palestinians. He couldn’t improve human rights. We have serious issues of freedom of speech. One Palestinian in 2021 was killed, Nizar Banat, because he dared to criticize Abbas. And he was killed while under arrest by the Palestinian security on the way to interrogation; he was hit on the head by iron bars and was killed. So we have serious issues.
Palestinians are fed up with the corruption that Abbas brought upon them in the West Bank, and they are fed up with the destruction that Hama brought upon them in Gaza.
Palestinians would like to see a leadership that brings construction. This is the younger generation of Fatah who have been waiting in queue for long years to have some kind of leading role in changing the direction of our policies. The first generation of Fatah leaders [in the West Bank and Gaza] established the student movement in the 1980s. Then they were deported [by Israel] in the mid 1980s. This is the layer of Fatah leadership that later became known as the Fatah Supreme Committee under Marwan Barghouti and others. [It includes] the heads of the Preventive Security of the Palestinian Authority when it was established in 1993, based on Fatah activists led by Muhammad Dahlan in Gaza and Jibril Rajoub in the West Bank.
Under this layer of leadership of Fatah, there is another layer, my generation who established the Fatah youth organization, who went into the streets at the early age of 15 or 14 and started throwing stones [during the First Intifada of 1988-1991]. These three, four years of life of the Palestinian people was the most important phase in our lives because attention came back to the Palestinian issue, but we were not violent. Using stones [rather than guns] was accepted by everybody. And in a few months, in a few years, we pushed everybody onto the diplomatic path.
We should be democratic. We should have elections every four years. We should respect the results of the elections. We should have a parliament that safeguards the rights of all the people. If any leadership is not able to respect the rights of its people internally, how can this leadership represent these rights in front of others? It doesn’t work. The right of a person is the right of a person, internally and externally, vis-a-vis the others, vis-a-vis the Israelis and in front of ourselves.
Also, we should be able to introduce a language to the Palestinian street that says the only working strategy in this conflict is the strategy of non-violence. It has been proven that we cannot pressure Israel. Israelis cannot be pressured, not by the USA., not by violence. The Israelis can be persuaded. We need to touch the hearts and minds of the Israelis. It’s easy to continue this game of blame. Will this bring us anywhere? No. It’s better to claim responsibility to show the world that we are adults. We claim responsibility and we say we have made mistakes also.
If we want to fix things, if we want to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back onto the diplomatic track, we should do some homework. We should take the first steps. We should initiate a process to bring back the Israelis, to open doors and start listening to us, and we need to gain their trust.
Ksenia Svetlova: It sounds very good. But will the average person in Ramallah, in Jenin [two cities on the West Bank] and I am not even talking about Gaza, subscribe to this?
Samer Sinijlawi: Well, today no. Because there is no official language that is addressing public opinion in Palestine showing them what could be done and how this can be done. But there could be an official language from leadership that addresses the people and convinces them that we have the path that can change their life.
At the same level of lack of security prevailing in Israeli society, there is a lack of hope, a disappointment, on the Palestinian side. Palestinians today, they wake up every morning and they are confident that today is going to be worse than yesterday. If Palestinians start waking up each morning and believing that today is going to be better than yesterday, this sense of hope will allow people to be more accepting of these ideas and these strategies. And I’m confident that the majority of Palestinians would sign onto this strategy and I am confident that the majority of Israelis would respond positively.
I started my political life throwing stones in the streets of my city because I wanted, at the age of 14 in 1987, to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea. Then when I was in an Israeli jail, in November 1988, Arafat announced the [Palestinian] Declaration of Independence in Algeria saying that the PLO now is adopting the two-state solution and the Palestinian state will only be on 22 percent of the land. We jumped up with happiness and we signed in.
Then in 1993 when the same leader came from Tunisia to Gaza with one plan – autonomy in two cities, Gaza and Jericho – we went to Gaza to receive this leader who brought us limited autonomy in two cities. Offer hope to the Palestinians and the Palestinians will sign in.
The era of the fatherhood-style leader, exclusive leaders like Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas, has ended. After Mahmoud Abbas, there will be no other symbolic leader. Even Marwan [Barghouti] cannot do the job alone. Marwan needs partners. Marwan needs to build a coalition among his generation of leaders who were in waiting. No one of them can alone be able to bring the momentum to be elected.
