The Palestinian National Initiative

The Palestinian National Initiative was founded in the worst year of the Second Intifada. In the spring of 2002 Israel reoccupied the West Bank cities in Operation Defensive Shield, laid siege to Arafat in the Muqata’a and to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and levelled much of Jenin refugee camp; the suicide bombings inside Israel were at their peak; the Palestinian Authority’s ministries had been physically destroyed and its reputation for corruption was, among Palestinians, the second subject after the occupation. The political field had narrowed to two poles — a Fatah-run Authority discredited by Oslo’s results and by its own patronage, and an Islamist opposition whose method was the bomb. On 17 June 2002 a group of independents announced a third: al-Mubadara al-Wataniyya al-Filastiniyya, the Palestinian National Initiative.

Its founders were an unusual set. Mustafa Barghouti, born in Jerusalem in 1954, was a physician trained in Moscow and at Stanford who had founded the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees in 1979 and spent two decades building clinics in villages the health ministry never reached. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, born in Gaza in 1919, was the founder of the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Gaza, a member of the first Palestine National Council in 1964, and the man who had led the Palestinian delegation at Madrid in 1991 and then resigned from the process over the settlements — the most respected Palestinian public figure of his generation precisely because he had never taken anything for himself. Edward Said, the literary critic at Columbia, had resigned from the Palestine National Council over Oslo and was in the last year of his life, dying of leukaemia. Ibrahim Dakkak was an engineer who had chaired the al-Aqsa restoration and been repeatedly imprisoned. What they had in common was that none of them was a faction boss.

The programme was democratic reform and unarmed resistance, and it treated the two as one argument. Al-Mubadara called for elections at every level of the PLO and the Authority, for an independent judiciary and a separation of powers, for an end to the security services’ proliferation, for the PLO to be reconstituted to include Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and for the Palestinian struggle to be conducted through mass non-violent resistance, international law and global solidarity rather than armed attack. Barghouti’s public case, made repeatedly, was strategic rather than pacifist: that attacks on Israeli civilians were both wrong and self-defeating, because they destroyed the international sympathy that was the weaker party’s only real asset, and because Palestinians could not win a military contest with the fourth-strongest army in the world but could win a political one. In the presidential election of January 2005, contesting against Mahmoud Abbas after Arafat’s death, Barghouti ran second with 19.5 per cent of the vote — a fifth of the electorate for a party with no militia, no ministries and no patronage. He was elected to the Legislative Council in 2006 on the Independent Palestine list, and served briefly as information minister in the short-lived national unity government of 2007.

Where the Initiative has mattered most is on the ground, in the village committees against the separation wall. From 2003 Budrus, Bil’in, Ni’lin, Nabi Saleh and Kafr Qaddum organised weekly unarmed marches against the route of the wall and against settlement expansion, alongside Israeli and international activists; Bil’in won a partial victory at Israel’s own High Court in 2007, which ordered the route moved. Barghouti and al-Mubadara’s cadres were among the marches’ organisers and among those shot with rubber-coated bullets, tear-gassed and arrested; Barghouti has been beaten and detained on several occasions and hospitalised more than once. Nineteen-year-old Bassem Abu Rahma of Bil’in was killed by a tear-gas canister fired at his chest in 2009; his sister Jawaher died after inhaling gas in 2011. The strategy that al-Mubadara advocates has a casualty list of its own.

Al-Mubadara remains small — a party of a few thousand members, two seats at its high-water mark, no armed wing and no share of the Authority’s revenue — and its founders are mostly gone: Said died in September 2003, Abdel-Shafi in September 2007, Dakkak in 2016. Barghouti, still its secretary-general, has become one of the most widely heard Palestinian voices in the international media since 2023, and the case he makes is the one al-Mubadara was founded to make: that the occupation is a system of legalised discrimination that must be named as such, that Palestinians need a single democratic representative body renewed by elections, and that the last Palestinian general election was held in 2006. That last fact is the Initiative’s whole indictment of both larger parties, and it is not in dispute.

Sources

• Palestinian National Initiative — Wikipedia
• Mustafa Barghouti — Wikipedia
• Haidar Abdel-Shafi — Wikipedia
• 2005 Palestinian presidential election — Wikipedia
• Bil’in — Wikipedia