Most often, Palestinian ethics has opted to use the slogan of liberation rather than that of independence, and whenever it opted for the latter, it was a matter linked to the decision.
During a stage of broad and accelerating revolutionary escalation, one of whose most vital ground was the precious geographical triangle of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, the state of Palestinian revolution, both military and civilian, was waged under the slogan of liberation. After the triumph at the Battle of Karamah (victory), this liberation was granted pseudo-sanctified status. The revolution continued to grow and expand, and was accused of having grown more prominent than its capacity justifies, as the doors of the Arab and Islamic world were opened to it, and even succeeded in imposing itself on international agencies, including the United Nations, and garnered immense popular support at the global level.
In light of this expansion, serious fears grew among the leaders of three arenas of the Palestinian revolution. The Jordanians feared the entrenchment of a parallel authority that could turn into a parallel one operating in their society and on the country's territory. They also feared slogans that considered Amman to be "Hanoi," with behaviors that were excessive and coarse in their intervention in Jordanian affairs without any direct links to the declared goal of Palestinian liberation. Only soon after, this saga ended with the Palestinian Liberation Organization's total withdrawal from Jordan, the most important geographical space it had occupied and the closest to the homeland. Instead, it found itself returning to its first base of operations, Syria, where the state was more capable of controlling the revolutionary movement- even though the number of fighters it could count among its ranks doubled- which implied, among other things, the positioning of the revolutionaries at the borders of its occupied Golan Heights. Here, a duality emerged between the fundamental need for Syria, on the one hand, and Yasser Arafat's aspirations to make his decision independently of it on the other. This was the most challenging duality that Palestinians found themselves having to confront.
The slogan of independent Palestinian decision-making in Syria was not seen, as it had been in other countries, as an affirmation of the legitimacy and strength of the revolution and its framework, the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Indeed, it was seen as an isolationist approach deviating from what Syria considers its fundamental commitment to Arab national causes, at the center of which is the Palestinian cause. Here, an equilibrium of mutual caution emerged between Arafat, the strong and popular leader at the Palestinian Arab popular levels, and Hafez al-Assad, the strongest man at the geo-strategic level. This mutual apprehension drove Assad to develop his intervention in Palestinian affairs using his reach, geography and position, rendering the independence of Palestinian decision-making, as Arafat envisioned it, impossible to realize.
Having been expelled from Jordan and controlled in Syria, the Palestinian revolution flowed into Lebanon. Subsequently, the mutual fears were much broader than those that had risen on the Syrian and Jordanian arenas, resulting in the great exit from the south and Beirut, with precarious concern in the north of Lebanon.
Factors of erosion can move mountains, seas and rivers from their original places, and these are not merely natural phenomena. There are similarities to this in politics, such that the Palestinian revolution was translocated from its original geography of armed struggle to settle in the arms of the geography of a political solution. The first such move was Arafat's departure from the last geographical stronghold of "Tripoli, Lebanon and its camps" through direct Egyptian and French efforts. The primary outcome was the Arab siege on Egypt being broken, with Arafat's ship docking on Egyptian shores in a move described as violating the greatest taboo at the time. This was a strategic landing which then led, after quite some time had elapsed, to the point in which President Mubarak held Arafat by the hand and delivered him to Gaza through a crossing controlled by Israel.
Palestinians obtained their independent decision, or whatever independence was made available to them, but they lost the safe and effective support that could have enabled this decision to transform into an independent state on the ground. They declared their political independence through their unanimously agreed upon parliament, and from Algerian territory, with all the moral and historical significance that this entails.
At the time, states raced to inaugurate embassies for the nascent state in exile, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization's representation and presence developed even in the United States of America and Israel. The Palestinian masses inside the homeland were given additional and renewed energy. They resumed their struggle, especially the Intifada of stones that went as far as impacting the Israeli government, which found breaking the taboo of dealing with the PLO inescapable. The Palestinians, with collective international consensus support almost unparalleled in history, entered the Madrid and Oslo eras.
The factors of political erosion, to which I referred in the introduction, undermined both slogans: that of liberation and of independence, and it even transformed these concepts that had until then been self-evident. Liberation was transformed into a settlement, and independence remained confined to the framework of its eloquent declaration written by the poet Mahmoud Darwish, which many considered to be little more than a poem, despite the fact that it generated significant shifts in policies and attitudes on Palestinian affairs.
Today… things are not trending towards liberation or independence in the conventional sense. Liberation, which is the principle and permanent slogan of the Palestinian national movement, its revolutions and forces … and independence, both as a declaration and an effort, and which is the most commonly used term, both failed to liberate the homeland or the people. However, what these terms have achieved is preserving the most precious possession that the Palestinians have managed to retain, the dream and embrace of the two irreplaceable besieged slogans. Just as factors of erosion move mountains, seas and rivers from their places, so do Palestinians still hope that things will change, with their first and last weapon being this: "No white flag shall be raised, and no dream shall be killed by the dreamers."
