After two years and ten months have passed on its last meeting, the PLO’s Central Council has convened recently although a considerable part of the previous council has not been executed yet.

This time the council has convened during the most dangerous circumstances that the Palestinian cause has faced for the level of conspiring against it reached the extent of entirely liquidating it.   

The enemies of the Palestinian people are trying to benefit from the unprecedented flaw in the balance of powerand the total bias of the American administration towards their plans in order to impose a complete liquidation project.

It began with entrenching the annexation and Judaising of Jerusalem then erasing even the possibility of negotiating about it then liquidating the refugees issue and their right of return and then the crazy expansion of settlement activity aiming at destroying any possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state with real sovereignty.  

What have the Israeli measures and Trump’s last stands proved were that the compromise between the Palestinians and the Zionist movement has failed entirely because Israel didn’t, doesn’t and won’t want it to happen.

All the Zionist movement wanted from the Oslo Accords was to neutralise the first Intifada’s impact and consequences and gain time to complete the operation of annexation and Judaising the West Bank together with Jerusalem as well as causing a deep division in the Palestinian arena.   

Since the Oslo Accords have failed and since wagering on a compromise with Israel, like wagering on the USA’s role as a mediator, has failed utterly, the time has come to realise that we Palestinians are not in a “solution stage” with the Zionist movement and Israel but in a stage of struggle for accomplishing the objectives of our people towards freedom, the right of return and liberation.

Consequently, what’s needed from the Palestinian Central Council, who has been responsible for endorsing the Oslo Accords, to acknowledge that the negotiation approach and Oslo’s approach has failed and is finished. It should adopt an alternative approach instead of searching for mediators for negotiations that won’t take place.

This approach should focus on embracing a national strategy in order to change the balance of powers relying on comprehensive popular resistance and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. It should achieve a real national unity and build a unified national leadership that stimulates once again all the components of the Palestinian people in their struggle to realise their rights, including the activation of the PLO and regaining its role, which was marginalised in favour of the Palestinian authority.  

The Central Council must take decisions that liberate the Palestinian people and their institutions from all the restrictions and commitments of agreements that Israel not only didn’t honourbut also violates daily, including the annulment of all the historical concessions which were presented to Israel on the hope of reaching a compromise or what was called the “two-state solution”.  

It is necessary for the Central Council to be capable of sending a message to the Palestinian people and the world that its decisions this time aren’t tactical manoeuvres but rather strategic and historic decisions and will be implemented.

It is also important that a clear message be sent to the world that what the Palestinian people are facing at the hands of Israel is a mixture of three criminal operations; displacement along with ethnic cleansing, occupation and the racial apartheid regime.

If Israel, with the backing of the US administration, killed off the possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state, it will solely bear the historical responsibility of the so-called “two-state solution” failure.  

The alternative for the independent state will not and possibly cannot be the current situation which is the apartheid and racial discrimination of a one state. However, it is the right of the Palestinian people to resist and struggle with all available means to overthrow the Israeli apartheid regime in all the lands of Palestine and establish the democratic one state over all the lands of Palestine in which everybody are equal not only in the civil right but in the national rights.

In other words, if Israel wants through its settlers to seize the occupied Jerusalem and continue to usurp the lands of Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem and Ramallah, it is our right when we are resisting their thievery to demand once again our rights as Palestinians, including the rights of refugees in Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Galilee, the Negev and the Triangle.    

There is a historical opportunity to build a new road that is different from all what has taken place during the last twenty five years. If the Central Council seized this opportunity, it will find the entire Palestinian people by its side. The Palestinian people didn’t spare any sacrifices but it will not accept and cannot endure any new frustration.  

The writer is Secretary-General of the Palestinian National Initiative.