Mustafa Barghouti reflects on the future of the Palestinian struggle in a time of genocide and ethnic cleansing

General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, Mustafa Barghouti, meets with members of the national and Islamic forces in Gaza City on March 20, 2022. (Photo: Youssef Abu Watfa/APA Images)

Dr. Mustafa Barghouti is a Palestinian physician and politician, serving as the General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, which he founded in 2002. Barghouti is also known for founding the Palestinian Medical Relief Society in 1979, which provides medical services to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. He has featured prominently in both English-language and Arabic-language media over the past year since October 7, emerging as a prominent advocate for Palestinian national unity and the holding of immediate democratic elections as an urgent requirement for confronting the threat of genocide and ethnic cleansing faced by Palestinians. He has strongly advocated over the past year for the rights of Palestinians to resist occupation and apartheid, in Gaza and beyond. Mondoweiss spoke to Dr. Barghouti on October 2, 2024, to reflect on the ongoing genocide that started a year ago and what it has meant for the Palestinian struggle.

Mondoweiss: It has been an entire year since the Israeli genocide in Gaza began, and it has now expanded into a regional war involving Hezbollah and, potentially, Iran. When Hamas launched its surprise attack a year ago, what went through your mind? Did you expect that the Israeli response would be a genocide like the one you have witnessed?

Mustafa Barghouti: Nobody expected that the second largest and strongest Israeli command brigade, [the Israeli army’s Gaza Brigade] would collapse as it did. That led to many things that, in my opinion, were never planned, such as taking civilians prisoners. There was a certain level of chaos. I didn’t, of course, know that there would be such an attack, but I did expect some sort of explosion [from Gaza], because of the fact that Israel was ignoring any demand to end this state of siege. We witnessed a situation where the Israeli occupation had continued for 57 years. Ethnic cleansing continued for 76 years. The siege on Gaza was becoming unbearable. You’re talking about 17 years of siege on Gaza that led to a situation where people had almost no electricity, only a few hours a day, where 24 percent of the water was either polluted or saltwater, where 80 percent of young graduates were unemployed, and where there was not only a complete economic disaster but a total loss of hope. I think when we reached that moment on October 7, it became clear to all Palestinians that Israel had no plan whatsoever for a peaceful resolution of this situation.

The new Israeli government is a fascist government with people in it like [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir, who are themselves settlers and were previously accused by the Israeli judicial system of being members of terrorist groups. They declared clearly that the Israeli plan is to fill the West Bank with settlers and settlements so that Palestinians would lose any hope for a state of their own, and they would have to choose between leaving, which is ethnic cleansing, living a life of subjugation, which is apartheid, or dying, which is genocide. In reality, this is an officially declared Israeli policy. So, of course, people were expecting some sort of reaction to get us out of a terrible situation in which Israel was literally eliminating the Palestinian cause. Netanyahu was very clear about his plans. He declared that the goal of normalization with Arab countries was to liquidate the Palestinian cause.

And if you want another reason, just two weeks before October 7, Netanyahu appeared before the United Nations General Assembly and showed a map of Israel that included all of the West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip, all of the Golan Heights, and a map of the new Middle East, which he is trying to construct, as he said, for 50 years to come.

Let’s fast forward to today. Israel has announced that it has launched a “limited” ground invasion of southern Lebanon. At the same time, the fighting in Gaza has for now subsided, but airstrikes and massacres against the civilian population continue regularly, and the likelihood of a ceasefire now seems farther than ever. Where do you think things are going, both in Gaza and in terms of a regional escalation?

First of all, you have to understand that Israel did not really scale back its operations in Gaza. It continues, maybe to a lesser degree than before, but they’ve already destroyed almost 80 percent of all homes in Gaza, partially or completely. They’ve destroyed all universities. They’ve destroyed most schools. They’ve destroyed 34 hospitals out of 36. They’ve squeezed more than 1.7 million people into an area that is no more than 12 square miles. On average we see 50 to 100 people killed every day.

And at the same time, they are now invading Lebanon. I don’t believe what they say, that Israel is going to have a limited operation in Lebanon. In my opinion, they will try to conduct a military ground operation that will go in from two directions; one in the direction of the Litani River, trying to push everybody from the south to north of the river, and maybe beyond it, and at the same time, another flank of the Israeli military operation will go into the Beqaa Valley, trying to cut off any contact between Syria and Lebanon.

In my opinion, Israel is planning to occupy the south of Lebanon completely, and maybe more, for a very long time and in a permanent fashion. The only thing that will stop them is the amount of losses they will incur because of the fighting of Hezbollah. Nothing else will stop them.

This raises the question; when Biden, the president of France, and other Western leaders come out and say Israel has the right to defend itself, does that mean that the right of self-defense includes invading other countries, bombarding other capitals, and occupying the land of other people? And if Israel has the right to defend itself, do Palestinians also have the right to defend themselves, especially since they are under occupation? What we see here is a horrible double standard. It is shocking when you see France declaring that it participated in defending Israel from Iranian rockets, alongside the United States and some other regional countries. Did any of them even consider participating in protecting innocent Palestinian civilians, where 51,000 Palestinians have already been killed, including the 10,000 that are still missing under the rubble? The number of Palestinians killed after this war in Gaza will probably exceed 100,000 if we include those who will die from diseases and the injured who will die due to lack of medical treatment.

Iran has already launched an unprecedented missile attack against Israel, but they attacked only military installations. What is interesting here is that both Hezbollah and Hamas are only attacking military installations, while Israel is bombarding a civilian population.

And do you think, then, that this situation might escalate into a regional war if Israel is unwilling to withdraw from southern Lebanon, if it’s indeed going to occupy it?

Absolutely. I think that’s exactly what Netanyahu wants. He wants to drag the region into a war. He wants to drag the United States into it, or maybe he already has a joint plan with the United States — because I don’t think Biden needs to be dragged. He’s already in this. He is complicit in this genocide. I think he’s trying to bring the United States into the war so that it will attack or participate in attacking Iran. I think this is one of his main goals, to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

And so where is the place of Gaza in all of this?

In my opinion, Netanyahu’s original plan was to ethnically cleanse Gaza. And he didn’t hide that. He said it on the second day of the war on October 8. His military spokesperson, Richard Hecht, declared that all Gazans have to be evicted to the Sinai. They failed. They failed because of the steadfastness and heroism of the Palestinian people in Gaza, but also because Egypt did not cooperate. Egypt realized that if Palestinians were pushed into the Sinai, it would be a major security disaster for Egypt and would threaten its national security. Since Netanyahu couldn’t conduct complete ethnic cleansing, he’s conducting genocide in Gaza.

But his ultimate goal, I think, once he’s done with Lebanon, will be to try to evict everybody from northern Gaza and annex it to Israel. This would be the Plan B to completely annexing the Strip or the total ethnic cleansing of the population of Gaza. But that doesn’t mean that he will necessarily succeed.

And would the rest of Gaza continue to witness “low intensity” warfare in that event?

It will continue. Already, Netanyahu declared that he is going to continue the Israeli occupation of Gaza. He wants to create some kind of civil structure of collaborators who would work under the Israeli occupation, as they tried to do with the Village Leagues in the West Bank during the 1980s.

Let’s step back a bit. Palestinians suffer from deep political fragmentation, perhaps today more than ever. There have been talks on achieving national unity more recently in Beijing. What is the significance of these talks and do you think something will come out of them?

Something will come out of them if the Palestinian Authority agrees to implement them. So far, it hasn’t.

Of course, these talks were significant, whether in Moscow or Beijing. I personally drafted both agreements in cooperation with others, and the agreement in Beijing was clearer, more specific. It included three very specific steps [toward national unity]. The first one is the formation of a unified national consensus government, which would be in charge of both the West Bank and Gaza, guaranteeing their unity and preventing Netanyahu’s plan of separating the two entities from one another. The second step would call for a meeting of the so-called interim Palestinian leadership, or unified leadership, according to our previous agreement in Cairo in 2011. And the third step would entail the meeting of all the leaders of the Palestinian factions to draft a plan to implement all these decisions.

“Those who oppose armed resistance oppose any form of resistance.”

Mustafa Barghouti

The agreement states that the president should initiate immediate consultations to form a national consensus government, but unfortunately, he hasn’t. So far, the Palestinian Authority has not moved in that direction. As long as it does not, this agreement will remain on paper.

You have very publicly supported the resistance in Gaza and across Palestine, and the role you have played in the media over the past year has been to develop a discourse that supports resistance. Yet the genocide in Gaza has been pointed to by the Palestinian Authority and its supporters that resistance, particularly armed resistance, will only bring about our destruction, and will serve as an excuse by Israel for genocide and ethnic cleansing. How do you respond to this?

Those who oppose armed resistance oppose any form of resistance, not only armed resistance. They are opposing even peaceful and nonviolent resistance. You know me, I’ve been an advocate of and an activist in nonviolent resistance all my life. But I say what international law says. I’m defending the right of the people under occupation to resist in all forms. International law says that people under military occupation, wherever they are, have the right to resist occupation in all forms, including military forms, as long as they respect international humanitarian law.

Israel is not only arresting people engaging in armed resistance. It is arresting people who are even engaging in verbal resistance and other peaceful kinds of resistance.

And by the way, Hamas stuck to nonviolent resistance for at least five years between 2014 and 2019. The Israeli response was severe violence against the peaceful marches that were organized in Gaza and in the West Bank.

It is very important, especially for younger people here, to understand that the oppressor, the colonizer, the aggressor, always tries to prevent the people under oppression from their right to resist injustice. Frantz Fanon spoke about the right of the people who are oppressed to practice violence against the oppressor’s violence, but what we see here is an even worse situation, where the oppressor is trying to prevent Palestinians from resisting in any form. If you engage in military resistance, they will accuse you of terrorism. If you do peaceful resistance, they will accuse you of violence. If you do verbal resistance, they will accuse you of provocations or incitement. If you are a foreigner supporting the Palestinian cause, you will be accused of anti-Semitism, and if you are a Jewish person supporting Palestinian rights, you will be called a self-hating Jew.

It’s a whole battery of ideological and tactical slogans that are used by the Israeli establishment to deny the people the right to resist. It’s just another way of dehumanizing Palestinians. On October 7, the first Israeli line was to dehumanize Hamas and immediately dehumanize Palestinians in general. That’s why Gallant called us human animals. And the goal is to justify the killing of civilians and the killing of children. Because, for them, we are not human beings.

So your response to some of the criticisms from Palestinians is that Israel doesn’t need an excuse to carry out what it’s been doing.

Of course not. The worst crime in the world is to blame the victim. It is absolutely unacceptable to blame the victim for what the aggressor is doing to them.

And related to the issue of national unity: let’s say that tomorrow the PA agrees to some sort of unity government. What does that unity government even mean when there is a fundamental disagreement not only on how to resist the Israeli occupation but on whether to resist it at all?

Well, of course, that’s a major problem. But in my opinion, the two main causes of internal Palestinian division are the following.

First, disagreement about the program. The Palestinian Authority, and to a large extent, the parties in the Executive Committee of the PLO, believed in Oslo — not only as an agreement but as an approach, which means they believe that the problem can be solved through negotiations with the Israeli side even when we have a severely skewed imbalance of power in Israel’s interest. That line believed in two illusions: the first illusion was that the Zionist movement and Israel as an establishment were ready for a compromise with Palestinians — life has shown that they are not ready for that, which has been proven when the Israeli Knesset decided not to allow a Palestinian state — and second, I think the whole idea of a compromise was demolished when the Israeli Knesset approved the Nation-State Law, which said that self-determination in the land of historic Palestine is exclusive for Jewish people.

So the Oslo line failed, and Israel killed it. And the approach, which believed in a compromise, failed. The other illusion that this approach believed in was that the United States could mediate between Palestinians and Israel. This also failed because the United States is totally biased toward Israel.

Since this line has failed, the programmatic cause of internal division is finished. It’s gone.

The second cause of internal division was that there was competition over authority between Fatah and Hamas. Let’s be fair and admit that. Hamas was running Gaza. Fatah was running the West Bank. Today there is no Authority anymore. Gaza is occupied, and the West Bank is completely occupied. So there is no reason for competition over an Authority that doesn’t exist — it’s an Authority without authority.

But there’s still fundamental disagreement over strategy. Not even over resistance, but over the idea of resistance.

“Had we had elections in 2021, maybe we would not have had this war.”

Mustafa Barghouti

Absolutely, because some people are still stuck in believing in Oslo, and they still dream about bringing back what was lost. But they are a very small minority now. That’s why we say the road to unity starts with two stages. The interim stage is to find a way for us to compromise and create some sort of interim unified leadership, because the crisis we are in cannot wait, and the risks we face are too great. And the second stage is to lead to free democratic elections that include Palestinians in Palestine and outside of Palestine. Only then will the people decide which strategy should be adopted democratically.

Of course, I have to tell you, had we had elections in 2021, maybe we would not have had this war.

Do you mean when the sitting PA president canceled the elections by using Jerusalem as an excuse? The excuse was that Palestinians in Jerusalem would not be allowed to participate by the Israelis because they held Israeli permanent residence IDs, correct?

Exactly. It was an excuse, because when we met with all the Palestinian factions in Egypt, we had a plan to get around that, and everybody agreed with this plan. We were going to conduct elections in Jerusalem without Israeli permission, without giving Israel the veto power over our elections, and our plan was to spread 150 ballot boxes all over Jerusalem, and then have 20 cameras monitoring each box. And let Israel try to stop us. I am sure, had we had that system, the number of young Palestinians who would have voted would have been much larger than the number of Palestinians who would have voted in accordance with the Oslo arrangements in Jerusalem — because it would have been an act of defiance and resistance against Israeli authorities. But unfortunately, elections were canceled. Had we had elections, no single party would have held an absolute majority. And by the way, that applies to the situation today, according to all the polls.

Because we have a fully proportional system now. If we had a pluralistic government, a pluralistic system, then I think this would have created a situation where the blockade or the siege on Gaza probably could have been broken. And maybe we would not have had this war.

Many have said that the West Bank did not play a major role in supporting Gaza and in resisting the occupation. People in Gaza hoped that there would be a popular intifada that would serve as its own front in the war. What’s your assessment of the role of the West Bank and what do you think is standing in the way of it having a more active role in resistance?

I never agreed, and I don’t like at all, any approach that separates the West Bank from Gaza and Jerusalem from the West Bank. Look, there was a time when most resistance activities were happening here in the West Bank. And people were screaming, “Where is Gaza? Why does Gaza not do anything?” There was a time in 2021 when most of the center of the Palestinian struggle was in Jerusalem, until Gaza intervened. So I don’t agree with this kind of separation. I think the West Bank is living in a new kind of Intifada since 2015.

“The first goal of the Palestinian struggle today is to stay in Palestine.”

Mustafa Barghouti

People are obliged to resist because of Israeli settlement expansion, because of what Israel is trying to do. And I challenge those who say that the West Bank is not participating, because the Israeli army cannot enter any city, any village, any town, any camp without facing increased popular resistance. But the conditions are different in the West Bank — in terms of the presence of the Israeli army, and in terms of the number of people who were arrested. We’re talking about 11,000 people so far. And it also has to do with the passive, negative, and unconstructive behavior of the Palestinian Authority.

We have to understand that the goals of the struggle are many. In this sense, the first goal of the Palestinian struggle today is to stay in Palestine, to be steadfast and remain. The fact that the number of Palestinians that remained in Palestine even after the displacement of 70 percent of the Palestinian people is now larger than the number of Jewish Israeli people, is the greatest dilemma and greatest flaw of the Zionist movement. And that’s why I believe the issue of staying in Palestine is very essential.

“Gaza is happening because of the West Bank.”

Mustafa Barghouti

And it’s not just about staying. The people here, the demographic presence, would not have been so effective had we not resisted. So the first line is that people should stay. The second line is that they should resist injustice, occupation, and apartheid. And that’s why I don’t blame the people in 1948 if they are not so active under the system of fascism. As long as they stay in Palestine and remain.

Is the West Bank next after Gaza?

The West Bank is the main target before Gaza. Gaza is happening because of the West Bank. Netanyahu wants to annex the West Bank. And not just Netanyahu and his government, but the Zionist establishment as a whole. But they cannot annex the West Bank with all these people in it. That’s why they are combining settlement expansion and gradual annexation with displacement of Palestinians, whether by force or by creating difficult social and economic conditions. And that’s why we have to understand that the main goal of this whole attack is the West Bank, including, of course, Jerusalem.

Netanyahu openly says that he is correcting Ben-Gurion’s mistake — that he did not displace the Palestinians who stayed in 1948 and did not occupy the West Bank and Gaza and expel its population.

Netanyahu also thinks he’s correcting Rabin’s mistake, who entertained the possibility, or potential, of some limited kind of Palestinian self-governance.

And third, he thinks he is correcting the mistake of Sharon, who had to withdraw from Gaza [in 2005]. This is Netanyahu’s mindset: he believes in himself as the greatest Zionist leader after Jabotinsky. His main goal is the total annexation of all of Palestine — and beyond. You heard what Trump said; he just discovered that Israel is very small, and it has to expand.

Do you think there is any room for hope amidst this despair?

Yes, there is a great amount of hope. There is hope in people’s resilience. There is hope in people’s resistance. I believe in the younger generation in Palestine. I think they are showing fantastic models of resilience and resistance. I’m not talking only about military resistance or even civil resistance. I’m also talking about this fantastic movement among a younger Palestinian generation worldwide, especially in countries like the United States and Europe, where you have a whole new generation of Palestinians who are regenerated and reenergized.

I think that October 7 reenergized a whole Palestinian generation everywhere. And I think this opens the road for a new kind of Palestinian unity around a unified project that includes all Palestinians wherever they live, whether in Palestine or outside Palestine.