The third death of Palestinian politics

JVL Introduction

Palestinian academic Yezid Sayigh is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon.

He describes himself as coming from a position of what Fred Halliday called “‘complex solidarity”.

It does not make for easy or comfortable reading, affirming as it does that Palestinian politics faces an existential crisis, echoing the words of Hani Al-Masri that the Palestinian “national project” has reached a “comprehensive structural impasse—indeed, a state of actual collapse.”

It is a crisis with deep roots going back to the Oslo period when all factions failed to generate forms of liberatory political struggle, other than the armed resistance they had inherited, appropriate to the new situation they faced.

The challenge is clear. “For any form of collective politics to be effective—or even to emerge at all—it must develop shared arenas, common understandings, and recognized leadership.”

His unasked question is whether these are anywhere in sight?

RK

This article was originally published by Middle East Reflections on Mon 16 Feb 2026. Read the original here.