Who Can Carry This Momentum Forward? Palestine and the Question of Political Agency

In the first weeks following the attack launched by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions against the Israeli occupation on October 7, 2023, the questions circulating across Arab intellectual and public spaces, among academics, researchers, and activists, reflected a sense that something could still be done. They concerned the event itself, its motivations and possible consequences, but also how to respond to it, how to act in defense of Palestinians in Gaza, and how to exert pressure to stop the war that Israel had begun waging against them. These questions did not necessarily develop into clearly defined research projects, yet they remained present in discussions and initiatives, and in efforts to assess where different actors stood and what instruments were available to them. Despite the enormity of what was unfolding, the space for action still seemed open to possibilities of influence.

As the war continued, however, this sense of possibility began to recede. The November 2023 truce came and went, hostilities resumed on December 1, and the months passed until the following Ramadan without any clear prospect of ending the massacre. It became apparent that a temporary suspension of the killing could form part of the management of the war and negotiations over its terms, without necessarily providing a path toward ending it. With each new round of killing, starvation, and displacement, Israel’s determination to continue became increasingly evident, as did the inability to stop it. The gap widened between what people were witnessing and what they could meaningfully influence.

This impasse also changed the nature of engagement with the unfolding events. A question oriented toward action presupposes, even implicitly, the existence of an actor who can be addressed, an instrument that can be used, and a possibility worth pursuing. When repeated attempts to intervene are met with the same outcome—the continuation of killing—understanding what is happening increasingly becomes the central concern. In this sense, the shift in questions can be understood as a consequence of the declining sense that meaningful influence remains possible, even as some initiatives continued to explore ways of exercising it.

Against this background, the center of gravity shifted toward attempts to comprehend what was taking place: What is happening to us? How should this catastrophe be defined? Where does it belong within humanity’s historical experience of colonialism, dispossession, and genocide? There was a need to situate these events within language, history, and memory, and to identify concepts capable of grasping a catastrophe whose duration and brutality exceeded the limits of everyday endurance. This was an intellectual and legal necessity, but also a response to a profound social and human trauma affecting how people understood themselves and the world in which they lived.

The attention devoted to the question of genocide, and to understanding the colonial structures that produce it, has therefore been, and remains, essential to defending Palestinians and preventing their experience from being erased or stripped of its political meaning. Such work also has the potential to reshape the convictions of sections of global public opinion and undermine the legitimacy of the occupation and the narratives that sustain it. Yet the continuation of the catastrophe raises a further question: how can this accumulated international support be translated into political leverage? How does recognition become pressure, and pressure produce results? Who has the capacity to carry the accumulated knowledge, recognition, and solidarity into the political arena and build upon its effects?

Legal and human rights mechanisms themselves constitute forms of political action, insofar as they create opportunities for accountability, pressure, and increasing the costs of wrongdoing. Their impact, however, depends on the existence of forces capable of using those opportunities and connecting them to sustained demands and political positions. Bridging the distance between condemning the occupation and constraining its ability to continue its project requires efforts that preserve what has been achieved, carry it from one arena to another, and prevent it from dissipating when public attention declines or the world turns to another catastrophe.

Several European countries have already witnessed examples of this translation into action: lawsuits initiated by human rights organizations, court rulings halting exports of military components, decisions suspending certain arms export licenses, and targeted sanctions against settlers and entities associated with attacks on Palestinians. These developments took place where legal, political, and social actors brought the Palestinian cause into courts, parliaments, and the streets, connecting legal arguments to instruments of pressure and influence. Such experiences demonstrate the importance of forces capable of carrying accumulated achievements forward and translating them into results, however limited or vulnerable to reversal those results may be.

Arab actors themselves, including young activists across the region, increasingly appear to expect the results of their efforts to emerge in European and American arenas rather than within their own societies, where the space available to them has narrowed. Even solidarity initiatives originating in the region, such as the Sumud Convoy, have substantially declined amid the same erosion of confidence in the possibility of exerting influence. The issue is not one of choosing between these arenas. What is achieved abroad matters, but it requires political and social mechanisms within our region, and particularly in Palestine, capable of carrying those achievements forward, building upon them, and transforming them into tangible political capacity that supports Palestinians’ continued presence on their land and limits the occupation’s ability to impose new realities upon them.

The urgency of this question becomes even greater when we consider that what has happened in Palestine constitutes, alongside the humanitarian and material catastrophe, a process of destroying Palestinian social structures and the institutional frameworks through which political agency is exercised. Assassinations, the targeting of leaders and cadres, and the destruction of institutions affect political movements and their relationships with society, undermining their capacity for organization, political action, struggle, and resistance. These developments also affect what the existence of such structures represents within Palestinian collective consciousness, and how the possibilities of resistance and the future are imagined.

In the West Bank, the crisis of political agency long preceded the war. Sections of the national movement had been absorbed into the institutional structure of the Palestinian Authority, altering their priorities and their relationship with the occupation. In its current form, entangled with the colonial system, the Authority organizes its presence within arrangements established by that system and ties the conditions of its continued existence to them. This leaves it unable to carry forward the tasks of struggle and resistance. At the same time, political organizations and forms of resistance seeking to operate outside this framework face persecution and restrictions on their ability to act.

The contradiction thus becomes increasingly urgent: an accumulated body of legal and moral support is emerging around the Palestinian cause, with some of its instruments of influence located abroad, precisely as the Palestinian and Arab forces capable of carrying that support into the political arena within the region and Palestine are being weakened.

The occupation’s continued actions, despite international solidarity, legal mobilization, and mass demonstrations, expose the limits of relying on global support alone. Following the Hebron operation, Netanyahu ordered the city placed under siege and preparations made for a complete closure of the West Bank. The operation itself demonstrates the persistence of resistance, yet the occupation’s continued escalation makes the question of the forces capable of restraining it all the more pressing. Alongside existing forms of resistance, there remains a need for sustained and organized political and social agency capable of translating international support into tangible gains on the ground, supporting resistance, and building upon its effects in ways that constrain the occupation’s ability to impose its own realities.

Completing the work undertaken in the intellectual and legal spheres therefore requires asking about the political actor itself, the conditions of its existence, and its capacity to act. What can be done today in defense of Palestinians? Through which instruments and structures? What forms of organization can respond to the destruction that has occurred and open possibilities beyond waiting for decisions made by the occupation and its allies?

Moreover, the accumulated support is vulnerable to erosion over time. On the third anniversary of October 7, conditions in Gaza have yet to improve, and Palestinians continue to be killed despite the accumulated condemnation and recognition. If this support finds no political force capable of translating it into concrete consequences, it risks being depleted. The occupation may even succeed in turning the consequences of the catastrophe into an advantage of its own. The actor capable of imposing realities on the ground can subsequently redefine those realities, rearranging their causes and consequences into a narrative that lends its victory an acceptable meaning. Under such circumstances, preserving the narratives of the oppressed becomes inseparable from their ability to remain political actors and challenge the victorious party’s efforts to consolidate the reality it seeks to establish.

From this perspective, we can understand the occupation’s attempts to redefine sections of the international movement supporting Palestinians as an extension of an Islamist tide threatening the West, while cultivating closer relations with right-wing political forces on the basis of confronting that supposed threat. In his July 2024 address to the US Congress, Netanyahu presented Israel’s war as a defense of civilization while linking protesters opposing it to Iran. By expanding relations with the European right and seeking to benefit from its growing presence in public life, the occupation attempts to reassert its place within the West and reclaim its association with the values the West professes, an association that the war has subjected to profound moral scrutiny. In doing so, it seeks to transform images of killing and destruction from evidence of culpability into supposed demonstrations of its resolve in a struggle it claims to be waging on behalf of others.

The history of domination is filled with attempts to present occupation as a civilizing mission, subjugation as modernization, and war as a path toward democracy. The justice of a cause does not guarantee that those who uphold it will retain the ability to define its meaning, particularly when their political forces have been displaced from the arenas in which outcomes are determined and official narratives are written. The weakening of organized political agency therefore threatens the very achievements produced by efforts to understand and document the catastrophe. Rebuilding such agency becomes a condition for protecting accumulated knowledge and recognition, and for preventing material defeat from becoming a defeat over meaning as well.

A Crisis of Political Agency Across the Region

It is precisely at this point that the question extends from Palestine to the wider region. The crisis of political agency exposed by Gaza is also part of a regional trajectory that preceded the war and was shaped, to a significant extent, during the years following the Arab uprisings. Those uprisings opened political space for social and political forces seeking to reclaim a role in determining the affairs of their societies. In response, local, regional, and international forces mobilized. Although their projects and positions differed, they converged in rejecting certain transformations that threatened their positions or interests, and in working to obstruct them and reconfigure the political arena.

Over the decade that followed the uprisings, this obstruction took different forms. In Egypt, the 2013 military coup was followed by widespread repression and the closure of political space. In Syria, Yemen, and Libya, wars and external interventions exhausted the possibilities for political transformation and depleted broad sections of society, while restructuring conflicts along armed lines, some of which acquired sectarian or regional dimensions. In Tunisia, the political trajectory initiated in 2021 undermined an experiment that had, for several years, sustained the possibility of a different political outcome. These trajectories varied in their causes and in the responsibilities borne by the actors involved, but one of their shared consequences was the narrowing of the space in which societies could build independent political power.

Despite the differences among these cases, large parts of the region came to be governed either by authorities monopolizing the public sphere or by conflicts that exhausted society and fragmented its forces across competing fronts and divisions. The capacity of political parties, trade unions, and social organizations to sustain political projects rooted in people’s everyday lives, and capable of continuity and influence, declined. Movements, initiatives, and forms of protest persisted, but there is a substantial difference between the existence of dissent and the existence of a force capable of organizing it, accumulating its influence, and negotiating on its behalf. In the resulting vacuum, the state, or whichever authority exercises control, comes close to determining the boundaries of political possibility on its own, while society’s capacity to impose its own choices diminishes.

During this period, the intermediary layer between society and the state was systematically crushed, including trade unions, political parties, political groups, and independent social organizations. This is the layer through which society can organize its demands, raise the political cost of ignoring them for ruling authorities, and compel those authorities to respond to forms of warfare and violence such as those witnessed in Gaza. When this intermediary layer is destroyed, anger and solidarity remain, but society loses much of the institutional capacity needed to transform them into pressure on state decision-making. Consequently, political inaction becomes less costly for those in power, however widespread the popular demands for action may be.

This brings us back to Gaza and to the question of the conditions that allowed the occupation to exercise such extensive violence. This time, the war did not remain confined to Gaza. Israeli strikes extended to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Qatar, producing what amounted to a declaration of war against the region as a whole. Could Israel have waged a war of this scale in 2010, 2011, or 2012, while expecting to contain its regional repercussions to the same degree? The comparison also extends to changes over the past decade in the ability of Palestinian and Arab actors to resist measures such as the closure of the West Bank. Such a counterfactual question cannot be answered conclusively, and the scale and particular circumstances of October 7 remain central to explaining what followed. Nevertheless, the comparison invites examination of the region’s transformation: what does it mean for the occupation to wage its war in a region whose political forces have already been exhausted, whose societies have been deprived of instruments of pressure, and whose capacity to influence events has been severely constrained?

In this sense, the question of political agency becomes essential both to understanding the conditions preceding the catastrophe and to responding to what it has revealed. Postponing this question becomes increasingly costly as the remaining organizational structures continue to be depleted. A similar gap can be observed in debates over the legacy of the Arab uprisings. It is often argued that their political failures did not erase the awareness they generated concerning democracy, freedom, and people’s rights. Even if we accept this assessment, the question remains: which forces will carry that awareness into political reality? Knowledge of rights, however widespread, requires social and political capacity capable of transforming those rights into demands that can be achieved and protected.

The issue, therefore, concerns the connection between consciousness and action, a connection that has been broken or weakened. Neglecting it may result in a situation in which our understanding of the causes of our powerlessness expands while our capacity to overcome that powerlessness contracts. Societies become increasingly capable of describing what has happened to them, defining the crime, and identifying those responsible, while the question of how to regain the initiative receives comparatively little attention. This is where the danger of remaining within the questions generated by catastrophe lies: despite their legitimacy and necessity, they may become the horizon beyond which political research and debate cease to advance.

Political Agency in Confronting Networks of Domination

Recovering the question of political agency begins with the political imagination through which we approach it, and with our understanding of the place of Palestinian action and its connections beyond its immediate arena. If we imagine such action as confined to Gaza or Palestine, or reduce resistance to armed struggle alone, we formulate our questions within those boundaries. When we instead situate Palestinian action within a broader global network of struggle and resistance confronting structures of domination that extend beyond Israel, our understanding of what political agency can mean, and what it can accomplish, begins to change.

This leads to a fundamental question: agency in confrontation with what? Answering it requires an analysis of the political environment that is commensurate with the relationships producing the crisis. What is happening in Palestine is connected to relations of domination extending beyond the occupation itself, encompassing networks of military and political support, economic interests, institutions, and discourses that protect the occupation and reproduce its superiority. Across the region, from Sudan and Yemen to Somalia and elsewhere, local conflicts intersect with interests and interventions that transcend national borders. Thinking seriously about political agency requires understanding these connections: how economic, military, ideological, and religious instruments of influence reinforce one another, and how their interaction generates the capacity to impose and sustain political realities.

These relationships can be understood as constituting a broad project of domination whose political and military center of gravity lies in the United States and its allies, extending through partners, institutions, and networks of interests. This structure seeks to preserve its capacity to shape the region’s direction and control its political choices, while accommodating differences among its political systems and societies and the diverse positions occupied by its constituent actors. From this perspective, the occupation forms part of a wider structure that extends beyond its immediate boundaries. Confronting it therefore requires understanding its function and connections within that structure.

Such an understanding demands examining the network as an interconnected whole, while recognizing the unequal positions of its actors, including their contradictions and rivalries. The consequences of actions undertaken by forces whose interests do not fully coincide may reinforce one another. These forces may converge in opposing a particular political transformation, only to compete subsequently over the distribution of its outcomes. Understanding the mechanisms connecting these different levels, and identifying points of dependence and potential pressure within them, therefore becomes an essential part of any serious conception of political action. This approach prevents both the reduction of each arena to its own particular circumstances and its absorption into a single explanation that overlooks what distinguishes it.

Expanding the analysis of this structure also reveals the region’s connections with societies across the Global South, which face, in varying forms and degrees, constraints on their resources, political choices, and development prospects. Alongside understanding networks of domination, we need to examine the relationships among the societies subjected to them and the shared conditions that make it possible to connect their struggles. The possibilities for political agency are also shaped by an understanding of where these societies’ interests intersect and how their experiences of oppression might provide a foundation for collective action.

On this basis, our conception of political agency changes, giving rise to questions concerning parties, movements, and organizational forms. How to establish a party, reconstruct a movement, or choose an organizational structure becomes a question that follows from understanding what we expect these institutions to accomplish, the environments in which they will operate, and the relations of power they will confront. When we return to familiar organizational forms, the question becomes whether they can carry this vision, why earlier forms proved ineffective or vulnerable to co-optation and dismantling, and how those weaknesses relate to the transformations experienced by their societies.

This requires thinking about forms of political agency capable of emerging within their own societies while developing the potential to expand and coordinate with others. Such efforts may begin around a specific issue or within a limited sphere, provided they recognize the connections between that sphere and its wider environment, and what is required to prevent it from remaining isolated. Expansion depends on substantive relationships that enable the exchange of knowledge and experience, the coordination of pressure, and the linking of interests that may initially appear separate. This horizon extends beyond the region to societies across the Global South.

The purpose of recognizing networks of domination is to ensure that their scale informs our understanding of political action and its possible development, while keeping emerging forms of agency open to future expansion. This broader perspective should not become a justification for making local initiatives contingent on the completion of an equivalent network capable of confronting structures of domination, or for postponing what can be undertaken now. Political agency begins at the scale currently available to it, from the position where it can exercise influence. Its ability to expand grows through action itself, through the experience it generates, the achievements it accumulates, and the new connections it creates.

These connections also require political substance rooted in the societies in which they operate, alongside a vision of what they seek to change in people’s relationships with political authority, the economy, and one another. The capacity to connect, however extensive, requires shared objectives and social constituencies capable of sustaining it. Without these foundations, the circulation of ideas and expressions of solidarity may expand while the capacity to take initiative remains limited and dependent on events as they arise.

At the level of organizational structure, it is also necessary to consider how continuity can be combined with the capacity to adapt to changing distributions of power. How can political action preserve what it has accumulated without allowing its organizational framework to become a burden? How can responsibilities be distributed so that the disabling of a single center does not bring the entire effort to a halt? What enables an organization to move between different issues and levels of action while maintaining clarity of purpose and its relationship with society? These questions precede decisions about an organization’s name or institutional form. They open the way to thinking about what can be built, rather than assuming that existing models can accommodate every possibility for political action.

Here lies a responsibility for research and political debate across the region: to connect what we know about the conditions around us with what is required to transform the structures that allow those conditions to persist. Insisting on the question of political agency redirects intellectual engagement toward the study of instruments of power and possibilities for organization, and toward understanding solidarity and political consciousness as resources that require actors capable of carrying them forward and developing their effects.

We have needed, and still need, to comprehend the enormity of what has happened to us and to situate it within history, language, and human memory. Yet remaining at this level leaves us resembling someone preoccupied with determining what kind of corpse we have become: how it was broken, the extent of the injuries inflicted upon it, and the name by which its death should be defined. Meanwhile, the actor responsible for producing the catastrophe continues to organize its instruments and expand its capacity for action. Recovering the question of political agency begins with refusing to accept that our task ends with understanding what has happened to us, and with thinking about what we might still be capable of doing.