Palestinian elites have been collaborating against the resistance for a century
Submitted by
Joseph Massad
on
Fri, 06/12/2026 - 09:39
The Palestinian Authority's war on the resistance is the continuation of a collaboration with colonialism that Palestinian elites have practised for more than a century
A member of the Palestinian Authority security forces fires tear gas towards a protest against their security operation in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on 16 December 2024 (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP)
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Amid the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and its terror in the West Bank and Lebanon, the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance must confront not only their Israeli enemy, but also their own elites who are collaborating with that enemy.
The historical reaction to colonial conquest and imperial control across much of the world has been threefold.
First, radical resistance by the majority of poor peasants and workers, and by a substantial sector of the urban middle class.
Second, cooperation and compromise by much of the wealthy elite and some sectors of the middle class, justified by the belief that such cooperation would lead to colonial concessions and avert an outright confrontation in which the colonised would surely be the losers.
Third, complete subservience and collaboration by another sector of the wealthy, hoping to receive preferential treatment over rival elite cooperators and compromisers, based on the logic that the persistence of colonial control benefits the elite as local agents of colonialism.
These responses have been recorded across the colonised and post-colonial world - from Asia to Africa.
The Arab world - including the Palestinians - has been no exception.
Indeed, pre-Nakba Palestinian society responded to British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism by following this script exactly, as it would after the Nakba.
Since the early 1920s, while divided among themselves, wealthy Palestinian elites broadly agreed that resisting Zionist colonialism required cooperation with the British occupiers.
The strategy was led by the Arab Executive and the Supreme Muslim Council, both dominated by major wealthy Jerusalem, Jaffa and other urban Palestinian families.
They were opposed by other elites, mainly a rival Jerusalem family and other families marginalised within these two bodies, who supported full collaboration with the British and the Zionists.
The latter, with Zionist funding and support, established the "Agricultural Party" (al-Hizb al-Zirai), the National Muslim Society and later al-Hizb al-Watani (the National Party).
The majority of peasants and workers chose resistance, with substantial support from the urban middle classes.
The independence movement
Middle-class intellectuals were so dismayed by Palestinian elites - whether the outright smaller group of collaborators or the larger group of "cooperators" - that they formed Hizb al-Istiqlal (the party of "independence") in 1932.
The party supported peasant and worker resistance and launched a civil rights movement of demonstrations, boycotts and civil disobedience.
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Hamdi al-Husayni of Gaza (unrelated to the elite Jerusalem Husayni family) and other young Istiqlal leaders were inspired by other anti-colonial struggles, especially Gandhi's activities in India.
Emulating Gandhi, the Istiqlal Party leadership, including Husayni and Akram Zuaytar, a young schoolteacher from Nablus, Izzat Darwazah, a nationalist publicist and teacher, and the lawyer Awni Abd al-Hadi, who was also a secretary of the elite-controlled Arab Executive after 1928, called for non-cooperation with the British rulers of Palestine.
They borrowed tactics, including Gandhi's March 1930 month-long Salt March across India, as well as boycott and civil disobedience.
Soon after forming the party, Istiqlal leaders openly criticised elite Palestinians for complicity with British rule.
At the party's first mass meeting in December 1932, its leaders called for independence, denounced Britain and Zionism, and called for cooperation with newly independent Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Accusing the Arab Executive of passivity, they demanded its leaders refuse cooperation with the British Mandatory authorities.
The following year, Istiqlal's capacity for mobilisation peaked, as British suppression, Zionist apartheid, evictions of Palestinian peasants and Jewish immigration to Palestine reached unprecedented levels.
Resistance and repression
Failing to persuade the Arab Executive to adopt non-cooperation, the Istiqlal Party mobilised demonstrations in October 1933, protesting British policy and Jewish colonisation.
The executive eventually relented and backed calls for demonstrations, despite "opposition" from the collaborationist elite faction.
Thousands marched across Palestine, including 8,000 in Jaffa alone - among them 600 Palestinians from Wadi al-Hawarith whose lands were taken over by Zionist colonists a few months earlier. Rampaging British police killed 26 unarmed demonstrators in Jaffa and Haifa and injured dozens more.
British authorities, wealthy elite Palestinians of both camps and Zionists all saw a common interest in suppressing the Istiqlal Party.
Their combined efforts succeeded in all but destroying what had become the most popular Palestinian anti-colonial party by 1934-1935.
Still, younger Palestinian activists, including former members of Istiqlal and the Congress for Youth, intensified their calls on Palestinian elites to abandon their futile efforts to win British support against Zionism and adopt non-cooperation instead.
By 1936, Palestinian workers launched multiple strikes that elite leaders opposed, costing them further support among the youth movement, the rump of the Istiqlal Party and its working-class supporters.
As elite politicians continued talks with the High Commissioner about establishing a legislative assembly, new meetings - led by Istiqlalists such as Hamdi al-Husayni and joined by urban workers - culminated in a major general strike declared on 19 April 1936.
Lasting for six months, it remains the world's longest general strike to date.
Highly mobilised Palestinians, led by Istiqlalists and youth groups, including the Young Muslim Men's Association, moved to the forefront of political life.
Their momentum compelled elite politicians - among them the Mufti Amin al-Husayni, who had initially opposed the strike - to establish the Arab Higher Committee a week later as a coalition to replace the defunct Arab Executive, which had been dissolved in August 1934 amid elite factionalism.
The Higher Committee sought to moderate demands for civil disobedience, while the British High Commissioner reminded the elite leadership of their role in restraining the masses.
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The mufti's reticence to support the general strike and the broader Palestinian revolt lasted well into the summer of 1936.
Meanwhile, Palestinian elites began to organise political parties that competed for British favour and, in the case of the collaborationist National Defence Party, to curry favour with the Zionists.
Amid the commitment to resistance among peasants, workers and middle-class youth and intellectuals, and the elite's continued cooperation and collaboration, the Palestinians' Great Revolt erupted and lasted until its final brutal suppression by the British and their Zionist colonial settlers in 1939, with more than 8,000 Palestinians killed.
Palestinian elite collaborators formed a counter-revolutionary militia called the "peace bands" to kill Palestinian revolutionaries.
The defeat of the Revolt led to the 1948 Nakba nine years later.
Oslo's heirs
These dynamics re-emerged in the post-Nakba period.
The children of expelled Palestinian peasants and workers, alongside some of the middle classes, launched a new political struggle in the late 1950s, which transformed into an armed resistance movement by the late 1960s.
Elite Palestinians would soon co-opt the movement, ostensibly to help it gain "international" legitimacy, first by interceding with Arab regimes to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1974 as "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people".
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Funding from Arab regimes soon domesticated the PLO.
Replicating the strategy of the pre-Nakba Palestinian elite, the PLO sought to cooperate with the US and Europe by "moderating" its demands for Palestinian liberation from Zionist settler-colonialism to calling instead for a "two-state solution".
Secret channels with the US and open channels with Europe ultimately diminished the erstwhile PLO agenda from total liberation to demanding a mini-state on a fraction of Palestine's territory.
But if the PLO after 1974 replicated the role of elite Palestinian cooperators and compromisers between the 1920s and 1940s, the signing of the 1993 Oslo accords transformed the PLO yet again into that other part of the 1920s-1940s elite - including the Agricultural Party and the National Defence Party - who collaborated outright with the Zionists and their colonial sponsors.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) today is a mirror image of these collaborator forces.
Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat's PLO and the successor PA have tried to extinguish all attempts to reinvigorate the struggle championed by the Istiqlal Party and the peasant revolutionaries, which was initially espoused by the PLO's "rejectionist front" since the mid-1970s, as well as by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and what remained of the PLO left since the late 1980s and early 1990s.
This culminated in the coup against the elected Hamas government in 2007, organised by the US, Israel and the PA, echoing how a similar coalition ganged up against the Istiqlal Party in the 1930s.
The PA security forces played the role of the 1930s "peace bands". This is the situation that the Palestinian people have found themselves in since 1993.
Their struggle today continues to be one between a collaborationist PA and a pro-liberation resistance intent on ending settler-colonialism.
The Gaza genocide is how Israel and its western sponsors have responded to the Palestinian resistance, while their PA proxy has intensified its war and repression against the resistance in the PA-controlled West Bank areas during the genocide.
The PA is aided in its efforts by the Israeli occupation army and armed Jewish colonial settlers.
But just as the collaborating and cooperating Palestinian elites of the 1920s to 1940s were unable to halt the resistance, the current PA collaborators are failing at their assigned task of vanquishing the spirit of resistance among Palestinians.
It is this ongoing resistance to Israel and its western sponsors, and the collaborating PA and the wealthy Palestinian elites who support it, that will ultimately decide the future of the Palestinian people.
After more than a century of collaboration and resistance, and Israel's refusal to halt its genocide, the scales continue to tip persistently in favour of the resistance.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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