Nation and Class: Generations of Palestinian Liberation

Abstract

After a century of confrontation with Zionist settler colonialism, the triumph of capitalism and unfettered marketization without justice and national rights for Palestine appears an irresistible and assured process. The Palestinian ruling class and Arab, international, and Israeli forces have sustained belief in a peace process that for a generation has persuaded or coerced Palestinians living in exile and within Israeli colonial dominion to delay or abandon the collective national goals of liberation, independence, and return. The market promises but can hardly deliver individual prosperity, quality services, and civic rights. But in the standoff between the interests of nation and of class, material conditions are being created for a generation of Palestinian liberation that may challenge settler-colonial exclusion and domination. A redefined notion of liberation would demand the people’s systematically denied social, economic, and political rights, which the people’s own political and economic leadership cannot indefinitely subordinate to a lost national struggle.