---
title: "Perceptions of Palestinian Politics and Struggle: The Case of Al-Aqsa Flood and the Israeli War of Genocide"
slug: "perceptions-of-palestinian-politics-and-struggle-the-case-of-al-aqsa-flood-and-the-israeli-war-of-genocide"
post_type: "post"
published_at: "2026-02-12T10:30:01+01:00"
modified_at: "2026-03-05T12:33:03+01:00"
author: "Tarek"
url: "https://cihrs.org/perceptions-of-palestinian-politics-and-struggle-the-case-of-al-aqsa-flood-and-the-israeli-war-of-genocide/?lang=en"
category:
  - "Forum Papers"
post_tag:
  - "Forum Papers 28"
country:
  - "Palestine"
field:
  - "Studies and Research"
---

# Perceptions of Palestinian Politics and Struggle: The Case of Al-Aqsa Flood and the Israeli War of Genocide

The Al-Aqsa Flood operation marked a defining historical turning point - a watershed after which nothing remained the same. Israel seized upon it as a golden opportunity to reshape not only the Palestinian reality but also that of the wider Arab Mashreq. In doing so, it unleashed a massive and unprecedented campaign of genocide against the Palestinians - so brutal that its scale, danger, and repercussions soon spread across the region, reaching as far as Yemen and Iran. Its consequences have been no less catastrophic than those of the first Palestinian Nakba in 1948, and perhaps even more consequential than the third Arab–Israeli war of 1967, despite its immense horrors and tragedies.

## Regional Shifts

 What must be understood is that the Al-Aqsa Flood operation - sudden, forceful, and unprecedented - marked the peak of the militant, faction-based military strategy long pursued by the so-called Axis of Resistance and Defiance. With Hezbollah backing Hamas in Gaza, and missile attacks launched by the Houthis in Yemen and the Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq under the slogan of ‘unity of fronts,’ the operation paradoxically signalled the collapse of that very strategy - and of the entire camp - swiftly, brutally, and unmistakably. Within just three months (17 September –17 December 2024), Israel crippled Hezbollah’s strength, destroyed the capabilities of Syrian army following the fall of the Assad regime (December 2024), and curbed Iran’s influence across the Arab Mashreq - after razing Gaza and tightening its grip on the Palestinians from the river to the sea. The Axis was effectively dismantled, culminating in the U.S.-backed war against Iran in June 2025. In the end, these sweeping developments cleared the path for Israel to openly express its pursuit of its shift from the idea of a ‘Lesser Israel’ to that of a ‘Greater Israel.’ It aimed to cement direct or indirect military dominance over the Mashreq, ensuring its long arm - by air and missile - could strike freely from Lebanon to Yemen and Iran, through Syria and Iraq, all while tightening its grip on the Palestinians between the river and the sea. ## Impact on the Palestinian Front

 Within Palestine, the war had deep and far-reaching effects on the national movement, embodied by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza, and on its core project of establishing an independent state. It even shook the very existence of the Palestinian people between the river and the sea, casting doubt on the future of Hamas itself. As we have seen, the war brought about the destruction of Hamas’s military capabilities and the collapse of its governing authority. Gaza was almost entirely obliterated, both geographically and physically, with two million Palestinians displaced and deprived of life’s basic necessities: water, electricity, food, shelter, and medicine. Its people were reduced to mere targets; an open firing range for Israeli bombs and missiles from land, sea, and air. Gaza became, in effect, the world’s largest graveyard, largest ruin, largest prison, and largest shooting range. After levelling Gaza, Israel sought to seize the moment - amid favourable conditions on the international and Arab levels- to permanently dismantle the Oslo framework and erase the very notion of a Palestinian state, reducing it, at best, to limited self-rule over the smallest possible territory, stripped of sovereignty over land, borders, airspace, and resources. The U.S. administration has largely gone along with this course. What must be noted, in light of these developments, is that the option of military confrontation - whether through state armies or armed factions - has effectively reached its end, regardless of how one judges its legitimacy or merit. It had, in fact, ended at the state level half a century ago. We are now witnessing the close of an entire era in the history of the Palestinian people and their national struggle. Yet acknowledging the failure of the military path does not mean the political or diplomatic one has succeeded. In both cases, the Palestinians have lost control over their destiny. The regional and international balance of power simply prevents them from turning their struggle and sacrifices into political gains. Since the mid-twentieth century, the global, regional, and Arab realities have left no room for a genuine Palestinian solution of any kind or scale. ## Failures of Political Understanding

 In contrast to these sweeping developments, the Palestinian leadership appears confused, adrift, and stripped of the power needed to confront Israel’s existential threats. This weakness stems from the stagnation and decay of the main national institutions - the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, the Palestinian Authority, and the factions - alongside deep internal divisions, the absence of a unifying national vision, waning legitimacy and effectiveness, lack of initiative, and the marginalisation of civil society both inside Palestine and across the diaspora, especially as refugee communities have faded as political actors. Rather than focusing almost exclusively on the Palestinian Authority, the leadership would have done better to revive the institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation - both official and grassroots - strengthening its role and standing. Instead, the Palestinians ended up losing both: they neither gained a truly sovereign authority nor preserved the PLO, whose influence has steadily waned. The recent, sudden, and opaque announcement of plans to hold elections for the long-paralysed Palestinian National Council is a case in point. Likewise, it would have been wiser to hold legislative and presidential elections in the occupied territories years ago, rather than cancel them in 2021. Doing so would have bolstered the international campaign for Palestinian statehood with institutional, legal, and representative legitimacy. A telling example is President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent declaration of his intention to hold such elections within a year and to draft a constitution for a future Palestinian state - a move clearly driven by external pressure. It would have been far better had he acted in response to his people’s needs and for the sake of developing the Palestinian political entity itself. Ideally, such initiatives should have come early in his tenure as head of the PLO, the Authority, and Fatah - positions he has now held for two decades, twice as long as the late Yasser Arafat (1994–2004). Politically, the leadership’s persistent adherence to the two-state framework confined to the West Bank and Gaza - maintained for half a century, especially since the Oslo Accords - has proven misguided or, at best, ineffective. Israel has contested every inch of the occupied territories since 1967. A more promising course might have been to adopt parallel strategies: confronting Israel on international grounds through a political struggle for a single democratic state of free and equal citizens - an alternative vision opposed to Israel’s colonial, settler, racist, and religious nature. Such a strategy might not have succeeded given the balance of power, but it could have opened broader horizons for challenging Israel on multiple fronts, rather than the current dead end. In all cases, the leadership’s lack of initiative and incapacity for action have crippled its ability to exploit Israel’s points of weakness - whether internal (divisions between religious and secular groups, extremists and moderates) or external (the growing global movements delegitimising and isolating Israel at both governmental and societal levels), given its demonstration that it is a colonial, racist, religious, and even genocidal state - under the most extremist government in its history. ## The Problem with Hamas

 As for Hamas, its situation is no better. It launched the Al-Aqsa Flood operation (7 October 2023) under dangerous illusions - overestimating its own military strength and misreading Israel’s internal crises. It believed Israel was ‘weaker than a spider’s web’, incapable of sustaining a long war or tolerating heavy losses. Hamas also pinned its hopes on the so-called ‘unity of fronts’, on the Axis of Resistance, and even on divine intervention - convinced that Israel would neither enter Gaza nor dare to occupy it. As was clear from the outset, these were naive, hasty, and ultimately fatal assumptions. As the war dragged on, Hamas tried to claim leverage: the hostages it held, Israel’s internal rifts between political and military leaders, divisions between government and opposition, and the protests of hostage families. Yet none of these cards proved effective. Netanyahu had been nearing the end of his political career before ‘the Flood’, amid fierce battles between religious and secular factions and his bid to control the judiciary, but he managed after the war to side-line most of his rivals, including Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Blue and White leader Benny Gantz, and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid. He did so by rallying most Israelis around what he cast as an existential threat from Gaza and the Palestinians as a whole. In the end, Hamas’s calculations collapsed into delusion, misjudgement, and disaster. Israel succeeded in dismantling its military capabilities, assassinating many of its leaders and cadres, and eroding its legitimacy in Gaza. Hamas failed to live up to its own slogans - it neither repelled Israel’s assault nor protected the Palestinians, nor met their most basic needs. It also failed to grasp the necessity of an exit strategy or a plan for de-escalation. Most strikingly, Hamas’s leadership, unable to deliver a credible message throughout the war, revealed a profound detachment from reality - clinging instead to hollow slogans such as ‘the resistance is fine’, ‘Israel hasn’t achieved its goals’, ‘Palestinians have nothing to lose’, and ‘our losses are tactical, theirs are strategic’. All this was said while Israel was killing, starving, and displacing Palestinians, and turning their homes into rubble. ## Back to Square One

 Hamas, which had only recently accepted Trump’s unfair deal, could have secured a far better outcome during the first ceasefire at the end of 2023. Doing so might have spared Gaza from devastation, saved its people from the horrors of war, and denied Israel the pretext to commit what it did. Throughout the first year of the war, Hamas also had multiple chances to negotiate a deal for the release of Israeli hostages. Instead, it clung to the illusion of a ‘unity of fronts’, to the hope of support from ‘the Arab and Islamic worlds’, and to its own ability to repel Israel. It failed to grasp that the Netanyahu-Smotrich-Ben Gvir government was bent on pursuing a genocidal war of unmatched ferocity. This war was designed to depopulate Gaza as much as possible, make life there unbearable, erase any Palestinian role in future political arrangements, and crush not just the idea of resistance but its very embodiment in the so-called Axis of Resistance. By the end of that first year, Israel had effectively forced Hezbollah out of the fight – or ‘the battle to back Gaza’ as Hezbollah termed it. This followed the pager explosions on 17 September 2024; the assassination of the Radwan Force leadership on 20 September; and the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September. A month earlier, Israel had assassinated Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 1 July. Yet even after all this escalation - and despite Israel’s overwhelming technological, scientific, and intelligence superiority - Hamas’s leadership remained unmoved. It failed to seek, through mediators, any deal that might have spared Palestinians further catastrophe, as if resistance mattered more than people themselves, or as if Hamas mattered more than Gaza. In short, Hamas’s leadership persisted in its delusions, insisting that Israel had failed to achieve its objectives and that ‘the resistance is fine,’ even after everything that had unfolded - after Israel assassinated Yahya Sinwar, its new political bureau chief and the architect of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation; after the collapse of the Syrian regime in late 2024; and even after the twelve-day Israeli-American war on Iran in June 2025, which wiped out Iran’s presence in Lebanon, Syria, and nearly all of Iraq. Despite all this, Hamas continued to believe - or convince itself - that it still held a bargaining chip in the Israeli hostages, and that internal protests and political turmoil would bring pressure on Netanyahu’s government. Now, regrettably, events have spun out of control, leaving Hamas’s position little more than symbolic - especially after Arab and Islamic states, including those closest to and most supportive of it, endorsed Trump’s plan. Hamas now faces a full capitulation agreement, with its funding, weapons, and even political backing drying up. It has been forced to accept what it once refused - on worse terms - including its own removal from the scene and the release of Israeli hostages. In truth, that supposed bargaining card was never really in Hamas’s hands, but in Netanyahu’s. Even widespread Israeli protests failed to shake his grip on power, as most Israelis rallied around him, viewing his leadership as vital to their country’s survival. Meanwhile, Israel has held more than two million Palestinians in Gaza hostage to its control, reducing their lives to unending misery and deprivation. In short, Hamas - once able to seize initiative and control in a single day, or even part of one - has lost both entirely. For 710 days, Israel has killed, destroyed, besieged, starved, displaced, and imprisoned Palestinians, reshaping the realities of Palestine and the entire Middle East - including Hamas’s own standing. Yet the movement’s leadership, or what remains of it, still clings to the same old illusions. It is tragic that this should befall a national movement six decades old - one with a long, rich, and costly record of political and militant struggle - and a people among the most educated and intellectually vibrant in the region. Yet the gap between the people and their leaders has never been wider, as shown by the bitter experiences of Jordan, Lebanon, and the occupied territories, and by the decline of the PLO, the Authority, and the factions. This war has taken the Palestinians back to square one - if not further back still. ## The Situation in Israel

 One key observation concerns Israel itself. Despite its vast military, technological, administrative, and economic power, Israel has become more dependent on the United States, and more exposed and isolated on the global stage. Its character as a colonial, settler, racist, religious - and also genocidal – state has never been clearer. At home, the war has reinforced Israel’s identity as a Jewish, religious, and racist state, eroding its liberal, democratic, and secular image. This has deepened internal rifts between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, secular and religious, moderates and extremists. These shifts are turning Israel into a fortress-like ghetto in the region - an outcome that runs counter to all talk of peace or normalisation. Israel’s crisis is amplified by the collapse of three long-standing myths it built around itself. First, its claim to exclusive victimhood - as the heir and guardian of Holocaust memory - has crumbled as it carries out a Holocaust of its own against the Palestinians. Second, its old narrative of being a small state surrounded by hostile Arab neighbours has flipped: it is now Israel that threatens those around it. Third, its image as a ‘democratic oasis’ has faded as it insists on defining itself as a Jewish state - making it inherently racist toward non-Jews - and, under Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir, placing Jewish nature above its secular nature, and its racist nature above its Jewish nature. Netanyahu’s assault on judicial independence and his effort to centralise power in his own hands embody this shift. Together, these factors have made Israel a political, security, financial, and moral liability for the world. They also help explain the growing shift in Western governments and societies toward sympathy with the Palestinians. From every angle, post–Al-Aqsa Flood Israel has entered a new phase - in its conflict with the Palestinians, its place in the region, and even its own self-image. It now seeks, in Netanyahu’s words, to move from the idea of a ‘Lesser Israel’ to that of a ‘Greater Israel’ - the vision he claims to have lived for. ## What Now?

 The question remains: what is the solution? What is to be done? It is a difficult and long-overdue question. Palestinians should have re-examined their political strategies, methods of struggle, and relations with one another and the world half a century ago - at least after leaving Lebanon in 1982, after the First Intifada and the Oslo Accords in 1993, or after Camp David II in 2000. Decades were lost to illusions about the Authority and armed struggle, with stagnant factions that failed to evolve or adapt, instead of turning to articulate new strategies for politics and struggling. Even so, the best course now is to focus on one essential goal: strengthening Palestinians’ ability to stay on their land; this must come first. The next step is to rebuild the Palestinian national movement on new foundations - learning from past experience while breaking with its failures, and aligning ambitions with real capabilities, free from illusion or overstatement. This means forming a shared vision that unites people, land, cause, and historical narrative, and giving the struggle new meaning based on the Palestinian right to freedom, justice, and equality. This is the language the world understands today - and the reason so many stand with the Palestinians, especially under the current international and Arab circumstances. Even after all this, it is still too soon to tell how the Palestinian cause and national movement will find their new footing. Much will depend on how Israel positions itself internally and regionally, how the Arab world responds to its challenge, and how the international community deals with an Israel now more exposed, isolated, and discredited than ever - as a colonial, racist, settler state committing genocide. All this must be considered against the deep weakness of the Palestinian situation, the limited capacity to face sweeping regional shifts, and the far-reaching consequences of this devastating war on every front.