Nadia Hijab is co-founder and honorary president of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. She served as Board President from 2010-2021 and as Executive Director between 2011 and March 2018. A writer, public speaker and media commentator, Hijab’s first book, Womanpower: The Arab Debate on Women at Work was published by Cambridge University Press and she co-authored Citizens Apart: A Portrait of Palestinians in Israel (I. B. Tauris). She was Editor-in-Chief of the London-based Middle East Magazine before serving at the United Nations in New York. She is a co-founder and former co-chair of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and now serves on its advisory board. She continues to serve Al-Shabaka in an advisory capacity and support its mission.
From this author
As the Israeli regime continues its genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, many have begun to weigh in on the future of Hamas and of Palestinian leadership more broadly once the bombardment ends. One of the dominant proposals is the revival of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with Hamas as a member party.
But revival of the PLO requires more than bringing Hamas into the fold, as the Fatah-controlled PA has effectively whittled down the PLO to a barren institution. What then, beyond inclusion, is needed in order to resuscitate the viability of the PLO? In an effort to strengthen the generative thinking around these questions, Al-Shabaka revisits a collection of its past works that sought to confront this very topic.
Jerusalem continues to lie at the center of political developments in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and in the shifting landscape of US and EU foreign policy toward Palestine and the Israeli regime.
Punctuated by the outbreak of the Unity Intifada in May 2021, the trajectory of Palestinian resistance is experiencing a watershed phase marked by new actors and themes. With the effective neutralization of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the deepening geopolitical fragmentation of Palestinians across colonized Palestine and the world, and the global shift to cyberspace, new opportunities — and threats — to Palestinian resistance have emerged.
The visible absence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from the ongoing Unity Intifada has led many to question the organization’s legitimacy and relevance. Do Palestinians still need the PLO? If so, why?
The vital question of how to reconstitute and strengthen the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and renew the Palestinian national project has long been at the forefront of Palestinian concerns. However, it stalled due to the bitter divisions between the major political parties, Fatah and Hamas, after the legislative elections of 2006.
Over the past four years, the Trump administration has enacted major long-term changes to US policy vis-à-vis Palestine. What possibilities lie ahead for the next administration to either expand or reverse this trajectory, and how can Palestinians leverage their power to influence future decision-making?
September 2018 marks the 25th anniversary of the Oslo Accords. Looking back, how did the agreement impact the Palestinian national project and cohesion as a people? What does a post-Oslo Palestine look like?
A quarter of a century since the signing of the Oslo Accords, an independent and sovereign Palestinian state has become little more than a myth as Israel continues to expand its settler colonial project and military occupation. Oslo’s structure and framework are to blame for this reality, as the Accords were not a peace agreement but a security arrangement between colonizer and colonized.
Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has spurred many proclamations of the end of the two-state solution. Yet is it time to move to a struggle for one state? Nadia Hijab argues that Palestinians should work for either outcome, and calls for the reframing of the Palestinian narrative to advance that struggle.
The Israeli right is poised to annex much or all of the West Bank while continuing to isolate Gaza – either through continued siege or by pushing it on to Egypt’s plate. Donald Trump’s stance on Jerusalem offers recognition of illegal annexation that could be just the beginning. And his drive to cut back the United States contribution to UNRWA could presage a campaign to definitively close the door on the rights of Palestinian refugees 70 years after Israel’s creation and the loss of Palestine.
