Opinion | Farrukh Abadi
A recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) between May and June among Palestinians across the Palestinian territories shows increasing support for the October 7 Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, for armed struggle to achieve an independent Palestine, and for Hamas. On the other hand, there is widespread opposition to the Palestine Authority (PA, the nominal governing body of the West Bank), and its leader Mahmoud Abbas.
73% of Palestinians expressed approval of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, an increase by 2% from when the survey was conducted three months earlier. When asked about the means to end Israeli occupation and establish an independent Palestinian state, over half picked armed struggle as the most effective means, which saw a 17% rise in support from Palestinians in Gaza since the last survey. When asked which political party or movement they prefer, the largest percent said Hamas (40%), double the support for Fatah (20%), the ruling party in the West Bank. It is notable that support for Hamas doubled after October 7. Support for Hamas governing Gaza after the war is at 61% and satisfaction with Hamas’s performance in the current war is at 75%.
These numbers are inverted when compared to Palestinian support for the PA government, including the new Prime Minster Muhammad Mustafa, part of the new government established at the behest of the US. The US hoped that Abbas’s new government would improve the popularity of the PA in order to provide an alternative to Hamas and eventually have the PA govern post-war Gaza; however, since the establishment of the new government in March, support for Fatah and Abbas has declined.
90% want Abbas to resign, a number that reaches 94% when looking only at the respondents from the West Bank. Similarly, satisfaction with the new prime minster is at 9%. Support for a newly-elected PA to govern the Gaza Strip after the war is at 16%, while support for the current PA under Abbas to rule sits at 6%.
These statistics reflect what Hamas has already established in the battlefield: political and military victory. Their broadly-recognized military acumen and leadership is the sharpest expression of their political objective of liberating Palestine, and they are doing the most to achieve this end.
Hamas leads the cease-fire negotiations on behalf of the Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian people, a position secured by their continued battlefield successes, and Hezbollah and Ansarallah have both said they will follow the lead of the Palestinian resistance when it comes to their own contributions to the war of liberation. For its part, Hamas has refused to lay down its weapons as part of the negotiations, and has refused calls for “outsiders”, i.e. non-Palestinians, to govern the Gaza strip or determine its fate. Instead it calls for a joint Palestinian coalition government for Gaza and the West Bank to govern until elections can be held—elections that have been postponed by the crisis-ridden collaborator PA indefinitely.
Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades has united a broad array of militant Palestinian organizations under their leadership, carrying out joint operations with the participation of the military wings of the PFLP, DFLP, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Resistance Committees, among others. Hamas was primarily responsible for planning, organizing, procuring the materiel for and executing Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the ongoing resistance today. They have manufactured weapons for decades in support of their operations and help arm the various factions they fight alongside, allowing the resistance to continue in its present form and utilize the weapons of their choosing. They have earned their position at the forefront of the resistance organizations fighting for a liberated Palestine, both politically and militarily.
In the current paradigm of Palestinian politics, there is no other party that nears support for Hamas nor is playing a more critical role for the liberation of Palestine. The PA and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO; the coalition of parties that lead the PA) are both dominated by the bankrupt Fatah party and the country-selling bureaucrat Abbas, widely hated by the people. It is, and has been, the designs of the US and Israel to extend the PLO’s rule to the Gaza Strip, a vain attempt that the masses rejected 20 years ago.
Hamas is the leading force of Palestinian resistance today, both militarily and in terms of popular support. Without the leadership of a genuine communist party, the struggle of the masses will be carried out by forces that have a dual character to them: they are primarily progressive in their resistance to imperialism, but can turn into their opposite upon their seizure of power and consolidation as the ruling power of a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country tied to imperialism.
A free Palestine, like other oppressed nations, can only come through a new democratic revolution that nationalizes all big capital, distributes land to the tiller, and governs through a coalition of all classes that have an interest in independence, under the leadership of the working class in the form of the communist party. The strategic perspective of the working class is able to rely on and mobilize the people for the defense and construction of the country and holdout against invasions and bribes. In the absence of such a force, there still remains a wide array of political forces that represent and oppose the interests of the Palestinian people to varying degrees, and it is the duty of internationalism to show solidarity with those forces primarily carrying out and leading the just war for the liberation of Palestine.
Photo: Members of the Qassam brigades, the armed wing of Hamas. Anadolu Agency
