Rupture and Representation: Conclusion

The contemporary struggle for Palestinian liberation has endured many low points over the past century. Few have plumbed the depths of the current one. The chapters in this volume converge on a shared assessment: the events set in motion on October 7, 2023, constitute not merely a crisis, but an historical rupture for the Palestinian national movement. While Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has impacted Palestinian life in ways that will reverberate for generations, the expert contributions collected here demonstrate that underlying and aggravating the unfolding catastrophe is a longer-running political unraveling. Fragmentation, institutional decay, and the erosion of representative authority have been fully visible and intensified, at precisely the moment when Palestinians most required collective agency. 

Several chapters emphasize that this rupture did not originate in October 2023 and, in fact, helped produce it. As Nour Odeh and Omar H. Rahman show from complementary perspectives, the Palestinian national movement entered this period at a time when it was already structurally and representatively debilitated. The hollowing out and subordination of the PLO to the PA, the Fatah–Hamas schism, the indefinite suspension of elections, and the conflation of the liberation movement with governance under occupation produced institutions and leaders incapable of strategic action. October 2023 did not create this crisis; it rendered it unmistakable. The result has been a profound strategic vacuum, in which neither Hamas’s unilateral resistance program nor the PA’s acquiescent survivalism and commitment to an expired political project could offer the Palestinians protection, legitimate representation, or a viable pathway toward liberation. 

This absence of effective leadership constitutes a central thread running through the volume. In arena after arena—international law, regional diplomacy, reconstruction, diaspora activism, and Global South engagement—the same paradox recurs. Palestinians today command unprecedented moral authority, legal recognition, and international public support, yet lack the political infrastructure required to convert these assets into either leverage or, more importantly, concrete achievements. As Rahman argues, a previously representative liberation movement under the Oslo process gave way to a governance structure subordinated to military occupation, alongside a resistance movement operating outside a unified national decision-making framework. This led, arguably inevitably so, to the steady erosion of popular legitimacy and international relevance. While Palestinians maintain a residual presence within international fora, it lacks its former underlying dynamism, political coherence, and authority to exercise effective agency and confront the challenges at hand.  

Mouin Rabbani’s chapter situates this paradox within the realm of international law. Since October 2023, Palestinians have achieved historic breakthroughs at the ICJ, ICC, and across the global human rights ecosystem, fundamentally altering the legal and discursive landscape. Israel now stands credibly accused of genocide and apartheid, and top Israeli officials are fugitives of the international justice system and the state itself an accused defendant. Yet these advances have coincided with an escalating assault on the international legal order itself, led by Israel’s Western allies. Lawfare, Rabbani shows, emerges as a vehicle for inserting the Palestinian cause at the center of the broader struggle for the survival of international law as a universal framework. Crucially, the chapter underscores that legal victories cannot substitute for political leadership, even as they expand the terrain on which the political struggle can be waged.  

A similar pattern emerges in the regional and international arenas examined by Khaled Elgindy and Sarang Shidore. Elgindy argues that Arab passivity during the Gaza genocide is not simply a failure of solidarity, but a consequence of the Palestinians’ diminished leverage—rooted in institutional weakness, strategic dependency, and political fragmentation. Although Arab public sympathy remains robust, without a credible Palestinian interlocutor it has proven difficult to mobilize popular support and translate this into sustained state action. Shidore extends this analysis to the Global South, documenting a significant resurgence of diplomatic and legal solidarity with Palestine. From UN General Assembly votes to ICJ interventions and the formation of the Hague Group, many Global South states have acted to defend international law and Palestinian rights, often at material cost. Yet this solidarity has been uneven and constrained by realist calculations, limited leverage over Israel, and competing interpretive frames. 

Together, these chapters complicate narratives of either growing abandonment or support. They suggest instead that Palestinian marginalization in regional and global politics is inseparable from the internal Palestinian political crisis itself. Where leadership has been absent, international solidarity—however principled—has lacked a focal point. Where Palestinian institutions have been perceived as illegitimate or incapacitated, other actors have filled the void or steamrolled them with technocratic, security-driven, or externally imposed frameworks. 

Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in the struggle over Gaza’s reconstruction. AbdalRahman Kittana’s chapter frames this as a political contest over sovereignty, land, and lived experience rather than a sterile exercise in redevelopment. The predominant “day-after” frameworks—including the Trump Plan—deliberately depoliticize Palestinians, casting Gaza as a humanitarian problem to be managed rather than a homeland to be rehabilitated under conditions of Palestinian agency. By contrast, the Gaza Phoenix framework articulates a vision centered on equitable land redistribution, the “right to the city,” and the reintegration of Gaza into a unified Palestinian political and economic space. Yet even this locally grounded initiative remains constrained by the absence of a legitimate national leadership capable of defending Palestinian agency against external encroachment. 

Zaha Hassan’s analysis of Palestinian activism in the West completes the picture by examining the arena in which Palestinian agency and public solidarity with it has been most dynamic since October 2023. Diaspora activism has reshaped public opinion, influenced policy debates, and contributed to legal and political shifts across North America and Europe. The effectiveness of this activism has been underscored by the intensity of the repression it has faced. Yet the chapter reinforces a core conclusion of the volume: diaspora mobilization, like international law and Global South solidarity, cannot substitute for the strategic leadership of representative national institutions. Without immediate and credible processes for internal political renewal, the diaspora-driven momentum risks losing traction. 

Across all seven chapters, a shared diagnosis emerges: The Palestinian question today is defined not only by occupation, apartheid, and genocide, but by a crisis of political mediation between the Palestinian people and the arenas in which their fate is being decided. The recurring analogy to the post-Nakba period is therefore instructive. Then, as now, catastrophe produced an organizational vacuum followed by a prolonged and uneven process of political reconstitution. Whether the current rupture will yield a comparable trajectory remains uncertain. What is clear is that neither the preservation of the status quo nor externally imposed “solutions” can resolve the Palestinian question. 

This volume does not offer a blueprint for Palestinian political reconstruction. It does, however, advance a set of analytically grounded propositions: Legal clarity without political mobilization is inconsequential; state solidarity unguided by the agency of Palestinian leadership remains symbolic; reconstruction without sovereignty reproduces domination and resistance; and activism without institutional renewal risks tactical exhaustion. At the same time, the chapters reflect that Palestinian nationalism, resilience, and international support remain powerful, if presently unmoored.  

The future of the Palestinian national movement will ultimately depend not on the coherence of international plans or the goodwill of external actors, but on the emergence or revival of political structures capable of uniting Palestinians across geographies, restoring independent decision-making, and aligning moral legitimacy with strategic capacity to achieve power and leverage. Whether such a transformation is imminent is doubtful. That it is essential is the shared—and sobering—conclusion of this volume.  

Yet historical precedent, emerging trends, and Israel’s own eroding global standing offer Palestinians strategic assets they lacked in the aftermath of the Nakba. This, in principle, better positions them for a national resurgence compared to the 1950s. By drawing the proper lessons outlined in this collection, it could help them achieve more concrete results.