Summary
Hawari’s term for the consensus (ijmaa’ in Arabic) a people without sovereignty must build from below, as the basis of a shared vision for the Palestinian future, in Beyond Failed Frameworks: A Re-Imagined Collective Future (lines 179-181).
Details
- Consensus is defined as “an agreement or accord that is reached by a collective or a group of people”, referring to both the process and the final decision; as opposed to majority voting, “which can lead to contentious outcomes and exclude large segments of people, consensus requires everyone involved to reach a negotiated agreement”, and the process builds “a network of trust and confidence among different groups and parties” (line 179).
- “In the absence of sovereignty and self-rule (particularly in colonial situations), it is necessary to think about a more revolutionary consensus — one that is derived from the people in ways that are not necessarily possible through what is considered as standard democratic procedures and institutions.” (line 181)
- Hawari’s historical examples: the early days of the Palestine Liberation Organization, where consensus among the guerrilla groups for radical structural change brought Yasir Arafat to the chairmanship in 1969 and a decade of pluralism followed (lines 183-185); the First Intifada, centered on “people’s power” through the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (line 187); and the BDS movement, whose Call won a vast majority of Palestinian civil society and whose BDS National Committee still decides by consensus (lines 189-195).
- Its negative case in the brief is the Future Vision Documents, which were produced by consultations among intellectuals, civil society leaders and politicians but “were not a result of a broad consensus that drew on other segments of society, which may be one reason for the limits to their impact and their reach” (line 177).
- The closing claim: “The culture of consensus is one that needs to be nourished and built on, particularly in the context of a geographically, socially and politically fragmented Palestinian society.” (line 213)
Related pages
Beyond Failed Frameworks: A Re-Imagined Collective Future, BDS movement, First Intifada, NGO-ization