Beyond Failed Frameworks: A Re-Imagined Collective Future

Summary

Yara Hawari’s Al-Shabaka policy brief argues that Palestinian futures have been discussed without Palestinian input or inside an imposed framework whose primary concern is “the containment of the Indigenous Palestinians and security for the Israeli settler state”, from the Trump administration’s “Vision for Peace” back through the Oslo Accords, which turned the Palestine Liberation Organization’s anti-colonial framing into a “state-in-waiting” that marginalized refugees and Palestinian citizens of Israel (Beyond Failed Frameworks: A Re-Imagined Collective Future, lines 141-153). Hawari assesses the 2006-2007 Future Vision Documents and the One Democratic State Campaign as attempts that stay within, or stop short of decolonizing, the settler-colonial structure (lines 157-173), and proposes Revolutionary consensus — consensus (ijmaa’) derived from the people, on the models of the early PLO, the First Intifada and the BDS movement — as the way to build a vision for the whole Palestinian people (lines 177-195). A future vision must rest on Palestinian rights and sovereignty, not on “feasibility” as defined by power, must refuse colonial permanence, and must shed NGO-ization and neoliberal discourse (lines 199-213).

What the file is

• An Al-Shabaka policy brief (topic: Politics), published Jul 23, 2020 as displayed in the text copy (lines 135, 245), “16 min read”, downloaded from https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/beyond-failed-frameworks-a-re-imagined-collective-future/ (access basis: NGO). The original is the HTML page; the text copy supplied with it (about 4,110 words, lines 1-400) is a plain-text rendering of that page, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers.
• The text copy includes the site’s frame around the brief: navigation and featured items at lines 1-128 and 243-400, including items dated September 2026 that belong to the page as captured, not to the 2020 brief. The brief itself runs lines 129-241, followed by the author’s biography (lines 239-241).
• Text quality: the brief’s prose is clean and complete in both copies. Its eight footnotes are unnumbered in the text copy (lines 215, 217-229); their numbering and attachment were checked in the original HTML — footnote 1 is the French-translation note (line 215), footnote 2 the full title of the Trump “Vision for Peace”, footnote 3 Fayez Sayegh (1965), footnote 4 Yezid Sayigh (1997), p.99, footnote 5 Linda Tabar (2013), p.3, footnote 6 Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine +100 (2019), footnote 7 Richard Falk (2013), p.83, and footnote 8 Frantz Fanon (1965), p.179-180. Three pull-quotations in the text copy are followed by “Share on X” page controls (lines 149, 169, 191, 209), which are not part of the sentences. The text copy gives the publication date as Jul 23, 2020; the original HTML’s structured data gives datePublished as 2020-07-22T16:53:49+00:00, the same instant as its displayed datetime 2020-07-23T00:53:49+03:00 (see Open questions).

Section by section

• Overview (lines 139-153): the thesis as in the Summary above. The two-state narrative — Israel and Palestine as “two warring national groups rather than the outcome of the Zionist project” — was implicit in the PLO’s Ten Point Plan in 1974, explicit at the Palestinian National Council in 1988, and cemented by Oslo, which laid out a timetable for statehood in the 1967-occupied lands and shifted the focus “from collective liberation to one that prioritized individual success and capital gain” (lines 143-145). Civil society became “largely reliant on external donor patronage” (line 147). As Israel moves “from de facto to de jure annexation of the rest of the occupied West Bank”, third parties hold onto the Two-state solution to protect their diplomatic and trade interests with Israel, and statehood remains “the dominant prism through which liberation is imagined” (line 151).
• Future Visions: Their Promise and Pitfalls (lines 155-173): the four Future Vision Documents of 2006-2007 — The Future Vision Document; An Equal Constitution for All; The Democratic Constitution; and The Haifa Declaration — the “unprecedented collective articulation” by Palestinian citizens of Israel of their aspirations, consolidating decades of demands, centering the Nakba and demanding that Israel “abandon its Jewish character and to embrace all its citizens” while asserting Palestinian national identity and Indigenous status (lines 157-161). Their distinctiveness is the focus on historical redress for the Nakba, but they do not discuss how refugee return under UN Resolution 194 could be facilitated, do not make ending the occupation and implementing return a prerequisite for their own demands, and sit “firmly within the two state framework”: “the call of the Future Vision Documents is not for a dismantlement of the structure but rather its reform” (lines 167-171). The One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC), established in Haifa, offers a ten point program including return and property restoration, but “falls short of calling for decolonization despite its recognition of Israel as an apartheid and colonial state” (line 173). Salman Abu Sitta’s detailed plan for return and grassroots youth groups envisioning the rebuilding of their ethnically cleansed villages are also noted (line 173).
• Collective Consensus-Building (lines 175-195): the Documents came from consultations among intellectuals, civil society leaders and politicians, not broad consensus, “which may be one reason for the limits to their impact and their reach” (line 177). Consensus (ijmaa’) is defined and distinguished from majority voting, and a “more revolutionary consensus” is proposed for a people without sovereignty (lines 179-181). Its history: Ahmad al-Shuqairyi formulated the PLO’s first documents, approved by an assembly of 422 Palestinians in Jerusalem that excluded refugee camps and peasant or working class backgrounds; discontent produced consensus among the guerrilla groups (spelled “guerilla” in this passage, as printed) for radical change, and Yasser Arafat was elected Chairman in 1969 “in what was essentially a political takeover led by Fatah” (line 183). A decade of pluralism followed until Israel drove the PLO out of Lebanon in 1982, after which Arafat’s authoritarian appointments and diaspora-elite overrepresentation overshadowed consensus (line 185). In the First Intifada from 1987, the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising made decisions with a rotating leadership, centered on “people’s power” (line 187). The BDS movement, established in 2005 after a call from 170 Palestinian civil society bodies, upheld consensus on its three demands and still functions through consensus in the BNC; its Call spoke to “the entire Palestinian people in their three geographic parts”, rejected Oslo, and answered leadership failure after the July 9, 2004 International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on the separation wall, while BDS is itself neither a political party nor a representative body (lines 189-195).
• Challenges and Possibilities (lines 197-213): Palestine +100, in which Palestinian writers imagine Palestine in 2048, “one hundred years after the Nakba”, mostly as hi-tech nightmares, makes articulating alternatives imperative against “a paralyzed Palestinian leadership” (line 199). Three stumbling blocks: (1) “feasibility” as defined by those in power — for over two decades the Oslo framework has defined it, relegating Jerusalem and refugees to “final status”; against it, Falk’s “politics of emancipation” and a “rights first approach” (lines 201-205); (2) colonial permanence — Fanon on French colonialism in Algeria as having “always developed on the assumption that it would last forever” — so imagining a decolonized future “is not an exercise in fantasy” (line 207); (3) NGO-ization and neoliberal discourse, which have de-politicized language and constrained possibility, to be shed by revitalizing “a local language of liberation and decolonization” and a shared lexicon (line 211). The conclusion: Palestinians have reached consensus on core issues while incorporating plurality, and “The culture of consensus is one that needs to be nourished and built on” in a fragmented society (line 213).
• Footnotes and author biography (lines 215-241): the French-translation note and footnotes 2-8 as listed in What the file is; four other Hawari titles are listed as more from this author (lines 231-237); the biography presents Hawari as Al-Shabaka’s co-director, previously its Palestine policy fellow and senior analyst, with a PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, where she taught and remains an honorary research fellow, her academic work focused on indigenous studies and oral history, and a commentator for The Guardian, Foreign Policy and Al Jazeera English (lines 239-241).

Key passages

• “Palestinian futures have long been discussed without Palestinian input or within an imposed and limited framework.” (line 141)
• “The effort to limit Palestinian collective visioning to a framework of statehood along the 1967 lines has been largely successful” (line 149)
• “In summary, the call of the Future Vision Documents is not for a dismantlement of the structure but rather its reform.” (line 171)
• “In the absence of sovereignty and self-rule (particularly in colonial situations), it is necessary to think about a more revolutionary consensus” (line 181)
• “The fulfillment of fundamental Palestinian rights and sovereignty, and not feasibility, must be the basis of any future vision.” (line 205)
• “Years of NGO-ization and neoliberalism in Palestine have led to a de-politicization of language and have constrained the perceived realms of possibility” (line 211)

Evidence the work relies on

• The Trump administration’s “Vision for Peace, Prosperity and a Brighter Future for Israel and the Palestinian People”, as Hawari presents it, with its full title given in footnote 2 (lines 141, 217).
• Fayez Sayegh, Zionist colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: PLO Research Center, 1965), cited in footnote 3 for the PLO’s mandate against “the Zionist settler colonial project that established Israel” (lines 143, 219).
• The Future Vision Documents themselves, as Hawari presents them, with two quotations credited in the text: the Haifa Declaration, pp. 11-12, and The Future Vision Document, p.9 (lines 163-165).
• Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p.99, cited in footnote 4 for the 422-member assembly that approved the PLO’s first documents (lines 183, 221).
• Linda Tabar, “People’s Power: Lessons from the First Intifada” (Center for Development Studies, Birzeit University, April 2013), p.3, quoted and cited in footnote 5 on the left’s role in the First Intifada (lines 187, 223).
• Jamil Hilal, “Reflections on Palestinian Leaderships Past”, cross-referenced in the text on the PLO after 1982 (line 185), and Hazem Jamjoum, “Reclaiming the Political Dimension”, cross-referenced on NGO-ization (line 211); Hawari’s own commentary “When Palestinians Imagine” is cross-referenced on grassroots return visioning (line 173). No fuller citation for these three is given in the brief.
• Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine +100: stories from a century after the Nakba (Manchester, UK: Comma Press, 2019), cited in footnote 6 (lines 199, 225).
• Richard Falk, “Rethinking the Palestinian Future”, Journal of Palestine Studies, volume 42, Summer (2013), p.83, quoted and cited in footnote 7 on horizons of feasibility (lines 201-203, 227).
• Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p.179-180, quoted and cited in footnote 8 on colonialism’s assumption of permanence (lines 207, 229).
• UN Resolution 194 and the July 9, 2004 International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on Israel’s separation wall, as Hawari presents them (lines 167, 189, 193).

Analysis

Hawari’s method is a brief historical and discursive survey in service of a prescription: she reads three visioning efforts — the Future Vision Documents, single-state initiatives and the BDS Call — against one test, whether they address the Palestinian people in their entirety and tackle Zionism as a settler colonial structure, and finds the first two reformist or incomplete and the third a working model of consensus. The consensus argument rests on three historical cases (the PLO’s founding and takeover, the First Intifada, BDS) presented in summary form, with the Sayigh citation carrying the founding-assembly detail and the Tabar quotation carrying the First Intifada claim; the brief gives no opposing account of those cases and no evidence for its judgment that lack of broad consensus caused the Documents’ limited impact, which it states only as a possibility (“may be one reason”, line 177). Its feasibility critique is carried by the Falk quotation rather than by an independent argument about who defines feasibility in any particular negotiation. The brief is a programmatic statement by Al-Shabaka’s co-director, as the biography presents her, not a research report: its figures (422 assembly members, 170 BDS signatory bodies) are given once each and are not checked against other sources inside the brief.

People, organizations, places and events

Yara Hawari, Ahmad al-Shuqairyi, Yasir Arafat, Fayez Sayegh, Linda Tabar, Richard Falk, Frantz Fanon, Salman Abu Sitta, Al-Shabaka, Palestine Liberation Organization, Palestinian National Council, Fatah, One Democratic State Campaign, Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, BDS National Committee, Vision Documents, Haifa Declaration, Palestine +100, First Intifada, Oslo Accords, Nakba, International Court of Justice

Concepts

Revolutionary consensus, NGO-ization, Two-state solution, One-state solution, BDS movement, Right of Return, Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism

How it relates to other sources

• With The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel: Hawari’s is a critical secondary account of one of the four Documents that source presents in full. She quotes The Future Vision Document, p.9 — “Israel is the outcome of a settlement process initiated by the Zionist-Jewish elite in Europe and the West and realized by Colonial countries” — in the form in which it also appears in that document’s own account of Israel as the outcome of a settlement process initiated by the Zionist-Jewish elite and realised by colonial countries; where the 2006 document demands a consensual democratic system from inside Israel, Hawari judges the Documents as a whole to seek reform, not dismantlement, of the structure, a judgment the document itself does not make.
• With Rethinking Statehood in Palestine and Stateless Citizenship (2013) on the Vision Documents: those sources count three vision documents (Molavi; Farsakh Chapter 10) or four “Vision Papers” (Farsakh Chapter 11); Hawari counts four Future Vision Documents, naming An Equal Constitution for All as the fourth, a title neither of the other two counts names in that form. All counts stand as printed in their places (see Open questions).
• With Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights on BDS: Hawari’s three demands, her 170 signatory bodies and her July 9, 2004 ICJ-opinion framing agree in substance with Barghouti’s account of the Call of July 9, 2005 by more than 170 civil society groups; Barghouti adds that the movement takes no position on a political formula, while Hawari reads the Call as itself presenting “a vision for the future through its three demands” — a difference of emphasis, not of the demands’ text.
• With Thirty Years On: The Ruse of the Middle East Peace Process: Razek, also in Al-Shabaka, argues a year later that the peace-process framework itself ensured no Palestinian state ever existed and prescribes reviving the PLO and renouncing Oslo; Hawari, writing in 2020, treats Oslo as the framework that has defined “feasibility” for over two decades and prescribes consensus-building and a rights-first basis rather than a named institutional program.
• With Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine: Kelly quotes Hawari on Palestinians being told the two-state solution is the only possible outcome; this brief is the fuller statement of that position, locating the telling in the Oslo framework’s definition of feasibility.
• With Palestinian Right of Return: Sacred, Legal, and Possible: Hawari cites Salman Abu Sitta’s “detailed plan for return” as an example of single-issue alternative visioning, without discussing its contents; the plan itself is that source.

Open questions

• Publication date: the brief is displayed as Jul 23, 2020 (lines 135, 245), while the original HTML’s structured data gives datePublished as 2020-07-22T16:53:49+00:00 and its date element gives that same instant as 2020-07-23T00:53:49+03:00. The displayed date is used on this page; both forms stand as recorded.
• The count and naming of the Future Vision Documents: Hawari names four, including An Equal Constitution for All; Stateless Citizenship (2013) counts three and Rethinking Statehood in Palestine counts three in Chapter 10 and four “Vision Papers” in Chapter 11, as recorded on Vision Documents. Whether Hawari’s An Equal Constitution for All is the same document as any differently titled document in those counts is not stated in the brief.
• Spelling: the brief prints “guerilla” twice in its PLO-takeover passage (line 183) and “guerrilla” twice in the following passage (line 185), both forms byte-checked in the text copy; neither is corrected here. It also prints Tabar’s introduction as “As Linda Tabar writes;” with a semicolon, as printed.
• Hawari cross-references Jamil Hilal’s “Reflections on Palestinian Leaderships Past”, Hazem Jamjoum’s “Reclaiming the Political Dimension” and her own commentary “When Palestinians Imagine” with no date, outlet or page; none is identified further in the brief.
• The brief says the ODSC was “established in Haifa” and offers a “ten point political program”, but gives no date for it; Rethinking Statehood in Palestine records the campaign as holding meetings since January 2018, which the brief does not state.

Coverage

lines 1-400 of 400, read in full