Is the “Palestinian Cause” an Obstacle to Palestinian Democracy?
An interview with Ahmed Albaba, by Verena Buser
The following interview was conducted in Berlin in the summer of 2025 and was originally published in German in the online magazine haGalil.
Verena Buser
Dear Ahmed, I am very pleased that you are here. Can you please introduce yourself?
Ahmed Albaba
I was born and raised in a so-called refugee camp in the West Bank, but I prefer the name Judea and Samaria, for good reason. I can go into that if you like. I first studied psychology there and then came to Germany, where I completed my master’s and doctorate degrees in social science. My research focuses on the collective memory of Palestinian families in the camps. I was also active in several research projects in Israel and Jordan.
My work led to a change of perspective for me. As I reflected on my own biography, I asked myself the question: what prevents us Palestinians from having a democracy? And I concluded that there are two ways of thinking in Palestinian communities. Or rather two projects. The first project is a development project, one in which people are concerned with everyday life. They want normal things like a good job and a good family, a good house and so on. They want to develop society and lead a normal life.
On the other hand, there’s also another project. I call it the resistance project—this term is in common use, anyway—and it’s based on the “Palestinian cause.” The goal is to liberate Palestinians from the Jews. It’s based on an ideology of hate, and the aim is to fight—against the West, but above all against Israel, against Jews and against Zionism.
In the course of my research but also as a result of reflecting on lived experience, my biography and the history of my family, I became convinced that the second project is a major obstacle to the democratization, secularization, and modernization of Palestinian society in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
It is important for me to emphasize that I do not want to offend anyone when I say that the “Palestinian cause” is an obstacle for us Palestinians. What I actually want to say is that we Palestinians now have a great opportunity to free ourselves from these ideologies and also to modernize, secularize, and democratize our society. But to do this, we have to give up this struggle, this resistance project, which is also a terror project. And my experience shows me that such statements offend many Palestinians. They feel attacked when you say that. But it’s not actually against Palestinians or against anyone. It’s quite the opposite. It’s for Palestinians, for Palestinian society. I wish the best for this society, and I want to do something for it. My words and my actions are my contribution to this.
You get so caught up in this tradition of the “Palestinian cause.” It’s like a religion. You don’t always act rationally in terms of purpose but rather in terms of values. And if you act value-rationally—which can be driven purely by emotion—there is a danger that the outcome, i.e., the results, are not really in your own interests. But my approach is that we should think rationally for a purpose—pragmatically—and in this way we can modernize and democratize our society.
Verena Buser
Can you explain to me how the “Palestinian cause” hinders the democratization or secularization processes?
Ahmed Albaba
It was created by the Arab world. The representatives of this project are Palestinian organizations founded by Arabs. I am referring specifically to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), established in 1964 by Gamal Abdel Nasser. At that time, there was no Israeli occupation. So the idea was to fight against the “Zionist project.” That was the 1960s, and now it’s 2025. But the language hasn’t changed. We can’t continue to think as if we were in living in the previous century. We need a new language. We can’t keep talking about the “fight against Zionism,” the “fight against Israel,” and the “fight against the Jews.” These are the obsolete slogans of the many factions of the PLO but also of political Islam.
This is a big obstacle, because the young generation is not striving for progress, not for economic goals, not for careers, not for things that are normal in the Western world. Instead, it fights against Zionism, Israel, and the Jews. The struggle takes place on various levels, including among Palestinian intellectuals, academics, and artists. Everyone in these circles is involved. They don’t deal with the real problems of society but create the image of an enemy and fight against it. And this fight costs us a lot.
In principle, the “Palestinian cause” operates on three levels. On a physical level, the goal is to physically eliminate Jews. There is this fantasy that if you eliminate Jews, then you liberate yourself.
On the next level, the narrative level, there are the contributions of academics and artists or historians. They try to establish a narrative in which Jews do not appear, i.e., to eliminate Jews at the narrative level. That’s why I say I come from Judea and Samaria—because by doing so I recognize that this area has a history, a Jewish history. The West Bank is a term that was established by the British Mandate administration. They created the East Bank and thus also this term, West Bank. So the Jordanians adopted it and the Palestinians as well. But if you look closely, the term “West Bank” is new. It’s a designation, not a name.
Judea and Samaria, by contrast, is a term that has an ancient history. And it shows that we inhabitants of the place have a—very long—history. If we renounce it, then we renounce an important part of our identity. But in order to develop an identity, I think we have to recognize this Jewish component of our history—not only acknowledge it but also adopt it into our cultural self-understanding. We are Arabs, we are Muslims, we are Christians. Yes, but we also have this Jewish tradition, Jewish heritage, and we must affirm this aspect of our reality too.
To make this more concrete: There are the ruins of the Hisham Palace in Jericho. Pupils should be taken there to show that we have an Islamic history and so on. But five kilometers away is Herod’s Palace, and nobody goes there. I think that’s a sign of failure. You have a great history, a great tradition, a very, very old history. Why deny it? It’s not good for our culture, our identity, or our humanism. The complexity of our inheritance isn’t against anyone—it’s an enrichment.
Verena Buser
So is this “resistance project” also about a lack of ideological criticism?
Ahmed Albaba
The so-called resistance project is actually a terror project. They try to legitimize terror by using nice sounding words, but in reality it’s a justification and legitimization of terror. But terror is not actually in the interest of the Palestinians.
It distracts us from our real problems. We have a lot of problems in Palestinian society, but because of this so-called resistance project, there’s no capacity to focus on the real problems and deal with solutions. We have economic problems. We also have patriarchal structures. There are still honor killings. We need a solution. And the academics and the artists and so on, they don’t care about these problems. If there’s an art project, it’s about occupation and how to develop a narrative against the Zionist narrative. But do we really need that? For me it’s a pseudo-occupation. We need solutions for the real problems in society.
Verena Buser
There’s a rather monolithic image of Palestinians in the West currently that’s been strongly influenced by so-called “pro-Palestinian demonstrations.” In contrast, your comments are very differentiated. Why do you think you could be described as an “unheard Palestinian voice”?
Ahmed Albaba
Well, first of all, I think it’s partly my own fault that my voice is not loud. But I also have good reasons why my voice is quieter than ideally it should be. Because of this “Palestinian cause,” many people, especially young people, believe that if they fight on these three levels—physical, narrative, and moral—then they are on the right side of history, and this belief gives them the justification, the legitimization for terrorist attacks, for denial and also for insults. The Palestinians know this because we grew up with it.
I was like that myself. I remember I was very young, maybe 18 or 19 years old. Someone was talking about a journalist whom he called a collaborator—he was working “with Jews, with the Yahud or Israel,” and was therefore a “traitor,” in effect. They told me to take the journalist’s camera away. I went to him and took his camera away. The man was so scared of me. It was unbelievable because he knew very well that I wasn’t alone, and if it came to a physical altercation other people would come and beat him.
Now I’m experiencing the same thing today. I’m the journalist who’s afraid of Palestinian teenagers who believe that if they beat me or kill me or ruin my reputation, then they’re doing something good for the “Palestinian cause.” That’s how they think. I used to think like that myself when I was their age, but now I realize we urgently need to change. It has to stop immediately! Because if the next generation thinks like that, then we don’t really have any chance of development, democracy, or modernization.
I believe that for many Palestinians who now have a job in Israel, for example, Israel is not the problem for them. On the contrary, Israel is the solution. Because it enables them to improve and establish their economic situation.
Verena Buser
What motivates you to actively fight against antisemitism?
Ahmed Albaba
I believe that the most important thing of all is that we Palestinians fight against antisemitism, because antisemitism is the reason why these destructive ideologies we’re talking about became established and remain widespread in our society. So if we work against this hatred—I know it’s not that easy, but we have to work to make it go away—then we won’t be so easily manipulated. As long as hatred against Israel is entrenched, you can activate it to quickly mobilize people for terrorist attacks. Therefore, fighting antisemitism is important not only for Palestinians but for the whole world.
Antisemitism is an ideology of hate that divides entire societies. It’s only a matter of time before a society like that collapses—when the cohesion between people breaks down after antisemitism has become an everyday phenomenon. Social peace collapses. And history shows that successively, not just since 1948 in the Arab world, anti-Zionism too has become an ideology of a similar nature. As a consequence, almost all Jews in the Arab world were expelled. That had a negative impact on Arab societies as well.
There were lots of Jewish people who contributed much to society throughout the Middle East—for example, in Egypt. There were artists, people who made important economic contributions. Today there are no Jewish voices in Egypt. The same applies to all Arab countries, including Syria and Jordan. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are dangerous ideologies that are eating away at society from within.
Verena Buser
Thank you very much for the interview.
Dr. Albaba’s dissertation on “Palestinian Families in the Refugee Camps in the West Bank” is available online here.
Topics: Israel Initiative
Dr. Verena Buser, a Berlin-based historian of the Holocaust, is a research associate of the Holocaust Studies Program at Western Galilee College (Israel) and research associate to the Antisemitism Commissioner in the State of Brandenburg (Germany) and his deputy.