OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)
When a question is raised about the prominent milestones of the contemporary Palestinian cause, what is meant is not merely a chronological arrangement of events, but rather understanding how the current stage was formed under the pressure of the occupation, the shifting balance of power, and the steadfastness of the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the diaspora. This cause has not moved in a straight line, but rather through major shocks that changed the form of confrontation, redefined priorities, and exposed the limits of betting on international promises whenever they clashed with Palestinian rights.
Prominent milestones of the contemporary Palestinian cause from the intifada to the open war
If we want to read the contemporary stage seriously, the logical beginning would be with the first Palestinian intifada in late 1987. The intifada was not merely a broad popular protest, but rather a moment of political and moral foundation that brought the Palestinian cause back to the center of Arab and international attention after years of attempts at marginalization.
At that moment, the Palestinian, in the camp, the village, and the city, imposed a new equation whose headline is that the people living under occupation are not a subject for security management, but rather the owner of a cause, a right, a memory, and resistance. During it, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, was launched, which would soon become within years the Palestinian faction leading the resistance action.
The Oslo Accords emerged in 1993 as one of the most controversial milestones in the contemporary history of the Palestinian cause. It was presented back then as a gateway toward the state and ending the occupation through a phased negotiation path.
However, what happened on the ground revealed a wide gap between texts and reality. Settlements expanded, the West Bank was fragmented, and core issues such as Jerusalem, refugees, prisoners, and borders were postponed. Therefore, many Palestinians view Oslo as a milestone that did not open the path to liberation as much as it granted Israel additional time to re-engineer control under political cover.
Al-Aqsa intifada and the changing form of confrontation
The year 2000 formed a sharp turning point with the outbreak of Al-Aqsa intifada, after the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque in a scene that carried clear political, religious, and provocative significance. Here, the Palestinian cause entered a more volatile stage, as talk was no longer just about the failure of the settlement, but about the exposure of the nature of the Zionist project itself as a project of uprooting and dominance that does not accept basic Palestinian rights.
Al-Aqsa intifada restored consideration to the idea of resistance in its various forms, and also revealed the scale of organized Israeli violence, including incursions, assassinations, siege, and destruction of Palestinian infrastructure. At this stage, the issue of prisoners emerged more in the public consciousness, and the presence of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa deepened as a unifying title that cannot be separated from the rest of the Palestinian geography.
It is true that the cost of the intifada was high humanly and materially, but its political impact was deep, because it shattered the illusion that Israel could turn into a peace partner merely through the continuation of negotiations.
Then came the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, as a result of resistance strikes, a step that later allowed the development of resistance in the Gaza Strip. Israel tried to market the withdrawal as an end to the occupation in the Strip, while the truth is that control remained in place through the siege, control of crossings, sea, air, and the population registry.
Therefore, the withdrawal was a military repositioning rather than a recognition of the right of Palestinians. What followed confirmed this clearly, especially after the imposition of the comprehensive siege on Gaza in 2007, in an attempt to break the will of the people and punish them for their political choices.
Gaza in the heart of the contemporary Palestinian cause
Since 2008, the Gaza Strip entered a series of repeated Israeli wars and aggressions that revealed the nature of the Israeli doctrine based on mass destruction and pressure on the civilian popular base. The 2008, 2009 aggression, then the 2012 aggression, then the 2014 war, and later the 2021 and 2022 rounds, all were episodes in a continuous policy targeting both the resistance and society together. With each round, Gaza paid a massive price in martyrs, wounded, and destruction, but at the same time it imposed an equation that the Strip is not an open arena without a response.
The importance of Gaza in the contemporary scene is not only because it is a target for siege and aggression, but because it turned into a testing center for the will of Palestinians and their ability for political and social steadfastness.
In Gaza, the file of resistance intersects with the humanitarian siege, and daily living overlaps with the major national question. This is what made the Strip strongly present in the consciousness of the Arab and Islamic masses, in regional calculations, and in the Israeli attempts to produce a permanent deterrence that it did not succeed in establishing.
Then came the Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent broad war of genocide carried out by Israel on the Gaza Strip to open the most dangerous chapters of the contemporary stage. This milestone cannot be reduced to its military dimension only, because it shook the political and media structure that tried for years to present the Palestinian cause as a secondary file that could be bypassed through normalization and regional understandings.
Suddenly, Palestine returned to the global forefront by the power of blood, rubble, and steadfastness, and the moral question returned to the center of international debate: “How can the world claim to defend law and human rights while watching mass massacres against a besieged people?”
Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa as a dividing line
In any talk about the prominent milestones of the contemporary Palestinian cause, Jerusalem cannot be bypassed. The city was not an ordinary negotiation file, but rather the heart of the conflict over identity, sovereignty, and narrative. Since the occupation of its eastern part in 1967, Israel proceeded with a gradual policy to impose Judaization, change the demographic character, and target Islamic and Christian holy sites, foremost of which is Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The Bab al-Asbat uprising in 2017, then the Battle of the Sword of Jerusalem in 2021, revealed that Jerusalem is still capable of rearranging the entire Palestinian scene. When Jerusalemites move in defense of Al-Aqsa or their homes threatened with displacement, as happened in Sheikh Jarrah, they do not defend only a neighborhood or a gate, but rather confront a project that wants to erase the Palestinian existence from the city. Most importantly, Jerusalem has proven time and again that it is capable of breaking the fragmentation imposed between the West Bank, Gaza, 1948 occupied Palestine, and the diaspora.
The West Bank, settlements, and the dismantling of geography
While Gaza was under siege and aggression, the West Bank was facing another path no less dangerous: accelerating settlement expansion, land confiscation, building the wall, and cutting off cities and towns with checkpoints and bypass roads. This policy was not an administrative detail, but rather an organized project to prevent the establishment of any meaningful Palestinian entity, and to transform population centers into isolated islands under Israeli security control.
During recent years, settler attacks escalated under army protection, and attempts to impose actual Israeli sovereignty over large parts of the West Bank emerged. Nevertheless, forms of popular and armed resistance did not stop, and new clash points appeared in Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem, and others. This means that the West Bank, despite the heavy security grip, remained a field open to explosion, because the settlement itself produces and renews the conditions of resistance.
Prisoners, refugees, and establishing the core of the cause
Among the common mistakes in some political readings is reducing the Palestinian cause to the 1967 borders only, while contemporary milestones reveal that the core of the cause is broader and deeper. The file of prisoners, for instance, remained a permanent witness to the repressive nature of the occupation. Israeli prisons are not a margin in the conflict, but rather a central tool to break Palestinian society and target its elites, youth, women, and children. In contrast, prisoners became a symbol of unity and national dignity, and their presence in the collective consciousness transcends the humanitarian dimension to the unifying political dimension.
The same applies to the issue of refugees. Despite attempts at political liquidation and marginalization of the right of return, refugees in camps and the diaspora remained one of the pillars of the Palestinian narrative. Every attempt to bypass them or deal with them as merely a relief file clashed with the fact that the displacement in 1948 is not an event of the past, but a continuous origin of the conflict. Therefore, any serious reading of the contemporary stage must see how the right of return remained present in the popular consciousness, even when diplomatic paths tried to push it to the back.
Regional, int’l transformations between normalization and reclaiming Palestinian voice
Recent years witnessed waves of Arab normalization with Israel that tried to present Israel as a natural part of the region, regardless of the continuation of the occupation, siege, and settlement. These transformations formed a major political and media challenge, because they sought to bypass the Palestinians rather than resolve their cause. However, experience proved that Palestine does not disappear by a political decision, and that attempts to leap over it remain fragile in the face of any major field explosion.
In contrast, the presence of the Palestinian narrative grew at the level of peoples, and within universities, unions, and solidarity movements around the world. It is true that official Western positions often remained biased in favor of Israel, but the international public sphere is no longer as it was. Images of massacres in Gaza, the steadfastness of Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the clarity of the structure of settler-colonialism, all were elements that contributed to breaking part of the narrative monopoly that Israel enjoyed for a long time. Platforms such as PIC played an important role in establishing the Palestinian narrative and following its details away from dilution or distortion.
Between the intifadas, Oslo, the siege, the wars, the battles of Jerusalem, the escalation of settlements, and the presence of prisoners and refugees, one truth becomes clear: the contemporary Palestinian cause is not the remnants of an old file, but a living conflict that renews itself because its original causes still exist. The real bet is not on the change of international discourse alone, but on the Palestinians remaining holding onto their right, narrative, and ability to transform pain into an unbreakable political action.