Amid the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and its terror in the West Bank and Lebanon, the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance must confront not only their Israeli enemy, but also their own elites who are collaborating with that enemy.
The historical reaction to colonial conquest and imperial control across much of the world has been threefold.
First, radical resistance by the majority of poor peasants and workers, and by a substantial sector of the urban middle class.
Second, cooperation and compromise by much of the wealthy elite and some sectors of the middle class, justified by the belief that such cooperation would lead to colonial concessions and avert an outright confrontation in which the colonised would surely be the losers.
Third, complete subservience and collaboration by another sector of the wealthy, hoping to receive preferential treatment over rival elite cooperators and compromisers, based on the logic that the persistence of colonial control benefits the elite as local agents of colonialism.
These responses have been recorded across the colonised and post-colonial world - from Asia to Africa.
The Arab world - including the Palestinians - has been no exception.
Pre-Nakba Palestinian society responded to British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism by following this script exactly
Indeed, pre-Nakba Palestinian society responded to British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism by following this script exactly, as it would after the Nakba.
Since the early 1920s, while divided among themselves, wealthy Palestinian elites broadly agreed that resisting Zionist colonialism required cooperation with the British occupiers.
The strategy was led by the Arab Executive and the Supreme Muslim Council, both dominated by major wealthy Jerusalem, Jaffa and other urban Palestinian families.
They were opposed by other elites, mainly a rival Jerusalem family and other families marginalised within these two bodies, who supported full collaboration with the British and the Zionists.
The latter, with Zionist funding and support, established the "Agricultural Party" (al-Hizb al-Zirai), the National Muslim Society and later al-Hizb al-Watani (the National Party).
The majority of peasants and workers chose resistance, with substantial support from the urban middle classes.
Middle-class intellectuals were so dismayed by Palestinian elites - whether the outright smaller group of collaborators or the larger group of "cooperators" - that they formed Hizb al-Istiqlal (the party of "independence") in 1932.
The party supported peasant and worker resistance and launched a civil rights movement of demonstrations, boycotts and civil disobedience.
Hamdi al-Husayni of Gaza (unrelated to the elite Jerusalem Husayni family) and other young Istiqlal leaders were inspired by other anti-colonial struggles, especially Gandhi's activities in India.
Emulating Gandhi, the Istiqlal Party leadership, including Husayni and Akram Zuaytar, a young schoolteacher from Nablus, Izzat Darwazah, a nationalist publicist and teacher, and the lawyer Awni Abd al-Hadi, who was also a secretary of the elite-controlled Arab Executive after 1928, called for non-cooperation with the British rulers of Palestine.
They borrowed tactics, including Gandhi's March 1930 month-long Salt March across India, as well as boycott and civil disobedience.
Soon after forming the party, Istiqlal leaders openly criticised elite Palestinians for complicity with British rule.
