The rise and fall of the Palestinian Fronts

On 6 September 1970, a young couple travelling under Honduran passports boarded an El Al Boeing 707 flight to Amsterdam. Seated in the second row of the tourist class section of the plane bound for New York, they were well dressed and calm. In fact, the passengers were in disguise. The man, Patrick Arguello, was a Nicaraguan-American member of the Sandinista movement. The woman, Leila Khaled, was a notorious figure in the Palestinian liberation movement. Khaled had grenades in her handbag and Arguello a pistol in his trousers. As the plane headed over the English Channel, the couple tried to force their way into the cockpit. At the same time, across Europe and the Middle East, several other planes were being hijacked and diverted to a place called Dawson’s Field, a defunct British RAF base in Jordan renamed Revolution Field. This operation was launched by an organisation called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The Amsterdam operation went badly wrong. The pilot nosedived the plane, throwing the hijackers off kilter, and the plane guards shot and killed Patrick Arguello. Khaled was arrested by British authorities and kept for over a month in a London prison, during which time she became a media sensation. The hijackings were front page news of the global press for weeks. This and several previous hijackings were some of the most high-profile actions of the PFLP during this period. The grounding of the hijacked planes and their hostages in Jordan reflected the growing size and implantation of various new armed Palestinian resistance groups in the country. Indeed, their size and growing confidence precipitated the eventual brutal crackdown by the Jordanian monarchy on the Palestinian movement in 1970.

Khaled later justified the hijackings in the following statement:

In all my time, in all my statements, I always said we were forced to do it. It wasn’t because we liked to do it, we knew beforehand that those people, the passengers, had nothing to do with the conflict. But before, nobody heard our screaming from the tents. Nobody wanted to hear or listen or learn about our sufferings. Nobody heard those who were tortured in jails. Or even if they knew they don’t want to do anything about it. So, we couldn’t see other ways, and we just used it for a short time, just to ring the bell in this world.^[1]

This quote illustrates the political horizons of the PFLP in particular and more generally the Palestinian left of the period, their desperation, their personal daring and their devotion to the cause. It also hints at their broader politics and strategies.

The genocide in Gaza has raised for millions of people the question of Palestinian liberation, what it might look like and how it might be achieved. Many activists have been studying the history of the Palestinian movement, and particularly the history of the Palestinian left. The work of figures such as Ghassan Kanafani of the PFLP have been republished in English.^[2] Several left publications have run articles featuring histories of the PFLP.^[3] The PFLP and their ilk can seem to offer a genuine alternative to the degraded and degrading politics of the Palestinian Authority.

This article will assess both the promise and failures of the Palestinian left. Although focusing on the PFLP, it will briefly also consider the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). It will demonstrate how these organisations, despite their rhetorical commitment to revolutionary socialist internationalism, were fundamentally informed by a combination of Stalinism, Maoism and Palestinian nationalism. Ultimately, these politics would limit their horizons and confirm their status as a “loyal opposition” in the increasingly compromised Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

The period of the 1960s and then the 1980s are both important in such a context. Both decades were moments of transformation, radicalisation and, in the case of the 1980s, mass mobilisation in which the Palestinian left played a significant role. Thus, this article will explore the politics of this section of the Palestinian left from the 1960s to the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.^[4]

Origins

After the devastation of the Nakba in 1948, the main centres of political organising among Palestinians were to be found in the diaspora. The class differences that existed in the pre-1948 Palestinian population also found expression in the diasporic Palestinians. The poorest sections of the Palestinian population had been scattered, desperate and immiserated in refugee camps across the region, while the middle and wealthy classes managed to establish themselves with relative comfort in cities, albeit a comfort circumscribed by anti-Palestinian discrimination.

The green shoots of organising began in the 1950s among young middle-class Palestinians. Many of the individuals who later became leaders of the PFLP were students at the American University in the Lebanese capital. Beirut was a melting pot of many different political organisations and currents.

The easy-going Paris of the Near East, which permitted capitalism and feudalism as it permitted freedom of the press, a feverish, bustling city of banks and publishing houses, which at that time was a haven for countless political refugees and a hideout for Kim Philbies of every persuasion.^[5]

The 1950s was a period of insurgent regional anti-colonial nationalist movements. Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in Egypt and ignited hopes among young Palestinians that a powerful Arab front could challenge Israel. By the late 1960s, however, it became clear that Nasser was reluctant to confront Israel militarily. In response, groups of young urban Palestinians struck out and took new initiatives. The most significant of these was the Arab National Movement (ANM), established by Palestinian Christian medical students George Habash and Wadie Haddad. As their name indicates the ANM was focused, at least initially, on building up a radical Pan-Arab movement. Their motto was “Unity, Liberation and Revenge”. They felt that Arab unity and independence from foreign rule was a precondition for waging a successful campaign against Israel. “The way to Tel Aviv is through Damascus, Baghdad, Amman and Cairo”, argued Haddad.^[6]

By the mid-1960s the ANM had begun to develop a more left-wing sensibility that was informed by frustration with what they saw as the weakness and corruption of the local nationalist regimes and a compromised and indolent Arab youth. Political leader of the PFLP Ghassan Kanafani wrote an essay in 1957 called Man and Principle which is emblematic. In it he suggests that three-quarters of the youth of Damascus waste all their time playing backgammon in the street cafés. This generation, he says “is represented by the young man who stifles his yawn in the cafes of Damascus, walks out into the street at midnight, looks in a bored way up to the sky and asks his companion who leans drunkenly on him: ‘Why has Arab unity still not been achieved?’” Kanfani despises this attitude and makes a call to arms.^[7]

The ANM also rejected the conservatism of the newly formed Palestine Liberation Organisation. The PLO was the brainchild of Nasser and designed to circumscribe a more independent Palestinian liberation movement. It was formally adopted by the Arab League in Cairo in 1964 and was led by several “notable” and wealthy Palestinians such as Ahmad Shukeiri. The PLO was actively rejected by the ANM, which emphasised the mass involvement of Arabs in their own liberation. By this stage, the ANM was starting to tilt leftward and began to adopt the language of socialism.

In an interview in 1998 George Habash described how socialism had initially “not been on our agenda” because there was a hostility toward the Soviet Union due to its support for the partition of Palestine.^[8] This was gilding the lily somewhat, given that the class position of Habash and his compatriots made them suspicious of socialist ideas in the 1950s. Later however, particularly after the Ba’ath party came to power in Syria, socialism was incorporated more into the ANM’s rhetoric. Thus, the ANM’s motto changed and became “Unity, Liberation, Socialism, and Recovering Palestine”.

The age in which the movement of Arab nationalism was separated from the progressive social revolution has ended… There is no longer a political national question standing separately and posing against a specific social question called “the workers’ question” or “the peasants’ question”; or “the question of social progress”.^[9]

Meanwhile, in the latter part of 1958 and early 1959 in the Gulf States, another section of the Palestinian diaspora formed Fatah. Fatah would come to be the major political force with whom the Fronts would compete and define their politics. Contrary to the ANM, Palestine was the focus of Fatah. Like the ANM however, they were increasingly frustrated with the Arab leaderships and the staid, inactive PLO. Instead, they aimed to mobilise Palestinians in armed struggle for their own liberation.

The only way to regain the robbed homeland is an organized revolutionary movement, unaffiliated, a movement that flows from the heart of the Palestinian people, that will spring from all the territories surrounding the occupied land simultaneously.^[10]

At the same time however, Fatah took money from the Saudi regime and was quiet about many of the dictatorial practices of other Arab states.

1967

The defining moment of this period for all Palestinian factions was the 1967 war. The defeat of the Arab armies by Israel disrupted many of the political certainties that had informed the Palestinian struggle. It undermined Nasser’s prestige and represented a major defeat for the traditional leaders of the PLO. More broadly it was also a huge blow to the notion that the Palestinians could rely on Arab armies to aid them in defeating Israel. The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani expressed this kind of sentiment in a celebrated poem written in the immediate aftermath of the war, “Footnotes on the Book of the Naksa”:

Stirred By Oriental bombast,

By Antarctic swaggering that never killed a fly,

By the fiddle and the drum,

We went to war and lost.

Our shouting is louder than our actions,

Our swords are taller than us,

This is our tragedy.

In short

We wear the cape of civilization

But our souls live in the stone age.

You don’t win a war

With a reed and a flute.

Our impatience cost us

Fifty thousand new tents.^[11]

The reference to the fifty thousand new tents was significant for the history of the Palestinian movement. The 1967 war had redrawn the lines on the map, created the Occupied Territories and vastly swelled the number of refugees living in the camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. Conditions in these camps were desperate; hot, desolate, barren. Over time such populations would become restive and angry. Eventually this population would be a base for the fedayeen – the fighters of Fatah and the Fronts.

In 1968 Fatah fedayeen alongside the Jordanian military pushed back the Israeli military in the town of Karameh. A small piece of Palestinian territory was reclaimed. This moment seemed like a lightning bolt of hope, not just for Palestinians but regionally. It seemed to represent the possibility of a victorious guerrilla force against Israel. Hossam el-Hamalawy’s history of the Egyptian left of the period describes the impact of the Battle of Karameh. He maintains that over 20,000 Egyptians volunteered to join the fedayeen and new leftist-led student societies spread in the Egyptian universities. “The Palestine cause was their main focus of propaganda and agitation.”^[12]

As a consequence of this action and an increase in regional funding, Fatah became the preeminent Palestinian organisation. According to the British Marxist historian Phil Marshall, it seemed to combine two deeply conflicted social forces, “Palestinian capital with the energies of the Palestinian masses: it seemed to reconcile the aspirations of the new bourgeoisie with those of the camps”.^[13]

Global turmoil

The PFLP’s politics were shaped by more than merely regional politics. The late 1960s were aflame globally. The Algerians had kicked out the French. The Vietnamese were resisting American imperialism. Student rebellions were sweeping the US and Europe. In Latin America several guerrilla movements were also challenging for power. In China, the Maoist regime launched a hostile offensive against its internal enemies but badged it as a radical struggle of the youth. Millions of people across the world turned to reading and political engagement. The Middle East was no different. George Habash describes how he developed his ideas:

My Marxism grew deeper during my imprisonment in Syria. I am indebted to my jailer, Abd al-Karim al-Jundi, who kept me in solitary confinement for nine or ten months, thinking he would break me. I spent that entire period reading all the collected works of Marx and Engels, of Lenin, also of Ho Chi Minh and Mao.^[14]

Sympathy and identification with the Maoist-influenced nationalist struggles of the day were not merely developed through abstract study. The influence of Maoism was literal, grounded in state-sponsored visits and meetings between Palestinians and the Chinese regime. In 1965 for example Kanafani visited China and met with the Chinese Foreign Minister Cheng Lee. According to Kanafani’s wife, Anni Kanafani, he was “greatly influenced by the visit”.^[15] A year later in 1966 he attended the Afro-Asiatic Writers Conference. One story reveals much:

A North Vietnamese writer after reading his speech distributed to the other members of the congress shrapnel souvenirs from the remains of an American plane which had been shot down a week before, Kanafani was so emotional that when his turn to speak came he choked up and couldn’t read his prepared speech. Instead, he said he had nothing to offer in the way his North Vietnamese colleague had but promised to do so at the next conference. Then he sat down and burst into tears.^[16]

The political tumult of this period found expression in the ANM and in late 1967 the PFLP was formed. George Habash described some of the political conclusions reached by the figures who would eventually lead the PFLP. It should be noted however that the “principle” of not depending on any regime or government proved to be very malleable.

The war of 1967 and the new defeat brought a full revolution in our thought. We decided to adopt the Vietnamese model: A strong political party, complete mobilization of the people, the principle of not depending on any regime or government. The situation was now clear. The true revolutionary forces began to emerge. We are now preparing for twenty or more years of war against Israel and its backers. We have the moral determination and the guerrilla tactics to do so, and we will continue to do so, no matter how much Israel is backed by America.^[17]

Class and the PFLP

The focus of the PFLP, as its name implies, was on Palestine and its liberation. According to the PFLP’s founding documents, the primary enemy of Palestinians is Zionism and imperialism. Imperialism was defined as countries who were sympathetic to the US and Israel. Regimes that were not, were understood as progressive potential allies. These “progressive allies” included the Ba’athist regimes of Iraq and Syria.

The notion of the “popular front” was also key to the PFLP. The popular front was a policy developed by the Stalinist-dominated Comintern and then implemented by Communist parties across the world in the mid-1930s. It was an attempt by Stalin to strengthen the USSR’s imperial position in the world and to develop an anti-German, Franco-British pact. Such an alliance necessitated the development of a less aggressive domestic posture among the Communist parties in countries that were aligned to the USSR. It therefore involved a directive to the international Communist movement to moderate their class hostility. Over time therefore the phrase “popular front” came to represent a leftist class-collaborationist approach to struggles.^[18] In the PFLP’s case the cross-class approach was given cover by revolutionary phraseology.

According to the PFLP the actors in the process of revolutionary national liberation were to be the “revolutionary masses”. Palestinian resistance was the vanguard of the “Arab front”, and the “Palestinian fighting masses on the occupied land are actors of the Arab revolutionary march against imperialism and its proxy forces”.^[19] There was an “organic link between the struggle of the Palestinian people and the struggle of the masses of the Arab people”, as well as “the struggle of the forces of revolution and progress in the world”.^[20]

In its early years the PFLP drew heavily on Mao’s theories to analyse Palestinian society. They identified three distinct classes: the proletariat (workers and peasants), the “petite” bourgeoisie, and the “haute” bourgeoisie. Following Mao, workers and peasants are the revolution’s vanguard and primary beneficiaries. They are “[t]he material of the Palestinian revolution, its mainstay and its basic forces”.^[21] Members of this class form the destitute majority of Palestinians who “fill all camps, villages and poor urban districts”.^[22] The theoretical documents of the PFLP in this period maintained that the middle classes, or the petite bourgeoisie, should play a supportive role in the Palestinian revolution.

Because the petite bourgeoisie’s support for the revolution is not consistent, its members must be replaced by members of the proletariat in the leadership as soon as members of the proletariat are capable of taking over.^[23]

In practice however, almost all the leading figures of the organisation were members of such a class; many had been doctors, teachers, writers or journalists.

For the PFLP the “haute bourgeoisie” was generally understood as an ally of imperialism, and therefore an enemy of the revolution. Nevertheless within it there were latent anti-Israeli sentiments which they thought could be aroused, at the appropriate time, to serve the revolution. The organisation was therefore riven with ambiguities toward the class forces, both Palestinian and regionally, for whom the Palestinian struggle was a vehicle to class or regional power.

Armed resistance

For the PFLP armed resistance was “the only effective method that must be used by the popular masses in dealing with the Zionist enemy and all of its interests and its presence”.^[24] The experiences of Vietnam, Cuba and China were the template. According to the PFLP’s second convention these international battles involved “armed struggle to overcome the enemy’s technological superiority through a protracted war commencing with guerrilla warfare and developing into a popular liberation war”.^[25]

The focus, at least in these years, on the armed struggle as the key strategy for victory was problematic in several ways. Firstly, the guerrilla struggle in Palestine was (and remains) in a vastly weaker military position to the overwhelming might of an Israel backed by the West. A strategy hinged mainly on armed struggle put the Palestinians on weak terrain. Furthermore, the Palestinian guerrillas had no strong and reliable military allies. The previous decades had shown how fickle the support for the struggle for Palestinian nationhood was from the larger military forces across the region. This capriciousness came not only from the “reactionary” regimes. The states with which the PFLP developed links, such as Syria and Iraq, provided limited and heavily conditional support for the struggle. They were concerned that support for the Palestinian struggle did not provoke revolt inside their own countries. According to Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, from the early 1970s in Syria,

Assad and his fellow officers objected to uncontrolled Palestinian military activity dragging Syria into undesirable adventures. They opposed the freedom of action accorded to the heavily armed Palestinians within Syria. As regular military officers they desired a monopoly of weapons in Syrian politics.^[26]

Thus, the Palestinian factions limited their military activity in exchange for the right to continue to operate in Syrian territory. Such a quid quo pro ensured that the PFLP limited their political and strategic horizons. This was to their detriment. Regional, particularly working-class uprisings, including inside the so called “progressive” regimes, would have strengthened the hand of the Palestinians by weakening the networks of capitalist power across the region.

Archives have also revealed that the USSR was funding and facilitating certain activities of the PFLP.^[27] The funding from the USSR and the Ba’athist regimes eventually had an influence over both the material and ideological contours of the PFLP’s political outlook. Furthermore, as Australian socialist Mick Armstrong has noted:

By tying themselves to these regimes, the PFLP downplayed the need to build a mass revolutionary movement from below throughout the Arab world. The PFLP ended up providing left cover for regimes like the Ba’ath in Iraq and Syria.^[28]

Another problem with the emphasis on armed struggle was that the PFLP’s rhetoric about the self-activity of workers and peasants was not matched in practice. The emphasis on armed struggle restricted the scope of popular mobilisation. Active participation in the actions and activities of the PFLP was often restricted to relatively few young men and left most of the rest of the population as supportive, often passionately supportive, but largely passive spectators. An oppressed population which sees itself as cheerleaders on the sidelines is both less capable of mobilising in thoroughgoing revolutionary struggle and ultimately incapable of creating a new society.

Finally, the focus on the guerrilla struggles helped popularise and entrench the dead-end politics of Maoism. A different political approach could have drawn on the industrial behemoth of the regional working class in a context of a period of intensifying class conflict. Hossam el Hamalaway’s thesis reveals how even by the late 1960s Egyptian youth, the poor and some workers were searching out political ideas and organisations.^[29] An organisation which advanced a non-Stalinist, working-class politics may well have got a hearing and laid the basis for a party that could have intervened into the mass social rebellions of the decades to come.

The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

In the immediate years after the PFLP was formed there were two splits in the organisation. A right-wing faction headed by Ahmed Jabril broke away, declaring a desire to be “less ideological” and more militarily focused. He formed the PFLP (General Command). Another faction, headed by Nayef Hawatmeh, split to form what would become known as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Historian Francesco Leopardi argues that:

Hawatmeh and his comrades criticised the PFLP leadership for its authoritarian drift as well as for its excessive military caution. Moreover, the PFLP’s left was composed of younger cadres who were closer to Maoist, but also Trotskyist, principles, giving to the dispute both a generational and an ideological dimension.^[30]

The DFLP emphasised the need for a simultaneous “social and political revolution in all the Arab states, linked with the battle against Israel and with world imperialism led by the United States”.^[31] Therefore the DFLP initially placed significant emphasis on building relationships with non-military New Left organisations internationally, in particular with Israeli leftist anti-Zionist organisations such as Matzpen. Indeed Hawatmeh said in 2003: “We regarded Matzpen as a member of the common struggle in the problems of our two peoples”.^[32] They were also in touch with some Trotskyist organisations in Britain and elsewhere. In its early years, the DFLP emphasised the importance of social mobilisation as a vital feature of the struggle against Israel. They were also critical of the PFLP’s relationships to the Iraqi and Syrian regimes.

The politics of Fatah and the Fronts were put to the test in 1970 in Jordan.

1970 and the aftermath of Black September

By the late 1960s nearly 70 percent of the population of Jordan was Palestinian. The country was ruled by the dictatorial Hashemite monarchy which was unable to control vast swathes of the country. Indeed, in many towns and villages the PLO was in charge. PLO forces ran the refugee camps, organised education and welfare, and were engaged in guerrilla training. The Fronts saw this positioning as allowing the Palestinians a base from which to launch a broader offensive against Israel. They called Amman the Arab Hanoi. The Fronts were also relatively clear-eyed about the Jordanian monarchy. They understood that the Jordanian rulers were not friends of the Palestinian masses and would prove an impediment to a generalised challenge to Israel (and therefore to imperialism across the region).

Therefore, from the late 1960s the Fronts had been calling for the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy and for the PLO to take power. The leadership of Fatah was hostile to such declarations, fearing that overthrowing the monarchy would imperil the PLO’s relationship with other regimes and wealthy backers across the region. The Fronts refused to curtail their activities and in September 1970 engaged in a series of plane hijackings and other attacks on Israeli infrastructure. Associated with this uptick in military offensives, the Fronts (working closely together) organised a “liberated zone” around Irbid, in north-west Jordan. This all proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for the Jordanian monarchy, which launched a widespread military offensive against the PLO.

After hesitating for months Arafat began to understand that the Jordanian regime would crush all PLO forces that threatened their own power. Eventually, Fatah agreed to endorse a PLO call for a general strike and total mobilisation of the fedayeen. The call was issued on Sunday 13 September over Guerrilla Radio. The poor and disenfranchised of the camps, as well as the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers in the cities, heeded the call. Journalist John Cooley wrote:

The guerrillas fought stubbornly, knocking out many Army vehicles with bazookas, the smaller RBJ rockets and heavy weapons fire. Teenage children of the refugee camps hurled grenades. Up in Irbid where the PDFLP had proclaimed a liberated zone and the “first Soviet of Jordan”, al Fatah appointed Palestinian “military governors” with the approval of Arafat at the central committee. But food and water ran short; fires raged out of control; dead and dying lay in the streets while ambulances trying to reach them drew fire from both sides.^[33]

While there was a significant response among the population, and the Fronts were correct in wanting to generalise the struggle, this moment of rebellion against a regional ruling class went down to defeat. The Iraqi and Syrian forces refused to enter the fight to back the PLO guerrillas and the regional working-class response was muted. In what became known as Black September, thousands of Palestinians were brutally murdered by the Jordanian regime, the centres of Fatah and Front organising were disrupted, and they were pushed out and forced to relocate, largely to Lebanon.

This period was the high point of the Fronts’ radicalism. The story from here is one of compromise and political decline.

After Black September

In the wake of Black September, Fatah, still the dominant force in the PLO, drew the conclusion that to win a Palestinian state they needed to be more conciliatory toward the Arab ruling classes of the region. This trend was entrenched by the result of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, which saw a détente between the Arab regimes and Israel. In the aftermath the regimes felt they could engage with Israel on a more equal footing and began a process of dealing with Israel diplomatically. Thus began the long process of accommodation with Israel, which in turn had a conservatising impact on Fatah and therefore the politics of the whole PLO.

The DFLP, influenced by a “stages theory” of social revolution, was one of the first factions in the PLO to develop the idea of a Palestinian mini-state in the areas conquered by Israel in the 1967 war. They pitched this as liberated zones from which a further war would be waged. In this line they were encouraged by the Soviets, who were keen to settle down relations with sympathetic regimes in the Middle East.

In October 1974 the PLO was recognised by the Arab League as sole representative of the Palestinian people. Arafat spoke at the UN for the first time and the next few years saw a shifting of the goalposts from the demand for liberation of the whole homeland to an ever-decreasing area – “wherever could be liberated”. This accorded very well with the interests of the Palestinian capitalist class – who were, by this stage, utterly dominant in Fatah. The DFLP, previously the most radical and leftward-moving section of the movement, backed the Fatah leadership. The PFLP, on the other hand, rejected the notion of establishing a Palestinian mini-state and formed “the Rejection Front”.

The 1970s were dominated by a round of further war, radicalisation and then defeat in Lebanon, and eventually the centre of Palestinian organising shifted to the Occupied Territories in the West Bank and Gaza.

Intifada

By the early 1980s a generation of Palestinians were growing frustrated at the limitations on their lives caused by Israeli military occupation. Tensions were mounting and underneath the West Bank and Gaza there was, to quote the singer Ani Difranco, a fire just waiting for fuel. By the mid-1980s this resulted in an explosion of self-activity. Expansive networks began to provide the base for a reinvigorated Palestinian movement not based on fedayeen or militants, but rather the whole of civil society. This became a movement deeply rooted in the Palestinian masses.

In 1987, the killing of four Palestinian labourers by Israeli forces proved the spark that was to ignite six years of mass demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, stayaways, riots and the establishment of “no go” areas for Israeli troops. This would become known as the First Intifada or the Intifada of Stones. Journalist Joe Stork poetically described the symbolism of the stone throwing:

The West Bank and Gaza is a land made in equal measure of stone and soil. The occupiers of the last twenty-one years have quarried the same stone to build their fortress suburbs that stand over this land. These constructions do not blend; they dominate. They are no more part of this landscape than the many tent encampments set up outside towns and large villages to garrison the tens of thousands of troops now needed to confront the stones. It is fitting that this uprising has reclaimed these stones to sling at the army, and to barricade the roads against their armoured vehicles.^[34]

The emblematic figure of the Intifada was the young person hurling stones, head covered by a keffiyeh, standing defiant against heavily armed Israeli forces or tanks.

George Habash described the dynamic in the following way: “As for armed struggle, the PFLP advocated it until the Intifada. Under armed struggle, it is the fedayeen who fight, but under the Intifada, it is all the Palestinian people – children, women, artists, everybody”.^[35]

There was a radicalism to this movement and space for the left to grow. There was a deep hostility to collaborators with Israel and even, among some, animosity to the Fatah leadership of the PLO. One story here will suffice.

The head collaborator of the camp, the mukhtar, had outlived many assassination attempts over the past several years. Recently, while he was away in Amman, some young men managed to break into his well-fortified home and in the bathroom they hung a portrait of Arafat with a noose. When he returned home and entered his bathroom, he had a heart attack and died on the spot.^[36]

The Fronts in the Intifada

Over the early 1980s the Fronts had shifted their organisational focus to the West Bank and Gaza and increasingly began to intervene into different social sectors to recruit. The PFLP were implanted in the camps in Gaza, whereas the DFLP and the Communist Party both had influence in the West Bank. Although they were not big enough to fully rival Fatah, the left had built up enough support to be a significant element of the formal leadership of the Intifada. Problematically, however, the Fronts remained inside the structures of the PLO, committed to it, albeit with criticisms of the Fatah leadership.

While the early months of the Intifada were led by a combination of local spontaneous action and pre-existing formations, a more formal political leadership coalesced in early 1988. This became known as the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU). Outside of the UNLU, and with growing influence, were the Islamist factions, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. The UNLU directed the course of the uprising through a series of communiqués. These communiqués, particularly in the early years of the uprising, would give each day of the week ahead a particular focus. The communiqués were assiduously followed.

In the occupied West Bank people walk with their eyes lowered to the ground. This posture is not to avoid the attention of the incessant military patrols or to avert one’s eyes from witnessing their physical violence. Neither do the downcast eyes indicate a population weary after twelve weeks of an uprising… Rather people look down to spot the latest statement from the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, often found in the streets or tucked under a windshield wiper or door.^[37]

In Gaza, the communiqués were broadcast outside radio stations to huge gatherings. The UNLU comprised both a political leadership on the ground in the Occupied Territories and a diasporic leadership. The diasporic leadership’s role was to develop the Intifada’s strategic orientation. Over time a political cleavage developed between the leadership on the ground, in the midst of the uprising, and the external leadership.^[38] The early articulated goals of the movement were to hold an international peace conference that could push for the establishment of a Palestinian state. This framework and these horizons were never seriously challenged by the Fronts.

As well as participating in the UNLU, the Fronts also established their own women’s committees and student bodies. Importantly too, the trade unions became a field of activity.

The Intifada, Palestinian workers, the unions and the left

By the 1980s the Palestinian working class had become a more significant portion of the overall Palestinian population. The number of Palestinians working in low-wage jobs in both the West Bank and as day labourers inside Israel had increased. Unions grew. One union official estimated in 1985 that out of 150,000 workers in the West Bank, around 30,000 were union members. Women were also becoming wage labourers. Indeed, much of their increasing influence in political and social life emerged from their participation in trade union struggles.^[39] Strikes were becoming an increasing factor in the struggle. Late December in 1987 saw a general strike of Palestinian workers across all the Occupied Territories. The strike extended to East Jerusalem – and was also universally observed by 650,000 Palestinians living inside Israel. Israeli profits in a variety of sectors, including hospitality, construction and fruit farming, collapsed.

By the time of the Intifada there were already several union federations and blocs, organised along political lines. The Palestinian trade union movement had, until the early 1980s, been dominated by the Communist Party (known as the Jordanian CP until the 1980s). The Communist Party had focused largely on bread-and-butter workers’ issues, largely eschewing the national question. But the realities of Israeli occupation were bearing down on workers, and it was impossible to separate the economic from the political; workers began to look to bodies that would address the question of the occupation. Although the CP maintained a significant presence the mood swung toward the factions inside the PLO, Fatah certainly, but also the Fronts. Both Fronts had made a turn toward emphasising working-class participation in the Intifada, declaring West Bank workers to be the vanguard.^[40]

Although these struggles were vital, there were some significant limitations to the power of Palestinian workers. Israel was built to be an ethnically exclusivist state, with an economy that matched. A Hebrew labour policy was developed by the Israeli pioneers both before and after 1948 in order to limit the reliance of the state on Palestinian labour. In 1982, Jewish Palestinian Marxist Tony Cliff remembered his youthful years in Palestine. He describes the process of the establishment of Zionist separateness:

The Zionists organised their own trade union, the Histadrut, which raised two political funds. One was called “the defence of Hebrew Labour”, the other “the defence of Hebrew products”. These funds were used to organise pickets to prevent Arabs working in Jewish enterprises and to stop Arab produce coming into Jewish markets. They did nothing to damage Zionist businesses.^[41]

Over time such dynamics were consolidated. Although Palestinian workers dominated in some sectors, the core of the Israeli economy did not rely on Palestinian labour. This meant that, while Palestinian workers’ strikes could be a crucial element in the overall struggle, they could not deal the knockout blow. Such a blow could only be achieved by regional working-class revolution. Nevertheless, Palestinian workers were very important for the Intifada. They helped give it a mass character and could point in the direction of what kind of forces were needed regionally to challenge both Israel and the dictatorial powers across the Middle East. In such a context the politics of worker mobilising became key.

The Fronts accepted the general line that the national struggle was paramount. This nationalist tendency of the unions led to a “freezing” of the class struggle inside Palestine and the creation of a “national alliance” between workers and the entrepreneurial class in the Occupied Territories. The words of one of the officials of the DFLP union body (the Workers’ Union Bureau, WUB) spelled this out.

The Israeli economic policy is aimed at weakening the Palestinian economy by putting restrictions and claiming taxes on Palestinian enterprises. So, workers have begun to compromise their own rights to protect the national industry, and therefore the national bourgeoisie. For instance, they gave up the thirteenth month pay. The WUB believes that there can to some extent be negotiations with the national bourgeoisie. There can be compromise, but not to the extent that everything will be loaded onto the workers’ backs.^[42]

So, the Fronts rightly saw that the workers’ movement needed to have a political attitude to the occupation, but they wrongly subsumed themselves into the PLO. They made no distinction between themselves and the nationalists. Ultimately this meant that the Fronts refused to carve out an independent revolutionary working-class position. Although they maintained that the working class was vital, the Fronts did not argue that the workplace committees should play a leading role in shaping the political contours of the popular committees and their control over society. By the end of the first year of the Intifada there was a consensus that the popular committees were the basis for a Palestinian state. In such a context there may well have been room to argue that an expanded and deepened version of popular power – workers’ power – was necessary. Even if such an argument was in a minority, it was the right argument to make. National independence, while important, does not bring genuine liberation for the nationally oppressed working classes. The history of post-colonial or post-independence states in the twentieth century has unfortunately not been one where the newly independent state has become a paradise for workers. Far from it – as the examples of Egypt, South Africa, Iraq and Algeria demonstrate. So, Palestinian workers needed to fight for the struggle for national independence to become a struggle for socialism.

Workers’ power in such a context should be the basis for a workers’ state, not just an independent capitalist state. These arguments were deeply pertinent in 1987 and 1988 in the Occupied Territories.

Negotiations with Israel, nature of a Palestinian state, attitudes toward the Arab regimes

The other issues around which there was contestation and debate was what attitude to take to regional rebellions, the negotiations between the PLO and Israel and the USA and finally the nature and contours of a possible Palestinian state.

As the Intifada transformed from a brief uprising into a more sustained rebellion, there was more to fight for. The Intifada inspired regional uprisings from Algeria to Jordan to the Gulf States. These weren’t rebellions just in solidarity with Palestine. They were rebellions that challenged the regional order. In Egypt mass demonstrations in universities were joined by workers from textile mills in Mahalla al-Kubra. Workers walked out and led a march in support of the Intifada while also raising slogans against the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. This was something the Fatah leadership could not countenance. So much of their existence and power was dependent on funding and support from these self-same regimes. They began to codify a policy of “non-interference” in the affairs of the Arab regimes.

Furthermore, the resilience of the popular movement was also considered potentially problematic by the Fatah leadership. While Fatah understood the popular committees as providing the infrastructure for a future Palestinian state, they did not approve of their radicalising dynamic. They wanted a movement that could be wheeled out and wheeled back in again according to the needs of its diplomatic negotiations. Fatah saw the mass movement only as a lever for its own power plays. Certainly, the Intifada had managed to change Israel’s stance. The Israeli ruling class felt that they were unable to continue the occupation with the same structures in place. Similarly, the USA saw that it might well be advantageous to develop a Palestinian leadership that might be capable of containing an insurgent Palestinian movement. Thus, at the 19th Palestine National Committee meeting in Algiers in 1988 the PLO voted to declare a Palestinian state. Upon completing the reading of the declaration, Arafat, as PLO chairman, assumed the title of president of Palestine. This represented the absolute consolidation of Fatah’s dominance in the PLO – a dominance which the Fronts did nothing serious to contest. In the wake of the agreement, Arafat toured the world to try and gain recognition for the new state of Palestine – as part of opening further negotiations with the US and Israel.

This process ultimately ended in the 1993 Oslo Accords and the establishment of the traitorous Palestinian Authority. The PLO voted to effectively recognise Israel as a legitimate state; and in doing so they trusted in the notion that the USA could act as a neutral arbiter in any negotiations with Israel. Fundamentally they propagated the disastrous notion that a Palestinian state could exist in peace next to an aggressive expansionist apartheid regime like Israel.

The Fronts were committed, to a greater or lesser degree, to the framework of international peace negotiations. As Leopardi argues:

For its part, the PFLP had already gradually accepted the idea of an international peace conference in the years preceding the Intifada. After December 1987 however, the UNLU stated clearly among its goals the achievement of a settlement through the international peace conference. This became a systematic demand for the PFLP and in its positioning within the debate, it did not adopt a hard-line position. The PFLP stated several times throughout 1988 that both the landmark results scored by the uprising and the international détente allowed by the USSR-US rapprochement on several issues were paving the way towards the settlement of the conflict with Israel.^[43]

Both the DFLP and the PFLP, in differing ways and at different paces, challenged elements of this trajectory while nevertheless maintaining their fundamental commitment to the PLO and its institutions. They oscillated wildly, denouncing Fatah one day but arguing to maintain loyal opposition to them the next. Hamas and Islamic Jihad on the other hand maintained a strident objection to the notion of a Palestinian mini-state and this objection stood them in good stead for the later betrayals.

At the same time, between 1991 and 1993 the Israeli arrest and killing campaigns eliminated many experienced leading activists. This repression occurred at precisely the same time as Fatah deliberately fragmented the movement. Arafat allocated PLO funds to institutions and personnel according to political loyalty, much to the detriment of genuine resistance activities. These two factors ultimately contributed to the decline of the mass character of the Intifada. Ultimately, the radicalism of the initial years of the First Intifada floundered. Israeli repression wore down the population, while the PLO pushed the struggle into more limited channels. The left had squandered opportunities to build a more serious, defiant opposition: one that looked not just to a deepening of the radical struggles of women, workers, students and camp dwellers but that also built more serious links with similar organisations in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan. Furthermore, there had been an opportunity to build a serious non-Stalinist revolutionary organisation to lay the basis for challenges to Fatah’s leadership in the future. This was not done.

Conclusions

The more recent history of the Fronts echoes the story told here. It is a story of a loyal opposition that often offers reasonable critiques of the PLO leadership but fails to advance any serious strategies that might challenge it. In at least two instances, the revolutionary moments in Jordan in the late 1960s and in the first Intifada in the 1980s, there was the real possibility of a break with the prevailing politics of Fatah.

Israel and its Western backers are powerful. But so is the regional working class. Historically the Palestinian struggle has inspired those beyond the boundaries of Palestine. Political trends developed among Palestinians have been influential among broad layers of people, both across the region and the world. The failures of the Fronts are unfortunately the failures of the Stalinist and Maoist left of the period. The dead-end strategies of armed struggle, a misidentification of some Arab regimes as “progressive” and the subordination of working-class politics to the national struggle, are all tragic but recurring themes of the twentieth century. Their failures meant that increasing sections of the population became disillusioned with the left and looked to other political currents that claimed to be untainted, incorruptible and determined resistance fighters. In short, the failures of the left allowed the space for first Islamic Jihad, and then Hamas to grow.

The Palestinian struggle has been one of the most determined and brave in history. It has withstood phenomenal body blows and suffered greatly from Israeli brutality. Nevertheless, the history of the struggle cannot be merely understood as only shaped by Israeli and imperialist violence. The strategy and tactics of the resistance forces themselves must be assessed. The tragedy of the Palestinian left is that it has been unable to turn the “screams from the tents” into cries of victory. A revolutionary left needs to be built across the whole region. Palestinians are diasporic and have often formed the cadre of resistance movements regionally. What’s more the Palestinian movement has proved to be the spark for many challenges to dictatorships across the world. In the West we must aim to build both solidarity and a revolutionary political movement that can aid such a project.

References

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[1] Quoted in Irving 2012.

[2] See Brehony and Hamdi 2024.

[3] See for example Leopardi 2024 and Kilani 2024.

[4] There is a longer history of leftist organising in Palestine. For the history of the Palestine Communist Party see Buderi 2010.

[5] Wild 1975.

[6] Quoted in Greenstein 2014.

[7] Wild 1975.

[8] Soueid 1998.

[9] Quoted in Greenstein 2013.

[10] Falastinuna (publication of the Fatah movement), 11 November 1960, quoted in Baumgarten 2005.

[11] Qabbani 1967.

[12] el-Hamalawy 1977, p.65.

[13] Marshall 1989, p.122.

[14] Soueid 1998.

[15] Kanafani 1973.

[16] Wild 1975.

[17] Cooley 1973, p.139.

[18] For more on the history of this term see Hallas 1985.

[19] Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), 1967 (Founding Statement).

[20] PFLP 1969 (Strategy), pp.18–19.

[21] PFLP 1969 (Strategy), p.47.

[22] PFLP 1969 (Strategy), p.47.

[23] Quoted in Cubert 1997.

[24] PFLP 1967 (Founding Statement).

[25] PFLP 1969 (Strategy), p.72.

[26] Khalidi 1984. Khalidi goes on to describe how during the Lebanese civil war the Syrian regime actively intervened with Israel to crush the Palestinian and leftist mobilisations.

[27] See KGB memorandum 1974, a message from Andropov to Brezhnev about the meeting between KGB station chief in Lebanon and Wadie Haddad, leader of the PFLP-EO (People’s Liberation Front of Palestine – External Operations).

[28] Armstrong 2024.

[29] el-Hamalawy 1977.

[30] Leopardi 2020.

[31] Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) 1975.

[32] Matzpen 2003.

[33] Cooley 1973, p.115.

[34] Stork 1989, p.67.

[35] Soueid 1988.

[36] Stork 1989, p.70.

[37] Johnson, Lee and Hiltermann 1989, p.30.

[38] For more on this dynamic see Leopardi 2020.

[39] Hiltermann 1991.

[40] Marshall 1989, p.154.

[41] Cliff 1982.

[42] Hiltermann 1991, p.77.

[43] Leopardi 2020, p.180.