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THE LEFT HAS PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE  
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Francesco Saverio Leopardi
July 2, 2024
Jacobin
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_ The rivalry between Fatah and Hamas has dominated Palestinian
politics since the 1990s. Yet for many years, the main challenge to
Fatah came from the groups of the Palestinian left, which have made a
huge contribution to the national movement. _

Georges Habash, military leader of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Amman, Jordan, in 1970. , Genevieve
Chauvel / Sygma via Getty Images

 

The Palestinian left receives little attention in current discussions
about Palestinian politics as its main factions appear marginalized,
although they have historically made a huge contribution to the
development of the Palestinian national movement. Today’s absence of
a progressive option between two conservative nationalist parties,
Fatah and Hamas, contributes to the impasse that Palestinians face in
terms of political initiative.

To understand the marginalization of the Left, we have to consider not
only some of the objective historical factors that undermined its
political weight, like the collapse of the Soviet Union or the rise of
political Islam. The inability to solve long-standing problems such as
intraleftist fragmentation or the primacy of nationalism over class
also represented key factors in the decline of the Palestinian left.

The PLO and the Left

At the end of the 1960s, Palestinian armed organizations had taken
over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and transformed it
into the main institutional platform of the modern Palestinian
national movement. Yasser Arafat’s Fatah emerged as the dominant
Palestinian faction, gaining immense popularity among Palestinian
refugees in exile thanks to the introduction of some key political
innovations.

Fatah spearheaded the idea that Palestinian nationalism and political
agency should be autonomous from Arab patronage and that armed
struggle was the key instrument for achieving liberation. Several
other factions joined Fatah in the PLO, with those claiming a Marxist
identity representing the main opposition to its leadership. By the
time the armed organizations were in full control of the PLO in 1969,
the Palestinian left was already displaying some of the long-standing
problems that would mark its trajectory.

The most important PLO left-wing organization was, and still is, the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a group led by
George Habash, a physician hailing from the town of Lydda, in
today’s central Israel. Habash was also known as _hakim al-thawra_,
“the wise man of the revolution” — a nickname that hinted at
both his professional background (_hakim_ means doctor in Levantine
Arabic) and his charismatic leadership.

The PFLP was founded in 1967 as the Palestinian national section of
one of the most important Arab transnational organizations, the
Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN). During the 1960s, the MAN had
moved closer to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who
championed Arab nationalism and unification. This also entailed a
shift to the left from the MAN’s traditional nationalist outlook as
Nasser himself leaned more decidedly on the concept of “Arab
socialism.”

After the crushing Arab defeat in the June 1967 war against Israel,
Nasser’s Pan-Arabism lost its credibility as the major agent of Arab
unification and Palestinian liberation. This left more space to
factions such as Fatah, who first insisted that Palestinians
themselves should lead the struggle for liberation. Habash and his
followers understood that the time was ripe for a paradigmatic change
in the MAN, and in December of that year, they founded the PFLP.

Splits in the PFLP

However, in its first two years of life, the PFLP suffered major
splits. First in 1968, Ahmed Jibril, a former officer in the Syrian
army, left the organization shortly after joining it and founded the
PFLP–General Command. Jibril argued that he had little interest in
the PFLP’s ideological debates and was more interested in organizing
armed resistance.

Possibly more painful than Jibril’s breakaway was the decision by
the then left wing of the PFLP to leave the organization in 1969 and
follow the leadership of Nayef Hawatmeh. Hawatmeh, a Jordanian
national, and his followers, who were mostly gathered around the
magazine _al-Hourriah_, contested Habash’s authoritarian leadership,
which they viewed as leaning excessively to the right.

However, personal rivalries possibly mattered more than ideological
differences in the split, as Hawatmeh resented Habash’s popularity
and charismatic aura. After securing protection from Arafat’s Fatah,
particularly for his comrades’ offices in Lebanon, Hawatmeh left the
PFLP and founded the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (later renamed simply the Democratic Front for the
Liberation of Palestine, or DFLP). The name was intended to highlight
the allegedly undemocratic leadership of the mother organization.

Habash was now left with a diminished organization that nonetheless
still enjoyed significant popularity and was loyal to its secretary
general. In 1969, the PFLP issued its political manifesto and adopted
Marxism-Leninism as its official ideology. The PFLP’s ideological
and organizational platforms reflected the influence of global
Marxism. Maoism and the Vietnamese experience clearly embodied some
key role models for Habash and comrades.

Unlike Fatah, the PFLP (as well as the DFLP) did not just seek
Palestinian liberation and the creation of a democratic state in the
whole of mandatory Palestine. They believed in a wider revolution that
would bring about socialism across the region and overthrow “Arab
reactionary regimes.” In this perspective, Arab reaction and Zionism
were both seen as local pawns of global imperialism, led by the United
States.

In the late 1960s, both the PFLP and the DFLP directed their vitriolic
rhetoric at the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This was the state where
the PLO had its headquarters and Palestinians had the best chance of
creating an “Arab Hanoi” to support guerrilla warfare against
Israel.

Despite the ideological differences with Fatah, the PFLP still
subscribed to the same shared values and practices that formed the
core of the PLO charter. By doing so, the PFLP acknowledged the
primacy of those ideas that Fatah had first introduced to the national
movement, especially Palestinian nationalism.

The PFLP would remain loyal throughout the decades to the PLO
framework despite its role of hard-line opposition. The organization
consistently reaffirmed the preeminence of the national dimension of
its struggle over the socialist, revolutionary line.

From Jordan to Lebanon

The calls for an Arab revolution clearly reflected the Arab
nationalist legacy of the MAN but put the PFLP and DFLP at odds with
Fatah, whose leaders strove to maintain a balance for the PLO in
Jordan. During its revolutionary years, until roughly 1972, the PFLP
became renowned in the world for its “external operations” —
specifically, the plane hijackings that made the figure of Leila
Khaled a global revolutionary icon.

While this strategy achieved its goal of drawing the world’s
attention to the Palestinian struggle, it also precipitated a
confrontation between the PLO and the Hashemite rulers of Jordan. In
September 1970, the PFLP’s landing of three hijacked aircraft at
Dawson’s Fields, a former British air base, was the spark for the
crisis, as King Hussein ordered the army to move against the
Palestinian armed organizations. Following what became known as
“Black September,” clashes continued into 1971, and the PLO was
eventually forced to relocate its headquarters in Beirut.

Once in Lebanon, the entire PLO entered a new political phase, one
where revolution and armed struggle stood alongside diplomacy and
institutional development. By 1974, the PLO had adopted this approach
as its official line, with the organization declaring its readiness to
establish a “combatant Palestinian national authority over any part
of liberated land,” foreshadowing the explicit acceptance of a
two-state solution. In fact, the DFLP was the first Palestinian
faction to propose such a political shift, which Fatah quickly
endorsed.

The PFLP was caught in the middle and rejected the new line, deeming
it to be a “deviation” from the PLO charter. Habash’s
organization faced a significant dilemma, pulled between its loyalty
to the PLO framework and its adherence to the role of radical
opposition.

Much of the PFLP’s popular support rested on its uncompromising
position over Palestinian liberation and its ability to perform its
revolutionary role. In Jordan, there had been a real chance for the
PFLP to launch a revolutionary transformation, whereas in Lebanon, the
balance between its two main political objectives was more difficult
to strike.

However, the Lebanese context still offered some revolutionary
opportunities to the Palestinian left. The local Lebanese National
Movement, led by Kamal Jumblatt, aimed to overcome the traditional
confessional system upon which state power rested and saw in the
Palestinian armed presence a potential partner. While Fatah tried to
avoid being dragged into Lebanese internal confrontations, the PFLP
and DFLP saw in Jumblatt’s initiative another chance to bring
revolution to an Arab state.

When the civil war broke out in 1975, it was clear that the PLO could
not remain uninvolved in the conflict. After all, a shooting incident
directed against Palestinian fighters ended up being considered the
first episode of the war. The Lebanese militias controlled by
conservative factions, particularly Christian Maronites, feared the
political and demographic threat that the PLO posed to the status quo.

Palestinian organizations became heavily involved in the war, as their
main goal was to protect the sanctuary that they had built in the
country. In the second half of the 1970s, solidarity with fellow
Palestinians helped the PFLP bridge its gaps with the rest of the
national movement. Revolutionary transformation gave way as a goal to
national survival.

The second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, after the first had
already occupied a portion of south Lebanon in 1978, marked a
watershed in the history of the whole PLO and of the Palestinian left
specifically. After a summer-long siege, the PLO was forced to leave
its Beirut base and relocate to distant Tunis. Meanwhile, the PFLP and
the DFLP moved their headquarters to Damascus, where the looming eyes
of the regime of Hafez al-Assad imposed a much more restrictive
environment on the Palestinian left.

The First Intifada

After 1982, the left groups appeared to have been deprived of any room
for revolutionary initiative. Armed struggle, as practiced until then,
did achieve international recognition for the wider national movement
but had delivered neither liberation nor revolution in the Arab world.
Fatah and the PLO leadership now bet everything on diplomacy and
sought to gain US recognition as a fundamental, preliminary step to
enter direct negotiations with Israel.

For its part, the PFLP could not accept this further turn toward
diplomacy but was unable to propose an alternative vision. In
addition, George Habash was unable to exert his strong leadership in
the way that he had done before after suffering a stroke in 1980 that
significantly weakened his ability to work.

The outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987 represented a golden
opportunity to find a way out of the political deadlock that had been
restricting the capacity for Palestinian initiative. The broad civil
uprising in the occupied territories shifted the PLO’s balance from
the diaspora to the homeland. For the PLO leadership, it was an
occasion to find more leverage for its diplomatic efforts. For the
PFLP and the Left, on the other hand, it was a chance to close the gap
with Fatah and renew their revolutionary credentials.

However, the First Intifada also saw the birth of the first
Palestinian organization outside of the PLO framework to gain wide
popular support. Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, was
established soon after the eruption of the uprisings and rapidly
presented itself as the new radical Palestinian option. This not only
threatened the status of the PLO but also jeopardized the role of the
Palestinian left, particularly the PFLP, which still positioned itself
as the hard-line opposition to Fatah’s deviations.

Several other prominent factors emerged during the early 1990s that
placed the whole left and particularly the PFLP in a critical
situation. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 undermined the
credibility of Marxist parties on a global level. At the Palestinian
level, this event did not prompt major transformations in the
ideological and organizational outlook of left-wing organizations.
Only the Palestinian Communist Party rebranded itself as the Palestine
People’s Party and adopted a social democratic profile.

The PFLP appeared particularly inactive in the face of this major
global challenge as well as the changed situation that the Intifada
had resulted in for Palestinian factions. At its fifth national
congress in 1993, the PFLP failed to update its vision for socialist
transformation and restated its adherence to the 1969 ideological
statement. At the same time, the traditional leadership did not allow
the new leaders from Palestine who had emerged during the Intifada to
gain adequate representation in the organization.

After Oslo

In late summer of that year, the PLO leadership and the Israeli
government declared the achievement of a framework for a peace
process, part of the so-called Oslo Accords. This turn of events
caught the Palestinian left off-guard. The PFLP and the DFLP,
alongside Hamas, rejected the secret deal that had been reached in the
Norwegian capital, although a small group in the DFLP left the
organization and founded the Palestinian Democratic Union (FIDA) to
lend their support to Arafat’s initiative.

The PFLP and DFLP strove to build a coalition in opposition to the
Oslo Accords with Hamas and other rejectionist factions.

As the ostensible Israeli-Palestinian peace process progressed and the
Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was established, the PFLP and
DFLP strove to build a coalition in opposition to it with Hamas and
other rejectionist factions. This initiative proved to be short-lived
as leftists and Islamists found little common ground and could not
overcome mutual distrust. In the 1990s, both the PFLP and the DFLP
gradually came to terms with the new reality. While officially
maintaining their rejection of the Oslo framework, they pragmatically
looked for a way to influence the new reality.

Party members were allowed to join the lower ranks of the PNA
bureaucracy, while top leaders considered returning to Palestine in
the context of the peace process. In 1999, for instance, Abu Ali
Mustafa, deputy secretary general of the PFLP, was allowed to return
to the West Bank to organize the resistance in the occupied
territories, as official statements maintained.

At the same time, however, many left-wing activists abandoned their
faction to join the mushrooming sector of nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs). The Left looked at civil society as the new
xxxxxx of resistance against both the occupation and the PNA’s
growing authoritarianism. Yet dependence on Western funding and the
conditions that came with it deprived the NGOs of much of their
progressive potential. Within the framework of NGO work, social
activism was professionalized, and a single-issue approach became
prominent.

In stark contrast, Hamas widened its social base during this period
through a large network of popular organizations that did not depend
on external finance and were thus able to mobilize popular support for
the party’s line and ethos. Leftist factions had been losing
membership and their opposition appeared toothless as both the PFLP
and DFLP had practically reconciled with Fatah and accepted the Oslo
framework.

The Second Intifada, which erupted in September 2000, sealed the
marginalization of the Palestinian left. In the context of a
militarized uprising, the PFLP and DFLP’s armed branches could not
match the strength of Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades or Fatah’s
Martyrs of Al-Aqsa.

In 2000, Habash resigned his position, and Abu Ali Mustafa became
secretary general of the PFLP, underscoring the importance that the
PFLP ascribed to reorganizing resistance in the occupied territories.
However, an Israeli air strike on his office in Al-Bireh assassinated
the new PFLP leader in August 2001.

While the Intifada raged on, the PFLP elected Ahmad Sa’adat, a
leader of the PFLP’s West Bank branch, as new secretary general.
However, Sa’adat too would shortly afterward be incapacitated in his
leading role. First the PNA arrested him in 2002 because of his role
in the killing of Israeli minister Rehavam Ze’evi as revenge for
Mustafa’s death. The Israeli army subsequently took Sa’adat from
the PNA jail to one of its own prisons, where he remains to this day.

The Palestinian Left Today

The Second Intifada would come to an end in 2005, leaving the PFLP
leadership in a bad shape. As for the DFLP, an aging Hawatmeh
continued to occupy the position of secretary general, but he was
based in Damascus, far away from the territories. In the hectic years
that followed the Second Intifada and Arafat’s death in 2004, the
Palestinian left appeared squeezed between the rising opposition of
Hamas and a fragmented Fatah that nonetheless still embodied the
PNA’s ruling party.

The scattered participation of the left-wing factions in the 2006
elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, the PNA parliament,
testified to their inability to play a meaningful role in the growing
polarization of Palestinian politics. The PFLP won three seats out of
132 with a little over 4 percent of the vote. The DFLP ran a joint
list with the People’s Party and FIDA that called itself the
Alternative; it took two seats with just under 3 percent. The
Palestinian National Initiative of Mustafa Barghouti, a former
People’s Party leader who had stood against Mahmoud Abbas in the
2005 presidential election, also won two seats.

Hamas was the overall victor, and its rivalry with Fatah eventually
resulted in full-blown conflict between the two groups. As this was
unfolding, the Palestinian left sought to play a mediating role but
was unable to influence the course of events. The entire left
condemned the 2007 takeover of Gaza by Hamas, while acknowledging the
responsibilities of Fatah for escalating the crisis.

In the years that followed, Palestinian leftist factions continued to
focus on reconciliation efforts. Their membership kept declining along
with their impact on Palestinian society.  For instance, left-wing
students’ groups affiliated to the main parties have not been
performing well in university elections.

Some prominent figures in Palestinian politics kept rising from the
ranks of the Left, such as the PFLP’s Khalida Jarrar. However,
against the background of worsening economic conditions in the
occupied territories and growing authoritarianism by both Palestinian
administrations in Gaza and the West Bank under the weight of a
crushing occupation, the left factions have been unable to propose an
alternative view for liberation and mobilize popular support
accordingly.

 

Ideological and organizational renewal continues to elude the major
groups. For example, the PFLP has continued reelecting Sa’adat as
secretary general in his prison cell, underscoring its inability to
find a new leader who could oversee party affairs from outside prison.

More broadly, the inability of the Left to renew its vision for
Palestinian liberation remains a central problem. Left parties, much
like the other Palestinian organizations, remain tied to traditional
views that emerged during the 1960s. They have failed to elaborate an
alternative that might depart from the historical paradigms of
Palestinian nationalism and focus more precisely on the core
contradictions of the question of Palestine and of the Palestinian
national movement.

How to rebuild an institutional platform that might provide legitimate
and comprehensive political representation to the Palestinian people?
How to elaborate a vision for self-determination detached from an
impossible two-state solution? How to provide an analysis and a
political response to the colonial relations of power existing not
only in the occupied territories but throughout Israel/Palestine? How
to return political representation and involvement to Palestinian
refugees in exile?

While the brutal Israeli war in Gaza continues with no end in sight,
pondering these questions might appear irrelevant. Nonetheless, from a
longer-term perspective, the absence of a viable Palestinian political
platform is a vital missing piece in the struggle to achieve equality
and self-determination for Palestinians.

The Palestinian left in all its diversity could draw upon its
historical and intellectual legacy within the national movement to
provide fresh perspectives on the major problems of the Palestinian
question. Yet the traditional organizations appear to have exhausted
most of their political credibility and show little interest in
meaningful renewal. The outstanding question then remains as to
whether left-wing ideas and practices can find an effective vehicle in
the existing frameworks or will have to seek new institutional
channels.

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Francesco Saverio Leopardi is the author of The Palestinian Left and
Its Decline: Loyal Opposition. He teaches at the University of Padova.

* Israel/Palestine; Palestinian Left; Fatah; Palestine Liberation
Organization;
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