National liberation and the left in Palestine

The global movement of solidarity with Palestine is extensive and vibrant. Everywhere, there are pressing questions about the Palestinian future­—and about the Palestinian past, especially histories of colonial rule, imperialist strategy, Zionism, resistance and national liberation.1 Two issues come up repeatedly: first, in a region of intifadas, uprisings and revolutions, why has the left been in retreat? Second, why has the Palestinian left been unable to match the extraordinary resolve of the mass of Palestinian people? This article will explore how we got here and provide ideas on how radical activists can invigorate the revolutionary tradition.

Since Britain invaded Palestine in 1917, most histories have served the interests of the colonial power and the Zionist settler movement. It was not until after the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 that Palestinian writers began to record the experience of struggles against these twin forces and not until the 1980s that detailed accounts of Palestinian resistance based on archival records long concealed by the British and the Israeli state began to appear. Palestinian writer Nur Masalha writes of “memoricide and erasure”—a sustained attempt by Israeli writers, educators and media people to detach Palestinians from their history.2 In an assessment that evokes the genocidal assault on Gaza, Scott Webster sees memoricide as “memory made rubble and ash”.3 However, from the earliest years of British occupation, a movement for national liberation was in formation. By the late 1920s, this had taken on the form of mass struggles, with calls for independence backed by mobilisations, including nationwide strikes. In these circumstances, the Communist movement had opportunities to play a key role in the struggle for national liberation. Its failure had consequences for Palestinian activism across the generations and implications for revolutionary strategy today.

In 1933, British officials reported that Palestinian protests focused on a dual enemy: “Down with the English!” and “Down with the Colonisers [the Zionist movement]!”.4 The influence of traditional notables of the Ottoman era, especially landowning dynasties intent on preserving their privilege, inhibited the movement, but increasingly, it escaped their control. Guerrilla bands appeared in northern Palestine, notably the Green Hand group, which attacked British troops and Zionist settlements that were protected by armed militia.5 Independent organisations flourished and in 1936, after the emergence of a wider armed movement under guerrilla leader Izz al-Din al-Qassam, mass resistance became an intifada—the Great Uprising that defied Britain and the Zionist forces for three years. At its heart were activist committees in villages and urban neighbourhoods, which organised collective actions bringing out and shaping its class character: tax and school strikes, targeting landowners and recalcitrant merchants, and disciplining strike-breakers. Charles Anderson describes “a process of rebel state formation…materialised through everyday practices and struggle”.6

In this highly charged situation, the left had opportunities to support struggles for national liberation identified by the international Communist movement as part of the agenda for revolutionary change. A Palestine Communist Party (PCP) had been established in 1923, but in 1937, when mass resistance was most intense, it split as most members—immigrants who were part of the settler project—moved into alliance with the Zionist movement. Rather than supporting Palestinian liberation, they became participants in its suppression, in effect allies of the British, and within a few years, they actively engaged in displacement and dispossession of most of the Palestinian Arab population. The collapse of the party had profound implications for Palestine and the wider Middle East.

Communists in the colonial world

In the years following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Communist International (Comintern) declared its support for liberation movements in countries such as Palestine. The Theses on the National and Colonial Questions, drafted by Lenin for the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, urged support for such movements, notwithstanding that their leaderships were invariably of a “bourgeois-democratic” character. Lengthy debates at the congress addressed relations with such leaders in countries in which most people were peasants and where Communists faced difficulties organising among small proletarian minorities without the advantage of well-developed revolutionary organisations similar to the Bolsheviks in Russia.7 Lenin’s proposition, which carried the day, emphasised the importance of movements for national liberation that were capable of mobilising great masses of people among whom Communists could build their own independent organisations.8 Without any pretence that national movements had “communist colouring”, Communists should support liberation movements, Lenin argued, with the aim of weakening colonial control and stimulating currents that could forge alliances with revolutionary forces on the advance in Europe:

The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form.9

This approach addressed pressing questions facing the revolutionary left in territories of the former Tsarist Empire and more widely in regions under colonial control. It had special relevance in the Middle East, where Britain and France had replaced Ottoman rulers—unilaterally creating a series of new states including Palestine—and in Egypt, where Britain already faced a mass revolutionary movement. The approach of the Comintern towards organisations in these two countries that aspired to join the Comintern provides an insight into both opportunities and problems faced by Communists in colonised countries in general.

In 1919, a nationalist revolution began in Egypt under the leadership of the bourgeois Wafd Party. Millions joined mass demonstrations and rallies that had a radical character: Muslims, Christians and Jews participated together, challenging sectarian divisions, and women from all sides played leading public roles.10 The movement energised Egypt’s workers and for several years, trade unions proliferated and organised repeated mass strikes.11 Stimulated by this radical atmosphere, and by the successful revolution in Russia, groups of intellectuals formed “socialist clubs” in Alexandria and Cairo. In 1920, British officials reported that “Bolshevik centres” had been established in several cities, and, in 1921, activists from across the country declared an Egyptian Socialist Party.12 Among leading members were activists attracted by European social democracy, including British Fabianism. Anarcho-syndicalists were also prominent, especially in Alexandria, where they helped to organise a series of labour disputes. Many came from the mutamassirun (Egyptianised), immigrant communities mainly of European origin.13 Often socially isolated from the mass of Egyptians by religious and linguistic differences, these early Communists nonetheless attempted to forge unity in struggle and were able to attract significant numbers of industrial workers.14

The party sent representatives to the Fourth Congress of the Comintern held in Petrograd and Moscow in 1922, requesting admission. The Congress demanded acceptance of several strategic principles, including support for Egypt’s national liberation movement. After internal disagreements, the organisation formally complied and changed its name to the Communist Party of Egypt (CPE).15 Tareq Ismael and Rifa’at al-Sai’d comment on the party’s systemic difficulties, including “internal ideological tensions between the primacy of socio-economic and nationalist goals and between reformist and revolutionary means to their achievement”.16 The party soon shed its social democratic elements—members who would not identify with radical social transformations that went beyond national independence. At the same time, it struggled to convince members engaged principally in labour struggles, and under strong syndicalist influence, to back the Wafd party, which was led by landowners and merchants. Marius Deeb describes the CPE’s relationship with the latter as that of “limited support but not that of cooperation”.17 In 1925, after several years of continuous repression by the British and the Wafd (which had won a shadowy form of “independence” from the colonial power), the CPE’s most prominent members were jailed for “spreading revolutionary doctrines”.18 The party never recovered and by the late 1920s, it ceased to function as a coherent body.

The Egyptian experience was that of a newly formed current lacking cadres familiar with Marxist theory and practice and who were unable to synthesise their orientation on industrial struggle with critical endorsement of nationalist aims. The CPE was increasingly distanced from the nationalist movement, becoming vulnerable to repression by both the British and the Wafd. At the same time, it demonstrated that by establishing branches in major industrial centres and leading a series of strikes and workplace occupations, revolutionaries could have an impact far beyond their numbers.19 The party left an important legacy: when a second generation of Communists emerged in the 1930s, its activists drew on the CPE’s principles of activism, unity and internationalism. Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman observe:

Perhaps the early communists’ most lasting legacy was the conception of class unity and solidarity…by building an organisation which would ideally unite all the workers in Egypt, and by fighting for the common interests of the entire working class the communists introduced a new and potentially powerful vision into the Egyptian labour movement.20

“Left Zionism” and the PCP

Members of the ECP came from a wide range of ethno-linguistic and religious backgrounds, combining around the idea of “social transformation through industrial and political power”.21 It was a different story in neighbouring Palestine, where workers’ unity remained an abstract principle—one eventually abandoned by the PCP in favour of ethnic separatism. Here, Communists emerged in the early 1920s from the left-Zionist Jewish Socialist Workers Party (MPS, known by its Hebrew acronym Mops or Mopsi). The organisation had originated in
Poale Zion (“Workers of Zion”), a left-wing movement in Eastern Europe and Russia that provided early recruits for the settlement project in Palestine. Unlike other radical movements in Jewish communities, such as the Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland and Russia (known as the “Bund”, alliance or association), it focused on migration to and settlement of Palestine, professing support for “proletarian Zionism”. In Palestine, Poale Zion maintained, Zionist ideals were to be achieved through the victory of socialist revolution:

[The] development and success of the Yishuv [the settler community] in Palestine have proven that Palestine can be built only by means of the emigration and settlement of great masses of Jewish workers, relying on their own labour and organising their activity in accordance with the aims of creative and constructive socialism…all material and socioeconomic measures, in Palestine and abroad, should be taken for socialist settlement in Palestine and for the future Jewish dictatorship in Palestine.22

Palestinian historian Suliman Bashear writes that for these activists, “Socialism meant a Jewish socialism only”:

When left-wing Zionism happened to talk about a working class, a class struggle, production relations, trade unions, or similar concepts, only a Jewish context was meant. Consequently, it ignored the Arab rejection of Zionist “socialism” and at best explained it by the backwardness or lack of development of class relations within the Arab camp. It could not perceive that this rejection was the outcome of the basic material contradiction between the colonialist economic and political aims of Zionism and the Palestinian Arab aspirations for independence… For, to realise this contradiction would mean to stop being a Zionist.23

Socialist-Zionists developed the idea of the “conquest of labour”. Settler institutions in Palestine were to employ exclusively Jewish labour with the aim of consolidating a Jewish working class that, in theory, would advance the prospect of revolutionary change. In 1920, the Poale Zion movement split, and its left wing entered discussions with the Comintern on terms for affiliation of a revolutionary party in Palestine. In 1921, the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) set out its views, declaring that the aim of Poale Zion “to create the basis [in Palestine] for the material and social liberation of the Jewish working people is both utopian and reformist”: the actual outcome, proposed the ECCI, would be “directly counter-revolutionary”, only helping to strengthen British colonialism.24 The Poale Zion left, writes Ran Greenstein, “was torn between the national focus of labour Zionism and the anti-colonial focus of international communism, with the injunction of ‘supporting every liberation movement in the colonies’”.25

The ECCI explained its conditions for admission to the Comintern in uncompromising terms: the group was to break completely with Zionist ideas and organisations. The executive set up a special commission that insisted on the necessity of establishing close contact with the mass of people in Palestine, “in order to transform the party from an organisation of Jewish workers into a true territorial party [of Arabs and Jews]…[and that] the Communist Party must support the nationalist movement for the freedom of the Arabian population against the British-Zionist occupation”.26

In 1922, the Comintern adopted the “Theses on the Eastern Question”, focusing on developments in the Middle East and Asia, where struggles against colonialism had been boosted by the success of the Russian Revolution and the enthusiasm of peoples in much of the former Tsarist Empire to solidarise with the Bolshevik government. It declared that every Communist Party in a state that possessed colonies should organise in solidarity with the revolutionary movement among subordinate peoples, while adding:

[T]he pseudo-socialist colonialist tendencies of some categories of well-paid European workers in the colonies must be firmly and stubbornly opposed. European worker-Communists in the colonies must strive to organise the indigenous proletariat and to win its confidence by raising concrete economic demands (raising the level of native workers’ pay to that of the European workers, labour protection, social insurance, etc). The formation of separate Communist organisations of Europeans in some colonies (Egypt, Algeria) is a hidden form of colonialism and furthers imperialist interests.27

This policy addressed directly the circumstances of the Pieds Noirs (“black feet”) of Algeria and the mutamassirun of Egypt. It summarised: “Any attempt to build Communist organisations on ethnic lines contradicts the principle of proletarian internationalism”.28 In Egypt, the ECP worked to overcome barriers of ethnicity, language, religion and culture.29 In Palestine, the Comintern insisted on a similarly uncompromising approach. Its position on Zionism was clear, writes Musa Budeiri: “The Comintern was opposed to the colonising project which was viewed as a tool of British imperialism, and opposed to the Zionist ideology which called for Jewish immigration to Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish national home”.30 In 1924, after a series of factional disputes and splits, remaining activists of Mopsi were finally admitted to the International as the PCP, undertaking to align with the It’s principles and strategies.31 They also agreed to continuous efforts “to widen and strengthen ties” with the Palestinian national movement.32

Yishuvism

Johan Frantzen summarises the approach of the Comintern: if the PCP remained Jewish, “objectively it would be a colonialist party, whereas if it succeeded in ‘territorialising’ its Jewish membership and ‘Arabising’ its membership overall, its presence in the country would be justified”.33 The party declared its support for Comintern policies but failed the key test, writes Suliman Bashear, “[to] translate its anti-Zionism into deeds”.34 In 1924, among several hundred members, there were no Arabs and party leaders’ later claim of a surge in Arab membership was “a gross exaggeration”, writes Budeiri, “aimed at winning the favour of the Comintern”.35 A large group of Jewish members had already
abandoned the PCP, declaring “Leave the Zionist Hell!”.36 Others denounced the party as “crypto-Zionist” and called for full support of the national movement. They gradually disappeared as some members wholly opposed to the Zionist project left Palestine, with the Soviet Union a favoured destination.37 A further group formed a faction within the party focusing on work within Jewish trade unions to integrate Arab workers. They were soon expelled from the Histadrut (New General Workers’ Federation), the ethnocentric trade union at the heart of the settler project, whose leaders declared that Communists were enemies of the Jewish people and of the Jewish working class in Palestine.38 In 1925, Palestinian workers formed their own trade union, the Palestinian Arab Workers Society.

The PCP announced “a total break with Zionism”.39 However, in practice, it moved continuously towards the Zionist mainstream.40 This was facilitated by Yishuvism, the idea that the settler community was present in Palestine legitimately, that it would continue to grow by means of immigration, and that the task of Communists was to participate in its social and political life in order to radicalise Jewish workers.41 Paul Keleman describes this approach as an attempt to see Zionism as “detached from its social base in Palestine”:

It derived from the idea that the Yishuv, having matured into a stable, national community, was largely autonomous from the Zionist movement and had the potential by virtue of its technical capacities and social organisations to be the most advanced political force in Palestine.42

Ran Greenstein quotes the former leading PCP member Nahum List to the effect that this was “Zionism without Zionism”.43

The party was unprepared for the intensification of conflicts in which Palestinian Arabs confronted Britain and the settlers. In 1929, it took a contradictory approach to the Western Wall/al-Buraq clashes in Jerusalem, in which Jews and Arabs were victims, describing the events both as “a general Arab uprising” and a “pogrom”.44 The ECCI saw the events as part of mass Arab activism, “a national liberation and anti-imperialist movement…of all Arabians”, and criticised the PCP for its overwhelmingly Jewish composition and continuing lack of contact with the Arab masses.45 As Arab resistance continued, the party was increasingly compromised. Frantzen comments that it had become “an arena of ideological struggle between communist and Zionist ideas, with Zionist-leaning Jewish Communists developing theories that sought to combine the seemingly irreconcilable ideologies”.46

Towards the Nakba

The Comintern viewed Zionism as a deceit. In 1919, it declared that the movement had facilitated imperialist aims: “Under the pretence of creating a Jewish State in Palestine, [Zionism] in fact surrenders the Arab working people of Palestine”.47 The assessment was prophetic. By the early 1930s, the movement established close links with British colonial authorities and, although there were tensions between Zionist leaders and the British government, such as disagreement about levels of immigration and disputes about land acquisition, Zionist institutions consolidated rapidly alongside the Mandate regime.48 Zionist militias were armed and trained by the British. During the 1936-9 intifada, Zionist groups worked with British forces to suppress the Palestinian movement and some were integrated into British military units, including the notorious Special Night Squads (SNS).49 Matthew Hughes describes “a mutually beneficial relationship” between Zionist intelligence agencies and the British and, in the case of the SNS, an example “of how imperial powers will use an indigenous [sic] loyalist colonial community to help pacify rebels”.50 When Ilan Pappé assessed processes of consolidation of the Zionists’ proto-state, he identified this period as crucial in translating “the abstract vision of Jewish exclusivity” into more concrete plans, “part of the same preparations that were aimed at snatching, by force, a state in Palestine”.51

This was the context in which the PCP attempted, according to its official statements, to “Arabise” the organisation. In the late 1920s, it had recruited a modest number of Palestinian Arabs, whom the ECCI insisted on appointing to the leadership. However, the party continued to operate almost exclusively within Jewish communities, publishing most of its materials in Yiddish—a reflection of its focus on new European immigrants and the conviction that it could draw the settler population to the left. Contradictions came to a head with the 1936 intifada, and in the following year, when Palestinian resistance became armed struggle, the party polarised. A specifically Jewish section was established, many of its members soon abandoning the PCP. There were further splits, fusions and separations but the project of a unified Communist organisation was over. In 1943, the party finally broke up into Jewish and Arab groups, the latter declaring the formation of an independent National Liberation League (NLL).52 At the same time, the PCP was accelerating towards full accommodation with the mainstream of the Zionist movement. In 1948, when the Zionist leadership unilaterally announced the establishment of a sovereign State of Israel, the PCP’s support was “total”.53 The party declared:

This is a great day for us. The British Mandate, covered with blood, is dead. The Jewish state arises. The British mandate has been annulled by the struggle of the Yishuv and with the help of the Soviet Union and the progressive forces of the world… On our side stands the whole Jewish people. On our side stand all progressive forces. We will fight and we will win…

Long live the Jewish state! Long live our independent, democratic state! Glory to the defenders and fighters for independence! Justice is with us! Victory will be ours!54

Members of the PCP soon participated in the assaults of Zionist militias on Arab towns and villages—the Nakba (catastrophe) that ejected most of the Palestinian Arab population across new borders into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Many Jewish Communists aligned with Zionist fighting units, now combined as the Israel Defence Force (IDF). Budeiri observes that after years of prevarication, they had finally accepted the “national solution” proposed decades earlier by founders of the Zionist movement.55

Stalinisation

However, the collapse of the PCP was not solely an outcome of its relationship with settler colonialism. The party was also affected by changes in strategy dictated by the Comintern, which in the late 1920s became an instrument of the regime that seized control in the Soviet Union: a bureaucratic military dictatorship, soon the basis of a state-capitalist ruling class. Facing an internal crisis, the Stalinist regime imposed policies of forced collectivisation of agriculture and intensive industrialisation. A reign of terror suppressed all opposition, as the last remnants of the 1917 workers’ state were swept away. Now the Comintern announced a strategic turn, declaring that nationalist movements in colonised countries were to be viewed much more critically. In this Third Period of Soviet strategy, the “revolutionary wings” of national liberation movements, including their bourgeois leaderships, should not be trusted.56 Rather, Communist organisations must prepare for the prospect of mass upheavals and for soviet power. Duncan Hallas comments that the apparently “leftism” of this Third Period of Soviet strategy was so extreme “that it effectively isolated these Communist parties from the working-class movements, making them abstentionist and passive”.57 The aim was to minimise threats to ruling classes in states in which Communists were active, reducing problems for Soviet foreign policy, now focused on the interests of the Stalinist ruling class and its policy of “socialism in one country”.58

These “ultra-left and adventurist policies” were damaging for Communist currents everywhere: in the case of Palestine, they entrenched hostility within the PCP to the Arab national movement as the party “carried out the Comintern’s instructions to the letter”.59 It campaigned against traditional leaders of Palestinian society in the form of the Arab Executive (dominated by landowning dynasties) and, in practice, against emerging rank-and-file activists who contested the British presence. When conflicts between settlers and Palestinian Arabs intensified, the PCP declared that Arab leaders were now “traitors”.60 It called for struggles against “the Arab bourgeoisie” and local “feudalists” as part of a wider effort to liberate all Arab countries.61 The PCP was to work for the formation of an “all-Arab revolutionary anti-imperialist front”, uniting workers’ struggles against the Arab bourgeoisie in expectation of a revolutionary upsurge across the region.62

This turn was congenial to members of the PCP who were continuously drawn towards the mainstream of the settler movement. However, the twists and turns in strategy were not over. In 1933, the Comintern began to adopt a new approach. Shaken by the rise of fascism in Europe, and in particular by the catastrophic failure of Third Period Communist strategy in Germany, it called for the establishment of “militant fronts” with social-democratic parties and, in the case of colonised countries, for “unity with anti-imperialist forces”.63 Now the idea of “soviet power in backward countries”, which had been advanced rhetorically with no realistic expectation of success, was abandoned in favour of “the national liberation revolution”, and the Jewish settler community was said to be “fascist”.64 PCP leaders struggled to win the bulk of the Jewish membership to the new position. When the organisation split in 1937, the overwhelmingly Jewish section described Palestinian armed struggle as “a revolt organised by fascist agents” and asserted that the Jews in Palestine constituted “a nation”.65

The regime in Moscow treated Communist parties worldwide instrumentally. They were expected to align with Soviet strategy, producing what
M S Agwani calls “mechanical endorsements” of changes in policy.66 In 1921, the Comintern established the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), one of a series of institutions that aimed to train cadres from Communist organisations worldwide. It first drew in activists from Central Asia, later recruits came from the Middle East, Africa and even North America. The aim was to educate “future leaders” of Communist parties. By the 1930s, this meant the production of loyalists focused upon “toeing the Party line, whatever that might be”.67 The PCP sent a group of its Arab members to the KUTV, and one of them, Radwan al-Hilou, known as “Musa”, returned to be appointed secretary general of the party, drawing the leadership closer to Moscow and to its abrupt changes in strategy. Hilou arrived in Palestine in 1935 to direct the PCP to abandon the Third Period agenda and move to a popular front strategy with the Palestinian resistance, which included support for its armed wing. This abrupt turn, dictated from above, consolidated factionalism among Jewish members already compromised by their links to Zionist institutions and accelerated the move towards a separate Jewish section of the party and the split of 1937.

Soviet “somersault”

Moscow had yet another hand to play. Since the first discussions on Palestine in 1919, the Comintern had supported Arab struggles for independence. Now the regime in Moscow began a re-orientation to place the Soviet Union alongside the Zionist movement and eventually to arm Israel as the state’s first source of advanced weaponry.

In 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed on a non-aggression pact. Notwithstanding this formal agreement, Moscow was alarmed about the Nazis’ imperial ambitions. Official publications warned of threats worldwide from fascism, including in Palestine, where, it was believed, fascists would “stealthily” take over the Arab movement.68 Soon, traditional Palestinian leaders, earlier supported as integral to anti-colonial struggles, were depicted as “fascists” and “wreckers and traitors”.69 The main Comintern publication declared: “the Arab people, supported by the progressive elements within Palestine Jewry, must wage an uncompromising struggle against the Grand Mufti [the key figure of the Arab Executive] and his associates”.70 Zionist leaders had already made contact with Moscow, opening talks about potential mass movements to Palestine of Jews in areas under Soviet control. The leading figure in the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann, argued that “past misunderstandings should not rule out a new orientation of the [Soviet Union] towards Zionism” and that the regime in Moscow should “take an interest in the Zionist solution to the Jewish question”.71 He attempted to convince Soviet strategists that the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would complement Moscow’s interests in the Middle East, specifically that it would challenge Britain, hastening its retreat from the region. By 1946, Soviet leaders had concluded that they could exploit “imperialist contradictions” by moving towards Zionist aims, and in 1947, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko confirmed Moscow’s move by offering support for a Jewish state in Palestine. Laurent Rucker calls this shift “one of the most stunning pronouncements in the history of Soviet diplomacy”.72 Within months, Soviet diplomats at the United Nations voted in favour of partition of the country into an Arab and a Jewish state—in effect, an endorsement of the Zionist agenda.

According to M S Agwani, this “drastic change” in the Soviet position, “from denouncing Zionism as an ‘imperialist conspiracy’ to conceding its basic claim”, had a profound impact in Palestine and the whole of the Arab region.73 Jewish Communists who had hesitated about wholesale support for Zionist aims made hasty adjustments, most fully backing the Zionist leadership.74 The Stalinist regime of obedience to Moscow made open opposition from PCP members “inconceivable”, observes Rucker.75 Yet, key figures in the Arab-based NLL wrote bitterly to Soviet leaders:

We have always fought against the Zionist conception and have viewed Zionism as an imperialist venture directed by British imperialism in order to create a Trojan horse in the Middle East… Comrade Gromyko by his statement has strengthened Zionist ideology and the Zionist grip over the Jewish masses. Such strengthening will help imperialism to continue to use the Jewish masses as instruments in its opposition to the liberation movements in the Arab Middle East.76

In May 1948, when Zionist leaders declared a sovereign state of Israel, the predominantly Jewish PCP became the Communist Party of the Land of Israel (Maki). This marked the first time a Communist organisation identified Palestine by its Hebrew name. Among the signatories of Israel’s Declaration of Independence was Meir Vilner, formerly general secretary of the PCP, who also became a member of Israel’s Provisional Council of State.77 Leaders of Maki called on their members to join the Haganah (“the defence”) so that former comrades soon found themselves at odds as some sections of the NLL actively resisted Zionist militias and the ethnic cleansing of Plan Dalet.78 Budeiri sums up the final collapse of the PCP: “Jewish Communists had travelled full circle and finally returned to the position which they had held in 1919”.79

New left

The Soviet Union concluded, writes Joel Beinin, “that Zionism was the most reliable anti-British force” in the region and in 1947, arms, ammunition and aircraft were supplied to the Haganah from Czechoslovakia, as authorised by the Soviet leadership.80 These were immediately in action: according to
David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, they “saved our country. I don’t doubt it”, adding that “the Czech weapons were the most important help that we got. They saved us, and I doubt very much that we would have survived the first month without them”.81 If Britain was midwife to the ethnocentric state that emerged in 1948, the Soviet Union assisted actively at its birth.

In the following years, Communists were viewed among Palestinians with deep suspicion. They were discredited, writes Laure Guirguis, “for having more or less blindly followed the [Soviet Union] and accepted the United Nations partition plan”.82 It took almost two decades until activists looked to the left for theoretical insights and strategic perspectives. They were members of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), which was founded in the early 1950s to promote Arab unity, seeing communism as “a dangerous ideological threat to the concept of Arab nationalism”.83 In the late 1960s, a radical current in the movement made a sharp turn, criticising Arab states they had earlier lauded as “revolutionary” and linking Palestinian struggles to anti-imperialist movements in South-East Asia, Africa and Latin America. Its leading members began to talk of class, imperialism and revolution, the need for “scientific socialism” and “a true Marxist-Leninist and internationalist stand”.84 After the June war of 1967, in which Arab armies were decisively defeated by Israel, they declared that the Nasserist regime in Egypt, the focus of earlier hopes for change, was “petit bourgeois”, that an “Arab revolution” depended upon “the toiling social classes” and “popular armed struggle”. In December 1967, George Habash and a group of Palestinian members of the ANM established the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In 1969, a group led by Nayef Hawatmeh left the PFLP to form the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), calling for “socialism”.85

The new left was part of a revitalisation of Palestinian nationalism stimulated by guerrilla struggles led by Al Fatah (“victory”, “conquered” or “opening”), which in 1964 captured the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Fatah intended to emulate movements such as those which had brought independence to China and Algeria, and to re-establish the armed resistance that had proved so effective against Britain and the settler movement in the 1930s. It also spoke of “revolution”, but for its leaders, including Yasser Arafat, this had a specific, limited meaning: the mobilisation of young Palestinians for guerrilla raids against Israel. It did not imply political intervention in states across which Palestinians had been dispersed during the Nakba, for Fatah was firmly attached to the status quo in the Arab region. Its leaders agreed on a pact with Gulf regimes: they would ensure that Palestinian struggles would not disturb these states’ “internal” politics in exchange for money and arms. This “principle of non-interference” reflected the origins of Fatah within an embryonic bourgeoisie that had emerged in the booming oil economies of the Gulf in the years after the Nakba, especially in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.86 Lacking citizenship and under increasing pressure in these states, Palestinian bankers, financiers, merchants and property developers rallied behind Fatah. By the early 1970s, the organisation’s combined income from Gulf states and Palestinian capitalists amounted to tens of millions of United States dollars each month, financing military activity and a network of organisations established across the diaspora.87 Fatah’s guerrilla activists came from the refugee camps and impoverished neighbourhoods of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Its leaders, however, came from an aspiring capitalist class that sought equal status with regimes from which they drew support. Rather than challenging Arab capitalism, Arafat and the organisation’s leadership sought a place within it.

Yet, Fatah’s “revolution” put the PLO on a collision course with the regimes. Its mobilisation of Palestinian activists won wide support among people across the Middle East who, energised by armed struggles against Israel, challenged their own rulers. In 1968, in events that were to be repeated throughout the Middle East and North Africa, mass demonstrations in Egypt celebrated the Palestinian cause and challenged the Nasserist regime.88 It was in this context of solidarity and emulation in the Arab states that the new left in the PLO grew rapidly. The left’s revolution emphasised mass participation, grassroots democracy, education, women’s rights, international solidarity and, in principle, a challenge to the Arab regimes. It attracted many of the most energetic and creative activists, organising educational events for women and youth and cadre schools for its guerrilla fighters.89 The PFLP, founded in 1967, in particular became a cultural hub. It encouraged what Ghassan Kanafani, a journalist, novelist and leading member of the organisation, called “resistance literature”, taking Palestinian struggles to new global audiences.90 Kanafani represented a current of Palestinian radicalism that offered prospects of revolutionary change. He produced the first detailed assessment of the Great Intifada of 1936-9, noting the importance of mass action, the significance of early guerrilla struggles, and the baleful role of the Comintern, especially “the uncompromisingly doctrinaire” position of the Third Period adopted by the Comintern and the PCP between 1928 and 1934.91 For Kanafani, the failure of the PCP to achieve Arabisation was a key issue. When Palestinian struggles reached their height during the Great Intifada, he argued, “the Communist Party’s virtual absence from the scene” meant that there was a vacuum of leadership that was exploited by forces hostile to the mass of Palestinians. This analysis, produced in 1969, informed Palestinian radicalism and took the PFLP and other groups of the left closer to insurgent anti-imperialist movements worldwide, as Palestine was understood more widely “as a key front in the global struggle against capitalism and US imperialism”.92

The PFLP criticised Fatah for placing military activity above engagement with the mass of Palestinians, alleging “elitism” and arguing for construction of a revolutionary party to be part of “Arab liberation”, challenging regimes across the region.93 The DFLP argued for “winning victory by merging [Palestinian struggles] into an all-Arab revolutionary front against imperialism…led by the alliance of workers and peasants and guided by the ideology of the proletariat”.94 Rank-and-file members of the Fronts embraced these agendas, viewing the liberation of Palestine as part of wider struggles for social justice.95 Their leaders, however, pursued strategies that inhibited these aims, moving close to states said to be “anti-imperialist”, including Syria, Iraq, Algeria and Yemen, but in which ruling classes maintained tight control over the mass of people.96 Reluctant to alienate rulers who periodically supplied arms, training and rhetorical support, the Fronts declined to turn their principle of revolutionary intervention into solidarity with those subordinated by the regimes.

Organisations such the PFLP were also affected by the growing crisis of the PLO under a leadership that operated through patronage and increasing authoritarianism. As Ramsis Kilani has pointed out in this journal, the left was compromised by engagement with a Fatah-dominated system that allocated finance between Palestinian groups.97 Although the PFLP left the PLO’s executive committee in 1977 to form a “Rejection Front”, it soon rejoined—weakened and dependent upon a command structure that became more corrupt as Arafat embraced the project of a “ministate” on a fraction of Palestinian territory.98

During the “Marxist turn” of the ANM, key figures such as Habash and Hawatmeh drew on ideas that still dominated Communist parties of the region. Despite the experience of the PCP in Palestine, they absorbed Stalinist orthodoxies, including ideas about class alliances, “stages” of revolutionary change, “progressive” regimes and a global “socialist camp” under Soviet leadership. States such as Syria were dismissed as “petit bourgeois” but also seen as part of the liberation struggle “because of the role…that they can play in the stage of the democratic revolution”.99 In the mid-1950s, the Moscow regime moved away from Israel, forging relations with a series of Arab states part of an “anti-imperialist” bloc. George Habash declared: “We…consider ourselves part of the current of revolutionary forces in the world headed by our friend, the Soviet Union”.100 For his PFLP, “unity of the struggle against imperialism” required “belief in the necessity and inevitability of the unity of the socialist camp”.101

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Comintern agreed on strategies for liberation from colonial powers that included support for bourgeois nationalists. This approach, revived under very different circumstances during the Popular Front period of the 1930s, was now applied mechanically to relations with post-colonial states in which ruling classes maintained savage regimes of control. The Ba’athists of Syria were conservative nationalists hostile to Palestinian struggles. In the mid-1960s, they had seized and imprisoned Palestinian leaders, among them Arafat. In 1970, during the Black September crisis in Jordan, they watched passively as the army of King Hussein assaulted PLO forces. In 1976, the Syrian army entered Lebanon and attacked Palestinian bases and refugee camps. Rashid Khalidi writes that, nonetheless, there were years of expectation on the Palestinian left that Syria and other “progressive” states would rally to the Palestinian cause. In fact, he observes, “narrow self-interest motivates the foreign policy of Arab States to the exclusion of all else”.102 For the rulers of Syria, “There is no independent Palestinian decision”.103

Mass struggles and liberation

Ghosts of the Stalinist past haunted the Palestinian radicals. In 1948, there was disbelief and anger in Communist parties across the Arab states when Moscow backed partition and supplied arms to Zionist forces. Communist organisations in Syria and Lebanon experienced a collapse in membership; in Egypt, a Communist movement, which was a key force in anti-colonial struggles, fell into disarray as its main currents entered factional struggles over the legitimacy of the Soviet turn.104 Israel and al-Sai’d observe: “Many people viewed the war [in Palestine] as a war against imperialism in general, and the opposition of the communist groups [in Egypt] sharply reduced their popularity”.105

Over the next 20 years, Communist parties across the Arab region loyally implemented Moscow’s key international strategy: to identify “progressive” elements among the region’s ruling classes and to lobby them for a share in power. Communists entered government in Syria and Iraq, in the latter even joining a Ba’athist regime after losing thousands of party members to a Ba’ath-led massacre.106 In Egypt, they went further, dissolving the party and telling president Gamel Abdel Nasser, head of a bureaucratic military regime that suppressed all opposition, “your leadership is the substitute for our independent organisation”.107 The party’s leaders were transfixed by Nasser, showing “unreserved admiration” for the regime and telling members to enrol in its Arab Socialist Union, the sole legal party, which, they argued, “alone was competent to carry out the tasks of the revolution”.108 When Palestinian radicals sought support from Communists in neighbouring states, they found they had been compromised by their place within the regimes or, as in the case of Egypt, to have liquidated, leaving the largest working class in the region without a formal presence on the left.

In Gaza and the West Bank, and in refugee camps across the Middle East, resistance continued. The intifada of the 1930s had shown that Palestinian struggles were most effective when energised by activity from below. When another great uprising began in 1987, it was again characterised by direct democracy, as communities in the Occupied Territories mobilised on the basis of self-reliance and continuous defiance of Israeli forces. For years, Palestinians had organised Voluntary Work Committees to cultivate land, pave roads, provide sewage, clean streets and support those in the most deprived areas. These were at the heart of an uprising that continued for almost six years, contrasting self-organisation with the top-down, elitist approach of Fatah, which had become increasingly detached from the mass of people, prioritising diplomatic manoeuvres and relations with the Gulf regimes. Emergence of an independent leadership on the ground hastened moves by Arafat to seek a negotiated deal with Israel, the US and their allies, initiating the Oslo “peace” process and agreement on a Palestinian ministate under Fatah’s control—something
Edward Said called “an instrument of Palestinian surrender”.109 Despite the efforts of their activist members, the radical Fronts struggled to maintain support. Disoriented by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the “socialist bloc”, and by the relentless hostility of its Arab allies, the PLFP, like Fatah, was in rapid retreat.
Tariq Dana comments that “components of the PFLP’s ideological identity, such as social justice, equality and socialism [became] more rhetorical than substantial”.110 At the same time, the organisation was increasingly affected by its engagement in a “professional, elitist and depoliticised [non-governmental organisation] sector” implanted in the West Bank and Gaza by the World Bank and “developmental” organisations committed to the neoliberal agenda.111

When there were mass demonstrations across the Middle East in support of the 1987-8 intifada, Palestinians found that their putative allies among the Communist parties were absent from the scene. Solidarity came from people of the region who organised despite the Stalinist left, often charging their governments with complicity with Israel and its allies. When a further intifada erupted in 2000, there were renewed efforts at solidarity and emulation in the Arab states. In the case of Egypt, the movement for Palestine began a long process of consolidation that opened new spaces for public protest and played a key role in raising confidence that the regime of Hosni Mubarak could be challenged from below. In 2011, the Tahrir Revolution brought down Mubarak, Israel’s key Arab ally.112 Despite the PLO’s official policy of “non-interference”, Palestinian struggles again played a key role in catalysing opposition to the regimes—in the case of Egypt, with fatal results for the dictatorship.113

During the 1990s, as Fatah and the left lost support, the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad won backing among Palestinians for their continuing resistance to occupation. In particular, writes Dana, Hamas “managed to fill the void left by the decline of the Palestinian left”.114 Many activists of the Fronts maintained defiance of Zionism and its allies; their leaders, however, embraced a form of politics that led inexorably to suffocating relationships with “progressive” regimes determined to control Palestinian struggles. Emerging from the Arab nationalist movement, they had never shed its preoccupation with Arab unity and their illusions in the Arab states. In 1968, a delegate to the AMN conference warned: “The Movement has accepted scientific socialism, but we do not know exactly what it means”.115 In the case of the PFLP, Guirguis comments that George Habash and others who founded the organisation “borrowed Marxist notions” but remained reluctant to adopt the key principles of communism.116 In the early 1920s, the Comintern insisted that these focused on the working class, the independence of the left and on an unbreakable commitment to internationalism. A century later, these ideas remain central to strategies for change, guiding principles for effective struggle against Arab capitalism and for Palestinian liberation.

In 1989, as the Second Intifada progressed, Edward Said wrote: “People do not get courage to fight continually against as powerful an army as Israel’s without some reservoir, some deeply and already present fund of bravery and revolutionary self-sacrifice: Palestinian history furnishes a long tradition of this”.117 History gives evidence of continuous resistance to colonialism, the settler movement, the state of Israel and its allies—invariably against overwhelming odds. At the same time, it highlights the importance of struggles for liberation independent of perilous alliances and false friends. Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated by Israel in 1972, warned of the historic betrayal of Arab rulers who abandoned the Palestinians to their fate.118 A series of revolutionary upheavals have since challenged regimes across the region. Tens of millions have engaged in struggles to remove dictators and challenge imperialist networks. In a post-Stalinist era, the politics of the bankrupt Soviet tradition no longer inhibit radical activists: for the first time in decades, revolutionary Marxist currents maintain a presence in states including Egypt and Syria. Each is inspired by Palestinian struggles and committed to contest Israel and the Arab rulers who are among its key allies. It is among workers at the heart of repeated uprisings and revolutions and alongside a new revolutionary left that Palestinians will find solidarity and the power to advance their struggle for liberation.

Philip Marfleet is Emeritus Professor of Social Science at the University of East London. He is the author of Palestine, Imperialism, and the Struggle for Freedom (Bookmarks, 2025).

Notes