Palestinian history: a tool for liberation

A review of Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom by Philip Marfleet (Bookmarks, 2025), £10

Publication of Philip Marfleet’s Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom comes in the context of almost two years of genocide enacted against the Palestinian people by the settler-colonial Israeli state. On top of the genocide, we have been seeing the most rapid expansion of settlements in the West Bank in decades, inevitably accompanied by violent settler attacks and repression of the whole of Palestinian society in the West Bank by the occupation forces. However, this period has also been marked by spectacular resistance. First and foremost from Palestinians themselves, armed and otherwise, so that even after employing the most barbaric tactics of forced starvation, carpet bombing and mass forced displacement, the occupation forces have still not achieved a single one of their stated aims. Resistance has not been limited to Palestine. Millions of people have taken to the streets across the world in a solidarity movement that has endured, grown and shifted mass public opinion so that support for Palestine is now the position of the global majority.

Those of us actively engaging and participating in this solidarity movement need to ground our work in a historical analysis of Zionism and the Palestinian struggle if we are to understand our role in effectively furthering the struggle. Marfleet’s book lends itself to these ends, emphasising the agency of Palestinians in their own liberation and providing an overview and class analysis of this struggle, from resistance to British colonialism through to today’s national liberation movement.

Marfleet traces how Zionism, the ideology and political movement for the creation of an exclusively Jewish state, self-consciously allied itself with Western imperialism to ensure its success in occupying Palestine. As the Ottoman Empire went into decline in the early 20th century, Chaim Weizmann, one of the Zionist movement’s leaders at the time, began to appeal to the British ruling class, arguing that Zionism could serve British imperial interests in the region. Weizmann suggested a Zionist state would serve as “a colonial border guard in the service of British imperialism”.1 Although not always enthusiastically, the British government leaned into this alliance and issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, committing to securing a state for Jewish people in Palestine. Despite clashes and disagreements, Marfleet shows how the British mandate largely collaborated with the Zionist settler movement against Palestinian anti-colonial resistance, particularly during the 1936-9 uprising and eventually on the Peel Commission, which proposed the partition of Palestine along lines serving British interests. Just as the British Empire was in retreat globally, this was a way to secure continued control of the Suez Canal, and air and land routes, as well as an excuse to continue their racist anti-immigration policies, turning away Jewish refugees from central and Eastern Europe in the context of the rise of fascist regimes.

From here, Marfleet recounts the horrors of the Nakba, with Zionist forces, acting as a newly established occupying army, implementing the lessons in brutal repression and collective punishment that they had learnt from the British. Marfleet particularly examines the insistence of the Israelis on the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their home, marking the beginning of a settler regime that relies on ethnic cleansing as its primary tool of occupation.

By this time, there was a new imperial giant to which the Middle East was of huge strategical importance: the United States. Marfleet provides an analysis of US imperial interests in the region, from securing access to Gulf oil, to stemming growing Soviet influence, first in Iran, then in Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser. A wave of nationalist movements in the 1950s and 1960s, notably in Syria, Egypt and Iraq, prompted the US to supply military aid directly to Israel, where before they had only provided development aid. “Preservation of the state of Israel” would be adopted as US policy.2 Zionist victory over the Arab armies in the 1967 War, leading to Nasser’s brief resignation, cemented the US’s unconditional support for Israel, prompting a huge increase in military aid. From 1967-8, the value of weapons provided to Israel increased by 450 percent.3 This came in a context where failing US military intervention in Vietnam made the US reluctant to engage directly, necessitating a proxy in the Middle East to protect its interests. Marfleet shows how Israel continued to rely on financial and military support from the US, as well as impunity provided by the world’s imperial hegemon, for its survival, and in return acted as a watchdog for the imperialist interests of the US ruling class.

Overall, Marfleet puts forward a convincing analysis of how Zionism has tied itself to Western imperialism. It is here where we can identify the importance of our front in the struggle, as solidarity movements within imperial powers such as Britain.

Another theme running through the book is the central role of solidarity from neighbouring Arab people, alongside the resistance of Palestinians inside Palestine. Popular struggles against British and French colonialism had been deeply connected across the region. However, when the majority of the Middle East and North Africa gained political independence, leaving Palestine as one of the last remaining colonies in the region, many people looked to their new regimes as the hope that could liberate Palestine. Coming off defeat in the 1967 war, most of these leaders explicitly turned their back on Palestine, arguing that it was no longer their fight. In the mid to late 1960s, the recently formed Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), led by the nationalist Fatah party, sought to turn towards guerilla warfare, building groups of fedayeen (self-sacrificers) militias both in the neighbouring diaspora and within Palestine. During the global uprisings of 1968, the PLO moved to position the Palestinian struggle as not only a group of refugees fighting for their homeland but as part of a global movement against Western imperialism.

A victory for the fedayeen over a Zionist assault on a Fatah base at Karama (Jordan) not only gained the Palestinian resistance a global audience, but also sparked a renewed sense of people power among the Arab masses. There was a shift in consciousness around the struggle for Palestine; people started to recognise that the Arab regimes were not going to live up to their hopes of leading the fight for Palestine. The popular sentiment that the fedayeen had ignited, coupled with the growing political repression and collaboration with Western imperialism from leaders across the region, prompted the Arab people to direct their attention not just away from, but actually against the Arab regimes: they were part of the imperialist system that was responsible for the occupation of Palestine and of the increasing infringements on political freedoms and economic conditions across the region. In Egypt, the impact of Karama was immediate, with mass protests against Nasser taking the slogan: “There Is No Socialism Without Freedom!”.4 As Marfleet explains: “The more that Israel aligned with Western interests the more clearly the Palestinian struggles were identified with anti-imperialism and with the repression of the Arab regimes”.5

Throughout the entire book, we see the symbiotic relationship between the Palestinian resistance and the Arab masses, who were recruited into the fedayeen to fight against the Zionists and resisted their own local rulers. Marfleet argues that a working-class revolution toppling local rulers complicit with imperialism offers genuine hope for the dismantling of the colonial Israeli state and the possibility of a single Palestinian state on the territory of historic Palestine.

Marfleet’s exploration of the Palestinian struggle is underpinned by a class analysis, and the centrality of class is clearest when exploring the contradictions between the interests of the Arab ruling elite, along with the bourgeois leaders of the Palestinian national movement, and the interests of genuine national liberation for the Palestinian people. In the 1920s, Palestinian landowners collaborated with Zionist agencies, selling them land and allowing peasants to be dispossessed and displaced. At the same time, Palestinian peasants were actively organising and fighting against the theft of their land. These contradictions, Marfleet shows, repeatedly came to head within the national movement itself. The 1936-9 uprising was a marriage of armed struggle and industrial action from below. In the late 1920s, in response to organised armed settler attacks, Palestinians had started to form their own armed groups, at the encouragement of Izz al-din al-Qassam, who has become a symbol of Palestinian armed resistance. Qassam also encouraged establishment of trade union organisations. In 1934, the Arab Workers’ Society started organising pickets against Jewish-only labour sites, calling for mass participation when they were met with arrests. Soon, the armed groups and workers organisations were collaborating.

The meeting of these strands of organising, along with youth groups and the Palestine Communist Party, led to the first coordinated demands of the national movement: self-determination and independence from British colonialism, a block on land transfers from Arab to Jewish ownership and a halt to Jewish migration to Palestine. A general strike was organised, sparking the revolt. This movement had been organised from below and the Palestinian traditional leadership struggled to gain authority over it. The Arab Higher Committee, the official Palestinian leadership, asked the Arab rulers to urge Palestinians to call off the strikes so that they might appeal to the British to directly address their demands. As most of these rulers had their positions of power protected by the British, they conceded, betraying the movement. On this subject, Ghassan Kanafani’s book The Revolution of 1926-1939 in Palestine, initially published in 1974, offers a valuable analysis, focusing on this moment in the Palestinian struggle, therefore providing a much more in-depth class analysis of the uprising.

Class tensions within the official Palestinian leadership were carried over into the PLO, whose largest and most influential faction, Fatah, had a largely bourgeois leadership base of businesspeople and well-off professionals, drawn from the diaspora of Palestinians largely located in the Gulf states, who needed a state that could protect and build their capital. Because of their reliance on the Arab regimes for both funding and a physical base, the PLO adopted a policy of “noninterference” in the affairs of other Arab states. Marfleet shows that, because of the relationship between the wider struggles of the Arab masses and Palestinian liberation, noninterference was a contradictory strategy. This became obvious during the Black September of 1970.

As the fedayeen were gaining strong influence in Jordan, the ruler, King Hussein, moved against the PLO with the support of the US. Syrian troops initially intervened but quickly retreated. Iraqi troops, who had declared that they would support the PLO, remained passive, and Nasser objected only with words. The result was a massacre of up to 20,000 Palestinians and the dismantling of a key part of the PLO’s infrastructure. This made clear that the interests of the Arab political elite were fundamentally at odds with even the bourgeois elements of the Palestinian national liberation movement. The left of the Palestinian national leadership sought to confront this contradiction and agitate against the Arab regimes. However, in the wake of the 1987 Intifada, Fatah would further betray the movement: “Fatah leaders pursued manoeuvres that would soon lead to historic developments—to PLO recognition of Israel, its legitimacy and rights to Palestinian land, and to plans for a ‘ministate’ in the form of a Palestinian entity on a fraction of the historic homeland”.6 Fatah turned its back on popular resistance to embrace a diplomatic approach through the Oslo Accords in order to accommodate its alliance with the Arab regimes, who “owed their continued existence to imperialism, to weaponry supplied by the US and its allies, and to intelligence services, troops and training programmes provided with the aim of securing corporate assets and strategic interests”.7

These class contradictions have continued to undermine the Palestinian struggle, whether through the collaboration of Palestinian Authority with the occupation forces, or the complicity of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s regime in Egypt with the siege of Gaza.

A few other important arguments explored in the book are worth mentioning. First, Marfleet is clear on the importance of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants as an integral demand of the national movement. A second point emphasised by Marfleet is the way the Zionist strategy of Jewish-only labour, and exclusion of Palestinians from workforce, undermined Palestinian working-class power, while seeming to put (exclusively Jewish) workers at the centre of the Zionist project. The identity of Jewish workers became tied to the colonial project and the oppression of the Palestinians. This is important as it challenges the myth that the Israeli working class will be a force for Palestinian liberation. Finally, Marfleet offers an analysis of the social and political base of Hamas, which is crucial to our understanding of the struggle today.

Marfleet’s book is valuable as an up-to-date and general introduction to an understanding of these questions, drawing on a Marxist analysis. It builds on his earlier works on this topic, which date back to his 1989 book, Intifada (Bookmarks). It helps us to understand today’s genocide in Gaza and the context of imperialism, to situate our role in the struggle. Globally, support for Zionism is at its weakest since the establishment of the state of Israel. We can see that this is owed to a fight being taken up on multiple fronts—with the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and across historic Palestine and mass protests in a global solidarity movement. Following Marfleet’s analysis of the class dynamics of this struggle, we must start asking and answering the question of how we can bring a serious class element into the struggle, including in contexts such as Britain, where our ruling class are deeply implicated in the genocide and colonisation of the Palestinian people. This book should be used as a tool to effectively further the fight for Palestinian liberation, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.

Tara Mann is a socialist based in London who is active in the student movement for Palestine.

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