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A Look at the Different Palestinian Political Parties

Several Palestinian parties have worked for the liberation of Palestine. Therefore it is necessary to discuss the history of Palestinian resistance to understand the role of each organization.

The main Palestinian party is called Al-Fatah. Founded in 1958 by a group of young Palestinians including Yasser Arafat, the party stood for the liberation of Palestine in its entirety through armed struggle, inspired by the Algerian revolution against French imperialism. The battle of Karameh in Jordan against the Israeli army in 1968 popularized Al-Fatah in such a way that thousands of Palestinians, Arabs, and even foreigners joined its ranks to fight for the liberation of Palestine. A year later, Yasser Arafat took command of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which became the representative organization of the entire Palestinian people. From then on, the history of Al-Fatah becomes intertwined with that of the PLO and the Palestinian struggle.

Al-Fatah’s political perspective – the liberation of all of Palestine by armed means – was based on class conciliation, prioritizing the interests of the Palestinian bourgeoisie over those of millions of Palestinian refugees spread throughout the Arab world. In addition to class conciliation, their project included the policy of “non-intervention” in the politics of other countries which, in practice, cemented an alliance with the reactionary Arab bourgeois regimes at the expense of Palestinian and Arab workers in each country.

In 1967, the main left-wing party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was formed. The PFLP understood the liberation of Palestine as an anti-imperialist struggle to be led by the working classes of Palestine and Arab countries together. They rejected the policy of class conciliation as well as conciliation with the Arab regimes. Its slogan was “The road to Jerusalem starts in Cairo, Amman and Damascus.” Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, they also stood for armed actions and became famous for hijacking planes. Two years later, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) was formed, based on a more radical dissent from the PFLP.

Both organizations claimed to be Marxist and made a negative assessment of the political and military support given by Stalin and the Palestinian Communist Party to the formation of the state of Israel, a betrayal that to this day weighs on the CP even under their new denomination as the People’s Party.

In September 1970 in Jordan, King Hussein, backed by the state of Israel and the United States, carried out a massacre of Palestinians – who then constituted 70% of the local population – and expelled the PLO and Palestinian parties to Lebanon. It is worth remembering that the then head of the Syrian Air Force, Hafiz al-Assad carried out a military coup precisely to prevent the arrival of aid to the Palestinians. He then started the Assad dynasty, which is one of the worst dictatorships in the entire region as well as a confessed enemy of Yasser Arafat and the PLO.

This defeat together, with the defeat of the Arab countries by Israel in the October 1973 War, paved the way for the pressure from both the Arab regimes and the Soviet Union for the PLO to abandon the struggle for the liberation of Palestine in exchange for the formation of a Palestinian mini-state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem – about 22% of the entire Palestinian territory. The DFLP was the first Palestinian resistance organization to publicly stand for this policy. Later Yasser Arafat made a historic speech at the UN plenary in 1974, holding a machine gun in one hand and an olive branch in the other, in which he offered a kind of “historic compromise” to the criminal State of Israel. But U.S.  imperialism and Israel did not want a compromise but rather surrender.

In 1975, the Lebanese Christian Maronite bourgeoisie started a civil war to prevent democratic reforms demanded by the Lebanese national movement led by the Druze bourgeois Kamal Jumblat, in alliance with Arab nationalist and left-wing parties. The Lebanese national movement made an alliance with the PLO, then the main military force in the country, an alliance that imposed a series of defeats on the Maronite far-right forces. A year later, Syrian troops invaded the country at the request of American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to prevent the defeat of the far-right forces. This invasion was instrumental for the 1976 massacre of Palestinian refugees at Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp.

In 1982, a joint action by the Israeli army and the far-right Maronite militias expelled Arafat and the PLO forces from Lebanon, and promoted the massacre in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila, where around 3000 Palestinians were executed in cold blood by Maronite militiamen under logistical support from Israeli forces. The massacre of Palestinians provoked a popular uprising that expelled Israeli troops from Beirut and then throughout Lebanon.

The origin of Hamas

In 1987, Palestinians began an Intifada (popular uprising) in Gaza and the West Bank. The Muslim Brotherhood organization was put under enormous popular pressure to play an active role in the Palestinian resistance, following the example of al-Fatah, left-wing parties or even the Islamic Jihad—a religious political party formed after the Iranian revolution that stood for a regime of Iranian type in Palestine. This pressure led to the formation of the Islamic political party Hamas.

Hamas stands for several of the Muslim Brotherhood’s values: free market, private property, class conciliation, social assistance for the poor, and education through Islamization. Unlike the Brotherhood, Hamas defends the national liberation of the entire Palestinian territory by any means necessary, including armed resistance. Their first manifesto advocated an Islamic Palestine.

Hamas later modified their political program. On the one hand, as early as 1993, their historical leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin stood for a 10 or 20-year truce with Israel (Hudna in Arabic) which eventually implied recognition of the State of Israel. This same content was expressed in their 2006 electoral platform, in which there is no reference to the fight for the end of the State of Israel. On the other hand, they abandoned their stand for an Islamic Palestine in their 2017 new manifesto, without clarifying which model of state they stood for. In Gaza, besieged by the state of Israel for 17 years, there are restrictions on democratic freedoms. However, Hamas is one of the few Palestinian parties that holds internal elections for their leaders every four years, with a real impact on the organization’s policies.

Another important aspect is their foreign policy. Hamas limits itself to defending the Palestinian right to self-determination. They do not want to interfere in the politics of other countries, allowing political relations to different regimes such as the Saudi, Iranian, Turkish, and Qatari.

The Palestinian Intifada pressed U.S. imperialism and Israel to adopt the Oslo Accords in 1993, transforming Al-Fatah into a manager of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Oslo Accords led to greater colonization of Palestinian lands and institutionalized an apartheid regime against the Palestinians, continuing the ethnic cleansing that began 75 years ago with the Nakba.

Palestinian left-wing parties denounced the Oslo Accords but later capitulated to Al-Fatah and adapted to them. Furthermore, they abandoned their independence from the Arab and Iranian regimes. Therefore, they did not play any significant role in the wave of Arab revolutions that broke out in December 2010 in Tunisia. Currently, they have become supporters of the so-called “axis of resistance” led by the Iranian regime, with the participation of the Syrian dictatorship, and the Lebanese political party Hezbollah among others. Dissent from these organizations—such as Masar Badil (Alternative Path), better known for the Palestinian prisoner’s solidarity network called Samidoun, which they lead)—are in the same situation. Led by former PFLP leader Khaled Barakat, Masar Badil opposes the corrupt Palestinian Authority, and is harshly persecuted in imperialist countries such as Germany. However, as well as the PFLP, Masar Badil has been completely silent in the face of the arrest of Palestinian activists in Syria, and also in the face of the massacre of half a million Syrians carried out by the Assad regime with the support of the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, and the Russian army.

Hamas, on the other hand, has maintained its opposition to Oslo and ended up becoming the main organization of the Palestinian resistance, aiming to replace Al-Fatah as the leading force of the Palestinian national movement.

Among Palestinian youth, new organizations regularly emerge to confront the violence of Zionist colonization. In 2022, young Palestinians from different organizations armed themselves to carry out self-defense in Palestinian cities and refugee camps, outside the guidance of their parties. The group that has become most famous is the Lions’ Den in the old city of Nablus while the Jenin refugee camp has become the main center of this new Palestinian resistance.

>> The text above is excerpted from an article by Fabio Bosco, and is reprinted from Workers' Voice.

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