Over the last six months or so I have been attempting to acquire a better understanding of the history and dynamics of Palestinian struggles, with particular emphasis on the Palestinian Left. I had a few assumptions before I began this project, ideas I had developed quite a long time ago, which I’ve wanted to clarify. But how? Talking to people involved in the events in question, certainly, to the degree that this is possible, and to the degree I have the energy and commitment to track people down. And reading anything I can touching on the history and current situation. Which is certainly easier. Which brings us to the current opportunity. For the first time, all of those theses that people did and which were never looked at again, the research done for PhDs and Masters which were submitted and judged and a copy placed in the university library and only that library – those are going on-line, to be unread on a global rather than merely university-wide basis. But they are there, available on the internet to one and all, the one being me, the all being also me, in most cases. What were these assumptions, the ones I’d developed, the ones I would seek to clarify? One was that, though the organised Palestinian Left was centrally organised around an anti-imperialism primarily manifest as Left nationalism, there was nonetheless very much an internationalism at play – or rather internationalisms, of several intersecting varieties. Despite this variety and multiplicity, however, I viewed such Palestinian internationalism as on the whole ideologically compatible with what was the hegemonic late twentieth century idea of Left internationalism: internationalism as an aggregate of externally-relating national struggles, national economies producing national classes, even if in ‘national liberation’ formulations understood as involving parallel relations to what was understood as imperialism. The tendencies that would come together in the PFLP, and those that would come out of it – or indeed, the bulk of the mostly overlapping, wider terrain of Palestinian rejectionism – were a radical or at least militant edge of internationalisms no more anti-nationalist than anti-statist. Favouring revolutions against ‘reactionary Arab regimes’ involved substantial and heated debates about which Arab states were NOT reactionary i.e. to be overthrown as soon as practicable. Thus, for instance and especially, the myriad positions adopted in the 70s in relation to the Syrian regime, of varying degrees of criticism even by those who would accept material support from the Ba’athists, while setting up offices in Damascus. (Perhaps only the most hierarchical and paramilitarised of the factions, the PFLP-GC, was truly and fully UN-critical of the regime, and slowly integrated into its military and repressive apparatus without ever being formally dissolved as an independent entity.) While this was complicated by the Palestinian dispersal and involvement in struggles throughout the region, many of the core ideas remained more-or-less intact. Nonetheless, this meant that the Palestinian Left was able to think politico-military strategy in relation to Israel in regional terms, as a strategy based on efforts in the direction of a series of revolutions against what were seen as reactionary regimes in the region. In the seventies, struggles in Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen were understood as part of such an international strategy, and of course the disaster of Black September cannot be properly understood without recognising elite fears of precisely such a dynamic involving attempts to dislodge the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan. It seems banal to call all of this a product of its time, unless we can truly specify what content this time had, and how it developed and passed away. Call it the era of national liberation, or, what is not the same thing despite overlap, the cycle of struggles in the sixties and seventies, and/or retrospectively try to understand the terrain of late programmatism and the specificity of its horizon of politics, and understand what has happened since, all of that history, as part of the period of restructuring that has reconstituted states and re-subsumed our lives under capital on a global basis – a restructuring in which the Middle East has played an enormous role, of course, from the oil crises and the rise of the petro-dollar, through the wars of restructuring involving the US and Iraq and everyone else, the shifting roles of the petro-monarchies in contesting the terms on which relation of exploitation are (re)produced in the region, and of course everything that can be signified by the word ‘Israel’. Another of my assumptions was that, by the eighties, significant sections of the Palestinian organised Left had manifested commitment, integrity and courage of a sort that had garnered the respect of significant sections of the Palestinian population. And that what this meant in practice was that, when Palestinian popular struggle in the occupied territories began to move beyond its pre-existing boundaries – most obviously in the first Intifada, both in form, not taking direction from the factions, and in content, not limiting itself to a strictly nationalist anti-Zionist politics – it was the organised Palestinian Left that had the political capital to most effectively re-assert ‘leadership’ and re-direct struggle back to a narrower version of what was posed as national liberation – whereas other factions were seen as too compromised, or even corrupt, part of elites against which parts of the Palestinian population were also tempted, or even beginning, to struggle. This is an aspect of the first Intifada that has been distinctly under-recognised, researched or written about. (It is sort of referred to in Aufheben’s piece on the Intifada, an article widely circulated in certain political worlds, though I don’t think people are wise to take the account of Palestinian history within it too seriously…) This assumption, then, was that the second emergence of the Palestinian Left was to expend the political capital accumulated in earlier struggles, in ‘leading’ the recuperation of the Palestinian struggles of the First Intifada into oft-(even ritually-)lamented narrower nationalism. Just in time to have their role usurped by what was to become Hamas – at the time still effectively sponsored by the Israeli state to undermine the PLO, including its PFLP and other Leftist tendencies – and at that time still tending to physically attack such Left factions as atheist-communists, an such. The third assumption, and this one was proven time and time again, is: If someone wants to write about Palestinian activist women, they are going to be writing about the DFLP. In any case, beyond the materials I’ve linked to on Facebook, and in case anyone finds any of them interesting enough to read, some of the more obscure materials I’ve been reading in the last few months include the following theses, all of which are available on-line: Bader Abdairahmanalaraj, ‘Harsh State Repression and Suicide Bombing: The Second Palestinian Intifada (Uprising) 2000-05’ (PhD) 2011. Farid Abdel-Fattah Abu-Idheir, ‘The Coverage of the Intifada in the UK Arab Daily Press’ (PhD) 1996. Ihab Aldaqqaq, ‘Palestinian Women’s Movements and Their Relations with the Palestinian Nationalist Movement: A History of Partnership and A Future of Challenging Cooperation’ (PhD) 2014. N.T. Anders Strindberg, ‘’From the River to the Sea’: Honour, Identity and Politics in Historical and Contemporary Palestinian Rejectionism’ (PhD) 2001. Megan Bailey, ‘An Army of Roses for Waging Peace: The Transformative Roles of Palestinian Women in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ (Honours Thesis) 2014. Bassam Yousef Ibrahim Banat, “Palestinian Suicide Martyrs (Istishhadiyin): Facts and Figures’, (PhD) 2010. Lauro Burkart, ‘The Politicization of Oslo Water Agreement’, Dissertation for Masters of International History and Politics, 2012. Brock Dahl, ‘The Lebanese-Palestinian Conflict in 1973: The Social (De)Construction of Lebanese Sovereignty’ (Masters Thesis) 2006. Giulia Daniele, ‘Along an Alternative Road: Women, Reconciliation and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ (PhD) 2011. Jessica Leigh Devaney, ‘A Dialogical Roadmap to Peace: Israeli and Palestinian Feminists Building Bridges to Peace in the Shadow of the Wall’ (Masters Thesis) 2006. Gert-Joachim Glaebner, ‘Militia Politics: The Formation and Organisation or Irregular Armed Forces in Sudan (1985-2001) and Lebanon (1975-1991)’ (PhD) 2006. Wafaa Hasan, “Orientalist Feminism and the Politics of Critical Dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian Women’ (PhD) 2011. Felix Kuntzsch, ‘The Violent Politics of Nationalism: Identity and Legitimacy in Palestine, Kosovo and Quebec’ (PhD) 2014. Francesco Saverio Leopardi, ‘’Coalition Politics’ and Regional Steadfastness: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Between 1983 and 1984’, Annali di Ca’ Foscari Vol. 50, December 2014. Halim Rane, ‘Reconstructing Jihad amid Competing International Norms: Implications for a Resolution of the Israel-Palestine Conflict’ (PhD) 2008. Daniel J. Walsh, ‘The Palestine Poster Project Archives: Origins, Evolution, and Potential’ (Masters Thesis) 2011. Other than theses, I also read a bunch of academic publications related to this history, in particular articles published over the last seven or eight years i.e. since I had last spent any real time reading academic works related to these subjects. I can’t be bothered listing them all, because I am lazy, but the following was an interesting find, in part because it seemed to confirm my own assumptions, which is always nice: Muhamad Hasrul Zakariah, ‘The Uprising of the Fedayeen Against the Government of Jordan, 1970-1971: Declassified Documents from The British Archive’, International Journal of West Asian Studies 2 (2), 2010. For some reason, no-one seems to have ever translated into English the pamphlet Mustapha co-wrote on Black September, after his involvement with the Palestinian Left there in the lead-up to the disaster. Despite the substantial world-wide interest in the Situationist International, this remains one text very hard to get at all, despite his famously having left the SI to join the Palestinian struggle and specifically what was then the PDFLP (now DFLP). On that less than spectacular note, I may as well stop for now.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 07:46:20 +0000