Continued from previous post.
The Global Scale of Palestinian National Liberation
While Omar faults the PFLP for its regional alliances and strategies, his obfuscation of global forces is just as essential to the book’s degradation of the Palestinian Left. Omar’s critique of the PFLP, which relegates itself to internal strategy, has its precedent set in Awad and Bean’s introduction, where, as mentioned earlier, they oppose “socialism from above” with “socialism from below.” Presumably benign at first read, Awad and Bean’s framework proves itself to be an opportunist binary that the book adopts to delegitimize not only the PFLP, but other Marxist-Leninist and socialist traditions. For example, Omar’s risible claim that “Cuban workers and peasants did not take part in making the revolution” reduces the Cuban people to passive witnesses of revolution. Omar connects the political orientation of the PFLP to the Cuban Revolution by arguing that the PFLP’s “vision of Marxist-Leninsm was expressed in the Cuban Revolution, where a small group of guerillas defeated a US-backed dictator and, a few years later, declared a socialist society.” This allows him to assume both the Palestinian Left and the Cuban Revolution as instances of “socialism from above” and undermine their popular constitution.
The term “Stalinism” guides the book’s overarching framework and is defined by Awad and Bean in the introduction as “a political tendency based on the false notion that socialism can be established in a single country rather than through the international rejection of capitalism.” They argue that this tendency is riddled with “stagism” which has squandered Arab socialist and communist parties’ “attempts to build a socialist alternative.” In broadly construing Stalinism as everything “false,” “rigid,” and “mechanistic,” and in equating it with any strategy they don’t agree with, the stage is set for the proceeding ahistorical criticisms of the strategies taken and alliances forged by the Palestinian national liberation movement.
In fact, Omar treats the PFLP’s alliance with the Soviet Union as one of its “political weaknesses” and brazenly suggests that they were “regularly manipulated by the Soviet Union.” He writes that “the PFLP, similar to the rest of the Stalinist left in the Arab world, allied itself with what it considered to be ‘real’ socialist societies, the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc.” Relying on the tired trope of “Stalinism” as a means to delegitimize the Palestinian Left, Omar argues that building socialism “will require the rediscovery of the real Marxist tradition, which has always looked to struggles of the working class – and not to Stalinist Russia or some authoritarian Arab regime that calls itself ‘socialist’ or ‘progressive’ – as the way to change society.” To Omar, the Palestinian Left is not a part of this “real Marxist tradition.” Shamelessly, then, he completely dismisses the relevance of the Palestinian Left’s political and theoretical contributions and ends the chapter by telling his readers, “it will be critical for us to learn from the mistakes of the old Stalinist organizations and connect these lessons to the struggles of today.”
The McCarthyist invocation of the Stalinist boogeyman – as an effort to define Marxism in a narrow, sectarian cast – ultimately renders Arab socialism as incapable of applying Marxism to its own conditions. In their conclusion Awad and Bean, instead, posit Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution as an alternative strategy that accounts for the supposed shortcomings of “Stalinized communist parties” to advance working class interests. They situate the political position of Jabra Nicola – one of the only Palestinian Trotskyists that Palestine has produced – against an entire body of organizational and political thought and strategy, writing that Nicola drew from
Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which articulated the need for national liberation struggles to challenge the role of local capitalist classes as well. This is in contrast to the strategy adopted by the Stalinized communist parties as well as some of the Arab nationalist organizations of the region, who argued for an anti-imperialist front that subordinated the working class’s independent interests to the national project.
Aside from absolving the Trotskyist and social democratic currents from its historical and current relationship to imperialism, there are various issues at hand.
Firstly, the book’s critique of the PFLP’s orientation to the Soviet Union, and its alliance, obscures the fact that the PFLP (including the other Palestinian political factions) had deep objections to Arab communist parties for their political adherence to the Soviet line on Palestine. Further, in addressing the friends of the Palestinian cause, the PFLP articulated the limitations of the USSR’s position on Zionism in its adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 242, while still emphasizing the necessity of their alliance.27 Despite these reservations, the PFLP understood that maintaining its strategic alliance with the USSR would strengthen its ability to withstand the growing onslaught of imperialism and regional reaction. This was seen with the anti-colonial and socialist revolutions in Angola, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of Yemen – their organizations withstood the violent offensives of imperialism and mobilized the popular classes, while they developed an alliance with the Soviet Union. Likewise, the PFLP maintained this critical internationalist alliance with the ultimate goal of advancing a national democratic revolution that provides both a material and technical base and paves the way for a socialist revolution. By subsuming the PFLP and other communist-oriented groups under the category of “the Stalinist left,” Omar construes Palestinians as puppets of supposed bureaucratic, despotic ventriloquists rather than revolutionary actors forging their own politics with the force of US-led reaction against them. Even more so, the relationship between the Soviet Union and the PFLP (or more broadly with the PLO) cannot be understood as unilateral or static. These dynamics shifted throughout the course of the revolution, and in the broader timeline of the Cold War.28
Secondly, Palestine’s anti-Soviet position obfuscates the historical effort of US imperialism to weaken the socialist bloc, as well as its growing influence over sections of the PLO. The PFLP understood that their alliance with the Soviet Union was situated in a global imperialist playing field wherein the US “established a series of pacts and defense treaties to face the socialist camp and to encircle it and limit its expansion, and also to neutralize national liberation movements.”29 As committed internationalists the Palestinian Left understood the positive effect of Soviet power for revolutionary forces in the Arab world. The editors’ refusal to address this global terrain allows for an analysis in which friends of Palestine are treated as enemies, and subsequently, the internationalist strategy of the Palestinian Revolution is reduced to categories like “false” and “incorrect.” The dichotomy of correct versus incorrect strategy is born not of a conjunctural or historical analysis of the arrangement of forces in the struggle against Zionism and imperialism, but time-honored shibboleths on the correct conduct of struggle. As a historical judgment, it overlooks how the PFLP’s positions were informed by their materialist analysis of the forces of imperialism and their understanding of the trajectory of the liberation project. The introduction of the DFLP’s “Policy of Phases” program and the PLO’s exile post-1982 from Beirut invited increased lines of communication with US administrations. Post-1982 Beirut materialized this reality when back-door channels were established with Arafat and the Reagan administration to move towards a “peace plan.”30 At this specific moment, the PFLP did not join in the policy of conciliation with the DFLP and Fateh; it maintained its analysis of the Palestinian struggle as linked to the struggle against imperialism. Ultimately, it prioritized an anti-imperialist front to secure the interest of the Palestinian movement more broadly, which includes defending the dignity of the Palestinian masses. If the ability to dynamically recalibrate one’s alliances in accordance to a changing political scene is not an example of the oft-cherished “proletarian independence,” then what is?
National Liberation as Class Struggle
Palestine views the prioritization of anticolonial liberation as a “Stalinist” and “mechanistic model” which “relegates the project of fighting for socialism to something that will take place at a future – often undefined – point in time.” This separation between anticolonial liberation and class struggle emanates from two fundamental misunderstandings. First, Awad and Bean misunderstand the class composition of anticolonial struggle in Palestine. And second, they misunderstand class formation. Their introductory warning against “Stalinism” thus poses a confusing and unexplanatory binary between anticolonial struggle and class struggle. Drawing from Frantz Fanon, however, we know that we cannot segregate class struggle from anticolonial struggle in situations of colonialism since “the economic substructure is also a superstructure.”31
The authors’ misunderstanding of class struggle and class formation is most evident in Awad and Bean’s advocacy for a crude theory of class which believes that the working class has “independent interests to the national project.” It is difficult to imagine what Awad and Bean mean here. If the national project, which guarantees the liberation and return of millions of dispossessed Palestinian refugees, is not where working class Palestinian interests fundamentally rest, then where else can we excavate this working class interest they speak of?
In order to conceive of this working class interest, we must attend to the national question. However, Awad and Bean’s dismissal of the latter in Palestine, in part, rests on their aforementioned use of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci himself charged Trotsky’s theory, which sidestepped the national question, as “nothing but a generic forecast presented as a dogma, and which demolishes itself by not in fact coming true.”32 Trotsky’s obstinacy is a reflection of the fact that his theory is not based in a materialist analysis of competing social forces on the national and world scales. Gramsci writes, “One cannot choose the form of war one wants, unless from the start one has a crushing superiority over the enemy.”33
It is worth emphasizing that Gramsci’s political strategy was constituted in a Southern context of unequal development. The national was, as is the case in the Palestinian context, the scale from which to launch a national-popular alliance. Gramsci’s theorization of the latter was not one of mere preference but one that responded to the constitution of Italian society in the interwar period. Conversely, Awad and Bean undermine a Marxist analysis of the national question by assuming that “internal conflicts between classes and seeing struggle from below” is “the answer.” By posing this “answer” against national unity, they fail to recognize how political answers are not eternal or transhistorical; Rather, political answers transform alongside shifting forms of class struggles.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels emphasize the national scale of class struggles: “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”34 This distinction between form and substance allows us to make sense of the PFLP’s analysis that the national form of Palestinian struggle is, in substance, an international struggle against world imperialism. Marx and Engels’ analysis of national struggle informed the Communist position and strategy they laid out, to “everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” If one adopts the logic of this position on national struggle and understands that Palestinian liberation is based on, and contingent upon, the movement of the popular classes, it becomes perfectly clear why supporting every revolutionary movement against Zionist colonization – the process which has dispossessed and proletarianized the majority of Palestinian society – is a position that uplifts Palestinian working class interests.
An alternative to Awad and Bean’s analysis of class would entail seriously grappling with national liberation and the concrete role of working and peasant classes therein. The late Marxist-Leninist philosopher Domenico Losurdo qualifies the frontist strategy taken in national liberation struggles, writing, “while the proletariat is the agency of the emancipatory process that breaks the chains of capitalist rule, the alliance required to break the shackles of national oppression is broader.”35 This is not to suggest that class oppression is distinct from national oppression. Rather, national oppression is one form of class oppression. Importantly, Losurdo points our attention to Marx and Engels’ pluralization of class struggle as taking multiple forms. The PFLP developed a related analysis that emphasized these various iterations of class struggle. They illustrated how in the Palestinian context of underdevelopment, the form of class struggle differs from the form of class struggle in an industrial society. This did not lead the PFLP to neglect the class question in Palestine, or to paper over the constitutive differences between classes, but to formulate a strategy by evaluating each class – the feudal, bourgeois, workers, peasants – in their respective relation to the Palestinian Revolution.
In committing themeslves to class analysis, the PFLP identified the position “that Israel represents a specific type of colonialism threatening the existence of all classes of the Palestinian people” as rightist thinking that obscured the class composition of revolutionary forces.36 Developing an analysis of each classes’ orientation to the Palestinian Revolution allowed them to determine “the real revolutionary class forces that constitute the pivot of the revolution.” In other words, the PFLP identified the forces behind national struggle as the popular (i.e., landless and pauperized) classes. From this perspective, national liberation is one form of class struggle. As the PFLP clarified:
National liberation battles are also class battles. They are battles between colonialism and the feudal and capitalist class whose interests are linked with those of the colonialist on the one hand, and the other classes of the people representing the greater part of the nation on the other. If the saying that national liberation battles are national battles is intended to mean that they are battles waged by the overwhelming majority of the nation’s masses, then this saying is true, but if it is intended to mean that these battles are different from the class struggle between the exploiters and the exploited, then the saying is untrue.37
When Awad and Bean suggest that working class interests are distinct from the national project they not only elide how national liberation battles are class battles, but they abandon the liberatory potential of popular resistance that takes the nation as its scale for forging revolutionary politics and building a socialist future. Ironically, Awad and Bean impose the very stagism they purport to oppose by segregating class struggle from national struggle. Losurdo writes: “Class struggle is the genus which, in determinate circumstances, takes the specific form of ‘national struggle’.”38 It is possible to come to terms with this formulation of national struggle as species and class struggle as genus only when we include the colonial theft of resources and land in our analysis of class formation and class interests. The abstraction of one form of class struggle and the universalization of it as the singular and only form is the symptom of a chauvinistic class position, both advertently and inadvertently adopted by those in the imperial core, which fails, and ultimately refuses, to take the national struggles of colonized peoples seriously. Today, it is either crude theories of class interests or liberal humanitarianism that bury from public view an otherwise obvious reality: that the Palestinian national liberation struggle is one of the most important class struggles of our history and our present.
Conclusion
The words of Ghassan Kanafani commence Awad and Bean’s book, but they forcefully degrade his life by rendering the politics and commitments he was martyred for as Stalinist and mechanistic. The confused analysis in Palestine is a reflection of its severing and isolation from historical and contemporary revolutionary theory that people like Kanafani actively developed and put into practice. Though the book importantly offers some tools and information for comprehending the Palestinian question, its lack of generosity towards the Left and its distancing from internationalist politics means that it fails to provide an analysis which clearly assesses the political stakes of Palestinian liberation for socialists in the US. If Awad and Bean believe that the Palestinian Left had it all wrong, what political formation do they consider to have it all right?
On the terrain of contemporary organizing in North America, they largely neglect uplifting grassroots organizations.39 In their conclusion, Awad and Bean mention NGOs like Adalah Justice Project and US Campaign for Palestinian Rights whose recent work, they argue, “reflects the growth of a resurgent American left that puts resistance to the US war machine at the center of a larger project of social justice.”
It is worth pointing out that NGOs play a specific and limited role in the solidarity movement for Palestine, employing strategies which are often confined to advocacy. When assessing the impact of NGOs, we must be clear about their class composition and orientation as NGOs, not movements, a clarification which Awad and Bean’s conclusion obscures. There are significant differences between grassroots organizations and NGOs, three of the foremost being funding, internal political mechanisms, and social base.
First, NGOs’ politics and strategies cannot be understood in isolation from their funding sources.40 Private donors which NGOs appeal to sustain their work and pay their salaries, no doubt come to shape their work, political vision, and class composition. Second, as opposed to NGOs, grassroots organizations have internal political mechanisms which hold them accountable to popular movements. These political mechanisms allow organizers to respond to resistance in Palestine. This summer, it was grassroots organizations who proved themselves capable of both responding to on-the-ground calls in Palestine and mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people across US, Canadian, and European cities. Lastly, the class composition and audience of the named NGOs is primarily middle class Americans. Of course, grassroots organizations are heterogeneous in their class composition and comprise these classes too. But the internal political mechanisms of grassroots organizations, and the fact that they are not constrained by the dictates of liberal and Zionist funders, means that they are able to cultivate a politics and strategy that aligns with and uplifts the vision of the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Structurally, NGOs are more committed to satisfying the needs of their private donors than they are of uplifting the demands of resistance forces in Palestine and the region.
Awad and Bean’s inclusion of NGOs within the left, paired with their failure to highlight grassroots organizations in the US, obscures the debilitating effects of NGOization. In the wake of Oslo, NGOization has been part of a larger process of liquidating the Palestinian Left.41 In fact, the US has financed the aid economy in Palestine and directly undermined popular resistance through the destruction of Palestinian institutions. The prevailing confusion in which NGOs are mistaken for popular or community organizations is a function of NGOization as it undermines existing popular movements or acts as part of a broader social, economic, and political terrain that prevents their emergence.
Given Awad and Bean’s commitment to “socialism from below” it remains unclear as to why their conclusion gives uncritical spotlight, not only to NGOs, but to members of Congress. We are not arguing that the authors should exclude the electoral sphere from their analysis, as it constitutes one terrain of struggle and a specific node in the movement for Palestine in the United States. But their positive rendering of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar for “[challenging] the status quo on Palestine” stands in confusing contrast to the book’s sectarian critiques of the Palestinian Left. We must ask why American politicians receive positive evaluation from Awad and Bean while their book offers a platform for the dismissal and belittlement of the historical contributions of Palestinian mass organizations? Critical questions remain: what is “socialism from below” to Awad and Bean? Is there any room for the Palestinian Left in their imagined political formation?
More disturbingly, the book’s vilification of revolutionary strategy severs itself from on the ground resistance in Palestine. This is not to say that they altogether neglect such forces.42 However, resistance to Zionism and imperialism in Palestine is not uplifted in a comprehensive or explicit way. This is harmful when considered alongside Awad and Bean’s dismissal of organized resistance forces who are resisting Zionism today, as “Stalinist,” “stagist,” and “mechanistic.” It should be seen as nothing less than shameful that the book treats the Palestinian Left with more criticism than they treat advocacy NGOs whose very legitimacy derives from the historical liquidation of the Palestinian Left as carried out by the US–Zionist alliance.
In this sense, the book’s misrepresentation of Palestinian history is not innocent. Its version of history complements its contemporary watering-down of the national question and the international dimensions of Palestinian struggle. Despite this, Palestinian history remains a crucial site of engagement for anyone concerned with an anti-imperialist and internationalist politics that is formulated and built from the historical and contemporary ground we exist on and not within “all these castles in the air.”43 History is a wellspring of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle. This has always been the case for the Palestinian national liberation movement which continues to draw inspiration from its forebearers, and which creatively produces and maintains its national symbols and traditions amidst the 100-plus-year-long refusal of Palestinian self-determination by colonial occupiers.
Despite the crucial role of history in the Palestinian project for liberation, often those who draw inspiration from historical revolutionary moments are charged with idealism or romanticism. We recognize this attitude in Palestine’s treatment of the Palestinian Left as stodgy and outdated, and in the assumption that its politics and strategy can be written off as false or misguided. This attitude is nothing but debilitating to the movement for Palestine in North America: it squanders the ability of socialists to build a genuine anti-imperialist movement against US and Zionist aggression. It was this iteration of bourgeois moralism that Kanafani identified as one of the causes of the Palestinian tragedy. It is then critical that we partake in acts of remembrance of those who came before us and were convinced of the enduring necessity and possibility of liberating Palestine. This is not an exercise in nostalgia or a romanticized vision of militancy. Nor is it a suggestion that the conditions of the Palestinian Revolution can be mapped onto our present. To remember, uplift, and learn from the political theory and strategy of the Palestinian Left is to struggle against Zionism’s ongoing, century-long counterinsurgency against Palestinian resistance.
During the Palestinian Revolution, the Zionist entity assassinated leaders of the Palestinian Left throughout Palestine, the Arab world, and Europe. This history reaches even further back to the era of British–Zionist collaboration (1917–1948), which saw the mass, brutal suppression of those who rejected the colonial hijacking of Palestine. There has never been closure to this repression. Our historical moment is constituted by an ideological struggle in which Zionism attempts to suppress and eradicate the memory of Palestinian and Arab revolutionaries it has transformed into martyrs. We identify this phenomenon all around us, from the contemporary desecration of Izz al Din al Qassam’s grave north of Haifa to the Israeli state’s attacks on Ghassan Kanafani’s memorial in Akka. We identify it, too, in the historical erasure of revolutionaries confined in prisons. One exemplar case is Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, a Lebanese communist and leader in the PFLP who has been imprisoned by the French state since 1984 with the support of the US and Israel.44 He remains the longest detained political prisoner in Europe.
The ongoing liquidation of the memory of the Palestinian Left is not exclusively a Zionist endeavor that takes place in Palestine. This revisionist operation proceeds right here in the US. On one level, the liquidation of revolutionary Palestinian memory and thought can be contested by recounting history through a materialist method. And on a more urgent level, we should ask what insights the Palestinian Left tradition can offer in strategizing for the liberation of Palestine and developing a robust internationalist, anti-imperialist movement in the present moment.
In 2021, the Palestinian people remain just as besieged, disinherited, proletarianized, and landless as they were in 1969, the year that the Palestinian Left theorized the forces constituting their enemies and friends – those who supported or opposed the miserable reality imposed by Zionist colonialism and world imperialism. Today, there are real, concrete enemies invested in the continuation of the indefensible reality of Palestinian dispossession. And there are real, concrete friends committed to its undoing. This undoing is a difficult feat that remains just as necessary, urgent, and possible. Yet any socialist movement in the Global North that is interested in aiding this possibility cannot avoid adopting a political theory and strategy that assesses and confronts the role of US–Zionist led imperialism in plundering the dispossessed of the world.
If anything, Awad and Bean are correct that socialists in North America must struggle for Palestinian liberation. But how can socialists in the US do this? It is clear that vague sloganeering and loose theoretical frameworks do not articulate a clear political vision and strategy that is centered on weakening the institutions of US imperialism and Zionism globally. As articulated by the Palestinian Left, a politics of internationalism and anti-imperialism must derive from clear political thinking that assesses both revolutionary and reactionary forces on the national, regional, and global scales. Accordingly, any strategy for mobilization must be based in a materialist analysis that places US-led imperialism and Zionism at the forefront and doesn’t shy away from supporting resistance on the ground in Palestine today. This analysis determines which struggles socialist movements in the Global North are obliged to support and allows them to challenge the prevailing political confusion and theoretical chaos in which all states are strategically undifferentiated, and a priori our primary enemies and antagonists – a confusion and chaos which has proved to be advantageous to US aims throughout the world. If vague sloganeering and idealist internationalism will not uplift the national liberation struggle of Palestinians being carpet-bombed, choked, and humiliated by the US-backed Zionist enterprise, what will?
Perhaps the most practical starting point is committing to the task that has been taken up by Palestinian revolutionaries and their friends for over 100 years: the unfailing readiness to identify, confront, and defeat enemy forces.
References
↑1 Anouar Abdel-Malek, Nation and Revolution: Volume 2 of Social Dialectics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 166.
↑2 Max Ajl, A People’s Green New Deal (London: Pluto Books, 2021), 146.
↑3 Her position is worth quoting at length: “The link between the interests of imperialism and the continued existence of Israel will make our war against the latter basically a war against imperialism.” Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live (1971), 51.
↑4 Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, “Intervention: The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts,” Historical Materialism 15 (2007): 171-204.
↑5 Abdel-Malek, Nation and Revolution, 166.
↑6 Abdel-Malek, Nation and Revolution, Part I.
↑7 Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2010).
↑8 Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, “Intervention: The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts,” 173.
↑9 Walter Rodney, “George Jackson: Black Revolutionary,” November 1971.
↑10 See our section below: National Liberation as Class Struggle.
↑11 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP (Utrecht: Foreign Language Press, 2017), 63.
↑12 To Anouar Abdel-Malek, “the combined effect of [these] two tendencies … leads to a global disqualification of socialism, with some minor and temporary exceptions. The USSR is condemned as bureaucratic and conservative; China as chauvinist, with racialist undertones; the European socialist states as bureaucratic satellites; Yugoslavia and Romania as right, or left, opportunists; Korea as dogmatic; Cambodia as erratic; Vietnam, after its victory, as conservative; Cuba as a bureaucratic satellite in its declining romantic phase. What remains, we may ask, of socialism? If every single country is subject to the same treatment, only one haven is left: the self-styled ‘new’ left, the defenders, apologists, and epigones of neo-Marxist epistemology, socialist reductionism, a dogmatic, supposedly ethical purity.” Abdel-Malek, Nation and Revolution, 165.
↑13 “PFLP: Introduction to this Edition” in Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP , 11.
↑14 These differences in approach are in reference to the US imperialist interventions that we have witnessed over decades, such as with the multiple invasions of Iraq and the wars waged on Syria and Libya through proxies.
↑15 For example, the PFLP repeatedly maintained the position that Palestinian decision-making should remain independent of Arab states, including ally states such as Libya, Iraq, and Syria. Indeed, the PFLP contradicted the Syrian states’ desires to overthrow Yasser Arafat as leader of the PLO, despite its own opposition to his leadership. Additionally, the PFLP often positioned itself in contradiction to Syria’s interest in Lebanon, including through its involvement with the Lebanese National Movement. There are various other moments where the PFLP diverged from its state allies despite its alignment on broader strategic considerations.
↑16 In the aftermath of the 1967 Naksa, the PFLP’s critique of the regional forces’ role was centered on the class composition of the political leadership of petit bourgeois states citing Egypt as an example. By reason of their class structure, these states were not, and could not be, the leading force of Palestinian liberation. Despite remaining antagonistic towards Western imperialism and Zionism, the PFLP understood that petit bourgeois states have the capacity of adopting “compromising non-radical programs in the face of the enemy.” Thus, the PFLP understood both the constraints of petit bourgeois states and the necessity of allying with them to struggle against imperialism, Zionism, and reactionary regimes. It is worth quoting them at length: “These regimes struck at the interests of feudalism and capitalism and their exploitation of the masses, but they preserved the petit bourgeoisie and its interests in the industrial, agricultural and commercial sectors, at the same time producing a new class of military men, politicians and administrative personnel whose interests became interlocked with those of the petit bourgeoisie, thus forming with it, the upper class in these communities. The interests of this upper class required the maintenance of the experiment within limits that do not conflict with its interests or with its thinking and view of the battle. This class is antagonistic to colonialism and reaction but at the same time wants to keep the privileges that it enjoys. It is this state of affairs that has defined the nature of the political, economic, military and ideological programs of these regimes.” For more on the PFLP’s approach to this question, see pages 81-84 of Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine.
↑17 For the PFLP’s deputy head of political relations’ understanding of the question of Syria in the Palestinian struggle, see Taysir Qubba, “Palestinians in Damascus,” Middle East Research and Information Project 134 (1985).
↑18 The PFLP’s 1969 booklet “The Military Strategy of the PFLP” explains that their military thought “proceeds directly from the ideological, class and organizational undertaking which forms the foundation of the commitment of the Popular Front as expressed in [A Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine (1969)].”
↑19 The PFLP wrote: “It is not a mere coincidence that the October Revolution and the revolutions in China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and the socialist countries of Europe have succeeded and stood firm in the face of imperialism and in overcoming or beginning to overcome their state of underdevelopment, against the quasi-paralysis or infirmity characterizing the countries of the Third World which are not committed scientifically to scientific socialist theory as their guideline for planning all their policies and defining their programs.” Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine , 112.
↑20 Revolutionary Palestinian strategy has creatively responded to the predicament of exile. As Nasser Abourahme explains, the Palestinian anticolonial experience was revolutionary precisely due to its “capacity to make territory.” Other Arab revolutionaries struggling against Zionist colonization and imperialism have had to adopt strategies for confronting, undermining, and transforming colonial space. The Lebanese communist and revolutionary freedom fighter, Souha Bechara, discusses how resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon continued through its capacity to “abolish distance.” The problem of liberating something that one is physically severed from (i.e.: recovering one’s land from the refugee camp of exile, or fighting for one’s homeland from the prison of torture), continues to confront Palestinians. Nasser Abourahme, “Revolution after Revolution: The Commune as Line of Flight in Palestinian Anticolonialism,” Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, May 2021.
↑21 Ghassan Kannafani, “On the PFLP and the September Crisis,” New Left Review I/67 (May/June 1971), 50-57.
↑22 Paul Thomas Chamberlain, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85.
↑23 Chamberlain, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order.
↑24 Chamberlain, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order.
↑25 In their document “Hands off the Militia!” the PFLP describes organizing their social base in preparation against reactionary repression: “Thus PFLP and other progressive groups strengthened their ties with the people, widened their militia bases, and intensified training and arming of the militia so that they would be prepared to carry their responsibilities of facing the enemy.”
↑26 Khaled, My People Shall Live, 58.
↑27 For more details on the USSR’s adoption of UNSCR 242 see, chapter 4 of Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live, titled “The Road to Haifa.”
↑28 In its 4th Congress, the PFLP speaks to Lenin’s policy of “peaceful coexistence” exercised by the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. The USSR’s practice of Lenin’s thesis meant securing the conditions necessary for the growth of socialist construction. The PFLP admits to not advocating for the USSR to undertake direct military confrontation against imperialist forces, or to export revolution. The PFLP’s anxiety was centered around the socialist bloc reducing support to national liberation movements. This speaks directly to the USSR’s push for political settlement based on UNSCR 242 which heightened the PFLP’s apprehension. The PFLP, in this report, state that they later reevaluated their position and understood the policy of peaceful coexistence to be essential for the “growth of the socialist economy, and the deepening of capitalism’s crisis, and intensifying contradictions among the imperial power.” Despite this policy, various other nations won their battle for national liberation with the support of the socialist bloc.
↑29 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, 88.
↑30 Despite voting on the 10-point program at the 1988 PNC meeting in Algiers, the PFLP maintained its position against normalization with the Zionist entity through the formation of the Rejection Front in 1974, and later, with the formation of the Palestinian National Salvation Front in response to the Amman Accord. See Anders Strindberg, “The Future of the Palestinian National Movement and The Damascus-Based Alliance of Palestinian Forces: A Primer,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 60-76.
↑31 Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 5.
↑32 Antonio Gramsci, “Internationalism and National Policy,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans.. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 241.
↑33 Antonio Gramsci, “Political Struggle and Military War,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks,” 234.
↑34 Karl Marx and Friedrick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), in Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 495.
↑35 Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 9.
↑36 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, 42.
↑37 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, 44.
↑38 Losurdo, Class Struggle, 14.
↑39 There are exceptions: the book briefly mentions Students for Justice in Palestine and the Red Nation. Also, they importantly argue for the need to expand anti-Zionism within the US labor movement, mentioning historical movements such as Block the Boat. However, nowhere do Awad and Bean make their readers aware of critical organizations and networks that are mobilizing for Palestinian liberation in the US and/or articulating sharp anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist politics. Some of the organizations that are excluded from their assessment of the terrain of organizing in the US are the following: The Palestinian Youth Movement, Within Our Lifetime, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Existence is Resistance, Al-Awda: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, U.S. Palestinian Community Network.
↑40 On May 25 2021, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund awarded the Tides Center a $150,000 grant for Adalah Justice Project. In 2018, they were awarded $160,000 and in 2020, they were awarded 100,000. This information is publicly available on the Grants Search section of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund website.
↑41 Adel Samara, “The NGOization of the Palestinian Left” in Imprisoned Ideas: A Discussion of Palestinian, Arab, Israeli, and International Issues (Ramallah: al-Mashriq/al-A’amil for Cultural and Development Studies, 1988).
↑42 Daphna Thier’s chapter briefly suggests the necessity of developing “real connections to the Palestinian national liberation struggle wherever it arises” and Toufic Haddad recognizes that the Palestinian movement is not defeated. The book refers, at various moments, to Gaza’s heroic Great March of Return.
↑43 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 516.
↑44 In 2013, Hillary Clinton blocked his release. See Fedayin.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/12/ ... -hijacked/
e of gender in the Palestinian struggle, and an historical and contemporary analysis of Black-Palestinian solidarity. The conclusion forwards Awad and Bean’s vision of Palestinian liberation while the afterward calls readers to action.
