Crisis of the Left, Crisis of the Palestinian National Movement
More than seventy years after the 1948 Palestinian Nakba and the creation of the State of Israel, as of January 2020 history seems to have rolled back on the question of Palestine. Commenting on US President Trump’s announcement of his long-awaited “Vision for Peace”, Rashid Khalidi noted that since the 1917 Balfour Declaration:
Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu stood next to President Trump during the ceremony organised to unveil the US sponsored plan, while no Palestinian representative was invited, consistently with the total US and Israeli neglect of Palestinian voices during preparatory works. As Khalidi and many others observed, this approach reflected the US and Israeli colonial perspectives informing their vision for settling the question of Palestine, one where indigenous views should not be considered. But the absence of Palestinian leaders as well as their feeble response to the publication of the plan also signalled the deep political and representation crisis that the Palestinian national movement has been experiencing since the 2007 Hamas-Fatah division.the great powers have repeatedly tried to act in spite of the Palestinians, ignoring them, talking for them, or over their heads, or pretending that they did not exist.1
Over the last five years, events in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) underscored the growing distance between the once dominant Palestinian fasaʾil (factions) and popular mobilisation against the occupation. Throughout most of 2018 and early 2019, thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip joined weekly demonstrations and sit-ins in what became known as the “Great Return Marches” to protest the ongoing Israeli blockade of the Hamas-ruled enclave. Palestinian factions had no direct role in launching the mobilisation which was instead the initiative of civil society organisations. In fact, the creation of an institutionalised coordination committee by the political factions contributed to winding down the marches’ momentum.2
In this context, Hamas’ government in Gaza and the Fatah-controlled Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in the West Bank, blocked in their competition for primacy, have proven unable to mobilise Palestinian society effectively on a national level, let alone within the Palestinian diaspora communities. Neither the PNA, as legacy and heir of the national project embodied by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), nor Hamas as its Islamist alternative succeeded in fulfilling the Palestinian long-term goals of self-determination and statehood. Within this impasse, these political entities stopped providing the Palestinian people with a comprehensive and inclusive institutional, political and cultural framework in which to voice, struggle for and pursue their political and social aspirations.
Against the backdrop of this crisis and of Palestinian political polarisation, the absence of an alternative “third way” between the internationally recognised PNA camp and the “radical” Islamist option arises as a central question. The political diversity of the Palestinian national movement points to the study of the Palestinian Left as a first step to investigate and understand the reasons of such absence. The Palestinian Left’s legacy of struggle for social and national emancipation, its pioneering mobilisation of labour, women and students as well as its historical contribution in terms of ideological elaboration should provide solid bases upon which establishing an alternative to the current deadlock. Nonetheless, the Palestinian Left appears marginalised and its factions display little influence on the general orientations of the national movement. Looking at the reasons behind the current condition of the Palestinian Left thus means pursuing a clearer understanding of the crisis affecting Palestinian politics nowadays.
The decline of the Palestinian Left cannot be approached without addressing specifically the marginalisation that its main faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), experienced throughout more than two decades since the early 1980s. The PFLP was not only the main leftist faction in terms of membership, popular support and international recognition. Within the Palestinian national movement, and specifically the PLO, it also represented the first competitor for Fatah. Its strong emphasis on armed struggle, its strict organisational rules and its Marxist-Leninist, but also Maoist, ideological background earned the PFLP the fame of hard-line, revolutionary force within the national movement. Its image of revolutionary “purity” has been often put in contrast with Fatah’s pragmatism, which the PFLP itself frequently denounced as opportunism. Therefore, the PFLP’s increasing irrelevance left a representative void within the Palestinian national movement which appears more significant as the Islamist and nationalist-secular options are at a standstill.
The current condition of the PFLP and of the Palestinian Left cannot only be ascribed to single external factors and events that chipped away its political weight. In fact, it is also the result of the conduct of a “loyal opposition” that stopped embodying a counterhegemonic project while the mainstream leadership asserted its vision increasingly uncontested. This left room to the emergence of a new Islamist competitor which in turn, after achieving partial hegemony, exhausted its alternative political capital. The PFLP’s conduct must therefore be analysed in historical perspective to comprehend the sources of its political action that ultimately led it to de facto relinquish its counterhegemonic role. Providing a historical account of the PFLP’s decline therefore means addressing a major cause behind the Palestinian crisis of legitimacy and political representation. The lack of political and organisational renewal within the Palestinian national movement is tightly linked to the shortcomings of the PFLP and of the whole Palestinian Left.
The account of the PFLP’s conduct behind its decline entails a focus on its collective agency conceived as the complex of discourses, priority formulation, positions and decisions that the PFLP adopted to tackle its political crisis. This approach allows to identify a pattern in the PFLP’s political agency that challenges static views of the PFLP’s marginalisation singling out specific factors and events without defining a relational network. The historical perspective on political agency sheds light on the core factors forging the PFLP’s policies, which cannot be neglected in achieving a comprehensive understanding of its decline and of its persistent marginalisation.
The focused study of the PFLP’s marginalisation process also opens new perspectives on the historical role of the PLO and its successor the PNA. By investigating their functioning from the PFLP’s minority and oppositional perspective, the PLO and the PNA not only emerge as institutional frameworks that embodied a political setting and target for the PFLP’s policies. The exploration of the PFLP’s marginalisation process allows to evaluate the PLO and the PNA in their double, and to a certain extent paradoxical, function of a constraining yet simultaneously vital framework for the PFLP’s agency. This perspective on the PLO and the PNA entails a reassessment of intra-factional relations within umbrella organisations and quasi-state entities. The PFLP’s case can thus be considered along the experience of other leftist organisations participating in national liberation movements.
The problem of a leftist organisation acting within the boundaries of an overarching nationalist discourse and platform resonated throughout the post-colonial history of the Middle East and North Africa. The ability to define an autonomous national liberation platform has been key to the success or failure of leftist experiences, that is why, the PFLP and Palestinian leftist trajectories should be read alongside the paths of similar forces acting in different national contexts. Addressing the PFLP’s marginalisation by focusing on its conduct means also problematising the issue of leftist decline in the post-Soviet world. The stress on political agency as response to emerging challenges underscores the importance of “individual” aspects characterising single cases. Leftist decline was not a mere by-product of the end of existing socialism but the result of peculiar reaction to such crisis, hence the validity of an analytical approach centred on political agency.
Subjective Factors, Dilemmas and Policy Fluctuations
The history of the PFLP outlined in this book stretches over 25 years, between two of the most fateful events in the history of the Palestinian national movement: the eviction of the PLO from its headquarters in Beirut following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the 2007 geographical and political split between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-dominated PNA in the West Bank.
In summer 1982, the PLO saw its state-in-exile destroyed and its military capabilities severely reduced at the hands of the Israeli army. In reconsidering its strategy, the PLO leadership relied on its wider international networks and gave priority to diplomatic activity to salvage its achievements and fulfil Palestinian long-term goals. For the PFLP, the loss of Beirut questioned its ability to perform the revolutionary task upon which it was founded and that had been substantially able to fulfil until then. The protection of the “Palestinian revolution” and the participation in the “progressive front” during the Lebanese Civil War provided the framework for such revolutionary performance, while the PFLP contributed to the PLO state-building project. After the relocation in Damascus, the PFLP’s autonomy was reduced, while renewed global interest in a political settlement seemed to favour Fatah’s new orientations. The counterhegemonic role played within the PLO was thrown into crisis and consequently, the PFLP started to lose constraining power towards Arafat’s growing individualism. During the following decades, the PFLP did not regenerate its revolutionary action notwithstanding the evolving political scenarios emerged ever since 1982. The PFLP’s conduct during the 2006–07 Hamas-Fatah conflict represented the conclusive step in its declining trajectory. Afterwards, the PFLP remained on the margins of Palestinian politics, while the whole national movement continued to face the impasse stemming from political polarisation and dysfunctional institutions. Such persistent marginalisation signals the perpetuation of problematic aspects in the PFLP’s agency which must be the subject of historical analysis.
In addressing, the PFLP’s marginalisation within Palestinian politics, the Marxian categories of subjective and objective factors are employed to analyse the PFLP’s trajectory.3 In this case, objective factors consist of external developments and events outside the PFLP’s control which are often highlighted as the main causes for its decline. Conversely, subjective factors can be identified with the PFLP’s own agency in facing such developments. By prioritising subjective factors, the goal is not to assert their overall predominance over outstanding objective fa...