Palestine: A history of horror and resistance

Israeli forces arresting a Palestinian during the First Intifada in 1988 (Photo: Wikimedia commons)

Palestinians talk about sumud, meaning “fortitude”. A feature of their resistance over the decades is the remarkable resilience of Palestinian communities in the face of occupation, repression and now a genocidal assault.

And after almost a year of the horrors delivered by Israel, the Palestinians are still undefeated.

After the end of the First World War, Palestine was under the control of Britain. The British used savage repression to try to crush Palestinian resistance, adopting techniques they had used during their campaign against the Irish Rebellion.

But resistance continued. There were demonstrations in the cities, often involving peasants forced from the land. After clashes in 1929 the British imprisoned and executed the key leaders.

As Jewish settlement in Palestine increased, Palestinians confronted a dual challenge—that of the British and of the Zionist settlers and their paramilitary force, the Haganah.

In 1936 Palestinian protests erupted into a national confrontation with these enemies. This intifada or uprising was based on mass mobilisation that the British struggled to control.

Even the conservative Palestinian leadership was compelled to call a “general strike”, really a mass movement of non-cooperation.

The traditional Palestinian leadership was hopelessly compromised. Like many national anti‑colonial leaderships, it was focused on maintaining its own interests. Some had sold land to the Zionists, resulting in thousands of forced evictions of peasant families.

After six months they called off the general strike but failed to rein in the movement. Activists now launched guerrilla warfare, soon making most of Palestine ungovernable.

Women, who played a key role in protecting their villages and resisting army searches, were beaten up and sometimes shot. Even a leading Zionist settler official admitted, “The women’s militancy bore eloquent witness to the depth of Arab national feeling.”

Britain eventually brought in 30,000 troops and a regime of intense repression, setting the precedent for the savagery of the Israeli assault on Gaza today.

British forces detained over half a million people—37 ­percent of the entire population of Arab Palestine—and killed at least 5,000 Palestinians.

Britain had effectively ­decapitated the resistance—the beneficiary being the Zionist movement. By 1948, the combined Zionist militias numbered over 95,000, the core of them trained and armed by the British.

In 1948, Zionists ­deliberately destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages, massacred civilians and expelled nearly a million Palestinians from their homes. Palestinians refer to this as the Nakba or catastrophe.

Part of Israeli ­myth-making is the claim that in 1948 Palestinians walked away from their homes and lands—leaving them free for the settlers. This is false. There was determined resistance even during the Nakba. Historian Ilan Pappe describes how villages “turned themselves into strongholds… holding out with what meagre arms they had before being overpowered by the assailants”.

The fate of refugees from the Nakba was shaped by their class position. The Palestinian ­capitalist class enjoyed access to capital and links in the region and often exercised a choice about destinations.

The mass of the peasantry and working class had a different fate. The poorest Palestinians from the marginal rural areas of the north expelled into Lebanon are still that country’s poorest and most vulnerable people.

Organised ­resistance resumed in the 1960s. It was based on the emerging capitalist class of the Gulf States symbolised by Yasser Arafat, a civil engineer who had become a millionaire in Kuwait.

Arafat and his friends founded Fatah, which soon came to dominate the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). In 1965 they launched a ^­campaign of armed raids. In Karama in the Jordan Valley, a few hundred resistance fighters stood their ground against thousands of Israeli troops, tanks and aircraft.

Their actions brought huge enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause. Arafat himself was almost captured and had to escape through Jordan.

Arafat aimed for the ­liberation of Palestine. But he aspired to a Palestinian state like other states of the region. This bourgeois nationalist approach was to mark the project launched by the PLO and ultimately lead to its defeat.

Fatah struck a deal with the—most wealthy—Arab states. In exchange for money and weaponry they agreed a policy of “non-interference” in the domestic politics of the wider Middle East. This proved to be a disaster.

Arafat and the PLO leaders ignored the mass movement that erupted in Egypt in 1968, which challenged the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel-Nasser. Rather than seeing this movement as a potential ally, Arafat feared the threat to Egypt’s rulers.

In 1987 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza launched a new intifada that lasted almost four years and caused immense problems for Israel. Every community in Palestine was involved—again a key feature was the leadership of women.

These struggles were ­courageous, energetic and ­anti-imperialist. They inspired solidarity across the Arab states. In Jordan, Sudan, Algeria, Kuwait and Egypt, millions took to the streets and in some cases organised solidarity strikes.

Arafat was appalled—the ­intifada threatened the policy of non-interference. The PLO turned its back on the most potent ­political force in the region.

Israel was nonetheless ­compelled to act, using a ­willing PLO to strike “peace” deals. Israel and the US dragged these talks out for years until in 2000 Palestinians rose against the Israelis in a further intifada.

This too stimulated a response across the Arab world. In Egypt it played a key role in the reactivation of the workers’ movement and the capture of Tahrir Square in 2002.

Many Palestinians had now abandoned the PLO. Arafat had negotiated a “mini-state”, really no more than a patchwork of enclaves on the West Bank controlled by Israeli forces.

It was a policy that required Palestinians to accept the ­existence of Israel and the loss of much of their historic land.

A new generation of activists emerged to claim leadership of the national struggle. For the first time, Islamists came to the fore.

Hamas was a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which also recruited members in Palestine.

For many years Israel ­condoned the Brotherhood’s activities in the hope that it would act as a counterweight to the PLO. Israel encouraged the construction of mosques, knowing that they were centres for Brotherhood organisation.

But at the start of the intifada the Brotherhood formed Hamas, declaring armed struggle. In 2001 US President George Bush declared that it was a ­“terrorist” group. In 2006 Hamas won a free election in the Occupied Territories. Israel adopted a policy of intense repression, ­assassinating its leading figures.

Like other Islamist ­organisations Hamas is full of ­contradictions. It is elitist and authoritarian. Backed by states such as Qatar and Iran, it has financial resources that many Palestinians say should be used for welfare and education. Hamas has suppressed protests over high prices and unemployment.

However, it opposes ­settler colonialism and the Israeli regime, and it remains the most popular Palestinian organisation. In the latest polls, support for Hamas stands at 40 percent in Gaza and over 60 percent in the West Bank.

The rise of Hamas is not the only expression of continuing resistance. Young Palestinians launched the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) ­movement. Infuriated by the collaborationist policies of the PLO, they were determined to internationalise the Palestinian cause.

The record of Palestinian resistance is impressive but not unique. Many colonised people have maintained long struggles against their colonisers.

What makes the Palestinians’ case different is that for over 70 years they’ve struggled with one arm tied behind their backs.

The Nakba displaced most of the population, atomised communities and weakened Palestinian society. Palestinians have since lacked many of the economic and political resources that most national liberation movements depend on.

The powerful working class movements in the wider region are therefore critical to bringing freedom for the Palestinians.

The key to change for Palestine lies in Gaza, in the West Bank and, most importantly, in the industrial cities of the Arab states. But, inspired by the resistance, we all have a role to play in building movements for BDS.