Two Traditions

The series is about the histories rather than the history of the Palestinian left, because there isn’t a single movement or party that has been able to channel all of these energies. That fragmentation reflects the wider division of the Palestinian people into separate political and geographical spaces: the Palestinian minority inside Israel itself; the population of the occupied territories, divided in turn between Gaza and the West Bank; and the diaspora in countries like Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

Our first episode covers the origins and early history of the Palestinian Communist movement, which was formed in the 1920s under British colonial rule. The Palestine Communist Party had a mixed membership of Jews and Arabs, although it split under the pressure of communal divisions during the 1940s into two separate groups.

After the Palestinian Nakba and the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948, the Communists inside what was now Israel reorganized as the Israeli Communist Party, known as Maki after its Hebrew acronym. The Communists developed a substantial following among Israel’s Palestinian minority as they were the only party to oppose the regime of martial law to which they were subjected until the 1960s.

Maki’s parliamentary group included the novelist Emile Habibi, who first joined the Communist Party during the British Mandate. Habibi was one of several important literary figures who belonged to the movement, including the man widely recognized as Palestine’s national poet, Mahmoud Darwish. The episode includes a detailed discussion of Habibi’s most famous work, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, a satirical take on the condition of Palestine that became a classic of modern Arabic literature.

After the 1967 war and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank by Israel, a new form of Palestinian left-wing politics took shape, with its strongest base in the diaspora. Our second episode traces the development of an avowedly socialist current within the Palestinian guerrilla movement that came to the fore from the late 1960s.

This current developed out of the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN), a group formed in Beirut during the 1950s whose members had an impact on the history of several Arab countries, from Kuwait to Yemen. While the MAN had been staunchly opposed to Communism and Marxism during its early years, its Palestinian leader, George Habash, and his allies went on to form an avowedly Marxist-Leninist group in 1967 called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

While Fatah, the party of Yasser Arafat, had a policy of noninterference in the affairs of Arab states, the PFLP argued that the Palestinian national struggle should be part of a wider Arab revolution. Its leader spoke about turning the Jordanian capital Amman into an “Arab Hanoi” by ousting its ruler, King Hussein.

At the time, Jordan was the main base for the guerrillas of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) who were carrying out attacks on Israel. The king and his advisers were naturally determined to prevent the overthrow of Hashemite monarchist rule, and they ordered a violent clampdown in 1970 that became known as Black September.

From Jordan to Lebanon

Our third episode takes a closer look at two of the most prominent figures associated with the PFLP: Ghassan Kanafani and Leila Khaled. Like Habibi, Kanafani was a major literary figure and we cover his 1963 novel Men in the Sun, another landmark in twentieth-century Palestinian culture. Kanafani also wrote political essays and edited the PFLP magazine Al-Hadaf before his assassination by an Israeli car bomb in 1972.

Khaled became world-famous for a time at the end of the 1960s after taking part in two plane hijackings by PFLP members. The PFLP defended the use of plane hijackings as a way to publicize the Palestinian cause, but it faced strong criticism from other Palestinian groups, especially Fatah. The second hijacking operation in which Khaled participated helped trigger the Black September crisis of 1970, after which the Palestinian guerrillas transferred the bulk of their forces to Lebanon.

Our fourth episode concentrates on events in Lebanon during the 1970s. By that time, ideological disputes and disagreements over Habash’s leadership of the PFLP resulted in a split and the formation of a new group that called itself the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), led by another MAN graduate, Nayef Hawatmeh. The DFLP went on to form an alliance with Fatah inside the PLO around the idea of setting up a Palestinian state in the territories occupied since 1967 — a step toward what became known as the two-state model for a peace settlement.

Meanwhile, the presence of the Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon was one of the main factors contributing to a major political crisis, as the right-wing Maronite leaders who had dominated the country since independence faced a challenge from the Left. The Palestinian groups aligned themselves with the Lebanese National Movement spearheaded by Kamal Jumblatt, which sought the refoundation of the Lebanese political system. When the crisis erupted into civil war from 1975, Western media reports often presented it as a sectarian conflict between Christians and Muslims, but questions of class and political ideology also played an important role.

This episode also picks up the story of the Communist movement inside Israel during the 1970s. In 1975, the Communist politician Tawfiq Zayyad was elected as mayor of Nazareth, which had a large Palestinian population. The following year, Zayyad and his comrades spearheaded the Land Day protests that proved to be a watershed moment for Palestinian citizens of Israel. The experience of Land Day spurred the Communists to establish a broad left-wing alliance that still has a foothold in the Knesset today: the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, or Hadash as it is called in Hebrew.

Intifada

In 1982, Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon to evict the PLO from its stronghold in Beirut. The focus of Palestinian political life now shifted toward the occupied territories, leading to the first intifada, which is the subject of our fifth episode. The intifada took the form of a mass popular uprising, with strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of protest. It put the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank under severe pressure.

The intifada built on years of organizing work in the occupied territories. The Communists in the West Bank pioneered such activism during the 1970s. In 1982, they separated from the Jordanian Communist movement to form a new Palestinian Communist Party (PCP), which joined the PLO five years later. The PCP, the PFLP, and the DFLP were all represented alongside Fatah in the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, the alliance that gave political direction to the intifada.

In many ways, the first intifada was the high point of left-wing influence in Palestinian politics, with the two separate traditions of Communism and left-nationalism now working together in the same organizational framework. But this period also saw the emergence of a new challenge to the left groups and Fatah alike in the form of Hamas, the Islamist party formed by Ahmed Yassin and his followers in 1987.

The exiled PLO leadership around Arafat used the intifada as the launchpad for a new diplomatic strategy based on the recognition of Israel in 1988 and the push for a two-state settlement. However, the eventual fruit of these efforts was the Oslo agreement of 1993, which left the basic questions about Palestinian sovereignty and the future of the settlements in the occupied territories to be dealt with at a later stage. Arafat brushed aside criticism from figures like Haidar Abdel-Shafi and Edward Said who argued that Oslo was a bad deal for his people.

Our sixth and final episode carries the story from the Oslo years to the present. Although the PFLP and the DFLP opposed the Oslo Accords, they struggled to present themselves as a viable alternative to Fatah during the 1990s. Many of their activists were drawn into work for Western-backed NGOs that did important work on the ground but had to comply with the agenda of their funders. With political Islam on the rise throughout the Middle East while left-wing parties were in decline, Hamas increasingly seemed like the most effective rival to Fatah.

After the collapse of talks at Camp David in 2000, the second intifada broke out, and the left-wing groups experienced further marginalization as competition between Fatah and Hamas became the central dynamic of Palestinian politics. In elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006, left-wing forces took nearly 10 percent of the vote on the proportional list. But their vote share was divided three ways and their performance was completely overshadowed by the victory of Hamas. Over the next two years, the polarization between Hamas and Fatah led to violent clashes, egged on by the United States, and the Hamas takeover of Gaza.

Another story we explore in this episode is the development of Palestine solidarity activism in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship after 2000, and the way Egyptian organizers drew upon the experience they had gained from these protests at a later stage when they pushed Mubarak to resign in 2011. After Mubarak’s fall, there were regular demonstrations in support of the Palestinians, and it even seemed possible that the Egyptian state might adopt a new policy toward Israel. The coup by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in 2013 shut down this window of possibility, with all forms of protest repressed more harshly than had been the case under Mubarak.

Solidarity and Survival

While the decline of left-wing influence in Palestinian politics since the 1990s certainly has its own particular features, it fits into a wider pattern across the Middle East and the wider world, in evidence everywhere from Italy to India. Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising that left-wing activists and organizations in Palestine have struggled to maintain a foothold under extremely challenging political conditions, even before the genocidal onslaught that Israel has launched against Gaza since October 2023.

Yet we can still find heirs of this political tradition taking a forceful stand against the horrors being inflicted on the people of Gaza today, from the Hadash leader Ayman Odeh to Mustafa Barghouti, the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative who began his career in the Communist Party.

Solidarity with the people of Palestine against the menace of genocide has become a defining issue for the international left, and that solidarity applies to all Palestinians, whatever their political views might be. But there’s good reason for taking a particular interest in the histories of the Palestinian left, and we hope that Red Star Over Palestine is a useful starting point. You can listen to the episodes on Apple and Spotify, or download them here.