The Palestinians have waged a decades-long fight for their right to national self-determination against the Israeli state, which is built on their dispossession and stands as the main obstacle to the realization of their national aspirations. Their resistance is a major obstacle to the efforts by Washington to stabilize its domination of the region.

The Palestinian struggle goes back to the early decades of the 20th century, when the Arab peoples fought against domination by British imperialism, which sponsored Zionist settlements to help colonize and subjugate the Mideast. London and the Zionist forces met Palestinian resistance from the beginning, culminating in the popular revolt of 1936-39, which was eventually crushed.

After World War II, Washington, now the dominant power in the Mideast, backed the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 through the armed terror of Zionist forces that drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. Despite this blow, efforts to forge a Palestinian national liberation movement steadily picked up steam over the next two decades as part of the rise of anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles in the region, from Egypt to Algeria.

From the beginning, the Palestinian movement has been marked by the struggle to chart a revolutionary course independent of the capitalist regimes that claim to speak for the Arab and Muslim peoples. These have included the bourgeois nationalist regimes in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

"We were convinced," said Salah Khalaf, a Palestinian student leader in the 1950s, "that the Palestinians could expect nothing from the Arab regimes, for the most part corrupt or tied to imperialism, and that they were wrong to bank on any of the political parties in the region. We believed that the Palestinians could rely only on themselves."  
 
Founding of PLO
In 1964, the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who enjoyed prestige because of his role in Egypt's fight against colonial rule, sponsored a conference of Arab heads of state that resulted in the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Its first leader, Ahmed Shukairy, was a bourgeois figure who strongly supported Nasser. The new organization was characterized by rhetoric but little action.

The Israeli regime's 1967 war on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan was a turning point. The Arab peoples were outraged by the Israeli seizure of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and West Bank. The rapid defeat of the Arab regimes' armies also led the Palestinians to look more to their own strengths. Struggles by Palestinians against the Israeli regime stepped up, and several new resistance organizations were formed. Besides Yasir Arafat's Fatah, founded in 1962, these included the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The upsurge spurred a struggle to transform the PLO, reforging it as a broad front of the fighting organizations of the Palestinian people. It became an organization commanding mass Palestinian support in the refugee camps and increasingly among those living within Israeli borders.  
 
'For a democratic, secular Palestine'
In 1970 the leaders of Fatah--the organization with the biggest following--put forward a programmatic document called "Toward a Democratic State in Palestine." It called for the overthrow of the "racist oppressor state of Israel" and stated, "All the Jews, Muslims, and Christians living in Palestine or forcibly exiled from it will have the right to Palestinian citizenship." The document advanced the slogan of replacing Israel with a "democratic, secular Palestine."

This revolutionary democratic perspective was in contrast with the demagogic, reactionary call attributed to Shukairy--who resigned as PLO chairman in 1967--to "drive the Jews into the sea."

In September 1970 King Hussein of Jordan reacted against the growing strength of the Palestinian movement within that country. He viewed it as an obstacle to his regime's efforts to reach an accommodation with Tel Aviv, and above all a threat to the stable rule of Jordan's monarchy. The Jordanian army launched an all-out attack on the Palestinian refugee camps in Amman, the country's capital. In the civil war that followed at least 8,000 Palestinians were killed. The liberation fighters who survived the onslaught were forced to relocate their base of operations to Lebanon.

In 1973 Israel was once again at war with its neighbors, as the governments of Egypt and Syria attempted to regain territory seized by Tel Aviv six years earlier. Although the Israeli army eventually pushed back the opposing armies, its reverses in the first days of the fighting punctured the image of Israeli invincibility, and greatly encouraged Palestinians fighting the occupation. The Palestinian national struggle gained wider legitimacy and support worldwide, while the Israeli regime's claims to be a beleaguered force for democracy and progress were discredited further. In 1974 the PLO was recognized by the United Nations General Assembly as "the representative of the Palestinian people" and granted observer status.

The Palestinians and other oppressed peoples received a huge boost, and Tel Aviv and Washington were dealt a major blow, by the 1979 Iranian revolution, in which workers and peasants overthrew the imperialist-backed monarchy. The post-shah regimes in Tehran have expressed their solidarity with the Palestinians, while seeking to bring sections of the Palestinian movement under their own influence.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon the PLO was forced to fight for its life, first in 1976 against a Syrian-backed offensive by rightist militias, and then in 1982 against an Israeli air and land invasion involving 60,000 ground troops, allied with rightist Lebanese forces.

Palestinian and Lebanese combatants in West Beirut, vastly outgunned, held Israeli troops at bay for more than two months, repulsing numerous attempts to overrun the Lebanese capital. This example of heroism and dignity won new supporters around the world and helped inspire protests opposing the war inside Israel itself. Eventually the PLO was able to negotiate an orderly retreat from Beirut of 9,000 guerrilla soldiers carrying their sidearms. The PLO leadership again moved its headquarters, this time to Tunis.  
 
Bourgeois leaderships exhausted
Over time, politics in the Mideast, like elsewhere in the semicolonial world, has become increasingly differentiated along class lines. The bourgeois nationalist leaderships that led anticolonial struggles have become historically exhausted. Those in power in the region have more and more sought an accommodation with U.S. imperialism as well as diplomatic and economic ties with Tel Aviv. The Egyptian regime was the first, in 1978, to sign a peace treaty with the Israeli state and extend it diplomatic recognition the following year. The regime in Amman has made similar moves.

In this context, the Palestinian leadership has progressively carried out a political retreat, with a growing orientation to and reliance on the neocolonial, capitalist governments of the Middle East that have hosted and financed the PLO apparatus. PLO officials, based in Tunis, became more bourgeoisified and more distanced from the day-to-day lives of the masses of Palestinian working people in the refugee camps and inside "Greater Israel," where the liberation fight has increasingly been centered.

Some factions within the PLO became willing tools in the hand of these governments. Increasingly, the central PLO leadership also turned away from the workers and farmers toward middle-class and bourgeois layers of the Palestinian population.

The Palestinian National Council registered this political retreat by voting in 1996 to remove clauses from the PLO charter advocating the overthrow of the Israeli state and the construction of a democratic, secular Palestine.

With the wave of strikes, land occupations, and street demonstrations that erupted in 1987 and became known as the intifada, the leadership and initiative began to shift to the occupied West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, and inside Israel's pre-1967 borders. Working people and youth in those areas breathed new life into the struggle, helping to lay bare the bone-breaking, murderous brutality of Tel Aviv's occupation, and winning many new adherents around the globe to their national liberation struggle.

Ultimately, however, the movement was not strong enough to reverse the retreat of the PLO leadership or forge an alternative leadership and political course. The rise of bourgeois formations such as Hamas, which uses radical-sounding as well as religious rhetoric, has fed on the disillusionment in the PLO leadership among many Palestinians who want to fight the Israeli regime.

The creation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) government in scattered pieces of the West Bank and a little more than half of Gaza, in agreements signed with Washington and Tel Aviv from 1993 to 1998 registered the continued bourgeoisification of the PLO leadership. The so-called Class A areas controlled by the PNA are surrounded by Israeli armed forces, police, and militarized settlements. The setup presents new obstacles to the Palestinian fight for national self-determination.

The PLO leadership now finds itself in the role of policing the Palestinian population at the demand of the Israeli and U.S. governments--to the point of relying on the CIA and Israeli secret police for training its police forces.

But the Israeli rulers and Washington face their own deepening problems in the Middle East and in the world, becoming politically weaker, not stronger. Despite their military strength, they have not been able to crush the Palestinian people's resistance.

A new advance in the fight for a democratic, secular Palestine and the development of revolutionary leadership will come out of further struggle in the Mideast, as well as anti-imperialist victories elsewhere in the world.  
 
 
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