The Palestinian resistance
Rashed Rahman
The ongoing Israel-Gaza war began with the spectacular attack by Hamas into Israel on October 7, 2023. Hamas succeeded in knocking out Israel’s electronic monitoring system on the Israel-Gaza border, thereby taking the Israeli army completely by surprise, killing over 1,700 Israeli settlers and soldiers and taking over 2,000 hostages. The land breach of the border was accompanied by 5,000 rockets being fired into Israel, motorised parachutes used to infiltrate Hamas fighters into Israeli-occupied territory and even sea-borne incursions. Israel has since retaliated by pummelling Gaza into rubble, sparing neither civilians, hospitals, nor even the south of Gaza that Israel itself ordered Palestinians to move to in order to escape Israeli bombardment of the north of Gaza. Over 4,000 Palestinians have been killed so far (and counting), with a heart rending number amongst these children.
Before we assess the likely outcome of Israel’s intent to launch a ground invasion of Gaza, it bears recollecting how we got here. The Zionist movement emerged in Europe in the late 19th century as a response to the long standing persecution of Jews in the continent. The looming defeat of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in WWI provided the British and French with the opportunity to divide up the potentially oil-rich Arab colonies of that empire through manoeuvres such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The post-WWI British Mandate over Palestine opened the floodgates to Jewish immigration from all over the world. WWII’s Nazi Holocaust against the Jews provided the justification for an UN-mandated partition of Palestine between an Israeli and a Palestinian state in 1948 (the original two-state solution). However, through terror and force, the Zionists captured more territory than they had been accorded by the partition plan and drove the Palestinian population out (the Naqba). That is how the colonialist-imperialist plan to plant a dagger in the heart of the Middle East as a reliable outpost for their interests transpired.
The early Palestinian resistance to this catastrophe remained largely confined to radio broadcasts from Cairo. The shattering defeat of the Arabs in the 1967 war, which yielded the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria (since illegally annexed by Israel), and the Gaza Strip and Sinai from Egypt (Sinai having been restored to Egypt after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war) left the Arab world reeling in depression. That is when Al Fatah emerged to lead an armed resistance against the expansionist Zionist settler colonialist enterprise. But very early on, Al Fatah’s leader Yasser Arafat pinpointed the major problem of the Palestinian armed resistance. This was the lack of a reliable, safe base area of operations against Israel. Jordan, where the Palestinian resistance (including other groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – PFLP – Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine – PDFLP – and others) was based, in spite of, or perhaps even because of the fact that Jordan housed 40 percent Palestinians, led to an uneasy coexistence with the King Hussein regime. This was certainly not helped by the extreme left adventurism of the PFLP operating with the motif: “The road to Tel Aviv lies through Amman.” To attract international attention to a perceived ignored Palestinian cause, PFLP indulged in a series of heroic but eventually damaging air hijackings, culminating in the ‘Black September’ hijacking of two airliners to Amman airport, where they were blown up on the ground. This proved the last straw for the King Hussein regime, which launched its army against the Palestinian fighters as a whole and against their refugee camps. In the latter enterprise, (then) Brigadier Ziaul Haq unleashed his tank brigade against the Palestinian refugee camps. If there was any saving grace from this Pakistani ignominy, it was the presence of a Pakistani guerrilla contingent training with the PDFLP, which fought against the Jordanian army side by side with their Palestinian comrades and brothers.
King Hussein’s massive crackdown against the Palestinians resulted in the Palestinian resistance being expelled to Lebanon. However, it did not take long for their expulsion from there too at the hands of an Israeli invasion assisted by the fascist Lebanese Falange, the latter credited with the Sabra and Shatila massacres. This time the Palestinian resistance was expelled to Tunisia, far from the battlefield. At that juncture, Yasser Arafat plumped for diplomacy, an effort that ended with the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords 1993, whose central recommendation was a two-state solution (again). However, the Oslo Accords were ill-fated since the Israeli leader who signed them, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by an extremist Zionist, and Yasser Arafat was poisoned to death by Israel. Since his passing, Al Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which it heads, have been reduced under Mahmoud Abbas’ leadership into a toothless phenomenon, not the least because of the rise and coming to power of an extreme right Israeli government/s led by Binyamin Netanyahu, which have tossed the Oslo Accords in the dustbin of history by extreme repression of the Palestinians, promoting Israeli settler expansionism in the West Bank, violating the sanctity of one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Al Aqsa Mosque, and reducing Gaza to the largest open-air prison in the world. Resort by the PLO to several rounds of Intifada have failed to budge the Zionist entity from its genocidal intentions.
These were the circumstances in which an Islamic resistance movement, Hamas, with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, emerged in Gaza as the alternative to Al Fatah and the PLO, the latter by now largely confined to the West Bank. Initially, Israel played dirty by supporting the rise of Hamas, hoping thereby to divide the Palestinians and weaken the flailing PLO even further. But, as Pakistan too has learnt to its cost vis-à-vis the Afghan Taliban, proxies eventually tend to turn on and bite the hand that feeds them. Hamas became the only Palestinian group conducting armed resistance to Israel. The latter has conducted four wars before the present one in Gaza without being able to crush Hamas. Whether it will succeed this time is also a moot point. Guerrilla resistance in Gaza is predicated on an ouster of past Israeli intelligence penetration of Hamas ranks and resort by the latter (in the absence of any other natural cover) to tunnel warfare. As the Americans experienced in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War, this can be a deadly riposte to conventional armies, no matter how powerful.
While Hamas prepares to defend itself and the Gaza Palestinians against the impending Israeli ground invasion, the Arab and Muslim world is, as usual, reduced to pious statements for a ceasefire, allowing aid for Gaza, and a peaceful two-state solution to the conflict that fall on deaf US-led western ears. The people across the world however, are rising in solidarity with the Palestinians, reminiscent of the 1960s anti-Vietnam War movement. An Israeli ground invasion of Gaza could lead to a widening of the war, including the taking up of arms by the West Bank Palestinians and Hezbollah. Whichever way the final confrontation with Israel plays out, this war has put paid to the incremental sell-out of the Palestinians by the Arab world, the latter being nudged by the US under the rubric of the Abraham Accords towards normalisation of relations with Israel.
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