THE INTERNATIONAL STRUGGLE ON BEHALF OF PALESTINE

Ilan Pappé

“International solidarity is not an act of charity: It is an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objective. The foremost of these objectives is to aid the development of humanity to the highest level possible.”

—SAMORA MACHEL

“These men, women and children whose lives are massacred in the struggle for liberation are in Vietnam, in Laos, in Khmer, in Thailand; they are in Palestine, in the Sinai Peninsula and other Arab lands under Zionist occupation.”

—OLIVER TAMBO’S CALL ON MK’S TENTH ANNIVERSARY, 16 DECEMBER 1961

OVER THE YEARS, as an activist in the international solidarity movement for Palestine, I learned three major lessons. First, that a life of activism on behalf of the Palestinian cause is a journey on parallel routes. This is particularly true for an Israeli Jew, like me. One journey is out of Zionism and its comfort zone; the second is a journey of winning the trust of your Palestinian friends and assuring them that you are a genuine supporter and the last one is trying to take your own compatriots on these journeys that you, yourself, have undertaken.

Another feature of activism and, in particular, international activism on behalf of Palestine, is the tension between effort and tangible results. This could be quite frustrating, given the lack of any significant change on the ground in Palestine; if anything, the situation there has grown worse over the years. Most solidarity activists deal with this frustration by focusing less on how much they have achieved and focus more on asking themselves if they have done enough for the cause they believe in.

Finally, you learn something about the true meaning of solidarity. First, by learning its genealogy and history—and there is no better guide than the anti-apartheid solidarity movement in South Africa. International solidarity with the ANC was paramount in the struggle to topple apartheid, as was the support many African states in the newly decolonized continent gave the ANC in the 1970s, a time long forgotten, when these new African states also led the support for the Palestinian struggle at the UN, culminating in the UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism. This was revoked in 1991 due to American pressure.

Learning about the true nature of solidarity is something you cannot learn theoretically or study in a university: you need to experience it through your own activism. It involves understanding fully the difference between pity, empathy, solidarity and advocacy. What it boils down to is a full understanding that you have to listen to liberation movements and the colonized people and learn what they need from you and not preach to them what they should do. This does not mean there is no room for criticism and an honest dialogue; neither does this stance help much to overcome the lack of a present clear orientation of the liberation movement and its chronic disunity. However, in the need of the day, you grasp fully what solidarity means and you become useful and important to the overall struggle. Indeed, for me this was a personal journey of learning, and un-learning, which began in the late 1970s and continues to this day.

The History of the Solidarity Movement

The world at large, governments and societies alike, was quite indifferent to the Palestinian plight in the early years after the Nakba. This crime against humanity was hardly acknowledged, recorded, or condemned. The early signs of solidarity could be detected in the Arab world and the colonized world of Asia and Africa. Solidarity with the Palestinians was first led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian President, and then by anti-colonialist liberation movements all over the Arab world, Africa, and Asia (and a decade later, also in Central and South America). In the Arab world, solidarity was sustained through a network of trade unions, students, and people from every walk of life, who identified with the Palestinian struggle and with the new body leading it in the 1960s, the PLO. After 1967, the traditional Left in the West began to sober up and understand that its enthusiasm about Israel as a socialist paragon was misplaced and it joined the solidarity movement (it is not surprising that, in the UK until 1967, the pro-Israeli lobby was led by the Left of the Labor party and the pro-Palestinian one by the right wing of that party, with allies in the Conservative and Liberal parties).

The international solidarity movement in the West, as we know it today, had its roots in the post-1967 period. Western public opinion seemed to be oblivious to the Nakba, the suffering of the refugees and the victimization of the Palestinians in Israel (who were under a cruel military rule until 1966). However, the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the emergence of the PLO as a classical anti-colonialist movement of liberation caused a dramatic shift in the attitude of many in European and American societies. For a while, it even seemed that some of the governments, in particular Britain, France, and the Scandinavian countries, were willing to pressure Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; but this willingness soon petered out under American pressure (where AIPAC made itself felt as potent actor in American politics). Support for Palestine in the West now moved to the public and remains there to this day.

There was a difference between the solidarity of the Left and the support in some liberal circles in the West. The Left identified the Palestinian struggle with anti-colonialism and saw itself as part of a network between the Left in Europe and the anti-colonialist movements around the world. Thus, the Left accepted the legitimacy of the armed struggle alongside the political one, while among liberals, it was easier to voice support after Fatah adopted its plan to pursue liberation in stages (its willingness to accept at least as a first step—the two states solution)—in particular, after Arafat’s famous 1975 speech at the UN when he held an olive branch next to a pistol as a symbol of the options, and his willingness to join the diplomatic effort. As a result of this support, the PLO in the early 1970s was able to open legations in many parts of the world and, unlike today, they were the principal address for the solidarity movement.

Thus, by 1975, for the first time since 1948, there was a visible section within global civil society that openly supported the PLO’s demand to be recognized as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people (there was less talk about a solution per se, as the powers that be were not as yet discussing in full the two states solution—as readers will remember, until the fall of the Labor party in Israel in 1977, the “peace” talks centered on the “Jordanian option” (annexing part of the West Bank to Jordan), and after the rise of the Likud to power, the conversation was about Palestinian autonomy in the Occupied Territories, both avenues rejected by the PLO.

In many ways, in the 1970s, the counter coalition for Palestine was centered in the non-Western world, where liberated African countries did not miss its comparison with the struggle for a free South Africa. The result was the support these countries gave at the UN to the 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism.

This enthusiastic network of solidarity was replaced by a short period of despair after 1982, such a year of disaster that, sometimes, its catastrophic impact on the liberation movement is forgotten or dwarfed. The PLO was exiled far away from Palestine, and an uneasy period of internal struggles ensued which did not help the solidarity movement to have a clear orientation.

Joining the Solidarity Movement

This was the time I began my long journey out of Zionism to full activism on behalf of the Palestinian cause. I arrived in Britain in 1980 as a Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford; under the supervision of a pro-Palestinian supervisor, the famous Lebanese historian, Albert Hourani, I began exploring the archival material about the 1948 Nakba in various places. This was my first station out of Zionism, a process that did not occur in a day, but started more or less there, where what I found in the archives contradicted everything I knew about 1948, and the outbreak of the first Israeli assault on Lebanon in the summer of 1982. Only outside of Israel was I able to connect the dots and see the bigger picture that led from the 1948 massacres to the 1982 massacres of Palestinians in Lebanon. The same ideology was behind both sets of atrocities and crimes against humanity. Once you realize this nexus between ideology and praxis, there is no way back. With every passing day, my doubts about Zionism grew and I challenged openly its moral validity and that of its projects in historical Palestine.

What I encountered in the early 1980s in Britain, many others in the West experienced elsewhere, in particular in the USA. Identifying with the Palestinian cause was still irregular, equated with support for terrorism on the one hand but, on the other hand, at least in certain circles—among trade unions, academia, and ordinary people—the pendulum began to shift. The quantum leap, in this respect, was the global reaction to the sights and sounds of the First Intifada of 1987.

The images from the uprising and the relative ease by which activists from abroad could reach the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip (until 2000), provided more depth to the solidarity movement. The solidarity movement found it much more difficult to operate after the Second Intifada which erupted in 2000. Conversely, at that very time, the solidarity movement became more institutionalized, which was manifested by the founding, in August 2001, of the official International Solidarity Movement (ISM). It was a Palestinian-led movement consisting of groups of activists around the world who wished to do more than demonstrate or be active on the Internet. They became volunteers, arrived in Palestine with the aim of helping the Palestinians to defend their olive groves, protect their school runs and defend their homes and businesses from the Jewish settlers’ violence and the army’s brutality.

The ISM was a precursor of a much larger and informal network of solidarity that sprang to life in this century. One after another, various Palestine solidarity committees or campaigns (PSCs), sometimes under such a name, sometimes under a similar name, emerged in many parts of the world. This development coincided with a formative period in my own activism. On several fronts, while I was still a faculty member of an Israeli university, it became clear to me that genuine anti-Zionist solidarity with the Palestinian struggle would be nearly impossible from within the Israeli academia. You lose your job when you do that and, if you do not lose your job, it probably means you are doing it wrong. The developments elsewhere meant that, no matter how alone you were in some of the struggles from within, you were part of an ever-growing network of solidarity you fully identified with.

Processing the knowledge, on the one hand, that you would not be able to be part of the local academia and that you should work from the outside, on the other, takes a bit of time and only by 2006 had this process matured. I left Israel and began teaching in the UK at a time when a new dimension was added to the international solidarity movement with Palestine: the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).

The Role of the BDS Movement

This movement was born in 2005 as a response to a call by Palestinian civil society, represented by more than 100 NGOs from all over historical Palestine and by Palestinian communities from around the world, demanding pressure on Israel through these three means—boycott, divestment and sanctions—until it respects the three basic rights of the Palestinians:

the right of the refugees to return,

the right of the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to live free of military occupation and

the right of the Palestinians in Israel to live in equality.

At a time of disunity in the Palestinian polity and when it is clear that there is very little chance for change within Israel, the position of the world public opinion has become a crucial factor providing encouragement to the Palestinian cause as Palestinians face one of their most difficult moments in history. The BDS campaign gives this international community a focal point and a sense of purpose. It has snowballed into an impressive movement of protest, with famous artists refusing to perform in Israel, students’ unions severing ties with institutions in Israel, and even big companies withdrawing their contracts from the Jewish settlements in the Occupied West Bank, while trade unions have withdrawn funds and investment form Israeli companies.

I moved to teach in the UK a year later and became deeply involved in the actions of the BDS and contributed, I hope, through my scholarly work to the making of a new vocabulary on Palestine that equated Zionism with settler colonialism, framed the Nakba as ethnic cleansing and substituted the call for peace with a demand for decolonization. In this new dictionary, Israel was no longer “the only democracy in the Middle East” but, rather, an apartheid state. All these new entries in the new vocabulary were presented, not just as political positions, but as findings of academic work and research.

In order to enhance the role, not only of academics but also of the academia itself in the struggle for justice and liberation in Palestine, I founded, in 2007, the European Centre for Palestine Studies—the first center of this kind within an academic institute in the West. There are now several such centers. Such centers seek to provide a safe space for writing on Palestine for postgraduate students and provide a hub for joint academic work on various aspects of Palestine past, present and future.

As could have been anticipated, the pro-Israeli lobby in Britain did all it could to foil the project, but my university was steadfast and did not cave into intimidation and pressure. Now, academic research and student activism in campuses are going hand in hand. In 2010, students all over the world organized the Israeli Apartheid Week, with the first recorded event at the University of Toronto, Canada. Thereafter, all over the world, once a year, a whole week is devoted to lectures, workshops and exhibitions on Palestine, stressing the fact that the Nakba is ongoing. The campuses have become hubs of pro-Palestinian activity, with a younger generation, willing to commit itself to the struggle emerging, including formerly pro-Israel Jewish students.

Again, as anticipated, Israel has reacted with vehemence. To this very day, Israel tries to encourage legislation in the West against the BDS. It has also established a special ministry, the Ministry for Strategic Affairs, to which it has accorded a huge budget to fight what Israel called the “delegitimization” of the Jewish state. This ministry employs networks of students and activists to challenge the pro-Palestinian activity on the ground and on the internet and tries, unsuccessfully, to commodify Israel as an oasis of human rights in the midst of a “barbaric” Middle East. The TV series, The Lobby, screened by Al-Jazeera, exposed only the tip of the iceberg when examining how the Israeli embassy was involved in smear campaigns against pro-Palestinian politicians and activists.53

The last few years, namely from around 2015 onwards, have seen the slow but steady influence the solidarity movement has had on politics from above. For the first time, leading candidates in the USA and Britain openly endorsed a pro-Palestinian stance, at least as far as the basic rights of the Palestinians for self-determination and statehood were concerned. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labor party and the high-profile candidacy of Bernie Sanders for the presidency, despite their failure eventually to win the desired positions of Prime Minister and President respectively, indicate that the pro-Palestine solidarity movement now includes members of the political elite. This also included the election to the House of Representatives of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

Conclusion: The Struggle for International Legitimacy

Looking back at the solidarity movement in the last 50 years or so, one can have a good idea of its major contribution to the struggle for freedom and liberation of Palestine. To appreciate it fully, one should explain the difference between International Law and International Legitimacy. International Law is a set of clear international conventions and UN resolutions that may not have a sanctioning power but are produced by legal bodies. For instance, the Palestinian Authority desperately tries to persuade these bodies to become the main tool that would help transform the reality on the ground, but to no avail.

It is much more difficult to define International Legitimacy. And, yet, we have an incisive definition offered by Martin Wright back in 1972, when he commented:

International legitimacy is an elusive and nebulous notion, on the frontiers of morality and law. It may be briefly described as moral acceptability. Acceptability to whom?—To the remainder of international society. South Africa under apartheid provides a good example of a state whose legitimacy is doubtful. There is no question that the regime in South Africa is legal. The steps by which it has grown up have made no breach in constitutional law. But it is condemned by a consensus of international opinion, expressed in a number of resolutions by both the United Nations and the Organisation of African Unity, and leading to the withdrawal of South Africa from the Commonwealth … South Africa is a pariah state. It is not immediately to the point that she is a very prosperous pariah.

This distinction is important because of the historical context and the top-bottom approach that has turned International Law into a useless tool in challenging the ideology of Israel and, therefore, allows it to perpetuate its overall policies towards the Palestinians all over historical Palestine. This state of affairs caters well to the main defenders of the Zionist project and Israel worldwide: a group one can call diet-Zionists, or liberal-Zionists. The reluctance of International Law to engage with the ideological nature of regimes means that, whatever else might be challenged, Zionist theory and praxis would not be put on the agenda of an international jury; it would be, and is, scrutinized by the unique Palestinian concept of al-Shariyya al-Duwaliyya, International Legitimacy.

International Legitimacy does not have any formal bodies and does not subscribe to official conventions. In many ways, it is the distinction one should make between boycott, an act of civil society, and sanctions, an act of government, which is what the BDS is ultimately striving to achieve. In the case of South Africa, the world needed these definitions for the Apartheid regime in 1972, because the governments of the West refused to support international civil society’s boycott of South Africa by applying sanctions against it (this only occurred years later). If we now substitute Israel for South Africa we can grasp the potential effectiveness of the position of international civil society in Israel’s regard, making the full meaning of international legitimacy much less obscure. There are similarities with the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, which included, at the time, public tribunals substituting for the formal International Legal one, insofar as the public felt they were not doing its required work. In the case of Palestine one such tribunal, namely the Russell Tribunal, enlisted famous human rights activists and lawyers and conducted a public trial discussing Israel’s violation of civil and human rights.54

To judge by the Israeli reaction, it seems that struggle for legitimacy, at this point, worries them much more than the attempt to impose International Law ruling on Israel. As aforementioned, Israel has established special teams and, eventually, an entire ministry, the Ministry for Strategic Affairs, to fight against what it called “the delegitimization of Israel” as, indeed, the state’s very essence and the nature of the regime cannot be questioned by International Law but can come under such scrutiny by International Legitimacy.55

This is, indeed, the biggest success of the international solidarity movement to date. The insistence on justice, truth and the right of liberation should not depend on how unified the Palestinians are at this given moment, or how successful they are in the struggle on the ground against their mighty colonizer and the international coalition that helps it. Unity and success on the ground are the means to advance and, eventually, liberate the colonized people. The international demand for protection of their rights, their narrative and their history is a crucial dimension of the struggle against denial and in the name of human and international legitimacy.

My own modest part was, and still is, not to allow the 1948 crime against humanity that Israel perpetrated against the Palestinians to be erased from memory or distorted. This is a struggle that must still be carried on today, because despite huge steps forward, the denial is widespread and continues to play a crucial role in Israel’s international immunity. This foundational crime is not acknowledged by presidents and prime ministers, governments, mainstream media or the political systems, in general. Their denial serves as the basis for Western perceptions on the Palestine issue; it is at the heart of the exceptionalism that provides Israel with impunity. International solidarity can play its role in an even more efficient way (alongside support for the BDS). My personal dream and hope, which begins to materialize as I write this piece, is to establish the first ever Center Against Nakba Denial. There are hundreds of centers against Holocaust denial, and this is good and fine, but the Palestinian struggle needs at least one against the Nakba denial.

Palestinians, themselves, will have to solve issues of unity and representation and chart for all of us their vision for the future and how they see the liberation project in our time. We, in the international solidarity movement, have to constantly work so that the international environment will be as conducive and supportive as it is today for Palestinian liberation on the ground, when the day for it comes—and it will come, sooner or later.

53 Al Jazeera Investigative Unit, “The Lobby Part 1: Young Friends of Israel,” Aljazeera, January 10, 2017, last accessed October 11, 2021 https://www.aljazeera.com/program/investigations/2017/1/10/the-lobby-young-friends-of-israel-part-1

54 See Russell Tribunal on Palestine, http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/

55 I have discussed this at length in my book, Ilan Pappé, The Idea of Israel (New York: Verso Press, 2010), 295–313.