THE STRUGGLE TO CONTROL THE NARRATIVE

When Pursuing Liberation, Watch Your Language

Ibrahim G. Aoudé

THE MAY 2021 EVENTS in Palestine reignited passions and heightened hopes that, this time around, the Palestinians would accomplish a leap forward in their struggle for liberation. The 2021 Ramadan Al-Aqsa uprising turned into a torrent of resistance, with masses of Palestinians from the 1948 occupied Palestinian territories participating in the defense of Palestinian Jerusalemites facing ethnic cleansing (not “evictions,” as Zionist propaganda would have us believe) from Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan and other Palestinian neighborhoods.

As I watched live coverage of events on Al-Mayadeen TV, I was transported into a different era. The scene was Beirut, seventeen years after the Nakba. The event was the first armed operation against the Zionist entity, established in Palestine on May 15, 1948. The operation itself was not significant militarily, but it dominated the news in the Arab world. I read in a Lebanese newspaper the first communiqué from the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, known also in Arabic as “Al-Fatah,” the inverse acronym of its Arabic name. I was captivated. You see, I was born in Jaffa and was three years old when the family fled Nazareth and took refuge in the southern Lebanese town of Marjayoun. Two understandings were instilled in me from a young age: First, I am a Palestinian Arab. Second, Palestine must be liberated. About 750,000 Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed.3 Those who survived Zionist massacres had become refugees in neighboring countries. My refugee status left an indelible mark, like a compass pointed towards Palestine, and a vision of the return of all Palestinians to the homeland.

Galloping events in Lebanon and the region reinforced that vision. Those events included the July 23, 1952, military coup that toppled the Egyptian monarchy, the 1954 Algerian Revolution, the Baghdad Pact of 1955,4 the 1956 tripartite invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and the Zionist entity, the unification in 1958 of Syria and Egypt in the United Arab Republic, the 1958 civil war in Lebanon, the 1958 landing of US Marines in Lebanon and the July 14, 1958, military coup in Iraq that toppled a Hashemite monarchy. As I was growing up in Beirut, I read books about Arab history and listened to many views among friends and relatives about recent events. I arrived at the conclusion that Western imperialism, led by the US ruling class, was the enemy of the peoples of the world and that the Zionist entity in Palestine was its main tool in the Arab world.

A few weeks after reading about the armed operation, a friend mentioned that perhaps I should meet with his co-worker at the office. Within days, I was having coffee with my friend and that mysterious individual, who handed me the communiqué on an Al-Fatah letterhead. I was elated. The language of liberation was nothing new to me, but there I was reading a group’s communiqué whose goal was Liberation.

I remember my teenage years in London, when my main concern was getting involved in Arab student politics and reading Marx. Shortly after the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established by the Arab League on May 28, 1964, a colleague in the Marxist study group asked me to write a short essay about the event for the group’s Arab language newsletter. In the essay, I pointed out that the PLO was created to contain Palestinian liberation aspirations. However, I still thought that the PLO would be a useful vehicle to contact and organize Palestinians for liberation.

Back in Beirut at the end of 1964, I immediately started working with Palestinian youth and joined a Lebanese Marxist study group as a carry-over from my London activities. My focus was the liberation of Palestine in the struggle against imperialism. In early 1965, I worked with Palestinian youth while maintaining contact with the study group. My work with Palestinian youth lasted till October of 1967, i.e., after the Naksa, the debacle resulting from the 1967 war. Given the sum total of my political activities, I had no choice but to leave Lebanon for Canada. Fifteen months later, I moved to the US. I often reflected on an interesting matter years later: I had been a transnational individual even before transnationalism as an academic discipline had been seriously theorized or came into vogue. I also wondered if there had been many others in my situation. The most the academy had been concerned with, until fairly recently, were diasporas. A second matter that I had reflected while in the “diaspora” was what I had sensed as an Arab compromise and the beginning of a Palestinian compromise, officially revolving around UN Security Resolution 242 of 1967.5 In hindsight, I attributed the compromise to the fact that the Palestinian revolutionary movement had been led by the Palestinian bourgeoisie. It was clear to me, when I was still active with the Palestinian youth, that the lack of democracy on the one hand, and the absence of any organizational discipline on the other, could become fatal for the popular movement, but not necessarily for its bourgeois leaders. Be that as it may, the dialectics of revolution are expressed in its ebb and flow.

In opposition to the winds of compromise, were “The Three No’s” of the Arab Summit Meeting in Khartoum, Sudan on August 27, 1967. “No Peace, No Recognition, No Negotiations” appeared to be the dam that would stop all compromise with the Zionist enemy.6 However, knowing the nature of most of the Arab regimes, it was hard for me to believe that Saudi Arabia’s position on total liberation had its roots in the firm belief in my people and the Arab masses across the Arab world. That belief was based on what I had witnessed while working with Palestinian youth and during the 1967 war, being at the scene when droves of young men were crossing the border from Lebanon to Syria to join in the fight in the ranks of Al-Fatah.

A third matter I reflected on was that compromise by Arab states was not surprising, since many of them had been created either by the Sykes-Picot Accord or the British, in the case of the Arabian Peninsula. But to have the Palestinian leadership compromising at that point was devastating.

These reflections took me back to Beirut in early 1967 when I was having a discussion with a member of a Palestinian organization that was not engaged in the armed struggle. I could not believe my ears—this organization was promoting a “two-state solution!” That logic did not make sense at all. It was couched by nonsense such as “we shall establish a state on any liberated part of Palestine.” One did not need to be a radical political scientist to see the illogic in that thesis, given the upheaval that was going on in Palestine and the Arab world at that time.

I spent my time in Montreal trying to understand the French-English divide and steeped myself in Marxism. I saw, first-hand, the repression of the State against the Quebecois nationalists, as I had been caught twice in the midst of huge demonstrations and running battles between the demonstrators and the police. Those were the heady days of 1968 and 1969. I also kept in touch with developments in the US. The Civil Rights movement was still going on, as was the war in Southeast Asia.

After arriving in the State of Hawai‘i, the headquarters of what is now known as USINDOPACOM (United States Indo-Pacific Command), I continued to follow the news of the antiwar movement and began to pay more attention to “American politics.” The antiwar movement had been strong here, given that the entire State is dotted with bases and installations that had fed the war machine in Southeast Asia. This fact belies the stereotype of Hawai‘i as the backwater of the empire.

My extracurricular activities had been limited to part-time work, reading Marxist classics and books on Palestine, and attending antiwar rallies and panels. Concurrently, news from the Arab world was not encouraging. The Cairo Accord of November 2, 1969, gave the Palestinian Resistance Movement the right to operate from Lebanese territory against the Zionist entity. However, the Jordanian army’s defeat of the Palestinian Resistance between September 1970 and July 1971 represented a major setback for the liberation struggle. Initially, the October 6, 1973, war was a pleasant surprise. Egypt and Syria undertook a coordinated attack, presumably to liberate their respective territories lost in the 1967 war. Anwar Sadat’s decision to halt the advance of Egyptian troops and leave Syria’s Hafiz al-Asad on his own in the fight against the Zionist enemy, constituted not only a military, but also a diplomatic strategic setback. “The Three No’s” of Khartoum completely vanished, as the world witnessed Sadat’s descent into the abyss of treason and ignominy. The road to November 19, 1977, the day Sadat visited the Zionist entity and gave a speech at the Knesset in Jerusalem, was paved with the blood of Egyptian and Syrian soldiers. Negotiations that had subsequently ensued with the settler-colonialists initially included discussions about presumably securing “autonomy” for the Palestinians.7 However, those had been pro forma negotiations, not meant to arrive at any agreement between the Zionists and Egyptians. At any rate, “autonomy” was a far cry from liberation. The Peace Treaty between Egypt and the Zionist entity was signed on March 26, 1979. Concurrent with Egyptian developments, the Lebanese scene, beginning with the Zionist entity’s 1968 raid on Beirut International Airport, had deteriorated into “civil war” by April 13, 1975. The PLO, with al-FATAH leader, Yasser Arafat as its chairman, beginning February 4, 1969, fought on the side of the Lebanese National Movement in the civil war against the right-wing Phalangist Party.8

Those events were watersheds in the ebb and flow of the revolutionary movement for liberation. They provide a base for a language of politics governing specific events. A lexicon for a particular situation is created through the ability to promote that terminology and have it disseminated by media outlets in the service of the event and its desired goal. A war of words, ideologies and doctrines ensues. The objective is to socialize the target public to accept the narrative woven around or against an event. Zionist narratives dominated the media scene in the West. In contrast, Palestinian narratives consonant with social reality were weak or totally absent. Hence, for instance, the Zionist false mantra of “a land without a people, for a people without land” was able to gain traction, despite the fact that the Nakba, it should be underscored, was in actuality reliant on superior firepower and international diplomatic support bolstering a process to which the far more accurate designation, “ethnic cleansing,” was never applied.

The beginning of the Palestinian armed resistance movement necessitated a language to support the event that was contrary to the main Zionist narrative. It emphasized achieving national liberation through armed struggle. Several factors, however, militated against the continued success of the armed struggle narrative and, by implication, the continuation and development of that struggle until liberation. The Arab-state system, by and large, had been pro-western and worked to abort the armed liberation struggle. Furthermore, Arab states, such as Egypt and Algeria, were weak compared to the Zionist entity and its Western creators. In the West, the Zionist-Western narrative triumphed by branding the Palestinian movement as “terrorist” and Arafat (nom de guerre, Abu Ammar) as “Abu Haddam.” “Ammar,” in Arabic means “Builder” and “Haddam,” means “Destroyer.” In fact, while still in Lebanon, I heard the “haddam” description of Arafat, from a relative, prominent in Lebanese society.

Western propaganda had not been able, on its own, to overcome the Palestinian resistance. It took two wars to seriously weaken it. The first was the 1970–71 war in Jordan and the other was the 1975 war in Lebanon. These two events point out that, while control of the media narrative is a necessary condition for success, propaganda on its own is not sufficient to arrive at victory. To enhance the chances of success, one must have fire power. When the Zionist entity’s military reached Beirut in the summer of 1982, the Palestinian Resistance was defeated and had to depart from Lebanon on August 30 of that year. This resounding strategic defeat made it easier for the bourgeois leadership of the PLO to move away from the language of liberation. The new language needed new events to bolster it and secure its dominance.

In less than a year after the Palestinian Intifada of December 8, 1987, the PLO met in Algiers on November 15, 1988, where Arafat declared a virtual independent State on the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. It was a Machiavellian move, in that the PLO used the Intifada as a veil to hide its selling out of the revolution. Given the nature of the two-state modality of the Algiers declaration, it was clear that Arafat had aligned the Algiers declaration with the Fahd Plan declared (but scuttled) at the Fez, Morocco Arab Summit Meeting of August 7, 1981, which called for an independent Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital.9 Furthermore, the first US Gulf War of 1991 had transported the Arab leadership to the Madrid Peace Conference on October 30, 1991.

Arafat, the PLO, the Arab states and the US began to develop a language of “peace.” Perhaps the presence of several Palestinians in Madrid, albeit as part of the Jordanian delegation, was viewed by some in the PLO as a significant success. However, the entire Madrid spectacle had been repulsive to those of us who thought that compromising on principles could be deadly for the cause of liberation.

Revolting as that spectacle had been, it paled in comparison to the Oslo Accords of September 13, 1993. I remember a few days after the signing of Oslo, a friend of mine from Egypt and I did a show on Public Access TV in Honolulu, in which we both condemned the Accords as treasonous acts that sold the Palestinian cause down the river. The Oslo language was a variant of the “two-state solution.” Its dictionary had terms such as “Gaza-Jericho First,” “Final Status Negotiations,” and “Confidence Building Measures.” In a major way, Oslo consecrated the recognition of the Zionist entity and gave up on liberating 78 percent of Palestine. It relegated, among other things, the matter of (East) Jerusalem, UN Resolution 194 governing the Right of Return, Zionist settlements and water for Palestine to the “Final Status Negotiations.” On the TV show, we pointed out the intentions of the Zionist entity and the compromised PLO leadership position and emphasized the existential nature of the struggle between Zionism and US imperialism, on one hand and the Palestinian and Arab peoples, on the other. Giving up on liberation was treachery.

On August 1, 1994, I was in Cairo meeting with the Secretary-General of one of the Egyptian opposition parties who asked, jokingly, why I was not in Gaza on that day to witness the Gaza-Jericho First celebrations. He knew where I stood on the Oslo Accords, but said that, under the circumstances, it was the most that could have been achieved to advance the Palestinian cause. That was the language of politics that fit the occasion. Incidentally, he was a friend of Arafat. It seems this new language of politics had permeated all levels of Arab officialdom, including the Palestinian leadership that fancied itself as part of that officialdom. Hearing PLO officials describing how state building, including the economy, could be achieved so that, for instance, Gaza would become the “Singapore of the Middle East” was very disturbing. In fact, it was despicable hearing wealthy PLO officials uttering such nonsense.

Since the Oslo debacle, the defeatist language of negotiations through all of its iterations became the official language of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Simply by accepting the language of the “two-state solution,” the PNA, by definition, accepted the division of Palestine. In each phase of negotiations there would be talk about “confidence-building measures” between the Zionist entity and the PNA. This meant that the PNA was succumbing to the US-Zionist agenda that sought to have the PNA agree to the legitimacy of the Zionist entity in 1948 Occupied Palestine. It also meant, insofar as the PNA was concerned, that the Palestinians living in the 1948 areas need only struggle within the settler-colonial entity against “racism” for “equality” with the settler-colonialists. Their struggle would be limited to “dismantling” the “apartheid state” and bringing “equality” between occupier and occupied. Quickly forgotten by the PNA was that a settler-colonial entity that has been adamant about creating a “Jewish state” would never allow “equality” between a Jew and a Palestinian. The raison d’être of Zionism is expansionism through expulsion and genocide, even beyond Palestine and the Palestinians. This fact, proven time and again by daily events of land theft and ethnic cleansing in all of Palestine, belies the notion of a peaceful existence between occupier and occupied or between a Palestinian State and a Zionist entity. While Zionists continued their crimes against the Palestinian people, Zionist propaganda adopted the language of “peace” and “victim.” They claimed that the Palestinians did not want peace or that there was no Palestinian “partner for peace” or that the Palestinians “refuse to live with us” (in the West Bank) and that is why they opposed the construction of settlements. This was the manipulative trajectory of the Zionist discourse.

Once the PLO agreed to a “two-state solution,” it automatically agreed with the Zionists to divide not just the Palestinian land, but the Palestinian people. A bourgeois leadership intent on having a land base, however restricted, would opt for negotiations, knowing full well that such a track would be against the interests of the dispossessed Palestinian population. This sort of leadership that sees no other avenue before it but that of “negotiations,” is a leadership that engages in “security coordination” with the enemy, a euphemism for collaboration, that serves the needs of the settler-colonial entity and the Palestinian bourgeoisie.

Zionist crimes against the Palestinians raise questions primarily regarding the PNA and the matter of the Zionist practices in dividing the occupied Palestinians: (1) Why acquiesce to the Zionist strategy of splitting the main force that Palestinians will have to rely on to achieve liberation? (2) Why rely on a “peace process” that has pushed Palestinians farther and farther away from even reaching autonomy on isolated spots of territory cut out by Zionist-settler roads and settlements? (3) What sort of leadership would agree to such provisions?

Those competing discourses and narratives transformed over time. They were driven by events on the ground, initiated either by the Palestinian movement for liberation or the imperialist-Zionist axis. The PLO leadership surreptitiously moved to a compromising position camouflaged by a declaration of an independent state, as previously noted. The dominant language since, became the language of Western narratives. In the Donald Trump era (2017–2021), it was relatively facile for Gulf Arab states to engage in open relations with the Zionist entity through the “Abraham Accord.” It appeared that the Palestinians, including the PNA leadership, were going to have their cause erased from history. It was a surreal moment watching PNA personalities condemn the Gulf Arab states for moving forward with open relations with the Zionist entity while leaving the Palestinian bourgeoisie behind facing an existential crisis.

The Ramadan Al-Aqsa uprising, however, radically changed the equation. Again, events on the ground became the basis for a renewal of political language, emphasizing the pillars of the Palestinian struggle for liberation (total liberation and the return of the Palestinians to the homeland). The May 2021 Intifada unified the Palestinian people. This unity contradicted the “two-state solution” that the Palestinian bourgeoisie has been clinging to for decades. Gaza’s support of the “Unity Intifada” underscored the centrality of the armed struggle for liberation. Unity meant that the struggle of the Palestinians in 1948 Occupied Palestine was not for “equal rights” between the settlers and the indigenous Palestinians. It was an existential struggle between a Zionist entity seeking to displace them, and the Palestinian people. Zionist attacks on Al-Aqsa showed the steadfastness of the people in defending the holy site. A PNA in crisis appealed to the UN to oppose these Zionist attacks even as it maintained security coordination with the Zionist enemy. Protests erupted in Nablus, Hebron and other areas despite the PNA’s attempts to contain them.

The ceasefire revealed several attempts to roll back the gains of this Unity Intifada in all its dimensions, including the emergent language of liberation that it asserted with blood. The Zionist entity and the EU, led by the US, quickly began to create new events to defeat the Unity Intifada’s asserted language. They refloated the “two-state solution” and propagated the “conflict” as between Hamas and the Zionist entity. It completely sidestepped the existential struggle between the Zionist entity and the Palestinian people. The US is supporting Gaza’s reconstruction, provided that it goes through the PNA with a long-term truce as a central part of the deal. It also mentioned that the PNA should be reformed without stating what it meant by “reformed.”

The PNA’s continued position of security coordination with the enemy is equally damaging. Mahmoud Abbas has not budged one iota from his compromised position of seeking crumbs for a Palestinian “State.” On a June 6, 2021 “al-Massa‘iyyah” program on al-Mayadeen TV, Khalil Qarajah al-Rifaa’i, a Ramallah writer and political analyst closely linked to the PNA, openly said that Oslo had paved the grounds for the Palestinian struggle to establish the Palestinian State “agreed upon” by “all” Palestinian factions. His reference was clearly to Arafat’s declaration of the establishment of a Palestinian state in 1988. However, it behooves us to note that, at that time, several fighting Palestinian organizations (Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others) did not exist and the terrain of the Palestinian struggle has since changed. The PNA’s language of politics completely disregards the nature of the Zionist entity, which has no intention of agreeing to a Palestinian state, as amply demonstrated by the expansion of the settlements and the flood of settlers already established on the West Bank.

In conclusion, the 1948 ethnic cleansing produced two contradictory discourses. One Zionist, the other Palestinian. The first supported the ethnic cleansing events, while the second focused on returning to a liberated Palestine. Over time, Palestinian liberation discourse lapsed into what became the dominant discourse of compromise. The PNA language overlapped considerably with the US and Zionist discourse of “peace,” which acted as a cover for the Zionist establishment and expansion of settlements after June 1967. But the socialization of the Palestinians around the discourse uttered through PNA officialdom nonetheless ultimately failed to rein in the liberation discourse that had been suppressed.

By contrast, the recent Unity Intifada engendered events that in turn revived the language of liberation. It is absolutely critical at this stage to not allow the enemies of the Palestinian people to create events on the ground that support their discourses at the expense of the language of liberation. The PNA often claimed that it engaged in armed struggle against the Zionist enemy when it was necessary. They evoke the September 2000 Al-Aqsa Intifada as an example. The point, however, is to ask a critical question: Is the armed struggle adopted as a main method for liberation, or to pressure the enemy to acquiesce to a “two-state solution?” Parenthetically, it should be remembered that while Sadat attacked the Zionist entity on October 6, 1973, his goal was not liberation, but “peace” with the settler-colonialists in Palestine. It is incumbent upon Palestinians everywhere to create new events that build on the accomplishments of resistance to enable us to bolster our discourse against that of our enemies. The torture and killing of Palestinian activist Nizar Banat in June 2021 while in PNA custody shows the desperation of the PNA to return events toward the language of compromise. However, judging from the uprising all over Palestine in response to Banat’s murder, it appears that his martyrdom has backfired against the PNA and the Zionist entity. The language of liberation seems to have asserted itself, so far.

The dialectical relationship between language and events cannot be overemphasized. It begins by recognizing that, on the road to liberation, it is absolutely essential to watch your language.

3 Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006).

4 Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2010), 235–37, 239, 260.

5 On June 12, 1974, the Palestinian National Council (PNC) replaced the PLO’s goal of a “secular democratic state” with an “independent Palestinian state.” The diplomatic dynamics surrounding the adopted change in language shows the coordination between the PLO and the Arab states at both the Algiers 1973 and Rabat 1974 Arab Summit Meetings. See Samih K. Farsoun and Naseer H. Aruri, Palestine and the Palestinians: A Social and Political History (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2006), 189, 214.

6 The cautioning against any Arab state reaching a separate peace with the Zionist entity was considered a “Fourth No.” See, for instance, Ghada Hashem Talhami, American Presidents and Jerusalem (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 103.

7 Harvey Sicherman, Palestinian Autonomy, Self-Government, and Peace (New York: Routledge, 2019). See also Farsoun and Aruri, 198.

8 B. J. Odeh, Lebanon: Dynamics of Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1985), 131–134.

9 The April 2002 Arab Summit Meeting in Beirut adopted a similar version of the Fahd Plan. See Farsoun and Aruri, 292.