How Revolutionary is The Palestinian Resistance? A Marxist Interpretation

Abstract

This study not intended to be an exhaustive evaluation of the Palestine Resistance, but rather an explanation from a Marxist perspective of points essential to an understanding of the crisis which the Palestinian movement as a whole now going through. There is, of course, no lack of analyses on the subject, but for the most part they have been limited to cataloguing particular mistakes and to fixing the ensuing responsibilities without making any real attempt to get back to the root of the errors. Thus, for example, the PDFLP (Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) taxes other resistance groups with having failed, in the period prior to September, to establish ties with the common people of Jordan and having left the initiative in this matter with the Hashemite throne. Such a criticism well-founded, but it can serve no purpose if it fails to point out the origins of the mistake by showing the cause-and-effect relationship between the ideology of these groups and its actual policy. So long as this relationship allowed to remain obscure, no criticism can be profitable. To be radical, Marx observed, is to grasp the matter by the root, but for man the root man himself. In this perspective, no study of the Palestinian Resistance which fails to consider the men who make the revolution can have any results. This does not mean that the circumstances which determine the birth and development of the revolution should be ignored, but that, in the last analysis, they are not the decisive factor. A study of the Palestinian movement must begin with an analysis of the social classes and groups which constitute it and determine its ideological, political and organizational decisions.