The murderous campaign of Zionist state attacks on Jenin and other Palestinian refugee camps throughout 2022 has galvanised a militant resistance. With election campaigning for the Israeli Knesset underway, the Zionists launched an all-out assault on Nablus’ Old City on 26 October, killing five Palestinians and wounding at least 21. In the context of another reactionary election which has returned Benjamin Netanyahu to power, the Palestinians have launched a new phase of the armed struggle, crystallising the momentum of the May 2021 Unity Intifada and responding to the Zionist wave of killings, arrests and colonial operations.
FRFI has reported on the targeting of the West Bank refugee camp at Jenin, site of the 11 May 2022 occupation murder of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. By 14 November, at least 197 Palestinians had been killed by settlers and occupation forces since the beginning of 2022, including at least 43 children. Warning of an ‘explosive situation,’ UN Middle East Envoy Tor Wennesland projected the West Bank’s deadliest year on record.
Palestinians have fought back through organised, armed resistance, with young fida’i fighters sparking pride inside and outside the refugee camps. Defending the city and camps of Nablus, a new group, the Lions’ Den (Areen al-Usud), has emerged since August and has alarmed the Zionist colonisers. A cross-factional development inspired by Jenin defence squads, the story of the Areen is synonymous with those who have fought most determinedly during months of colonial repression.
18-year-old Ibrahim Nablusi, who joined other youths in forming the Nablus Brigade, earned the nickname ‘Lion of Nablus’ for his defiance of would-be occupation captors and heroic death in combat. At the 24 July funeral of leading Brigade members Mohammad al-Azizi and Aboud Suboh, killed protecting other comrades in a firefight during a Zionist raid on the home of al-Azizi, Nablusi was photographed carrying a rifle in an image promoted widely by supporters of the resistance after his own killing on 9 August. As occupation forces closed in, Nablusi recorded the message: ‘Take care of the homeland after I’m gone, and my final will to you, on your honour – don’t let go of the rifle.’
Nablusi had previously associated himself with Fatah, the party of the collaborationist Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership. Other fighters, including Ashraf Mubaslat, Adham Mabrouka and Mohammad Dakhil, all assassinated in February, had left the Fatah military wing, al-Aqsa Brigades, in order to join the new front. A mass, armed rally of the Lions’ Den in Nablus on 2 September brought thousands of supporters in open solidarity with the movement. They put out a cross-organisational call: ‘We salute those who have walked in the footsteps of al-Yasser [Arafat, Fatah] and Yassin [Hamas] and Abu Ali Mustafa [PFLP] and Shiqaqi [Islamic Jihad].’ Emblems of the Areen were flown in Gaza at a mass rally on 10 November, commemorating the death of Arafat.
There are contradictions to this approach which are still to be confronted by its activists. The bourgeois Fatah strategy of concessions to Zionism, of which the PA is a product, has borne bitter fruits of comprador repression, including the killings of activists Basel al-Araj and Nizar Banat. On 31 October, the families and supporters of seven university students interned by PA ‘security’ forces protested on the streets for their release. The Fatah-dominated PA shares the aim of the new government in Tel Aviv to destroy all effective Palestinian resistance.
Class, colonialism and armed struggle
Poverty and class struggle are crucial in the wider context of de facto Zionist control over the expanse of historic Palestine. Even before Covid-19, 47% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were in poverty. By the end of 2020, 65.5% of Gaza youth were unemployed; in a recent tightening of the Zionist state blockade, fishing exports were banned from 5 August, following the latest Israeli bombing of the Strip, crippling a vital economic sector.
In Britain, the response of the pro-Labour Party left to the armed resistance of the Palestinians is typically hostile. In a Socialist Worker article on 1 November, Nick Clark claimed that, ‘though it draws on popular support, the strategy that focuses purely on military victories leaves the source of Israel’s power – its role in defending US imperialism in the Middle East – intact.’ Proof for this claim is found in the assertion that the ‘two episodes in Israel’s history that most shook its rule’ were the first intifada of 1987-93 and the May 2021 uprising.
It is a false assertion that Palestinian groups have ‘purely’ military aspirations. The Palestinian victory over the May 2021 onslaught on Gaza and later delaying of Zionist plans for Sheikh Jarrah and the Naqab had a lot to do with the mass protest movement on the ground, with young women at the fore. But May 2021 was also a military victory, spearheaded by the Palestinian ‘Sword of Jerusalem’ operation and the unified response of armed groups in Gaza against invasion. As rockets formed one line of defence alongside street mobilisations and a 17 May strike across historic Palestine, the coloniser once again failed in its aim of defeating the resistance.
There is also a false distinction made between the ‘non-violent’ first intifada and the ‘second’, al-Aqsa intifada of 2000-05 – an uprising ignored or dismissed in liberal accounts. This period saw the killing of 4,973 Palestinians including 1,262 children, the construction of an illegal apartheid wall through the West Bank and the assassination of resistance leaders Abu Ali Mustafa and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. In 15 years from 2000, more than 90,000 Palestinians were arrested. The British Labour government supported Israeli terror throughout, collaborating in the imprisonment of Ahmed Sa’adat and other revolutionaries and rejecting calls to investigate the April 2002 Jenin massacre.
In a 1993 FRFI article, Cat Alison reflected on the squeamishness of the British petit bourgeois left on the question of armed struggle – following decades of ‘left’ condemnation of the militant Irish national liberation movement:
‘As communists, then, we defend absolutely the right of the oppressed people of the world to take up arms against imperialism – and not put them down until victory. Those who abandon this position, should indeed be “ruthlessly dismissed from the ranks of the supporters of the revolution” [Lenin].’
Louis Brehony
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 291 December 2022/January 2023
