The relevance of anti-Zionism and the armed struggle for the national liberation of the Palestinian people

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November 29, 2020 marks 73 years of Resolution 181 adopted in 1947 by the United Nations General Assembly. The latter provides for the partition of Palestine into two states, one Arab and the other Jewish. In reality, it represents the error in which liberal society slips with regard to “the question of Palestine”: disqualification of anti-Zionism, acceptance of the essence of the Israeli regime making Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “scapegoat”, and promotion of negotiation and compromise to achieve peace, a solution that is less pragmatic than impossible.

After having promised everything and its opposite to both parties that were unable to reconcile the Palestinian and Zionist points of view, facing the losses and the blows received, the British, in 1947, abandoned Palestine, which they had occupied as a mandatory power since 1923 and relies on the United Nations (UN) to resolve the conflict.

On 29 November 1947, the UN adopted Resolution 181 which provided for the partition of Palestine into two states. A resolution which does not contain any legal measures of application, which does not take into account the demands of the Palestinians, and which grants the Jewish population more than half of the Palestinian territory while it represents only one-third of the population¹. This resolution is also treacherous as the British had promised the Palestinians their independence during the First World War.

November 29 will mark the 73 years of Resolution 181. The United Nations, the great prophet of peace, has organized a “Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” every year since 1977 in honor of this failed resolution

This is the sign of one of the many paradoxes present among most of the so-called supporters of the Palestinian people. Barring a miracle, the negotiation and the two-state solution promoted by the resolution of November 1947 will not compensate for the human and material losses suffered since 1948. The ultimate obstacle to peace is not Prime Minister Netanyahu, but the very nature of political Zionism and the State of Israel; aggressive, belligerent, racist, and imperialist. Therefore, it is necessary to reaffirm the relevance of anti-Zionism and the armed popular struggle for the national liberation of the Palestinian people, in prison for too long.

The origin of Zionist ideology

Between 1873 and 1896, the Great Deflation rekindled the oppression of Jewish minorities in Europe. In Eastern Europe, where the arrival of the capitalist mode of production was later, followed by a deep social crisis, characterized by growing anti-Semitism, manifested by numerous pogroms² in the Russian Empire. Jews³ from Eastern Europe migrate to the West and become the target of attacks by Western xenophobes. At the same time, Theodore Herzl, an Austrian Jewish writer assimilated to the West, developed his Zionist convictions by covering as a journalist the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a victim of French anti-Semitism. This case inspired him, in particular, to write in 1896 Der Judenstaat (“The State of the Jews”), in which he defended the creation of a Jewish state as a solution to anti-Semitism.

Zionism has various interpretations. Its most neutral definition would characterize it as a political ideology that can be summed up as follows: the Zionist wants the Jewish people, as a national movement, to have the right to have as much territory as possible in Palestine with the least amount of Palestinians living on it⁴. This is an ideology that denies from the outset the very existence of the Palestinian people, as implied by the famous slogan “a people without land for a land without a people”⁵. Anti-Zionism is the ideology that opposes it. 

Herzl’s first victory was to have developed Zionism as a reaction to the oppression of Jews. Poor, persecuted Eastern European Jews cling to the Zionist project and the promise of a Jewish national home. In the meantime, they are fleeing to Western Europe and through there, as Herzl writes in his book, “helping to introduce anti-Semitism or to develop the one that already exists”⁶.

The second victory of Zionism is to have convinced a great European power, the British Empire, to support the Zionist project in its colonial and imperialist aims. Herzl explains that “the poorest must go as quickly and as far as possible”, but at the same time such an emigration can only be meaningful if it is established around a political project in line with the context of colonialism at the time and aimed at creating a Jewish state. The Zionist movement will rely on its best allies: the anti-Semites. On the one hand, Herzl wants to send the poor Jews out of Europe; on the other hand, anti-Semites wish to get rid of it. In 1895, Herzl wrote at the beginning of his first diary that “anti-Semitism […] serves the Jewish character”⁷.

In order to meet the need for the support of a major European power, the Zionists are concentrating their efforts in London assisted by Chaim Weizmann, representative of Zionism in the United Kingdom. In 1916, Palestine was thereby transferred from Ottoman domination to British control during the Sykes-Picot agreements. A year later, the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared that “His Majesty’s Government favorably considers the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use all their efforts to facilitate the achievement of this goal”⁸. The Jewish people whom Herzl wanted to form a state were then endowed with the strength and political institutions required to participate in the postwar colonial race.

Netanyahu, “scapegoat”

The Zionist project will not stop to rely on the support of a great power throughout its history. France, then the United States has provided this protection, particularly since the 1970s. The Zionist movement was built by exploiting the oppression endured by the Jews, by counting on the support of anti-Semites, and by integrating into the imperialist system. Today, Benjamin Netanyahu applies Herzl’s recipes by relying on abjection greater than the pogroms in Eastern Europe: the Nazi genocide. He exploits more than his predecessors, the tragedy of the Shoah to attach the image of anti-Semite to any criticism of Israel, going so far as to place the responsibility for the Holocaust on Hajj Amine al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem⁹.

Benjamin Netanyahu came to power for the first time in 1996. Leading the Israeli government, he intends to reject the Oslo accords which provided for the recognition of the Palestinian Authority as representative of the Palestinians and the division of the West Bank (Cisjordanie) into three zones more or less controlled by Israel. Its objective is clear: to strengthen existing Israeli settlements and build new ones. At the end of its mandate in May 1999, the Palestinian Authority only controlled 10% of the West Bank and the Palestinian population suffered daily from the brutality and injustice of the occupation: restriction of movement, expropriations, destruction of homes, arbitrary arrests, collective punishments. Thousands of political prisoners languish in Israeli prisons (some are children) awaiting trial¹⁰. This is nothing more or less a form of ethnic cleansing initiated in 1948 by the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians who have become refugees in neighboring countries, the sole aim being to empty a land of his people¹¹.

Indeed, Netanyahu who has never believed in an agreement with the Palestinians harasses human rights NGOs, and Donald Trump’s unconditional friendship constitutes a real danger to peace. The recent normalization of relations between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates confirms the policy of repression and isolates Palestinians even further. Netanyahu made Israel the country with the most social inequalities according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), possibly the result of a liberal, capitalist model coupled with an apartheid regime.

Re-elected a second time in 2009, Netanyahu will eventually exceed the record for longevity at the head of the Israeli government until then held by David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state, who during the declaration of independence in 1948 posed Israel in a Jewish and democratic state and was committed to guaranteeing equality between all citizens. On the contrary, on July 19, 2018, Netanyahu passed a constitutionally valid law called “Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people” which does not mention the term democracy and establishes de facto discrimination between two categories of citizens, Jews, and Arabs, enshrining in law the apartheid regime which prevailed de facto¹².

However, in reality, wasn’t Netanyahu just, with more cruelty, perpetuating a logic that preceded him? Certainly, it poses a certain danger for the reasons stated above, but the issue of inequalities of status between Jews and Arabs, a major obstacle preventing the creation of a unified, multicultural and democratic state throughout the territory of historic Palestine, is not new and is part of the very essence of the Zionist project. After the first Israeli-Arab war in 1948 and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their land, the Knesset¹³ passed the “Law of Return”¹⁴ on 5 July 1950 and on 1 April 1952 the “Nationality Law”¹⁵.

The “Law of Return” creates a legal category of Jewish nationality. All Jews around the world have immediate access to Israeli citizenship. The “Nationality Law”, on the other hand, aims to denationalize the Palestinians. This law states that Israeli citizenship can only be granted to the Palestinians present in Israel between 1948 and 1952, expelling nearly 85% of the Palestinian population who took refuge in neighboring countries and became stateless. Nevertheless, the Israeli citizenship granted to the few Palestinians who have not fled does not legally make them members of the nation. They become second-rank citizens compared to national and Jewish citizens.

The “Law of Return” and the “Nationality Law” allowed Israel to privilege the Jewish Israeli population by differentiating between Jews and Palestinians. Israeli nationality is based on religious affiliation, excluding Christians and Muslims. These two laws allowed Israel to maintain a Jewish majority, enshrining the subordination of Palestinians under civil law. The “Law of Return” and the “Nationality Law”, two of the first amendments adopted by the Zionist state, included Palestinians in law only to ensure their exclusion¹⁶. Netanyahu’s policy is in fact only carrying out what the Zionist project demands him to do.

This is not about freeing Netanyahu from the many times he violated human rights, but rather about addressing two fundamental issues facing activists for peace and justice in Palestine. First, while the world views the question of Palestine as complex and irresolvable, it is, from its origins until today, a story of colonialism and racism. Zionism has not invented anything in this direction. Nonetheless, Israel has managed, with the help of its allies, to construct an explanation so complex that any criticism from the outside world is immediately castigated at best as naive, at worst as anti-Semitic¹⁷. Secondly, while some Israeli policies are severely criticized and condemned, the very nature of the Israeli regime and the ideology that produces those policies are not targeted. It is unthinkable that in the days of supremacist South Africa, the only worthy revolts would be those against atrocities committed by the South African government, such as the Soweto massacre¹⁸, but not against the very nature of the apartheid regime. If one is at all involved in the defense of human rights, it is not possible to tolerate Israel as a Zionist state and to only put the blame on Netanyahu.

The relevance of anti-Zionism 

Albert Camus wrote “to name an object badly is to add to the unhappiness of this world”¹⁹. On 16 July 2017, Emmanuel Macron concluded his speech at the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Vél’d’hiv’ raid by adding: “We will not give in to anti-Zionism, because it is the reinvented form of antisemitism”²⁰. This is a capital offense. One injustice cannot be repaired by creating another. Indeed, many Jews in the intellectual world have always been and remain, if not anti-Zionist, then at least non-Zionist²¹. This is a capital offense. One injustice cannot be repaired by creating another. Indeed, many Jews in the intellectual world have always been and remain, if not anti-Zionist, then at least non-Zionist.

If some people are still reluctant to claim to be anti-Zionist, it is important to recall a historical fact: 50 years ago, the international community condemned Zionism as a form of racism. In the early 1970s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) won many victories in the international community in the context of decolonization and global anti-imperialism. Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, is invited by the UN General Assembly to defend the Palestinian cause. Its success is total and leads to the adoption of Resolution 3237 which resolves the issue of the Palestinian people and its representation. It invites the PLO to become a UN observer and authorises it to participate in all the work and sessions of the General Assembly, with the exception of the right to vote²².

In November 1974, under the presidency of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the UN General Assembly suspended South Africa as a member state of the UN because of its violation of the principles of the UN Charter (inability to represent the majority of South Africans, institutionalised racial discrimination, etc). This decision sets a precedent where the General Assembly could suspend a Member State by a decision of its President. The PLO, a new observer member of the UN, was inspired by South Africa’s dismissal and undertook to mobilise a similar movement against Israel.

In the absence of a consensus in the Assembly, the dismissal of Israel appears complicated. The PLO, therefore, prefers to intensify its activities within the UN. In 1975, the Assembly adopted Resolution 3375 calling for the inclusion of the PLO in “in all efforts, deliberations and conferences on the Middle East which are held under the auspices of the United Nations, on an equal footing with other parties”²³. The Assembly also establishes the United Nations Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (UNCIRPP).

All these diplomatic successes led to a key moment in the history of anti-Zionism. In 1975, Cuba, South Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Syria introduced an amendment to a resolution on the Decade for Action to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination, adopted by most African states to delegitimise the apartheid regime in South Africa and Namibia. This amendment stipulates that wherever the terms apartheid, racism, colonialism, racial discrimination, and foreign domination appear, the word “Zionism” will also be inserted in the text. Having failed to dislodge Israel, the PLO has sought to delegitimize Israel’s constitutive ideology. This led to the adoption of Resolution 3379 in November 1975 declaring that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination²⁴. Zionist laws, policies, and institutions must therefore be dismantled, as well as Jewish national supremacy as a political structure based on displacement, forced exile, dispossession, second-class status, and the elision of the Palestinian people.

Unfortunately, this success did not last more than two decades. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait. While the United States establishes an international coalition to defend the small Arab state, Yasser Arafat supports Iraq in the belief that the coalition will not intervene. This was a miscalculation. The liberation of Kuwait left the PLO financially vulnerable and politically isolated. The United States, victorious, strengthens its status in the Middle East, while at the same time having a debt to the Arab states that have joined the coalition. They pay their dues by engaging in a regional peace process. Due to the financial crisis, its geographical isolation in Tunisia²⁵ and the rise of Hamas²⁶, The PLO, becoming weak and vulnerable, had too few strategic options at its disposal.

The United States then launched the Middle East Peace Conference by sending a letter of invitation to meet in Madrid at the end of October 1991. Their aim was to achieve a peace presented as real between Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians, but nevertheless seeking to launch bilateral negotiations between Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in order to disintegrate the Arab bloc and then involve the PLO at the very end in order to impose a peace settlement on the Palestinians²⁷. The PLO, in a situation of inferiority and because of their desire to retain power over the question of Palestine against other Palestinian organisations, may have had no choice but to accept the American and Israeli conditions. One of them was the revocation of Resolution 3379 condemning Zionism as a form of racism.

Thus, in the space of 20 years, anti-Zionism was discredited and discredited for imperialist and economic reasons, until it was compared to anti-Semitism by Emmanuel Macron in 2017. Without being able to attack the very ideology of Israel, the only “legitimate” weapons of the international community are to force respect for international law and its numerous resolutions (Resolution 181, 242, 338…), always adopted without consulting the Palestinians, without making their rights apparent and without ever recognising them as a national people. 

As for the resolution of this century old conflict, international society still advocates the old paradigm of the two-state solution. The reality is quite different: Palestine, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, is already de facto annexed and controlled by Israel. Moreover, Netanyahu proudly claims that under his long-lasting mandate, no Palestinian state will come into being. In this very real case, the two-state solution is buried in favour of a single state. But which one? What will be the status of the annexed Palestinians with their land ? The ultra-majority trend in Israeli society is clear : Jews and Arabs cannot have the same rights. On the Palestinian side and the Palestinian Authority, reactions are rare. This corrupt, elitist, bourgeois and collaborating organisation, financially supported at arm’s length by the European Union and the Gulf petro monarchies, settle for reaffirming the two-state solution and the need to enforce international law²⁸. Faced with this impasse, the question of taking up arms is at once fundamental, legitimate and legal. 

Popular armed struggle as a legal solution

Between World War II and the 1970s, the main form of armed conflict was non-conventional warfare. This is a conflict that is not inter-state, but whose belligerents are often armed groups fighting against sovereign institutions. The legal framework available to regulate them was limited to a single article of the 1949 Geneva Conventions²⁹. The United States and Israel led the march to delegitimize this armed force, describing it as terrorism. However, in November 1973, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3070 reaffirming that “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples to free themselves from colonial and foreign domination and enslavement by all available means, including armed struggle”³⁰. One year later, on 14 December 1974, the same Assembly adopted resolution 3314 on the definition of aggression. Article 7 of this resolution states that the use of force by a people to liberate itself from colonialism does not constitute aggression in legal terms³¹.

In March 1974, two additional protocols to the Geneva Conventions were introduced allowing the recognition of the sovereignty of armed national liberation movements. They broaden the legal lexicon governing non-conventional armed conflicts, legitimizing the use of force by non-state actors or guerrilla fighters. The first Additional Protocol sought to elevate the status of wars of national liberation to that of international armed conflict, thereby acknowledging the embryonic sovereignty of liberation movements and conferring them the right to use armed force. This addition took place at the Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Application of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts in 1975. This diplomatic conference intended to welcome the liberation movements as observer participants. In fact, the admission of national liberation movements to the diplomatic conference is equivalent to the recognition of their embryonic sovereignty, as explained by Abi Saab, representative of the G77: “The definition of sovereignty is the exclusive use of legitimate force. And legitimate force is force used in the name of the community as a source of order, not a disorder”.

The Palestinian resistance has thus led a campaign to bring its guerrilla warfare against Israel within the scope of international law in order to achieve two objectives: to challenge the criminalisation of its armed struggle as terrorism by creating a new legal regime, and to establish itself as an embryonic sovereign capable of having a monopoly on violence. This legal work affirmed the existence of a Palestinian nation eligible for the right to self-determination³².

The armed struggle is therefore legitimate and legal for the national liberation of the Palestinian people. However, in the early 1980s, the PLO took the decision to undertake non-violent resistance to the occupation, favouring negotiations with Israel and the United States, yielding to pressure from the Western world to maintain their elitist privileges in Palestine. As for Palestinian revolutionary groups using force such as Hamas or Islamic Jihadism, they are labeled as terrorists and serve as a pretext for brutal Israeli repression. ; among others, Israeli bombings in Lebanon and Syria and the imprisonment of 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

George Habash, at the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Palestinian political party of Marxist obedience, shows us why the popular armed struggle is necessary and is the only way to achieve liberation³³. It establishes a revolutionary theory and specifically defines the enemies of the revolution. For him, the problem of Palestinian resistance is that it struggles to answer the question “who is the enemy?” ; because it is daily and does not materialise: it is the “Israeli fact”. For George Habash, the struggle must be national and must aim not at the destruction of Israel as a nation, but as a political, economic, and military entity, which translates into Zionism, an aggressive, racist, reactionary and religious ideology. 

The first enemy needing to be fought by armed struggle is the Israeli entity. First of all, it represents a human element. Applying colonialism of settlement, each Israeli life is of immeasurable value to the Zionist state, all the more so if it is that of a soldier, in a country that devotes a real cult to its army. In addition, all Israelis are subject to racist military training in which Palestinians are presented as sub-men and sub-women. Thus, every Israeli is ready to give his or her life to defend Zionism against the “Arab barbarian”. Then it is necessary to break the sense of stability that Israel promotes by providing security for its inhabitants, while at the same time presenting itself as the state of refuge for Jews from all over the world. Armed struggle is therefore essential to bury this myth, which will also deter emigration in Palestine and encourage Israeli immigration.

The second enemy is Zionism and world imperialism. World Zionism is the living embodiment of the thinking of a racist movement sponsored by capitalism, exemplified by the moral, monetary, and military support of the Western world. Because Zionism has developed through imperialism, to separate the struggle against Israel from the anti-imperialist struggle would be to fall into a fundamental error.

Finally, George Habash defines the last enemy under a materialist conception: it is the Arab and Palestinian bourgeois class. The reactionary and bourgeois Arab classes are linked with imperialism, have allowed Zionism to invade Palestine, and have broken the Palestinian revolutionary momentum, as we can see from the normalisation of relations between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The Palestinian bourgeois class represented by the PLO has had a defeatist attitude in acknowledging and collaborating with the Zionist entity.

Zionism, although an ideology, thus materialises every day in the Israeli entity. In order for the Palestinian revolution to take place, it is necessary that it takes place in two ways: through thought, by limiting world Zionist propaganda as much as possible while correctly informing the different societies about Israel’s actions in Palestine, but also through arms, in order to weaken and then destroy Zionism in all its social, economic, military and political forms. Nevertheless, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) initiative launched in 2005 is a very relevant non-violent popular movement to support the Palestinian resistance without engaging in fedayeen operations³⁴. It is a question of boycotting Israeli institutions and companies that support the occupation and colonisation, pushing for the disinvestment of companies involved in this occupation, and demanding from our States concrete sanctions against the Israeli regime. 

On this 29th of November, we must therefore remember that Palestine must be a free country where all its citizens, Jews, Muslims, and Christians, are equal. This is not a complex and multifaceted conflict but a history of colonialism, racism, and imperialism illustrated by Zionist ideology. As long as it remains globally tolerated, or worse encouraged, there can be no freedom. It is the duty of anyone who is sensitive to the defense of human rights, wherever they are, to recognize that Zionist ideology, more than the actions of a man who claims it, is an obstacle to the construction of a just, equal, united and free world. It will then be a question of supporting by all possible means the freedom fighter, the one who is being denied his or her rights, the fedayeen, “who has taken up arms to try to get out of his or her despair”³⁵.

REFERENCES

CHOMSKY, N. PAPPÉ, I. (2015). On Palestine. Éditions Penguin. 

HERZL, T. (1896). Der Judenstaat. (L’État des Juifs)

HABACHE, G. (1969). Les ennemis de la révolution. 

KEITH, A. (1843). The Land of Israel According to the Covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. Edinburgh: William Whyte and Co.

ERAKAT, N. (2019). Justice For Some, Law and the Question of Palestine. Stanford University Press.

FILIU, JP. (2019). Main basse sur Israël, Netanyahu et la fin du rêve sioniste. Éditions de La Découverte. 

ACHCAR, G. (2018). La dualité du projet sioniste. Manière de Voir. n°154. pp 7-11.

USHER, G. (2003). Impasse stratégique pour la résistance palestinienne. Le Monde Diplomatique. n°594. pp 12-13.

VIDAL, D. (2017). Cisjordanie, de la colonisation à l’annexion. Le Monde Diplomatique. n°755. pp 22-23.

VIDAL, D. (2018). Antisionisme = antisémitisme ? : Réponse à Emmanuel Macron. Libertaria.

To quote the article:

H. M. (2020). The relevance of anti-Zionism and the armed struggle for the national liberation of the Palestinian people. Generation for Rights Over the World. growthinktank.org. [online] Nov. 2020.

©Photo by Hosny Salah on Pixabay.

Translated by Clémentine Gallot & Jessie Lee.