Palestinians
Abu Iyad, My Home, My Land
Abu Iyad, My Home My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle (with Eric Rouleau) (New York: New York Times Books, 1981).
My Home, My Land provides important information on the man who is second in command of Fatah and also presents the largely untold “internal” history of that organization. Abu Iyad and Eric Rouleau have collaborated on what is perhaps the most important work on the Palestinian resistance for quite some time. Finally a leader of the resistance is telling the story, not a political scientist in Washington, Tel Aviv or London.
“Abu ‘Ammar’s Biggest Mistake Was Gambling on the Americans”
‘Abd al-Jawad Salih was born in al-Bira, Palestine, in December 1931. He finished high school there and later attended the American University in Cairo, where he received a B.A. in political economy in 1955. He taught briefly in Jerusalem, and then at a teachers’ training college in Tripoli, Libya. After being expelled from al-Bira in 1973 during his second term as mayor there, he served as an independent on the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization until 1981. He now lives and works in Amman, Jordan. Joe Stork spoke with him in Washington in October 1983.
When you were in Cairo, did you get involved in Palestinian political activity?
Yasser Arafat’s Nightmare
Eqbal Ahmad, a close observer of the Palestinian resistance movement since 1968, has made many visits to the region and conferred with Palestinian leaders. His involvement developed out of his speaking and writing on behalf of the national liberation struggles in Algeria and Vietnam. Ahmad, who is from Pakistan, now lives in New York City and is a fellow of the Transnational Institute based in Amsterdam. Jim Paul and Joe Stork spoke with him in New York in October 1983.
Does the rebellion in Fatah offer any fresh possibilities in the PLO?
The Mutiny Against Arafat
The mutiny that broke out in May has shaken Fatah with the most serious crisis of its existence. This crisis not only threatens to split the main organization of the Palestinian resistance (with 80 percent of its members), but also calls into question the very existence of the PLO.
Behind the Fatah Rebellion
Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar, is associate professor of politics at the American University of Beirut and a research fellow of the Institute for Palestine Studies. He is currently a visiting professor at Georgetown University, and he has written widely on political developments in the Arab world. Joe Stork spoke with him in Washington in October 1983.
How did this rebellion get started?
The Dilemma of the PLO
In a ground-floor apartment this July, near a sprawling refugee camp in northern Lebanon, a new PLO poster was taped roughly to the wall. It made a pointed political statement, at a time when Yasser Arafat’s leadership had been openly challenged from within the military wing of his own Fatah movement. The poster was a large reproduction, printed in Arabic on a vellum-looking background, of the “Military Communique Number One” issued on December 31, 1964, to mark the start of Fatah’s armed operations against Israel. Throughout most of 1964, the Central Committee of Fatah’s far-flung political network had been almost evenly split on whether the time was ripe to start the “armed struggle” to which it was committed.
“The People Have Refused to Back Down”
Azmi Shuaibi is a dentist and a leading member of al-Bira municipal council, now disbanded by the Israeli military government. He comes from a peasant background, from the village of Dayr Ghassana in the West Bank, and was educated at Cairo University. He was elected to al-Bira municipal council on a pro-Palestine Liberation Organization slate in the 1976 election. Since 1977, he also represented the Ramallah-Bira section of the Palestinian Dentists’ Association. In the city council, he was responsible for the public library and its wide-ranging cultural activity, and for the secondary school committee. Shuaibi has been imprisoned several times for his political activity. Until recently he was under town arrest, which prevented him from leaving al-Bira or the West Bank.
Halabi, The West Bank Story
Rafik Halabi, The West Bank Story (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).
Rafik Halabi is a Palestinian-Israeli Druze. He writes at times with the viewpoint of an Israeli soldier and a former aide to Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, sometimes as an Arab villager. The West Bank Story explores several themes. Drawing on his experience covering the occupied territories for Israeli television, Halabi offers a journalistic account of the occupation’s history, its political figures and its radical “Palestinization” (or “de-Jordanization”). Another theme is the impact of the occupation on the occupying society.
Demographic Consequences of the Occupation
The residual areas of Palestine occupied by Israel in June 1967 (generally referred to as the West Bank and Gaza) contained a population of between 1,300,000 and 1,350,000 Palestinians. At that time, this population represented over half of all the estimated 2,650,000 Palestinians in the world. At present, the number of Palestinians who remain in these zones does not exceed 1,300,000—approximately the same number as lived there 15 years ago. Had the population of 1967 remained in place, natural increase would have yielded a present population in post-1967 occupied Palestine in excess of 2 million. Therefore, we estimate that the June 1967 war and subsequent occupation were responsible for the dispersion from their homeland of over 700,000 additional Palestinians.
Palestinian Communists and the National Movement
George Hazboun is a leading Palestinian trade unionist. He was dismissed from his elected position as deputy mayor of Bethlehem by a January 22 municipal council decision, spearheaded by Mayor Elias Freij, for his alleged abstention from attending council meetings since May 1982. Coming as it did three weeks before the convening of the Palestine National Council in Algeria, this dismissal was interpreted by the national movement as an attempt to clear the ground for pro-Hashemite elements in the West Bank to make their presence known in the Algiers meeting and to mute anti-Jordanian sentiment locally.
New Data on Palestinian Workers in Israel
A survey covering the inhabitants of the territories who work inside Israel, conducted by the manpower planning section of the Department of Employment, reveals that in 1981 some 76,000 of them were working in Israel. In 1971, the equivalent figure had been 21,000 and in 1975 it had been 66,000. According to the survey, financed by the Defense Ministry through the coordinator of activities in the territories, the inhabitants of the territories constitute about 5.5 percent of workers in Israel.
Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue
One of the lesser known aspects of Palestinian politics over the last eight years has been the steadily growing contacts between a number of Palestinian and Israeli progressive groups and individuals in the occupied territories. Though unreported, those contacts have not always been clandestine. They have involved a much wider circle than more publicized meetings between the small leftist parties on both sides of the “green line,” such as Matzpen and the Communist Party.
Dayr Yasin and Qibya
What is the meaning of the Israeli parliamentarian's comment that “in Lebanon we have entered with a policy that is a direct continuation of Dayr Yasin and Qibya”?
Kissinger Memorandum: “To Isolate the Palestinians”
MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION
DATE AND TIME: June 15, 1975 12:15 to 2:35 pm
PLACE: Suite 311, Hotel Pierre, New York City
SUBJECT: Meeting with Jewish Leaders (Klutznik Group)
Kissinger: First of all, I want you to know how much I appreciate your taking off on the weekend to come here.
Tawil, My Home, My Prison
Ramonda Hawa Tawil, My Home, My Prison (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979).
This book is the autobiography of a woman in revolt, but whose revolt is accidental. Although its title suggests a high degree of political awareness, the author conveys very little of the depth and impact of the struggle of the Palestinian people under Zionist occupation. The sole virtue of the book is to expose the self-centered elitist political perspective of the author. This is worth something, considering how the occupation authorities and the Western media have, each in their own way, conveyed the impression that she is a militant champion of the Palestinian struggle.
The PLO at the Crossroads
Throughout the twentieth century history of Palestine, none of the numerous proposals for “partition” of the country have ever been accepted by any significant group of Palestinian Arabs in spite of the many proposals to that end prior to and following the forced dismemberment of the country in 1948. [1] Palestinian and Arab resistance on this point has been unequivocal and effective — at least until recently.
Introduction to “PLO at the Crossroads”
As Sameer Abraham points out in the article that follows, no proposal for the partition of Palestine has ever been accepted by any significant number of Palestinians. Such proposals have always had the intention of securing and legitimizing the Zionist presence in Palestine. But with the “transitional program” accepted by the Palestine National Congress in June 1974 we are faced with a proposal of different intent, for this time the suggestion has come from the Palestinians themselves.
