Abu Ali Mustafa

Mustafa Ali al-Zabri was born on 14 May 1938 in Arraba, in the Jenin district, to Anisa and Ali al-Zabri, a farmer who had worked as a blacksmith on the railways and at the port of Haifa and who is believed to have joined Izz al-Din al-Qassam’s band in the revolt of 1936. He was schooled in the village, moved to Amman with part of his family in 1950, and could not finish secondary school: he worked as a messenger at a bank, in a carpentry workshop, a glassware shop and a cardboard factory. His comrades traced his temperament — plain, unceremonious, close to the poor — to those years.

He joined the Arab Nationalist Movement in 1955 and took part in the Jordanian campaigns against the Baghdad Pact and the British officers commanding the Arab Legion. Arrested in April 1957, he was sentenced to five years and served them in al-Jafr prison in the desert. On release at the end of 1961 he rebuilt cells among students, government employees and farmers and was given charge of the movement in the northern West Bank. He married Khitam Saleh in July 1964, moved to Jenin and ran an agricultural supplies shop that he turned into a cheap restaurant serving hummus, falafel and ful. He was jailed again in 1966. After the June 1967 defeat he reached George Habash and Wadi Haddad, took part in founding the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in December 1967, and headed its central field command in Ramallah. Most of the cadre who entered the West Bank with him were caught; he escaped to Jordan and directed the front’s work from there. At the PFLP’s third congress in 1972 he was elected deputy to Habash, a post he held until 2000.

He led the front’s fighters in Lebanon, including through the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, survived a car bomb placed under his building in the Cola district of West Beirut, and left for Syria at the end of August 1982. He headed the PFLP delegation to the reunification talks with Fatah in Aden and Algiers in 1984. He sat on the Palestine National Council from 1968 and on the PLO Central Council and Executive Committee from 1987 to 1991. He opposed the Oslo Accords, but insisted that the PLO remained the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and had to be revived rather than abandoned. Asked in 1999 on what basis a national dialogue could proceed, he answered that the front held it “our right to establish a fully sovereign, independent Palestinian state on the occupied Palestinian land, even if it is within the 1967 borders” — on condition that such a state not be treated as a final settlement of the Palestinian claim, because the refugees’ right of return under Resolution 194 “is a question that will not be resolved even by the proclamation of a sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 territories.”

He returned to Palestine on 30 September 1999 after thirty-two years in exile, saying on arrival: “We have returned, not in order to make deals, but to resist.” Elected secretary-general of the PFLP in 2000, he was killed on 27 August 2001 when Israeli helicopters fired missiles into his office in al-Bireh, one of the first assassinations of a faction leader in the Second Intifada. On 17 October 2001 a PFLP squad killed the Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi in Jerusalem in retaliation. Abu Ali Mustafa was succeeded by Ahmad Sa’adat, who has been held in Israeli prisons since 2006. Ramallah and Gaza City have both named streets and squares for him.

Selected contributions

• Co-founder of the PFLP (1967) and deputy secretary-general (1972–2000)
• Secretary-general of the PFLP (2000–2001)
• Member of the Palestine National Council (1968–2001) and of the PLO Executive Committee (1987–1991)

Sources

• Mustafa al-Zabri (Abu Ali Mustafa) — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — PalQuest