Nayef Hawatmeh

Nayef Hawatmeh was born in al-Salt, in Jordan, in November 1935, into a clan spread across Jordan, Palestine and Syria. He finished school at al-Hussein College in Amman and went to Cairo to read medicine, but abandoned his studies for a decade of political work; he later took a degree at Beirut Arab University in philosophy and sociology, submitting a thesis on the passage of the nationalist movement “from a broad nationalism to democratic leftism.”

He joined the Arab Nationalist Movement young and led it in Jordan and the West Bank after the April 1957 coup against Suleiman al-Nabulsi’s government. In February 1958 a Jordanian court sentenced him to death; he fled to Syria, and from Homs led an armed column on foot into Tripoli to join the Lebanese revolt of July 1958. After the Iraqi revolution he moved to Baghdad, where he led the ANM in Iraq and was jailed for fourteen months under Abd al-Karim Qasim, being released on 8 February 1963. He founded the newspaper al-Wihda in Baghdad with Basil al-Kubaisi; the Ba’th closed it twenty-seven days after its first issue and jailed him again, after which he was deported to Egypt. He took part in the liberation war in South Yemen and wrote The Crisis of the Revolution in South Yemen on the split between its left and right wings.

Hawatmeh was on the PFLP’s politburo when the front’s internal arguments broke open. On 22 February 1969 he led a group out of the PFLP — arguing that a petit-bourgeois formation could not simply declare itself Marxist-Leninist — severed its ties with the Arab Nationalist Movement and founded the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, shortened in 1975 to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was elected general secretary of its central committee at its founding congress in August 1970 and has been re-elected at every congress since, most recently the seventh, held in stages in 2018. Under his leadership the DFLP argued that the resistance’s relationship to the Palestinian masses was “impromptu and sentimental,” and that turning it into a genuine people’s war required organising and politically arming those masses. In Jordan the front pushed the slogan “all power to the resistance”; the clashes of September 1970 followed, and the Jordanian authorities put a price on Hawatmeh’s head. He moved to Beirut in July 1971.

After the October 1973 war he was central to the argument that produced the PLO’s interim programme, having called since July 1971 for a “secure, liberated support base” in the occupied territories; he was instrumental in drafting the Ten Point Programme adopted by the Palestine National Council in June 1974, and from 1975 committed the DFLP to a state on the territories occupied in 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital and the refugees’ right of return under Resolution 194 — a position later absorbed into the PLO’s own programme. The DFLP’s stated long-term goal remained a single democratic state on all of Palestine with equality between all citizens regardless of ethnicity, religion or sex. From the beginning the front criticised the PFLP’s international hijackings as an operational style too reliant on individuals; its own fighters carried out armed operations inside the territory Israel held, launched from anchor points in Jordan, the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon, and fought in Jordan in 1970, in the Lebanese civil war, against the invasion of 1982 and in the War of the Camps. He held out in Beirut through the siege of 1982 and then moved to Damascus. He helped draft the texts ratified by the PLO’s bodies, including the Declaration of Independence of 15 November 1988, opposed the Madrid conference and rejected the Oslo Accords, calling instead for an international conference under UN auspices. At the start of the Second Intifada in late 2000 the front formed the Palestinian National Resistance Brigades as its armed wing.

Selected contributions

• Founder and secretary-general of the DFLP (1969–)
• Principal author of the PLO’s Ten Point Programme (1974)
• The Crisis of the Revolution in South Yemen (1968)

Sources

• Nayef Hawatmeh — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question
• The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine — PalQuest
• The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — PalQuest